The Comeback

I

HISTORY IS UPON US

We know we live in history. We know we can shape it, although far less than we would like. And when we do intervene, it is inseparable from the great force with which history moves, surging across generations with ease. The full impact of that intervention – of getting it right or getting it wrong – is something that will slowly unfold over decades, even centuries. So history both constrains us and demands of us a great deal. Most of the time we can’t see its shape and instead feel ourselves caught up in mysterious tides, unable to make out the great flow. Or perhaps we don’t want to.

But we are always somewhere in history. Struggling in the waves. Being dashed on the rocks. Or just paddling innocently along.

The winter of 2012–13 needs to be thought of in these terms. Idle No More swept into our lives. Indigenous people massed in protest where protest was not expected, in shopping malls, at intersections across the country, as well as on Parliament Hill. New young leaders could be read and heard in all the media. The established leadership, non-Aboriginal and Aboriginal, the media, the experts tried without success to shape or control this organic expression of frustration and anger. Federal political leaders attended with solicitude at the side of Chief Theresa Spence, who was on a hunger strike on Victoria Island. Had she died from the effects of her liquid fast, within sight of the Parliament Buildings, a dangerous line would have been crossed. Irreparable damage would have been done to Canada’s social fabric, her death a modern version of Riel’s hanging. Events might then have slipped out of all control. Violence? We cannot know. In the end we stumbled out of the crisis. The governor general received the chiefs in a troubled atmosphere. There was a prime ministerial meeting to which some key chiefs refused to go unless the governor general was present.

The whole country seemed to be hypnotized by the seemingly abrupt arrival of indigenous people at the very centre of national consciousness. I say “seemingly” because the Canadian people and our government have not been paying attention. This was not just a rough patch in Aboriginal relations with the rest of Canada. It was not about personalities or a particular problem. It was not about Idle No More versus the Assembly of First Nations. Or various chiefs versus the national chief. Or those on hunger strikes versus those trying to negotiate. Each of those elements was part of a broad movement wrapped up in the forces of history. Then and now, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, each of us must try to fit the pieces together. Aboriginal people were at the very centre of national affairs because that is where they belong. They were at the centre of the national consciousness, as they should be, but in a way that reminded anyone willing to listen of what was and is at stake. This is the great issue of our time, the great unresolved Canadian question upon which history will judge us all.

Historic moments are always uncomfortable. They are always filled with strategic contradictions. Tactical contradictions. There are always divisions among those seeking more power for their cause. That is an almost necessary characteristic of movements seeking important social change. As for those in authority, they find themselves pulled and pushed in an atmosphere of crisis that melts the mechanical norms of power.

And so to those under attack – in this case the Canadian government and some of the non-Aboriginal leadership elements of Canadian society – it may seem that these divisions offer a cynical opportunity. To play one group of Aboriginals off against another. To attempt, for example, to discredit the Aboriginal leadership by attacking a handful of chiefs who overspend. Or a bit of corruption here. Or ineffectiveness there. Anything to avoid addressing real, long-standing questions. Or to avoid resolving real problems. But these are false opportunities. A false reading of what is happening.

Clever tactics or stalling won’t make the situation go away and will resolve nothing. Most important, without a serious level of resolution, the fundamental flaws in this relationship will simply become more troubling for all of us and increasingly problematic for the existence of Canada.

This historic reality is not helped by the natural tendency of the media and of political backrooms to view their own reality through the details of the day. It is natural. And it is necessary. They are endlessly drilling down – as they see it – into personalities, rivalries, divisions, failures. This is how they perceive their job – examining the entrails of chickens in order to tell us whether Caesar ought to go to the Forum.

This can also become a problem when dealing with a crisis, particularly a long-standing crisis. We are all caught up in the established narrative of the day. And within that narrative each of us is focused on our own particular realities. Our own habits, practical and emotional. This is normal. And in normal times it may work. But the key to dealing with a real crisis, one that goes beyond our personal realities, lies in our ability to move outside what we think of as normal. If the crisis is big enough, we have to reconsider the narrative or we can be destroyed by it. For example, the current prime minister, Mr. Harper, is usually locked fast onto an economic narrative of whatever is going on. A very particular economic interpretation at that. Such is his reality. As for Canadians at large, we have myriad realities. Some of them are as simple as getting to work on time or having access to gas for our cars. Anything that gets in the way annoys us. We have thousands of ambitions and concerns involving our families, our employment, our lives.

