excuses… excuses…

I am reading a lot of reports from inquiries and royal commissions lately. The subjects are Canada’s native residential schools, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s apology to the survivors of those schools, and the truth and reconciliation commission that is part of the deal struck by Aboriginal organizations, the federal government, and some survivors; not all but some or even most of the survivors.

Unlike the trc, I am not restricting myself to only residential schools in my research. So I pore over documents. As I flip through pages, I find my dander rise whenever certain phrases pop up. One is “in the best interests of..” and the other is “not racist given society’s attitudes at the time.” These two phrases, I’ve become convinced, are flip sides of the same coin.

The first phrase is often used as an excuse. Government officials or authorities use it to intrude, intervene, impose or intercede into the lives of Aboriginal peoples, their communities, their families. It has been used since before Canadian Confederation to “encourage” or force people off the land, from independence to lives similar to the old “fort Indians” who hung about hoping for scraps from the white man’s tables for survival because the buffalo herds had been hunted into near extinction.

This phrase also pops up regularly in various other invasions by government officials or cultural technology, like waves of armoured assault, one after another. The residential schools were only one wave, followed by social workers from the 1950s onward, to the police and the justice system close behind, to television and now the Internet. Each has either grabbed by force generation after generation of children, or enticed with promises of a better life. The result has been the same though – the loss of these children.

Today, whole Aboriginal communities are populated by shell-shocked, institutionalized people; parents who never had the chance to learn how to parent; adults who only learned how to abuse themselves and others. The prisons are full of them, but still churn out more year after year. The child welfare system is especially productive in creating damaged souls. TV and the Internet have replaced the residential schools; both achieve the same result with less fuss as languages wither and cultural norms are confused by foreign images and fleeting promises of instant fame or fortune.

The other phrase (“not racist given society’s attitudes at the time”) is trotted out to explain why the “father of public education” in Canada was not a racist. It is used to explain why the policies of forced assimilation that made the residential schools possible was not racist at all – but a humane act of kindness that went terribly wrong “with the best of intentions” (another one of those lame excuses). It is used to rationalize why a crime was not a crime at all; just the world working as it did in another time.

I don’t buy it.

So many writers, too many to quote here, speak of the architects of these monstrous machines with something akin to pity, excusing racist attitudes, sentiments and public statements with forgiving phrases like “not racist given society’s attitudes at the time.” As though they really weren’t racist at all, and that this really does explain and absolve.

It doesn’t.

It does not excuse hundreds of years of racism, and countless acts of racist cruelty, in the southern United States by saying they weren’t really racist because most people held similar views at the time. It does not excuse the rise of Nazism in 1930s Germany or the Holocaust that followed? It cannot let really nasty people off the hook, such as those who planned and executed the genocide in Rwanda.

So why do Canadians, and Canadian writers, routinely defend people like Egerton Ryerson, Duncan Campbell Scott, or a host of others that represented the cream of Canadian society, the best and brightest of their generations? Why do they argue that these folks were not racist? One would think that Ryerson and the others would have the benefit of superior intellect and Christian upbringing, and this would have taught them the difference between right and what was clearly wrong?

It didn’t. They truly believed they were superior to those of other races. They truly believed that the Indigenous peoples of this land were inferior. This is the dictionary definition of a racist.

So why do Canadian writers find it so difficult to face the truth? Why must they pretend otherwise?

human baggage, human bondage

My dinnermates wanted to know more about INPUT, the international public television conference held early May in Johannesburg, and what I did, saw, heard there. I mentioned a workshop organized by Sylvia Vollenhoven about slavery called “The Human Bondage Project.” Sylvia thinks huge, and plans a global examination about the basis of historic forms of slavery and its contemporary effects upon the world.

I mentioned some of the comments from the mostly African audience. One man rose to tell our shocked group that he had been bought and sold nine times as a farm worker in South Africa. He was not an ancient man. His comments sparked others to insist that the Project, therefore, must be “an African project, with African stories and only African perspectives.” I then told my tablemates that I made a contribution to the workshop, a confession really, to show that slavery must be a truly global story.

