Back in June, when the unmarked graves of children were found via ground-penetrating radar at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, I was profoundly shocked, and I wanted to do something. I saw that two Indigenous people had created a Go Fund Me campaign to raise a comparatively small amount – I think their goal was about $25,000 – and I contributed what I could afford. The amounts grew so rapidly that they soon reached somewhere like $170,000, and were able to help two bands arrange for the ground-penetrating radar to search their areas.

I was thinking about that when I read recently in the New Humanitarian that Indigenous groups in the US have received a massive outpouring of support from ordinary people who had learned about their needs via media coverage of the pandemic, which hit Indigenous people very hard. Go Fund Me and others like PayPal has made it possible for all of us to be givers – philanthropists, even if we don’t have a lot to give individually.