On broader social issues, we tend to focus on any sign of suffering. We are troubled by suffering, by the suffering of others. That is a classic Judeo-Christian – let’s say Abrahamic – expression of empathy. Not a bad thing. It is a good emotive entry level into public dramas. But if non-Aboriginals define their relationship to the Aboriginal reality through their emotions, well then, this emotional drama may simply take the place of ensuring that the issues are dealt with. That kind of sympathy may simply reinforce the old narrative in which “Indians” are a problem and unsuited to survival in “modern” society because they have been so shamed by us as to have lost the self-confidence necessary to function in the real world. Lee Maracle, in a conversation with CBC Radio host Michael Enright on May 18, 2014, offered a sharp correction to this destructive sympathy. “Shame is what other people call it. No one says it about themselves.” In this case, if there is shame it should be felt by the perpetrators. Maracle: “For any reconciliation to take place, the party that hurt you has to take part.”

Whatever our personal approach to reality, history is still at work. When we do try to work out exactly where we are in that history, well, it is not much more than a guess. History is always moving in various directions and at various speeds at the same time. It is filled with undertows and treacherous riptides.

Yet it does seem to me that right now we can see at least one pattern. And although it is one among many, I believe that not only our individual lives but Canada itself will be shaped by how we respond to it. If we engage intelligently, consciously and with a sense of the direction of our history, we will be able to change our narrative. By that I mean we will free ourselves from a surprisingly colonial narrative and embrace one that makes sense of what we do and can do in this place. The pattern is clear. For the last hundred years, Aboriginal peoples have been making a comeback – a remarkable comeback from a terrifyingly low point. A low point of population, of legal respect, of civilizational stability. A comeback to what? To a position of power, influence and civilizational creativity in the territory we call Canada.

Most Canadians still don’t understand this because we are focused on the suffering of many indigenous people, the problems, the failures. This leads some non-Aboriginals to feel guilt, others to sympathize, still others to write off the various Aboriginal societies as failed civilizations. These are roughly the same three responses as a century ago, except that the guilt and sympathy quotients are much higher and the dismissal quotient much lower. But all three are essentially negative and distract us from the main flow of history. And from our obligations.

What I mean is that our three responses distract us from the reality that most of the problems faced by Aboriginal peoples are solvable. And our pessimism – our guilt, sympathy and dismissal – blocks these perfectly achievable resolutions. Aboriginal peoples are in the process of solving them. We are still getting in the way.

The situation is simple. Aboriginals have made and will continue to make a remarkable comeback. They cannot be stopped. Non-Aboriginals have a choice to make. We can continue to stand in the way so that the comeback is slowed and surrounded by bitterness. Or we can be supportive and part of a new narrative.

Early in the twentieth century, First Nations and Métis reached the bottom of their population collapse. From as many as two million people they had melted down over some seventy-five years to approximately one hundred and fifty thousand. It was a vertiginous plunge, brought on by the loss of their ways of life, of their economic well-being, of their social well-being and of their food sources, as well as the rise of yet another wave of European diseases, this one particularly destructive, in good part because of their physically weakened condition. And all this was driven along its way by, or was a direct result of, government policy, continuing immigration and the resulting change in the use of land.

In other words, here was a period of deep contradictions in the reality and the mythology of Canadian life. Our standard national history portrays the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century as an era of creativity and nation building. The levels of immigration remain unmatched to this day. In the decade before World War I they grew to over four hundred thousand a year. Land was broken. Towns built. Railways were in permanent expansion, spurs off in every direction as villages grew into towns. All true. But at exactly the same time, in the same country, indigenous peoples were dying or suffering or not reproducing because of the terrible conditions to which they had been reduced, and doing most of this in small communities, out of the sight and mind of the largely European Canadian population.

As the indigenous population collapsed, the Canadian political system, emboldened by increasing numbers and power, declared the end to be nigh. It was clear – or so the common, self-serving argument went – that these native populations were unfortunately unsuited to the modern world. Backward. Weak. Stuck in irrelevant cultures. Much of this argument was folded into standard Victorian, imperial, Christian notions of charity.

