Where Do I Go

A history written by losers is every bit as misleading as one written by winners.

When I was a young boy my father would take me out fishing or hunting and he would say things like: “no white man has ever been here before.” which would make the forest seem magical to me. I loved to envision what it was like before the white man arrived, when only the indigenous peoples lived here and what life was like back then. There is a romantic element to it… I suppose you could be critical of my youthful imaginings and claim that I had fallen for the ‘noble savage’ stereotype, that there was a certain systemic racism being introduced into my not yet developed brain. It’s possible, but it didn’t seem that way to me. I in no way imagined one homogeneous people who all acted the same. I expected the same variety of people I would see in my own home town and across the country. Just less technologically advanced and living on and with the land in a way that simply wasn’t done anymore. The cruel winters must have been especially difficult, it was regularly forty degrees below zero where I grew up so I can only imagine how hard those winters would have been without our modern comforts. I respected that past and those people who lived through it, but I wasn’t a part of it, I was a foreigner. A settler… a colonist.

My father was born in Persia, my Mother in Toronto. My father’s father was born in Malaysia, his mother in Russia. My mothers father was born in England her mother in Ireland. I was born in Canada. Toronto, like my mother, but you can see how we are very new to this country. Some of my family roots got back to somewhere in France and we simply don’t know after that. We can trace back maybe four to five hundred years. That’s it.

You see, I saw a sign today that read “Canada 150 years, Anishinaabe 13000 years.” Underneath it said “more like 35000 years (according to some ‘papers’ …. we know better)” I can only assume that this is an allusion to the notion that their oral history is factually correct and modern anthropology hasn’t caught up to them yet. It could be that their oral history is correct, but that’s oral history, not anthropology and anthropologists should use oral history only as a guide.. but never as a final word. So there is some discrepancy on the actual dates for how long the indigenous population was here. I see no reason why it should matter one way or the other, but it does. None the less the sign is basically correct and I have no issues with it.

It got me to thinking though, where should I go if I want to be a native who is proud of their home land? Well, I am white, so there is nowhere I can do that and not be racist. I’m fine with that mind you, I have no desire to take part in collective pride over accomplishments and lives I had nothing to do with. Tribalism does not appeal to me. Sure, we stand on the shoulders of our ancestors and I am impressed with what human beings have done throughout the millennia… I am thankful to them for lifting us up out of the stone age and giving us Netflix, Smoothies, and Mandolins but I wouldn’t exactly call myself proud. In order for us to get here it took millennia of war and slavery… our history is bloody and ugly, nothing to be proud of and I’m not too sure I like the notion of pride to begin with, it was one of the seven deadly sins for a reason. Pride can blind you. So I struggle with how to deal with it. I don’t like it anymore than I like the word shame. I won’t feel pride nor shame over the actions of other people. Even with my own actions I rarely feel either one so why would I extend that feeling to the actions of others? Most of what I do in a day is so mundane that neither emotion makes sense to me. If, however, I was taught to feel pride for my heritage than I suppose it would only make sense to ask others to feel shame/pride for their heritage as well. Personally though, I reject that dichotomy.

Canada will be 150 years old soon. Canada, the English/French settlement that tried to incorporate and live with the indigenous population about as well as anyone had done up to that point in time (plenty did worse, some did better). It wasn’t completely successful and there was incredible cruelty involved in getting us to this point, but it was an attempt no more cruel than any done by other nations in similar circumstances. Even the various tribes, when the Europeans got here, weren’t any better at dealing with conflict than the Europeans were.. The Hadia, the Tlinget, the Camanche… there were hundreds of tribes who took enemy combatants as slaves after raiding their villages and some of these tribes would even sacrifice the slaves in ritualistic fashion (not all obviously, but some)… so it’s not like the Natives were pacifists on a moral high ground and the Europeans were simply hateful colonists. They were all human beings with the same flaws and imperfections as the rest of us. Life is more complicated than a simple dichotomy of that sort allows.

Yet the Europeans did colonize and take over the land through their use of superior technology (also, force and trickery) and the native population paid a heavy price. Something that empires dating back millennia had been doing to one another. The difference is that we’re living in it right now so the wounds are fresh. We’re afraid to peel off the scab. The last residential school closed down in the 1990’s. So we remember these crimes. I was born here and despite the fact that my family has been here less than one hundred years (and certainly less than thirteen thousand years) I have no where else to go. Technically, since I was born in Canada, I would be a native of Canada (dictionary definition) but in reality that is unacceptable terminology so I am a native of no land. A man without an ancestral home.

