Putting the ‘Indian’ Back in Canada
About a century and a half ago Canada’s first prime minister — Sir John A. Macdonald — launched a residential school system designed to bring our native peoples into the modern world of the 19th century. Today — thanks to ground penetrating radar — shell-shocked ‘ordinary Canadians’ are discovering the extent of the crimes perpetrated against generations of indigenous children.
History has mostly been a tool used by the winning side — or the last man standing — to make us feel better about ourselves. From the height of the present we can conveniently ignore uncomfortable details from the depths of the past. Things that interfere with what we would like to see reflected back at us.
Sir John A. Macdonald has been vilified by many for his role in this crime — but he was a product of his time. He was probably better than most of his peers. I am told he even extended the right to vote to indigenous people and wanted to do the same for women generally. He was above all a practical politician and realized giving women the right to vote was ‘a bridge too far’ for the 1880s.
EXCERPT FROM ARTICLE ON IDIGENOUS SUFFRAGE FROM THE CANADIAN ENCYCLOPEDIA
In the spring of 1885, Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald introduced the Electoral Franchise Act. Macdonald was prepared originally to extend the federal vote to all Indians — whether they were enfranchised or not — under the same conditions imposed on British subjects. However, after the North-West Resistance, the legislation was amended to exclude all Indian peoples resident in “Manitoba, British Columbia, Keewatin, and the North-West Territories, and any Indian on any reserve elsewhere in Canada who is not in possession and occupation of a separate and distinct tract of land in such reserve, and whose improvements on such separate tract are not of the value of at least one hundred and fifty dollars.” These arrangements remained in effect until 1898, when the Liberal government of Wilfrid Laurier, fearing the vote of Tory Indians (those who supported the Conservative party), reverted to the arrangements that existed before the Electoral Franchise Act.
Quite naturally Macdonald outsourced the operation of the schools to the Catholic Church who were acknowledged experts at the time. The Catholics were not required to be as practical as our first prime minister. They were not beholden to an electorate since they had a direct (internet?) connection to the creator who apparently, created us in ‘his’ image.
Ordinary English-speaking Canadians at the time were convinced much like their British contemporaries, of the rightness of their mission to extend Pax Britannica throughout the world. Given that the Catholic Church had a better educational infrastructure than their fragmented protestant cousins, English Canadians were happy to outsource the civilizing of heathen savages to them.
TWO FOUNDING PEOPLES — A POLITICAL COMPROMISE
When I was going to school — and until just recently — we spoke of TWO FOUNDING PEOPLES and BILINGUALISM. It seems like it took recent revelations about thousands of unmarked graves adjacent to residential schools to change the narrative.
However, when our current prime minister selected the first indigenous Governor General (Mary Simon) who is bilingual in English and Inuktituk, there were rumblings in the press from Quebec that she could not speak French. After more than a century of trying to eradicate indigenous languages, French and English Canadians can’t stop bickering about protecting their own rights within confederation.
Saving the planet means listening to Indigenous peoples: Wade Davis
Back in February of 2020, just before the COVID-19 pandemic got into full swing, I listened to a piece on Wade Davis — the Canadian anthropologist (not the baseball all-star). At the time I was compiling course materials for a new business school. Having endured four years of Donald Trump, I realized I could not simply sit idly by, while my profession, the business press and western society generally, seemed to have lost the plot.
Professor Davis’ voice was among the many that resonated with me. Some like him were ‘progressives”, while others like ‘free market economist’ Russ Roberts are clearly on the conservative side. However they all shared an ability for critical thinking.
Anthropology is the antidote to nativism. It’s the antidote to Trump. You know, the real central lesson of anthropology is that every culture has something to say. Each deserves to be heard just as none has a monopoly on the route to the divine. The other peoples of the world are not failed attempts at being new, they’re not failed attempts at being modern. — Wade Davis
Turtle Island is the name many Algonquian- and Iroquoian-speaking peoples mainly in the northeastern part of North America use to refer to the continent. In various Indigenous origin stories, the turtle is said to support the world, and is an icon of life itself.
It is a place where the local spirits of the land still speak to the families and the clans that remember how to listen. In Canada when children of settlers look at a forest we see a lumber mill, calculate the number of board feet and imagine logging trucks loaded with logs, headed for China. We forgot how to listen millennia ago.
Now like most of us, I don’t necessarily believe in ‘spirits’ (or literal ‘Adam and Eve’), but the forests may actually be ‘the lungs of the world’. Which kind of sounds like a living thing — and of course it is. David Suzuki — the renowned Canadian documentary series producer (the Nature of Things) — has discussed the way that our northern Canadian arboreal forests behave in some ways like a single organism.
In the west we may be wrong to treat forests as simple economic resources. The late German sociologist Ulrich Beck spoke of ‘the risk society’ and essentially challenged us to consider the externalities that too many economists assume away — and businesses are often free to ignore.
Perhaps — in light of recently recognized crimes against indigenous children and their families — we can find a way to formally recognize indigenous peoples in our constitution and protect their right to the use of their languages. It should be enough for a person to be bilingual in English and / or French and/ or Inuktitut (or Cree or Ojibway…) and still qualify for public office where bilingualism is mandated.
Maybe we can also learn from them. They have for instance, practiced forest management for millennia before we interrupted them.