It was the era of overwhelming empire mythologies. Around the world the imperial power and imperial myths of a handful of countries dominated all thoughts and actions. Few of us today have any real sense of just how powerful and truly international these imperial mythologies were. They were also astonishingly parochial. After all, they asserted that little countries with small populations like Britain and France should set the pattern for the world. Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution, revealed to the world in 1859, were quickly mangled into a populist political narrative, filled with strange leaps of logic. For example, it was assumed that because things had happened over thousands of years, setting a painfully slow pattern of evolution, whatever was done today by those capable of taking power was actually a manifestation of scientific destiny. And scientific destiny somehow meant that these changes were intentional. So, in yet another remarkable leap, the altering of an insect’s wing by a fraction of a millimetre over thousands of years was equated with the immediate political destiny of empires and the racial superiority of those who ran them. The victories of European armies outside Europe somehow signalled that the winners were the carriers of Darwinian destiny. They were intended to lead the world in everything from table manners and dress codes to economic methods, political philosophy and governmental administration. In his remarkable book of ideas, Principles of Tsawalk, E. Richard Atleo (Umeek) eloquently describes and analyzes how Darwin was used against indigenous peoples. The Darwinian “theory of evolution and its interpretations created, for colonizers, a view of differences between people that was and is characterized by superiority and inferiority.”

Francis Pegahmagabow (1891–1952), third generation chief of the Wasauksing First Nation on Georgian Bay. Most successful allied sniper of World War I. Three times awarded the Military Medal. In 1943 Supreme Chief of the Native Independent Government. Photographed in June 1945 while in Ottawa. Canadian Museum of History, 95293.

It is essential in this situation simply to put aside the serious aspects of Darwin and look at how his ideas were quickly jumbled up with those of others into a political ideology of evolution, progress and race that justified whatever the Western empires wanted to do. Darwin’s “natural selection” became by 1864, thanks to the pen of Herbert Spencer, “the survival of the fittest.” Suddenly public debate was full of scientific truisms that were neither scientific nor true. Natural selection was somehow a reason for colonial wars. Evolutionary biology became an excuse for any kind of organized racism. The preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life was an explanation for empire. By the 1870s we had social Darwinism.

All of this would lead to Hitler’s murderous racial theories. We all know about the violence, the inhumanity, the tragedy. But we should never forget that the theories were simply nonsense. And make no mistake, the British, French and American empires were built on that same social Darwinist ideology. Nor should we forget that in the second half of the nineteenth century, Canadian Aboriginal policy was deformed by social Darwinism and so became a creature of its time.

Why did so few people see how horrible all of this was? One explanation is that it was woven seamlessly into our concepts of progress and democracy. Rank racism was institutionalized within the fundamentals of European philosophy and culture. No break with rationality or the Enlightenment or individualism was required, nor, I repeat, with progress and democracy. What’s more, all these elements remain in place today.

Europeans insisted that their principles were universal. Of course they were universal. After all, they said they were. They still say it, with the same old conviction.

All around the world today you can be served slices of tasteless white toast or equally tasteless baguettes. The details of universality as mediocrity are always fascinating – think of them as the lingering crumbs of massive international forces. They make sense because just behind them lie the imperial national schools of philosophy, which are still anchored around the world in their universities, and in ours, and taught as universal. Their national narrative of history, of civilization, of cuisine, of fashion, all apparently universal.

One of the biggest barriers to reconciliation between Aboriginals and non-Aboriginals in Canada is precisely the continuing power of these narratives in our universities. And, it follows, in how we imagine that a state must function. The power of narrative is absolute.

Today’s mythologies of globalization and economic determinism are small-time and regional compared with these ideologies of civilizational truth and destiny. The tattered remnants of English exceptionalism and French exceptionalism, the century of American exceptionalism, all of these remain inextricably linked to this warped idea of a Darwinian destiny.

At first glance such overwhelming imperial power did indeed seem to be justified by Western nations’ technological leadership, military prowess and cultural sophistication. But the key intellectual tool – and the central mythological tool – was the conviction of racial superiority. Racism. It was all about white people, pink people, at the top. This was God’s team, with Darwinian determinism and the machinery of modernism on its side.

In only a few years these intellectually and politically argued myths, laid out with detail and with great self-confidence, would lead the European peoples to massacre themselves in first one world war and then a second. The result was a continental civil war lasting thirty-two years and fought over their theories of race and governance. It was clinically delusional behaviour, the outcome of four centuries of European determinism. And yes, the European outliers like the Canadians, Indians, Algerians, Australians and New Zealanders, along with a multitude of other non-European servants of the empires, would be drawn into the argument. One hundred million dead in less than half a century. A historic record. And all in the name of Western superiority. It is always fascinating how delusion comes with self-justifying, even enabling parameters. The United States went in as the smallest of the European-style empires and came out as the new Rome with its own version of saving civilization, because Americans, like those who had come before, were driven by their exceptionalism. It’s peculiar to go back and read what London, Paris, Berlin, Washington, Rome, Brussels, Amsterdam and yes, the outliers in places like Ottawa were saying about race to justify their actions in the lead-up years to the wars. Educational curricula were filled with these absurdities.