I told the audience that I came from a “people who practised slavery.” I explained that my Kanienke:haka (Mohawk) nation waged wars for territory, defence, domination, or trade. In the process, my people took male, female and child captives as slaves. In this way we replenished the genetic pool, learned about other groups and societies, extended our diplomatic relations far beyond our national boundaries, and through work and intelligence our slaves helped us establish the Mohawk nation as a dominant military and trading society in eastern North America.

“They (the slaves) could become full citizens of the Mohawk nation,” I explained, “if they learned our language, adopted our customs, followed our laws, accepted our religion and spiritual beliefs. We absorbed or assimilated them into our people. Some became leaders of our people, valued for their knowledge of other languages, laws and customs.” I explained that this was not a one-way street because other nations took Mohawks and others as slaves too.

“What I didn’t tell that audience in South Africa, and Sylvia wished I had, was that we also took a lot of Dutch, French and English as slaves. Very often, they did not want to return to their own people,” I said, “especially many of the female slaves. They had more rights and status in Mohawk society than they would ever enjoy in their own European societies.”

It is a fact that most European captives preferred to remain with their Indigenous American owners. I mentioned the on-going controversies with the Cherokee Nation’s attempt to deny citizenship to the Freedmen. The Freedmen are former slaves who decided to stay with the Cherokee after the U.S. Civil War. The Freedmen chose to endure the death march called the Trail of Tears along with the Cherokee; an ethnic cleansing carried out by the U.S. Army after President Andrew Jackson ordered the removal at gun-point of Native Americans east of the Mississippi River to “Indian country” in the Oklahomas.

With our little group was a CBC editor and my former producer in radio. She sat there muttering almost chant-like throughout: “Slavery is bad. It is never good.”

Now, this wasn’t a discussion about the merits for or against slavery. It was an attempt to explain that historically, slavery was never a simple matter. Even today, discussion about slavery cannot be limited to “slavery bad… never good.” It was and is a much more complex subject that goes to the heart of human endeavor; social, political, religious and economic interaction and how societies evolve and grow.

Slavery has many overt and ugly facets, which we rightly condemn. We know that the export of millions of Africans to the Americas and Europe was one of humanities great holocausts. It bled the African continent and robbed its nations of almost any chance of social, cultural or economic stability even to this day. Slavery also has many not-so-obvious and even benign forms of human bondage that occur in every society.

For example, a few years ago, an advocate against child sexual exploitation named Cherry Kingley blew me away as she described the legalized and licenced operations that make such exploitation possible and even profitable. We permit pimps in their various forms to own male and female, adult and child sex slaves. Hotel, motel and bar managers know what’s really going on in those rented rooms of theirs. So do taxi drivers who transport johns to and from these establishments, often acting as tour guides for the sexual predator. Except for the pimps, all are legally licenced by elected city councils. Those sitting on city and town councils are neither stupid nor ignorant about the part they play in this trade. This is but one example where the supposedly moral and upright citizenry meet and collaborate with the ugly underworld in an ages-old dance in social commerce.

What are sweat shops in Toronto or Montreal if not slave shops? Aren’t migrant farm workers in the cabbage fields of southern Quebec not a part of an agricultural and economic slave trade? What are one-company or one-industry towns, if the inhabitants have little or no other choice for employment. Why is it that nearly every mine, drilling or logging operation in northern Canada has its own comfort girls made available for the use of workers?

It is not a simple matter, as my former producer would have it, of drawing a line in the sand with those on one side instantly and unreservedly evil while on the other is the pristine good. To me, that is absolute hypocrisy; turning a blind eye to the various forms of human bondage that occur in everyday life in Canada and around the world, pretending it doesn’t exist, or condemning the reality of other peoples lives.

A man in Indonesia takes money to feed his large, starving family in exchange for one of his daughters to serve a family in Malaysia. She will likely end up a prostitute in Thailand. A young Cree boy his early teens in north end Winnipeg signs up with an escort agency because he needs the money to survive. It isn’t right. But these types of transactions take place everyday. It is reality.

