Renaming Ryerson University: Canadian historical culture today is a palimpsest, or possibly palindromic, as First Nations attempt a palingenesis

palimpsest: 1 a piece of writing or manuscript on which the original writing has been effaced to make room for other writing. 2 a place, experience, etc., in which something new is superimposed over traces of something preceding it.

palindrome: a word or phrase that reads the same backwards and forwards, e.g. rotator, or nurses run [Greek palindromos running back again].

palingenesis: 1 regeneration, rebirth.

Canadian Oxford Dictionary (2001)

The Dundas Street renaming, et cetera

Dundas Street in Toronto (yes, all 25 kilometres) is losing its name: boohoo!  But I pity that Canadians cannot tolerate paradox.  Toronto ‘the Good’ cannot cope with the idea that Dundas, who never once set foot on Canada, was responsible for over half a million slaves being shipped out of Africa. Not a nice legacy, indeed.  But in our effort to purify Toronto, and by implication our image of Canada, are we not actually imitating historic movements which did not tolerate impurity?

In a recent opinion piece contributed to the Toronto Star, Canadian sage John Ralston Saul writes: “Imagine the same street if it were called Goebbels Street? Himmler Street?”[1] Saul seems to forget that everything Hitler did was about purity: he was a vegetarian; he didn’t smoke; he was obsessed with germs; and above all, he wanted to cleanse Germany, along with the rest of Europe if not the world, of so-called impurities, Jews and other ‘inferior’ people.  If we cannot tolerate perceived imperfection, are we not by implication being intolerant?

Why now? The pandemic has much to do with this.  As is often said (but without the irony) we are not only enduring a Coronavirus pandemic, we are also experiencing – it is alleged - a “racism pandemic”.  While unable to socialize with each other, for fear of spreading viruses, we nonetheless aim to promote socialization by spreading diversity and inclusion.  While we obsess over possible germs, we rid ourselves of our historic weaknesses.  While the coronavirus kills, we nonetheless strive to make Canada a “safe” place. Constrained by the pandemic, we anyhow take the given time to adjust our urban landscape, or at least its nomenclature.

After Dundas Street, what’s next?  All the Dundas streets in Canada? (My Mom is moving to one of them). Today I see the name British Columbia is on the chopping block, among some. In my view, the province is neither British nor Columbian, but, heck: out with the old and in with the new!

Perhaps, in the future, we should use numbers instead of names for streets.  The city of New York, for example, must be an improvement over “Old York”, where one has to pay attention to odd English spellings.

The welcome mat is always at Canada's door.  But as we retrofit the house, we also need to remind ourselves that imperfection is not always a bad thing, that it, too, should be included in the name of diversity.  Otherwise we lose our sense of tolerance.

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[1] John Ralston Saul, “Dundas Street is a terrible name.  Changing it would show Toronto is no longer trapped in the image of a major slave baron” Toronto Star (Tuesday, July 6, 2021).  See also Matt Elliott, “Spending millions to rename Dundas and other streets will not fix the real inequities in Toronto.  Here’s an idea that might help.” Toronto Star (Tuesday, July 13, 2021).

The Kamloops Residential School: Remembering a Tragedy

We must acknowledge the remains of 215 kids (some as young as three) found on the grounds of the Kamloops Residential School in BC – once the largest such institution in Canada – all located in unmarked graves, and recently discovered using radar technology.  The school opened in 1890 and closed in 1978. Yes, this represents a profound tragedy, certainly a significant number when considered at once, but they were not “mass graves” a term some in the media and NDP leader Jagmeet Singh are prone to using.  This is not necessarily a “genocide”, a word that has been bandied about ever since Beverly McLaughlin, former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, gave it sanctity using the term “cultural genocide”, following the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Should the RCMP (which to date maintains a poor relationship with the Indigenous) have been called in to investigate, as some have wondered on CBC Radio?

On the one hand there is too much present-day thinking going about, and by that I mean we judge the past by the standards of today.  Today we talk about justice, equity, diversity and inclusion, in other words postcolonial thinking where empathy reigns supreme, hence Justin Trudeau’s plethora of apologies - and now, of course, official recognition by means of flag lowering.  He only just apologized for the Second World War internment of Italian-Canadians, a move motivated in part by Liberal electioneering prospects.  This is despite the fact that some 3,000 Italian-Canadians were card-carrying Mussolini-supporting Fascists, according to York University historian, Roberto Perrin.