It was in the forty years before the European civil war began that Canadians of European origin decided that “Indians,” “Half-breeds” and “Esquimaux” were among the destined losers when faced by our superiority – our Darwinian destiny. And so we set about helping them on their way to oblivion, banning languages, cultures, rituals. Of course, it was more complicated than that. In a country that believed it was built on the rule of law, respectable mechanisms had to be put in place. Myriad laws, regulations and administrative structures were created and amended in order to install a legal infrastructure of racism and punishment, both social and economic. Residential schools were only one part. But they were an important initiative because a boarding school system gave the state, through the churches, total control over future generations. Behind the progressive mask of education, using the key mechanisms of civilizations – language, culture and all things spiritual – they could mount a direct attack on indigenous peoples. The sexual exploitation, the medical malpractice, the experimentation – all could be seen as expressions of the European racial desire to demean other races. Perhaps these acts of evil betray a desperate innate desire to convince themselves that their racial ideology of superiority was true.

Am I exaggerating? Here is Prime Minister John A. Macdonald speaking in the House of Commons in 1883. He is explaining the need for residential schools: “When the school is on the reserve, the child lives with his parents who are savages; he is surrounded by savages, and though he may learn to read and write, his habits and training and mode of thought are Indian. He is simply a savage who can read and write.” These words from our first post-Confederation prime minister clarify the issue. We are dealing with deeply rooted, European-style racism that is central to the late-nineteenth-century narrative.

On the West Coast, the banning of the potlatch ceremonies was dressed up as a reform to protect the economic wealth and moral well-being of the natives. It was actually an attempt to weaken those natives who had adjusted successfully to the newcomers’ economic system and made themselves powerful players in the new fishing industry. At the national level, we took away their right to vote, to retain lawyers, to organize politically. The 1927 amendments to the Indian Act not only banned potlatches but made it virtually illegal to pursue land claims, and even illegal to wear Aboriginal clothing or perform traditional dances outside of any individual’s own reserve. We broke our own laws by pretending that “Indians” could not leave their reserves without the permission of the local government official: a fiction made up by senior civil servants in the Department of Indian Affairs. And, of course, we broke the treaties that had been signed in good faith by the Aboriginal side, and in earlier periods in good faith by both sides.

Remember, we non-Aboriginals were signatories. As a non-Aboriginal, I say we. And through Canada’s signatures we committed ourselves to the permanency of our relationship with the words that these treaties would stand “as long as the sun shines, the grass grows and the river flows.” These were and remain binding legal documents. Perhaps more important, with our signatures we committed our government to act always with the Honour of the Crown.

The illegal, immoral, unethical acts that followed represented far more than the breaking of specific treaties. We were betraying relationships that were based on good faith and to which Aboriginals made immeasurable contributions. Aboriginals understood these actions as a betrayal of those properly established and maintained relationships. They laid this out in thousands of letters, petitions and written speeches. One of the most eloquent summaries of the situation was the letter presented by British Columbian chiefs of the interior – Chief Petit Louis of the Secwépemc, Chief John Tetlenitsa of the Nlaka’pamux and Chief John Chilahitsa of the Syilx – to Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier at a meeting in the Oddfellows Hall in Kamloops on August 25, 1910, during his historic tour of Canada by rail. Over the years, the arguments of the indigenous – these were far more than protests – were developed into a complex intellectual and legal framework built up on the foundation of treaties and civilizational arrangements stretching back to the beginnings of New France, the Great Peace of Montreal of 1701, the Royal Proclamation of 1763 and the Treaty of Fort Niagara of 1764.

So the indigenous–immigrant relationship was carefully developed over hundreds of years and largely in good faith. What followed from the 1870s on was quite different. Increasingly, non-Aboriginals did not act in good faith. And each of these betrayals we undertook in order to help them disappear. For their own good.

Most of us believe that we are now free of these attitudes. We condemn them. But it isn’t as simple as that. To free ourselves, two things must happen. We must reinstall a national narrative built upon the centrality of the Aboriginal peoples’ past, present and future. And the policies of the country must reflect that centrality, both conceptually and financially.