Canada Day, a short-lived misadventure
Amid widespread calls for its cancellation, sitting out Canada Day has symbolic value. But when you stopped attending your racist aunt’s barbecues, did you notice Truth spring and Reconciliation flourish?
By Gareth Chantler
“This land is soaked with blood,” was, at one point, the only thing I could manage to say, discussing The Secret Life of Canada podcast with a newcomer friend.
“Everywhere is actually,” they pointed out.
So whether it is Alberta’s Eugenics Board, or the illegal Provincial birth alerts of today, Canada’s won’t be the first horror stories a newcomer reads, no matter from where they hail.
That’s part of why whitewashing Canada to newcomers is so distasteful. It is not just dishonest, but it is also infantalising. It sees a window of opportunity, during that temporary naïveté which sometimes accompanies human relocation, to imprint a national mythology.
Hence, one supposes, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) 93rd recommendation “…to revise the information kit for newcomers to Canada and its citizenship test to reflect a more inclusive history of the diverse Aboriginal peoples of Canada, including information about the Treaties and the history of residential schools.”
Deny, Deny, Deny, Downplay
“It’s never been a secret that residential schools had graveyards. It’s never been a secret that children went missing,” Daniel Heath Justice told CBC’s Unreserved. “I don’t think we can unearth hidden histories without pain coming with them, because pain is a part of why they’re buried.”
The National Post’s Matt Gurney doesn’t disagree that Canadian history has been whitewashed to some extent, but goes on to suggest the bigger problem is “Canadians don’t know anything about their history.” Canadian history needs to be learned first, or else “you will continue to be shocked by things that shouldn’t be shocking.”
I do not think Gurney’s take is dishonest. But notice how easy these things come and go to settlers. So little is at stake for us. Just revising our hot takes in time for the backyard season. The big question? What books are on our shelves this winter.
In general, English-speaking Canada has shifted down from denialism to whataboutism. Now, of history all too recently denied, we hear ‘Of course.’ Of course horrible things happened. A shrug seems implied. Yet settlers still feel moved to enumerate all the good that Canada — a bad actor — could be construed as responsible for.
This planet is a factory that produces genocides. Why would this place be any different? But many seem to think history always has two sides — history as a slice of bread.
I heard it said often enough — “there are always two sides to every story” — at white BBQs growing up. Always be suspicious of wisdom that does not mention power.
Honest disagreements, the kind that didn’t happen at the white BBQs I grew up with, seldom resemble two sides, for and against.
Honest disagreement is collaborative, discursive, fruitful, inconclusive. Tangents are explored without a timer or a goal, parties work together to delineate what exactly it is they disagree about. Seldom does resolution occur, but the conversation is enjoyed. Good intentions should be detected, because both parties make an effort to show them.
Honest disagreement is mostly just listening to things, not knowing if you disagree with them or not until much later.
The ‘there are always two sides’ people think history is a schoolyard, and honest disagreement is a tug of war where both sides shake hands afterwards. They want to go home with their prejudices.
The TRC issued 94 calls to action, 71 to 76 inclusive deal with “Missing Children and Burial Information.”
In other words, any settler could have known to expect the “gruesome discovery.” So perhaps Gurney was right — if his point was Canadians didn’t read the report. It has been out for over five years.
“I was on air recently and people were saying, we need to hold on, we don’t have all the facts,” Canadaland’s Emile Nicolas said recently, in relaying the conversation happening in Quebec “—probably because they didn’t read the TRC report.”
This talking point also gets a lot of repetitions. If it were so distant in the past, it wouldn’t be so disquieting.
As with ongoing racial discrimination and the legacy of slavery in the United States, whenever you hear an exasperated plea to “move on” because “it was a long time ago” you can be sure whatever is being discussed basically happened yesterday.
Walk through Cambodia today and notice the curiously high incidence of missing legs. That is the kind of recency we’re talking about. So recent that the evidence marks the survivors. It is precisely because it is so recent that settlers are defensive about it.
The Indian Act is still law, the 60s scoop was the 1960s, and the TRC did not investigate abstract history, but the recent, visceral, human past. Many “Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls” are missing right now.
If everything was in the distant past, people like Minister for Crown-Indigenous Relations Carolyn Bennett and Minister for Indigenous Services Marc Miller might fill their air with words; instead, they speak in the heeled cadences that mark preparation by a legal team.
The Ally with No Clothes
Recently on MP Nate Erskine-Smith’s podcast, Miller spoke about the federal government being at odds with various provincial governments on the files in his remit. There seemed to be an obliviousness that colonialism presents as a monolith to the colonized.
“The Viceroy and the Queen can’t seem to work out their differences on the finer points of your liberation.” Does that sound like a reasonable appeal to patience for someone living under the British Raj?
Erskine-Smith, arguably the most open minded, but certainly the least loyal Liberal by voting record in the House today, did not resist Miller on the challenges the government has mounted to delay settlement of two cases concerning the persistent violation of Indigenous human rights. Attrition has always benefited governments. They wait survivors out. The minister voiced support for that longstanding tradition.
It is hard to tell whether Miller knows his hard-earned facility with the Mohawk language is being wrung out, in classic Liberal fashion, for every drop of whatever credibility it is worth. Meanwhile the Liberal Party of Canada’s plan to govern remains eternal: just make it to the next election.
This Train is Moving
The most obvious change happening in the conversation now is that the people who book segments on television and radio are beginning to call on Indigenous voices, who have been available the entire time.
“Maybe we have done too good of a job promoting Canada as a place where these things couldn’t happen,” Lou-Ann Neel told CTV News in the style of interview that used to be reserved for APTN or late night TVO documentaries. “And here we are finding out the exact opposite.”
“So many people would report these things and nobody would believe them,” she added (in other words, denialism was recently the norm). “I think that’s a real symptom that we need to do something about.”
In fairness to Miller, he said on June 26th, “The stories were there; they were denied. They were denied, perhaps, as an exercise in collective, willful blindness of a country who perhaps doesn’t want to believe that the atrocities have been committed on this land.” He also pointed out the problem with the federal government investigating itself for a crime it committed. A centimetre of progress.
“We don’t want to be objective if it means pretending that ideas don’t play a part in the social struggles of our time,” historian Howard Zinn writes, “…I ask that history be more than a cold recitation of facts about the past, that it serve a purpose in shaping the future.”
Canada Day was Dominion Day forty years ago. Forty years is enough. This July 1st, why don’t we go back to the old name? Dominion Day has the advantage of being more honest. As Zinn points out, “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.”