I remember when I was in university history classes and I’d listen to the professor talk about colonialism. Everything would be negative, colonialism was pure evil, subjugating native peoples, indoctrinating them, stealing their land and enslaving them and there was really nothing else to say about it. Almost the opposite of how I was taught about it in grade school where they told me these men were brave heroes who left the confines and religious discrimination of Europe to seek a new and better life in a free world… that’s how quickly times change. From the 70’s to the 90’s we went from teaching our children that the original colonizers were heroes to teaching them they were villains. That’s not good for a young kid struggling to understand the world. There was even one prof in my University who would go out of their way to let non-European students know that their history was honorable and that they had every reason to be proud of their past but when one of the other students put their hand up and asked: “well, I’m European, do I have anything to be proud of?” the teacher immediately and without hesitation replied: “No, you should be ashamed of your past.”

This student had the same basic ancestry as I did so that didn’t feel particularly good, was it something in my genes? Could I fix it? Not only do I not really have a home but on top of that I should be ashamed of my vagabond past? This didn’t gel with how I saw my parents or my grandparents. They seemed like nice people, what should I be ashamed of? Had they done something wrong I was unaware of? Hell, we just got to this country, but this is how most post-colonial theory is presented. It’s basically predicated on the notion that colonialism was purely a force for evil and all those associated genetically with the original colonizers need to pay a price for that.

Is Canada 150 a national party or a celebration of colonization?

For example in one thread about the issue I asked a general question.. ‘what, exactly, do they want?’ and I received this answer from a self-identified indigenous protester. Notice how they don’t actually answer the question and instead just turn to condescension and righteous indignation.

To be clear, not all immigrants are treated this way. I have friends that have immigrated from Eritrea, Korea, Iran, India, China… none of them are asked to feel guilt for the system they’ve adopted, none of them are accused of being trapped in a bubble of ‘white privilege’, is there a pejorative he would use for non-white immigrants? Is it because they look like the original colonists? Is that what it is? Is it because the people in power, the people sitting in parliament today mostly look kind of like me? That’s what apparently gives me my ‘white privilege’. I’ve been told that ‘white privilege’ was the notion that I could move through society without having to be made aware of my race, that I wouldn’t wonder if my race was holding me back from this or that job, this or that social function, I could be blissfully unaware of it… but that phrase in and of itself takes away that power. Is that the right direction? Shouldn’t we be working to give everyone that freedom and not take it away from the few who have it? I don’t want to get caught up in this game of being constantly aware of what I look like. I have a mirror at home and I already avoid that as it is. How do you stop that pendulum from swinging back and forth and how many people are taken out by it’s movements? This sign, making playful fun of Canada day was forcing me to see… not me, but an imagined collective that I am assumed to be a part of. That’s why I’m told to ‘check my privilege’ when I want to have an opinion on colonialism or black lives matter or any other social movement of that nature, because I am a part of that collective through no choice of my own. Ok, I get it, can we move forward another step now please?

Canada will be 150 years old soon, that’s not very old. The sign comparing it to 13000 years tells me that it’s an incredibly short amount of time. Rome lasted for over a thousand years, ancient Egypt too… Canada has a meager 150 years. Marred by colonialism and a mixing of cultures that had incredibly detrimental effects on the aboriginal population. They were ravaged by disease, war, segregation, attempts at assimilation and bigotry not to mention being forcibly removed from sharing in their cultural history. That’s not easy for a group of people to live through and history has shown us time and time again that cultures die out under these circumstances. Yet the natives of Canada are fighting back, they are making a name for themselves with movements like Idle no More and through the activism of people like Tanya Tagaq. Their traditional languages are now taught in some of our finer schools, the fact that many of the treaties were violated or written under false pretenses is now openly discussed and accepted and the government has apologized for several different abuses that took place throughout the years. This wasn’t easy to accomplish, it took years of work on the part of indigenous artists, writers, activists, and council members shining a light on these problems for us to see it. We still haven’t had an indigenous prime minister for example. Most recently is the talk of residential schools and the harm they did to some natives and the missing and murdered aboriginal women committee that is investigating how so many indigenous youth can go missing with no real investigation into where they went. How do we reconcile with these indigenous peoples in such a way that no one feels marginalized? Or better yet, to use the word de jour, oppressed.

Personally, I feel that all people are oppressed and all people suffer. While it is true in very general terms that people from certain cultural or socio-economic groups can suffer more on average it’s not safe to assume that simply because someone comes from a particular culture they haven’t (or have) suffered or been oppressed as much as anyone else. In fact that is a dangerous assumption that assumes knowledge and causes animosity and division. I’d like to argue against those types of simplistic views that seem to me to be lacking in nuance. I try to take people at face value and let them build their identity while interacting with me. I won’t judge them as colonizers or the colonized. Let them speak, let them create their own identity instead of giving them one based on a presumed collective they are forced to be a part of.

