As national
bestsellers go, Bob Joseph’s book, 21 Things
You May Not Know About the Indian Act, provides valuable context to the
history of our First Nations Peoples, particularly given the current Coastal
Gaslink pipeline debate – or crisis, rather - that began in northern British
Columbia, and which has since spread to other parts of the country with a
number of strategic rail and road blockades.
Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chiefs oppose the project, as they lay claim to
considerable swaths of unceded land through which the proposed pipeline will
run, while most elected Band Councils – which are products of the Indian Act – support it.
21 Things, which should be read by all concerned
Canadians, methodically details how the Indian
Act (1876), created when Sir John A. McDonald was Prime Minister, made
Indigenous Peoples (in variation of an oft-repeated phrase) “wards of the
state.”[1]
Moreover, the subsequent legacy of the Residential school system robbed
generations of youth of their family elders, ancestral values and cultural
identity, confronted as they were by physical and sexual abuse at the hands of so-called
denominational educators - and by high rates of death, especially from TB.
Echoing the
conclusions of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the words of Beverly
McLaughlin, former Chief of the Supreme Court of Canada, Joseph – like many
today – refers to this sordid episode in Canadian history as “cultural
genocide”, a term I prefer not to use.
The important memoir, The
Education of Augie Merasty, for example, which gives a child’s eye view of
the Residential school system, does not compare to Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, or Elie Wiesel’s terror-fraught
Night, and here I am in accord with
Merasty’s own co-writer and editor, David Carpenter, who concedes “Augie might
differ with me on this”.[2] The sheer industrial scale and deliberate mass
destruction of Jews and others at the hands of the Nazi’s who were either
gassed, incinerated - and sometimes shot, when considered cost-effective - or
turned into soap products, suggests that a “genocidal” approximation of these two
different historical experiences – Jewish and Indigenous – is not quite tenable.
So what do
we call the Indigenous experience in Canada since the Indian Act? An “historical
wrong” is a generic term Justin Trudeau sometimes uses. A system of “apartheid” is perhaps a more
valuable and historically generalizable designation employed by Tommy Douglas
when he was Premier of Saskatchewan.[3]
A form of apartheid persists even today, and we can make comparisons between
the Indigenous and the Palestinians, as each are in their own ways “a landless
people", or deterritorialized, to use the term coined by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, since popularized by legions of admirers of the two postmodern French
thinkers who wrote a number of seminal works together – one as a philosopher
and the other as psychiatrist.[4]
When
looking at the greater nineteenth century context, “historical error” - or, in
more modern parlance: “fake history” - is a term which apparently has its
rightful place according to another French thinker Ernest Renan in his classic
essay of 1882, “What is a nation?”[5] He explains that “historical enquiry brings
back to light the deeds of violence that took place at the origins of all
political formations, even of those whose consequences have been the most
beneficial. Unity is always achieved brutally …”[6]
Renan insists that “the act of forgetting … is an essential factor in the
creation of a nation” and he adds that “progress in historical studies often
constitutes a danger for nationality.”[7]
In other words,
Renan might be construed as someone who – at first blush - considers Indigenous
studies at our schools and universities a threat to Canadian nationhood, but
his notion of such is that it presupposes “all individuals have many things in
common.”[8] He is not a racialized thinker: in fact, he
considers Europe to be a thorough mix of apparent “races”, and he argues that “the
primordial right of races is narrow and full of danger for true progress”.[9]
Renan also goes on to anticipate a
“European confederation” in the future.[10] But, even more significantly, Renan promotes
the right of national self-determination as first proclaimed by the French Revolution
with an eye to revisiting Germany’s conquest of Alsace-Lorraine in the
Franco-Prussian War of 1871. “A nation
is a soul, a spiritual principle …. A nation is therefore a vast solidarity.”[11]
More famously, as he puts it, a nation is “a daily plebiscite.”[12]
Even though
the right to vote in the nineteenth century was restricted (only white men and
those who held property or who payed taxes were eligible), the electoral
principle - ostensibly a European construct, one could argue - was introduced
into the Indian Act, thus disrupting existing
traditional matriarchies. Not only were
Indigenous lands in a number of provinces reduced to postage stamp-size
reserves, the Indian Act specified
that “First Nations must have an election every two years.”[13]
This electoral principle (and Canadian Confederation) occurred – not by chance,
I would argue - along with Benjamin Disraeli’s Second Reform Act of 1867 which
enfranchised large numbers of the working classes in both England and Wales.
