He could have been even more direct, in my opinion: not
only did Canadians know what they were doing during all those years, but they
actually did it all on purpose, enshrining their purposes in a series of
legislative actions that, when considered in total, leave no doubt as to their
meaning: they were designed to abolish the so-called “Indians” by turning them
all into compliant, non-troublesome ordinary Canadians --- in other words, not
to put too fine a point on it, they were engaged in an act of legislative
genocide. (And please don’t let’s hear any quibbling against use of the word
because it is supposed to diminish the suffering of other genocide victims: the
fact is, Canada’s actions towards its native people fits the definition of
genocide to a tee.)
I’ve been impressed in recent months by the amount of
commentary on indigenous affairs that has begun to appear in the nation’s
newspapers, more impressed by the amount of it than by its quality. Since most commentators in the press these
days are instinctively conservative --- they would hardly be allowed to comment
if they weren’t, since the owners these days are usually major corporations
with interests in other fields that they are likely to be using their newsapers
to defend ---- it is no surprise to find that many of them appear to have
discovered a magic bullet by which the so-called Indian problem could be dealt
with. That magic bullet is the policy of assimilation, in which they are
following the lead of the Conservative government.
The government’s policies, designed to undermine the
rights guaranteed to the indigenous in the constitution, to undermine their
control of even the minimal lands the indigenous have been confined to, and to
undercut provisions of treaties made many years ago, have been accurately
described by Russell Diabo, author of the
online First Nations Strategic Bulletin, as “the Canadian government’s
war against the native people of canada.”
The enthusiasm of so many commentators for the
assimilation policy ignores the fact
that this has always been government policy, ever since a policy existed in
Canada, which is more than 200 years, and it is precisely this policy that has
resulted in the sorry conditions that apply in so many Aboriginal reserves
today.
Ralston Saul, in his piece acknowledges that there are
contradictions that arise in any consideration of policy towards the indigenous
people. This is one of the first things
that struck me when I began to write abut indigenous policies in the late
1960s. I made many visits to native communities and fairly quickly understood
that there was more to write about than their often appalling conditions of
life. What confronted anyone trying to meet as many Aboriginal people as
possible was how many of them had been persuaded to be ashamed of being native
people. I can recall many youngsters in their mid-teens who told me how they
had been schooled to be ashamed, and it wasn’t until they were 14 or so, and
able to do some thinking for themselves, that they realized how false all this
was.
The contradiction that struck me was this:
First, only by re-asserting their traditional values,
re-discovering their ancient ceremonies, and basing their actions and demands
on what is, after all the fundamental view of life of indigenous people
wherever they may be in the world, that is, a holistic view that sees
themselves (and us) as just one of the participants in the cycle of life, and
the one with probably the greatest responsibiity for the health of the world,
could they hope to recover and take a responsible place in the mosaic of
whatever nation they might find themselves in, which in this case was Canada;
Second, it
seemed almost contradictory that, faced with having to defend themselves
against governments, corporations, intellectuals and others armed with the
formidable knowledge and sophistication inherited from the modern world, the
secret to their success in this confrontation quite evidently lay in their
being equipped by a modern education to deal on equal terms with the moloch
that they faced.
Ralston Saul makes this point in his article: some 30,000
native people are in universities and colleges. And a people who wefe forbidden
in 1927 from hiring lawyers to pursue their claims, now have 1,000 lawyers
among their own people. Time, he says, and one must welcome and heartily
endorse his call, time to listen to what they have to say. Otherwise, Canada
can nevefr be the country it purports to be, an inclusive democracy with room
for everyone to express themselves.
For sure, the native people stand first among those who
deserve that chance. But even if there were no question of their deserving it,
they are, regardless, seizing it as they comeback from those many decades when
they were treated by something not far from contempt by the mainstream society.
On the question of this treatment I always think of the short shrift given given in 1928 to Chief
Syllaboy of the Mikmaqs, when he pleaded that his hunting rights had been
guaranteed in a treaty of 1752. This argument was scarcely even considered; the
province argued that Mikmaq rights had been
extinguished. Sixty years later
in 1985 the Grand Council of the Mikmaqs chose one of their men to hunt outside
the boundaries of his reserve, to test the continuing validity of the law. He was convicted, and the Supreme Court of
Nova Scotia upheld that conviction, but it was overturned by the Supreme court
of .canada, thus confirming a gradual change in the interpretation of
Aboriginal rights.
The Supreme Court ruled that the 1752 treaty was still a
binding and enforceable agrement between the Crown and the Mikmaqs, and that
the protection of their hunting right overrode provincial legislation.
If it proved nothing else, this decision showed that the
indigenous memory is long. And it is certain, as Ralston Saul has argued in
his piece, that we ignore it at our peril.
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