Colonialism was more complex than how it is presented today too. It wasn’t simply an evil system that destroyed lives… that’s one thing it did but to fully understand what it’s done to our culture requires much deeper thinking over a longer time frame than that view point allows. We must rise above that kind of mono-mania. It connected the globe as well, modernized countless groups of people and hooked up countries to an electrical grid. It allowed us to start to see ourselves as one people on the planet and less as various competing tribes constantly preparing to fight one another. You can’t send foreign aid to poor countries and not accept that colonialism is a huge part of why that’s even possible. Between 1990 and 2013 we lifted more than one billion poeple out of extreme poverty around the globe. This has been happening for a hundred years now. Global awareness came at a very high price. There are positives to it and a more nuanced understanding of it’s effects is necessary for us to move forward. Those people who first came over here, or those who later on designed treaties or residential schools to try and assimilate or accommodate the indigenous people may seem evil or at least misguided now… but there is absolutely no reason to assume you wouldn’t be the same as them if you were given their experiences and their life to live. Looking at these issues requires at least some hermenutical sensitivity. So I don’t accept the ‘colonialism is evil’ rhetoric anymore than I accept the white privilege rhetoric or the shame/pride dichotomy. These views are too simplistic, too reductive, and they lie by omitting large parts of the complete story.

Yet, however you want to categorize or view colonialism, there is no doubt that without it there is no Canada and that is the issue we are facing. Canada was born out of Colonialism and we have to live with that. Many of our indigenous population do not want to celebrate Canada because of what it represents to them. The almost complete destruction of their culture. Could you imagine the Maccabees celebrating the Roman Empire? Could you imagine the surrounding tribes of the Aztec empire celebrating an Aztec anniversary? Celebrating the empire that imprisoned, enslaved and sacrificed them? Of course not. There is nothing unfathomable about this movement, in fact it makes perfect sense, but would the average Native Canadian be better off if colonialism never took place? Would they be better off if they still lived life the way they did before the first ships came sailing down the St. Laurence? Would we? Would the globe? What would first nations culture look like if it had the chance to advance naturally and without European influence? We won’t ever know, it’s too late for that. Our only job now is to pick up the pieces and make the best of it while trying to honestly understand what we did to get here… the good and the bad.

Now here we are, hundreds of years later, and a hundred and fifty years after Canada left England. This year there’s been more media coverage of the indigenous populations issues with Canada day than ever before in our history. What will it take for us to reconcile our past? How many generations, how many years? Should we cancel Canada celebrations all together? How would the public respond to that? I have a feeling a more balanced response is necessary.

I am not a nationalist, I don’t sing our anthem (I’m not even sure I remember all the words), I don’t celebrate Canada day, and I don’t really care about Canada at all. Nationalism, to me, is a form of tribalism and the biggest cause of modern war in my opinion so I simply do not take part in it. I vote, and that’s about as far as I’m willing to go, but I do care about the people inside of these borders getting along with one another and not holding grudges. Can we have racially motivated laws in our country? Can we let the indigenous population live under one rule and the rest of us under another? It seems fair at first glance and possibly racist at first glance. It depends on who filters the information and how your political views shape the way you see our nation today. Generally speaking those on the left will see these things as a positive and those on the right will see them as a negative. The goal is to balance out the population so we don’t see indigenous youth going to jail, or turning to drugs, suicide, crime etc… in such ridiculous numbers. So we try to implement initiatives that can help improve certain communities. We know the issues they face are not the result of genetics so we try to find policies that can balance these issues out and maybe create a level playing field for all people. How do we know when to stop though? Or if we’ve gone too far? There are no easy answers. From what I can tell this has never been done before and those of us in the modern world trying to reconcile colonial pasts with our present are doing something unprecedented on the planet.

I don’t have the answers and I probably never will. I may not envy the cultural genocide, destruction of the family and occasionally murderous history that our first nations have lived through but I do envy their sense of identity, their sense of home, their attachment to the land itself as if their ancestors can sing to them from deep within the forests of our country… those are things I don’t have and never will have. They are worthwhile and beautiful. If I wanted those things I have no clue where I would have to go to find them. I will not look at our indigenous people with pity, it’s a useless emotion. I look at them the same way I do the rest of our population, with love. I hope.

This Canada Day I still will not celebrate, much the same as I always do, but I will spend time thinking about the cultural divide we all live with. I will imagine what it will take to bring our people together, right, left, indigenous and immigrant. I will think about what it will take for us to see past our past and into our future in such a way that we can all work together and not get caught up in the politics. I also am trying to teach my sons a more nuanced and honest assessment of our past so they can learn about the past of the land we now occupy. The people who lived here before us, their history and the general effects of colonialism. I know I don’t have the answers for what we need to do next in order to heal, but I want to raise my boys in such a way that maybe they will be better equipped to deal with this and understand our current situation. At least give them a consistent education instead of one that changes it’s philosophy half way through their development like mine did. Maybe the next generation can be better informed about our past and with better information make more constructive choices about how we can all move forward. It’s too late for me. Either way, celebrate Canada Day however you choose. Celebrate it if you like, ignore it if you prefer, maybe focus on aboriginal day instead, or learn about the animistic religions that were such an integral part of their lives and try and get in touch with what they can offer us in the modern world. Search through the stories, the mythologies, the philosophies and maybe you will discover what we have lost along the way. Good luck.