In my opinion, my former producer refused to accept that the world is a complicated place; that every society and group has practised obvious and not-so-obvious forms of slavery in the past and continue to do so today. To her, the world is reduced into those two simple phrases, “slavery bad… never good.” By refusing to consider degrees of human bondage, other perspectives, other realities, my former producer was imposing her own morals, values, and her situation upon everyone else. She set a standard on morality using her own life as the yardstick by which others will be judged.

it must be the water

Or the heat. You decide.

I can understand if Canada’s Dakota people didn’t celebrate Canada Day this year after the government offered them a deal to buy out their treaty and aboriginal rights. They turned it down without hesitation and rightly so.

According to a government e-mail, the Dakota First Nations in Canada are American Indians who signed treaties in the United States. This is a serious insult to the Dakota who claim that they chose to live in Canada much like the United Empire Loyalists or the Mohawks of Tyendinaga.

I can think of a lot of other people that Canada might want to get rid of first. Um, like that Federal bureaucrat for one…

here we go again

The CBC is hailing the Royal Assent given to Bill C-27, an Act to Amend the Human Rights Act as a good thing. I say, beware what you wish for – especially when it comes from Canada’s other national public broadcaster (APTN is another).

Why? I remember Bill C-31 which allowed some but not all “non-status Indian” people to regain their status after the Canadian government had stripped them of their rights in the first place with clearly, obviously, deliberately discriminatory legislation.

First, Bill C-31 didn’t work for everyone. Second, it continued to allow discrimination against Status Indians. It did so by continuing the very same discrimination – only this time by jumping a generation. So Bill C-31 might allow a child of a non-status Indian to regain rights, but the children of this person would lose it. Clever folks, these federal bureaucrats. Makes you wonder what they do in their spare time.

Secondly, status is one thing but most services are delivered to “band members.” Some bands came up with such narrow definitions of membership that they actually lost numbers. This, too, is another form of discrimination but the feds considered this to be OK so long as it was Indians discriminating against Indians AND in a way that they agreed with (less Indians is and always has been the ultimate objective of federal Indian policy).

Then there were the unkept promises (don’t get me started!) by the Prime Minister on down that bands would be adequately funded and able to handle the increased demand for medical and social services, housing, basic welfare, etc.

Hah! If you believed that one, I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn for you.

Here’s what the CBC put down about Bill C-27:

But bands in the region will need more money to comply with the act, said John Paul, executive director of the Atlantic Policy Congress of First Nations Chiefs.

With this legislation, he said, communities may be forced to provide services “with money they don’t have.”

Reserves were exempt from the Canadian Human Rights Act when it was passed in 1977. The exemption was supposed to be temporary to give bands time to prepare.

The House of Commons closed the loophole late last month.

Not quite accurate, even for the CBC. It was not ONLY status Indian bands that needed more time. The federal and provincial governments wanted time as well, so they could get their programs, policies, laws and regulations in line with any changes that might be required to accommodate the COLLECTIVE rights of Aboriginal peoples. Or maybe to find new ways to weed out even more Indians or otherwise restrict their rights.

Whatever. These rights were entrenched in the Charter of Rights and the Constitution Act. The federal and provincial governments were also supposed to make sure that any changes they made did not undermine or violate these rights.

You see, it isn’t just one party that has been discriminating both for and against Aboriginal peoples. Sometimes the Indigenous peoples do it to themselves. But most often, it’s the folks with the power and authority that discriminate against Indigenous folks with near impunity – and get away it time after time.

So, let’s start keeping track of who is complaining about what in the next few months. Let’s just see if the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, and the legions of knuckleheads out there who think status Indians spend their lives sipping mai-tais by the backyard pool, begin to file all kinds of grievances “so we can all be equal under the law.”

To me, equal treatment would mean that the federal and provincial government begins to treat them the way they have been treating Indians. Let’s see how they like that!