Gord Downie could have stood for a lot of things on Saturday night, during the final performance of the Tragically Hip’s Man Machine Poem tour, and possibly of his life. But with the nation watching — 11.7-million tuning in on CBC — he called for non-Indigenous Canadians to take up the long, difficult process of decolonization.

His comments came framed as a compliment to Justin Trudeau, who was in the crowd (wearing a Canadian Tuxedo): “He cares about the people way up North, that we were trained our entire lives to ignore, trained our entire lives to hear not a word of what’s going on up there. And what’s going on up there ain’t good. It’s maybe worse than it’s ever been [ … But] we’re going to get it fixed and we got the guy to do it, to start, to help. […] It’s really, really bad, but we’re going to figure it out — you’re going to figure it out.”

Debate has followed about how much this was an endorsement of Trudeau, a professed longtime fan of the band, and how much it was — with Downie’s trademark sly irony — a challenge.

It came at the end of two weeks of racial discord in Saskatchewan, following the shooting of Colten Boushie, a Cree man from the Red Pheasant First Nation, by Gerald Stanley, a white farmer now charged with second-degree murder.

Saskatchewan social media filled with so much invective against native people by whites — many almost certainly Hip fans — that Premier Brad Wall had to plead for an end to “racist and hate-filled comments.” The Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations, meanwhile, pushed the RCMP to investigate the shooting as a hate-crime.

Boushie’s murder took place less than two hours from Saskatoon, “the Paris of the Prairies” as Downie framed it in “Wheat Kings,” a story of injustice (David Milgaard’s wrongful conviction), a song CBC listeners voted their favourite of all time.

Hip fans love that song in part because it portrays Canada as a nation that cares about injustice. It’s a rare band that makes its fans want to be better people, but the Hip have always been that band. They’re nationally renowned as “good guys,” and Downie’s lyrics have always seemed to have come from the brightest person in the room. We’ve aspired to be as smart as he is, and as decent as they all are.

So Downie issued us a challenge. He wasn’t talking about Saskatchewan, but rather the North, of whom he has been a vocal supporter since the Hip played Ontario’s Fort Albany First Nation, near Attawapiskat, four years ago. Downie has been to the communities and seen the ongoing devastation caused by Canadian colonialism and resource extraction. His comments were a demand for us to begin the lengthy process of ending those injustices.

The day after the Boushie shooting, video footage was publicized of Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould (then AFN’s B.C. Chief) at a 2012 protest against the controversial Site C dam project, to which the Trudeau government quietly granted permits in late July.

“The country’s reputation is at stake with approval of these projects, like Site C, like the Enbridge pipeline,” Wilson-Raybould says in the video. “Running roughshod over Aboriginal title and rights, including treaty rights, is not the way to improve that reputation.”

It’s not scandalous that the minister was caught holding a position contrary to her government’s. The scandal, instead, is seeing a government so vocal in its promises to First Peoples supporting projects contrary to the ideals it claims. The video appeared at a time when Trudeau was already being criticized for budgeting 30 per cent less for on-reserve education than he promised, and for leaving in place the 2 per cent base-funding cap for First Nations he swore he’d remove.

Surely Downie was ignorant of none of this. He’s always known about the injustices in this country and he’s never shied away from them. His certainty that we would do better than we had — though framed as a statement — was also a demand.

But inside the 6,700-seat Rogers K-Rock Centre Saturday night, one listener had a lot more power to do better than anyone else.

To Trudeau, Downie made the same challenge his band has always offered the country: be a good person, however much work it takes, how much courage — or be something worse.

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Trudeau is a Hip fan, so he, too, knows that “the human tragedy / consists in the necessity / of living with the consequences / under pressure, under pressure.”

Jesse Staniforth is a Montreal-based journalist and a regular contributor to the Nation magazine, serving the Cree Nation of Eeyou Istchee on the eastern coast of James Bay.

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