Joyce Echaquan, Atikamekw woman aged 37, died under a barrage of racist slurs at a hospital in Joliette, Quebec. The hateful words that she was able to record in her final moments, while crying out for help, visibly plunged her into a deep state of distress. She wanted us to see and hear, and we did, with a heavy heart and a dying soul. 

Like George Floyd, Joyce couldn't breathe. Those who, at one time or another, may have faced an affront to our dignity, similar disparagement, gasped for air. We suffocate from air so thick with hatred of the other. 

The women who uttered such heinous insults did so with perfect assurance, absolutely certain they were within their rights, acting appropriately, within the walls of a public institution. The Public Inquiry Commission on relations between Indigenous Peoples and certain public services in Quebec by the Honourable Jacques Viens, another report among many, had already pointed out the impacts of systemic racism, a latent poison seeping into society and made more deadly when it is denied and trivialized from the highest level. The dismissal of a nurse and an orderly, caught in the act by the victim's recording will not be enough to solve the problem, because the issue runs much deeper than a crime story in the news media, or the sorry deeds of a few individuals. 

Racism against oppressed people must be addressed on the whole, from its genesis. We have yet to emerge from the centuries of humanity denied that colonization led us into. We will not understand nor eradicate racism without the courage to examine what produced it, and question what perpetuates it. The time to face our duty to memory, truth, conscience and justice is now.

Racism humiliates, offends and kills, in all forms. Racism is a crime, a weapon of hatred and indifference, from physical and psychological violence to failure to assist a person in danger. 

We must hear and receive those who demand that the system driving this violence be dealt with, not just its symptoms. The collateral effects are devastating. Joyce Echaquan died as a result. She is not alone. This cannot be allowed to continue. 

— Michaëlle Jean

Source: The Hill Times, October 9, 2020.