On the other hand, we forget that the entire planet is right now in the middle of a pandemic, and these children could easily have died from TB, diphtheria, measles, or other infectious diseases.  Advances in modern medicine – and access to it - are, well, recent, and death in general was in days of old far more prevalent. For example: about 15 times the number of people died of the Spanish Flu that followed the First World War than have died so far from Covid-19, at least in part because we now have the science of immunology.  Moreover, the attitude towards death is different today in Canada than in the past.  All those soldiers who died in Afghanistan were welcomed and memorialized along the “Highway of Heroes” in Ontario.  Such individuated recognition was not possible – even unthinkable - during Canada’s previous wars.   

This was a Residential school run by Catholic missionaries, so I would not discount the possibility that some of these interred children were abused.  We lack sufficient evidence here, but we do have the other Indigenous testimonies, such as that of Augie Merasty, whose account of abuse – including sexual abuse, as I have said elsewhere  – is just not comparable with Jewish memories of Auschwitz. But it is a fact that some children did run away from Residential school only to die of hunger or exposure, for example Chanie Wenjack, now viewed as a resistance figure, whose fate prompted an inquest into the Residential system.  At least 3,200 children died while at in Residential school, according to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2015; if the Kamloops school is any indication the figure is much higher.

Do Canada’s Indigenous live in a system of apartheid?  The answer is yes.  But to call the discovery of these children’s remains evidence of a “Holocaust”, a “genocide”, or a “crime against humanity” is to fall prey to popular culture, a weak vocabulary - and the news cycle.  Black Lives Matter – moved by George Floyd’s death - has, of late, melded with Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation, such that both The Globe and Mail and CBC Radio have recently featured stories of miscegenation between Blacks and the Indigenous.  But no one is talking about mixed-race results between the Indigenous and the Chinese, and still less the Blacks and the Chinese.  Ask yourself, why?

The more multicultural – and postcolonial - Canada becomes, the more it presumably will adjust to Reconciliation with the Indigenous, but multiculturalism in itself is no panacea for racism.  Given that the nineteenth-century Indian Act made the Indigenous Peoples “wards of the state ”, the Canadian state must in the end be held accountable for what happened in Residential schools, which were in themselves an abuse. I suggest that the Kamloops grounds be preserved - and the remains identified, if possible, for the purposes of Reconciliation. To be Canadian today is to be keenly aware of the Other. As many cultures in one country we continue to exhume past pains with the aim of bettering the lives of our fellow peoples - including the fallen children, who deserved far more.  

 

 

 

  

Trudeau’s blackface: further thoughts

Methinks some Canadian media critics protest too much at Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s three occasions when he wore blackface or brownface, the latter (and most recent) being in 2001, 18 years ago, while attending a party held at the elite private school, West Pont Grey Academy, in Vancouver, where he taught.  High School drama teachers enjoy centre stage (his costume considered ‘outstanding’ at the time), though I doubt Mr. Trudeau would ever have anticipated receiving such world-wide attention for this particular episode.

Claims that he lacks ethics, or is a racist or a fraud and should resign, or that we don’t know the ‘real Trudeau’ are exaggerated.  Missed is the point that possibly, before he entered politics, he lacked some insight into what being non-white was like, either in Canada, or in the even world in general. When travelling the globe with his father, former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, he likely only met the prestigious few, not the ones who have to scramble daily to make a living, so, yes, indeed he benefited from a privileged background; but he appears to have, like many of us, developed over time, and he now demonstrates considerable empathy towards marginalized people: the Indigenous, LGBTQ, Syrian refugees, and of course women.   I doubt that his core values were ever racist, unlike his father who dabbled in an admiration of Fascism at the hands of his early Jesuit teachers.  And let us not forget former Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King’s recognition of a fellow mystic in Hitler before WWII.

When is an apology not enough? I note with dismay, that when federal Green Party Leader Elizabeth May was recently asked who her hero was, she replied in an immediate and unfiltered voice: “Jesus Christ” – and then apologized for her remark.  If Elizabeth May has to say she’s sorry for being Christian, what does Justin Trudeau have to say to redeem himself from his blackface lapses?  Is Canadian society so secular – or cynical - that apologies are no longer acceptable?  We have all made mistakes, or done things we regret, myself included; and in Trudeau’s case I do not see his antics as intentionally disrespectful towards people of colour.  (Disclosure: I spent a year teaching History in Jamaica at the University of the West Indies in the early 1990’s where the minimum wage for the average citizen was a paltry US $8.00 daily).

People grow up, they change over time (as do our social norms), and yet Trudeau was able to prolong his adolescence – like many in education - precisely because he taught high school. Trudeau’s maturity probably came with marriage in 2005, and then with parental responsibilities.  The outpouring of condemnation for Trudeau’s errors in dress (imagine if he had been pictured in drag three times – what would we be thinking now?) are perhaps part and parcel of the current admixture known as Canadian multi-ethnic democracy, another one of our post-colonial moments, an irony since it was  Pierre  Trudeau who introduced multiculturalism to the land.

