Canada

OUR HERITAGE and OUR PEOPLE

We define heritage as the things we care about that we've received from previous generations, and that we hand down to the next.

Heritage has many parts. Each can be as full of personal history as an old family photograph, as fanciful as a ghost story, as solid as a family home, as changing as the river that runs by your home, as tantalizing as a recipe, or as intangible as language.

Heritage tells us who we are, where we are in the world, and what matters. Think of heritage as having three levels:

• personal: the knowledge and customs handed down to us through our family;

• community: the traditions of the ancestral groups to which we belong (e.g., First Nations, French-Canadian, Muslim) and our experience in the places we walk every day;

• regional and national: the values and outlook that have been shaped by the forces of history and the land upon which we live.

Heritage--a person's, a community's, or a nation's--- brings order and a sense of continuity to our lives. At the same time, heritage itself always changes, as our experience adds new dimensions to it.

In the beautiful mosaic we call our Canadian identity, everyone's story and heritage count.