Truth and Reconcilliation: The House We Found, by the Buddhist Cristian and Brittany Molenaar

The House We Found

Music and lyrics by Morgan Garry (The Buddhist Christian). Video by Brittany Molenaar, founder of The Invisible Woman Series and INVISIBLEme.ca.

The House We Found tells the history of colonization as a parable about one house. A family lives in a small home they know well. The father's hands built its walls, and the mother's voice filled it with songs. They aren't perfect, but they belong there. One day a stranger walks in, pulls up a chair, and acts as if he has always lived there. Neither man understands the other. One says "please leave my table," the other hears something else, and fear fills the gap where understanding could have grown.

The stranger asks for just one corner. Then others arrive, each asking for "just this room," until the family who owned the whole house has almost nothing left. They're moved down into the basement and told they can keep their songs and customs as long as they stay downstairs. The newcomers call themselves generous and can't see why the family is angry. Over time, the children upstairs grow up hearing that the house was empty when their people came. The children in the basement quietly learn their grandparents' hidden names.

The chorus asks the questions at the centre of the song: Whose house is this? How long does taking something turn into owning it? If I inherit what you stole, does forgetting make it right?

As a hundred years go by, memory turns into belief. The people upstairs say their prosperity is earned and blessed by God. Their pride keeps rising until it turns them against each other, and they fight over rooms and draw borders everywhere. Meanwhile the family below carries its grief, generation after generation, taught to stay small and stay silent. As tension builds on both floors, one side reaches for the deadbolt and the other for the hammer, and history whispers that it's happening again.

The song doesn't end on a verdict. It asks a different kind of question: what if no one owns the sunlight? What if being born upstairs doesn't make you greater? What if justice isn't vengeance, mercy isn't chains, and making room for everyone is how we break this old cycle? In the final moments, a child turns on a light in the crowded house. She looks upstairs, then downstairs, and asks: Why can't we all live here?

The song was written in the spirit of Truth and Reconciliation. It asks listeners to face the truth of what happened on this land, including the displacement, the erased names and the stories told to justify both. It also offers a hopeful path forward, where honesty comes before healing and a shared home becomes possible. Although it speaks directly to the Canadian experience, it also speaks to any place where one people's home became another people's inheritance.

May we find the truth together, so that we may all live free and at peace.

More music: You can find more of Morgan's music by searching The Buddhist Christian on Apple iTunes.