beyond the words, to the meaning

I once had respect for an editor at the National Post newspaper, a right-wing Canadian rag that has seen better days. But then, so has the editor in question. Once, in a former life, I even insisted that we bring him onto our national TV program to represent the intelligent right wing in Canada. Today, I would more likely be encouraging an examination of the racial intolerance in right wing journalism, so often cloaked in the the guise of free speech.

I respect people who can articulate an argument in a logical way even if I don’t agree with them. I look for people who make me think, who provoke. But in the end, I look for writers who share my belief in what should be a central plank in journalism (just as in medicine): First, do no harm.

My respect for this person, never great, has evaporated completely. It disappeared as Jonathan Kay’s writings on Indigenous peoples in Canada has become increasingly shrill, calling for the wiping out of entire Indigenous nations, whole cultures. He does so based on little more than racial prejudice. Gone is any trace of an open mind willing to listen, to see value in other points of view or opinion. Gone too is the wish to do good, the grudging respect, or at least any civility or politeness that may once have existed – if only in my own mind.

Like many anthropologists working with aboriginals, the authors were pressured to act as advocates for native cultural empowerment. But what they saw — sex and child abuse, violent crime, economic and social dysfunction, suicide, substance abuse and Fetal Alcohol Syndrome — soured them on the mantras being peddled by their peers. The most urgent task, they conclude in their book, isn’t heaping more powers and cash on band leaders, but providing natives with the education and cultural formation required to make it in modern society, so they can leave the reserves behind. Widdowson and Howard don’t call this goal “assimilation” — but I do.

Actually, Widdowson and Howard do advocate assimilation. They may not use the word but the meaning is crystal clear. They have just become the latest to join the far-right’s on-going attempt to obliterate the Indigenous in the guise of “civilizing” them; a centuries-old and completely barbaric approach that finds a parallel in the idiocy and madness that made one of the the Vietnam war’s great quotes possible: To save the village, we had to destroy it.

If you want to look further, just go here. Do your own search for other columns. See for yourself. Make up your own mind. Just don’t get mesmerized by pretty words – look at what they actually mean. See the ugliness for yourself. Then ask yourself: If this had been written about the Jewish people, would the Canadian media have let him get away with it?

In other words, the encroachment of Western values in aboriginal communities isn’t the problem — it’s the solution.

check it

Balbulican at StageLeft has something of interest. It’s about the not-so-invisible Reform-Conservative party’s Aboriginal policy. If you’re thinking “deny, deny, deny” then you’re only partly right. Here a sample, then why doncha just head on over.

Their actions since their election, however, have all been completely consistent with the views of Tom Flanagan, Harper’s professor and key policy advisor.

In 1999 Flanagan published “First Nations, Second Thoughts”. In that book he argues that the presence of Aboriginal people in the new world doesn’t give them any legal or constitutional rights. The fact that the Canadian Constitution, the Supreme Court of Canada and the UN all disagree with him didn’t phase Flanagan. He also argues that:
• Aboriginal culture is inherently inferior to European culture, and always was;
• Métis are not Aboriginal people;
• Because Aboriginal didn’t haven Westminster style parliaments, they are incapable of governing themselves;

Flanagan’s conclusion: the only (final?) solution for Canada’s Aboriginal Problem is Assimilation.

How should that assimilation be accomplished?
- Land Claims and Treaties should be made subsidiary to Canadian laws.
- Nation-to-Nation relationships should be terminated. Self governments should be reduced to the level of municipal governments.
- Every incentive should be presented to move natives off reserves and into the cities; the land base should be diminished to the extent possible.
- Special programs of support for Aboriginal people are discriminatory, and should be eliminated.

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?