The discovery of remains of Indigenous children - now numbering over a thousand souls - buried in unmarked graves on the grounds of Residential schools has shaken much of the country and stirred a debate over whether Canada Day, July 1st, should be marked by official celebration. Cities like Victoria and Fredericton have, in effect, cancelled Canada Day, 2021, though no one yet has suggested taking the national holiday off the books altogether. Overall this year’s Canada Day is a subdued affair. Ironically the pandemic offers opportunity for further reflection and quiet reassessment. Leading Indigenous writer Tanya Talaga (now a Globe and Mail columnist) recently invoked Pol Pot’s ‘killing fields’ of Cambodia as a means of comparison, while others drum up (as I have said previously) the now generic term genocide, and still others may liken the separation of children from parents with Trump’s handling of refugees and migrants at the American border with Mexico.
Canada’s relationship
with the Indigenous is our original sin.
Many feel a profound sense of guilt, or shame; they also believe they
can take a step towards expiating the guilt by accepting the term “genocide”. We
now have a word for it, which lumps together so many international horrors,
with the additional highlighting of full spectrum terminology. After all, genocide is a part of world
history, and Canada is a part of the world, therefore genocide is a part of
Canadian history. The more the term is
employed, the more the public, hearing about it over and over again on CBC
Radio these days, may not be inclined to question it. They do not wish to appear
racist, or condescending. In other
words, critical thinking now means not doubting the term “genocide”.
Indigenous grief,
pain and anger has manifested itself in outrage, understandable perhaps, but no
one seems to ask: what policies with respect to the First Nations should the
Canadian state have adopted in the nineteenth century? Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime
minister and an architect of the Residential school system, was not only imbued
with colonialism, but, he along with just about everyone else in and out of authority
at the time, partook in social Darwinistic thinking and De Gobineau’s theory of
the inferiority of non-white races. Given
that the Indigenous occupied the land, or “Turtle Island” as it is known, long
before “settler” culture, they were at odds, and continue to be at odds with
the very invention of this thing called “Canada”. More consequentially, however, state building
was – and perhaps remains - at odds with the Indigenous peoples.
History is
always being rewritten by the standards of today, and the problem with the
future (as de Tocqueville said) is that it never arrives soon enough. In our haste to correct the past, or rather atone
for it, and the more we view things Canadian exclusively through the lens of
colonial oppression, the more I suspect we may be “deconstructing” – to use
Derrida’s now commonplace term – this thing called Canada, though not
necessarily always wisely. Many blame
colonialism in blanket form, but its impetus comes from a long line of
predecessors in, for example, the Puritans, and before that the Crusades, before
that the Normans and first the Vikings.
These transcultural movements of people and ideas can all be summed up
in one word: the West. But it is the
West which also provides the science and technology for locating the unmarked
graves. While the science of immunology was largely unavailable to First
Nations Peoples in years past, it is this very science that is now democratizing
Canada by providing the “truth” for all to see regarding the number of deceased Indigenous children,
though this was likely no surprise to the survivors of the Residential School
system. Even Canada’s first Indigenous Justice
Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould admitted, upon learning of the Kamloops
gravesites, that this is not “news.”
In the maelstrom of grief and guilt Canada is in need of some contrarian thinking. I am neither an apologist for the establishment, nor trying to restore things to some Victorian order, but given our public anxieties about the past, it is worth adding to it thoughts on Justin Trudeau’s 2018 characterization of Canada as the world’s “first post-national state”. “There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada”, he said. This suggests that Canada is already experiencing issues of cohesion, if not particularity, which again is perhaps nothing new, but in this case it’s coming from the Prime Minister. We also see this in our military where a number of the top brass for many months now have been embroiled in allegations of sexual misconduct, as well as among the lower ranks. Canada’s perplexity with the military is existential: it, like the country itself, lacks purpose. Our closest ally is simultaneously our greatest protector and our greatest threat. As climate change advances, the greater the demand for Canada’s fresh water, hence the more the U.S. will want to expand beyond its northern frontier. In other words, once the USA starts controlling our water resources, or worse, then Canadians - including possibly our First Nations - will want to re-evaluate John A. Macdonald by appreciating his efforts to unite the country via railroad construction across the continent. But by then it will be too late. Canada will disappear like the Byzantine Empire, the surviving eastern half of the Roman Empire, and its capital Constantinople which succumbed to the Ottoman Turks on May 29th, 1453. But unlike that famous date, Canada’s demise will be forgotten, smothered by American imperialism and hidden in an eternal sense of sorrow.