Tragically, however, the right to vote beyond the reserve was not extended to all
Indigenous Peoples until it was introduced by Prime Minister John Diefenbaker
in 1960, though Indigenous veterans of WWI were granted the vote in 1924.[14]
This
electoral principle is still at the nub of the Wet’suwet’sen debate. Band Chiefs, who have “status” according to
the Indian Act, are elected to a limited term and support the Coastal Gaslink
pipeline project. Hereditary Chiefs,
according to Bob Joseph, “have power passed down from one generation to the
next along blood lines or other cultural protocols” (though in the case of the
Wet’suwet’sen which of the two is not very clear), and they oppose the project
because it runs through their traditional territory.[15]
Josephs goes on to say – and this should be subject to further analysis - that
the Hereditary Chiefs are “similar to European royalty”.[16] Similar to European royalty when – in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries? Queen Victoria, as is
well-known, chose the location of Canada’s capital, Ottawa; she also chose the
name of New Westminster as the original capital of British Columbia, so she
participated in the colonial process on one level at least. She also enjoyed good relations with Benjamin
Disraeli, so her influence was likely by means of protocol and supine deference. Overall, the British Empire represented colonial rule in the name of its
monarch, which dates back to the Norman Conquest of 1066, also - and this is no
coincidence - the mainspring for the Crusades which followed.
Today’s
European royalty, however, are mere titular figures – constitutional symbols
that have no real authority outside of ceremony. The examples of Prince Harry and Meghan
Markle suggest that pomp and circumstance are no shield from the invasive
scrutiny of royals by the British popular press. In other words, the Wet’suwet’sen Hereditary
Chiefs who lay claim to an occupation of land that numbers in the thousands of
years appear to exercise a kind of power that exceeds that of European royalty today,
such that they can spark a national crisis – rather unlike Queen Elizabeth II
whose role is to stay above the fray of politics (but who is also by no means
marginalized).
European
democracy advanced hand in hand with science – in particular positivism, with
its focus on the observable, as found for example in Renan – in the nineteenth
and later in the twentieth centuries. Central to this was the expanded electoral
vote, which worked against hereditary influences in society mitigating the role
of the Crown. Today’s Supreme Court
of Canada, with support from the Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms,
indicates that there must be “nation to nation” dialogue with the First Nations.
This brings us back to the Royal Proclamation of 1763 which indeed first
articulated such a relationship between the Indigenous and “settlers”, a lapse
in the longer tradition of British imperialism - later revived by the Industrial Revolution - following a costly Seven
Years’ War.[17] In other words, Canadians are being held to
account to an agreement when a monarchy, using its “soft power,” was apparently more inclined
to recognize other hereditary chiefs, that is, when the English Crown still had a measure of influence.
Most of us
in the modern world – with the exception of the Saudi royal family and perhaps Donald Trump's White House - have moved
on from the idea of hereditary power. Is
the idea of an unlimited tenure with actual authority, or the hereditary
chiefdom of the Wet’suwet’sen, consistent with Canadian democracy as we know it
today? Or am I imposing my own Western
values? Is Prime Minister Justin Trudeau,
himself, a kind of Liberal Party hereditary chief, eldest son to Pierre Trudeau? These are questions we must ask ourselves as
we – Canadians and First Nations – work towards Reconciliation, and with that
in mind 21 Things is a good first
step.
[1]
Bob Joseph, 21 Things You May Not Know
About the Indian Act: Helping Canadians Make Reconciliation with Indigenous
Peoples a Reality (Port Coquitlam, BC: Indigenous Relations Press, 2018),
p. 60.
[2]
David Carpenter in Joseph Auguste Merasty (with David Carpenter), The Education of Augie Merasty: A
Residential School Memoir, ed. David Carpenter (Saskatchewan: University of
Regina Press, 2015), p. xxxiv.
[3]
Joseph, 21 Things, p. 45.
[4]
François Dosse, Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, Intersecting Lives, tr.Deborah Glassman (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2011), p. 258.
[5]
Ernest Renan, What is a Nation? And Other
Political Writings, ed. and tr. M.F.N. Giglioli (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2018), p. 251.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid. The
full sentence reads “Now, the essence of a nation is that all individuals have
many things in common, and also that they have forgotten many things.”
[12] See
Ibid., pp.
261, 262 Giglioli translates these key
words mundanely as “an everyday plebiscite.” Stefan Collini in The London Review of Books, points out
that Hobsbawm in his Nations and
Nationalism since 1780 offers a superior translation: “a nation is a daily
plebisicite.” In the original French: « L’existence d’une nation est (pardonnez-moi
cette métaphore) une plébiscite de tous les jours. » See Renan, Oeuvre Complètes de Ernest Renan, I, ed.
Henrietta Psichari (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, [nd]), pp. 904,903. See Stefan Collini , “The Enlightened Vote,” London Review of Books Vol 41, No. 24 (19 December 2019), p. 10.
Cf. E.J. Hobsbawm, Nations and
Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1991), p. 7.
[13] Joseph, 21 Things, p. 109.
[14] Ibid., pp. 81, 82.
[17] For some text and discussion of the
Royal Proclamation of 1763 see Joseph, 21
Things, pp. 82, 83.