But do we need to seek resolution for Justin Trudeau’s every apparent contradiction?  If we cannot accept that consistency and neat coherences in life are unrealistic, an unachievable goal, given “the crooked timber of humanity”, then maybe we should consider emulating instead the Chinese system, where the average person does not have to think about politics and lives instead in ready admiration of the leader.  As I indicated in my previous blog on the same subject, man is fallible.  Some outraged Canadian critics seem to think that their political leaders should be infallible – for life.  And to make a not too fine point about it, liberalism is a political philosophy that tends toward contradiction, as it avoids extremes of Left and Right, which is why the Liberal government can appear a conundrum, declaring a climate emergency one day and endorsing pipeline politics the next, but that is perhaps a topic for another blog.

I am more concerned when a politician does not apologize.  Look to Donald Trump: he is in his third year of office, plans to run for reelection, and has yet to apologize for any of his countless misogynistic, racist and other vile remarks and actions. Trump has violated every known norm, and continues to do so.  If we can’t tolerate Trudeau’s relatively small errors in the past, beware that we replace him with someone else who is worse for the present. Look to Premier Jason Kenney, now leader of the United Conservative Party of Alberta (after being in the federal Cabinet for 10 years), who will not apologize for his actions as a student in San Francisco (at about 20 or 21 years of age) when he prevented people dying of AIDS from seeing their partners in their final hours, either in the hospital, or sometimes even at funerals.

  

Look also to British Columbia’s former Liberal Premier Gordon Campbell arrested on drunk driving charges in 2003 while in office but on vacation in Hawaii. Campbell subsequently asked for forgiveness for his high state of inebriation, succeeded in various reelections, and now is charged with sexual assault during his role as Canada’s High Commissioner in London.  Look to the esteemed Doug Ford, Progressive Conservative Premier of Ontario (and likely aspirant for Andrew Sheer’s job as Leader of the Opposition in Ottawa) who, according to The Globe and Mail, peddled hashish in the 1980’s.  This is someone who contributed to the regular impairment of peoples’ minds, and he is now leader of Canada’s most populated province.  Maybe it is no accident that Doug Ford was chosen leader of his party and assumed office in the same year the Trudeau government legalized pot: the electorate has apparently forgiven him, even if he has not publicly come to terms with it.

Much ink has been spilled over Trudeau’s blackface. At worst, the prime minister could be considered a boy king, a tumble-down Trudeau, dwelling at times too much in the life of a thespian, unlike his father who would eventually become Canada’s pre-eminent philosopher king.  But he is no racist.  Born the eldest son, on Christmas Day, named Justin by a father who spoke of a “Just Society”, our current prime minister has had a lot to live up to, and there lies the catch: ideals inspire, but no person is a  ‘blank slate’ upon which one can work freely and easily. John Stuart Mill learned that at the hands of his father, much to his detriment. In Canada there will probably always be “the persistence of the old regime”, of the era before the Charter of Rights and Freedoms which was introduced in 1982.  Prejudices will persist, but it is incumbent upon Trudeau to rid himself of the appearance of prejudice.

Trudeau’s blackface reminds people of Canada’s continued systemic injustices, but we may have bigger problems at hand. Donald Trump recently floated the idea of buying Greenland but was rebuffed by the Danish prime minister.  Was he serious?  Does Trump now have continental ambitions?  Has American “manifest destiny” even abated since Trump’s America First movement?  Goldwin Smith, Canada’s first public intellectual, warned pessimistically well over a century ago that Canada is an absurd entity bordering on the behemoth we know as the United States.  And I agree with the historian Margaret MacMillan who has suggested some while ago in The Globe and Mail that as the climate crisis worsens, more of our natural resources will considered be up for grabs, making Canadians and our way of life more vulnerable to global geo-politics, in particular subject to American ambitions.

 

Trudeau’s periodic episodes with blackface have likely offended numbers of Canadians, but the advent of the cellphone brings on a confusion of “then” and “now”, as this all-pervasive form of modern technology contributes to the elimination of our sense of time.  With the cellphone anyone can be reached at almost any moment, anywhere, helping to erase, as well, our sense of the past.  We gaze at a picture in our hands of a turbaned Trudeau dressed as Alladin, forgetting even that it was taken before 9/11, truly a different era. Meanwhile we continue to scan our cellphones for the next world outrage, as our minds become ever-more mired by constant media and the oppressiveness of the human condition. At least we were distracted by Trudeau.