Happy Birthday Canada. It’s Time to Grow Up.
So you’re 150 years young this year. Honestly you don’t look a day over 110…. Good for you!
Now I’m not sure if nation years work like dog or cat years, but when I look around the world at the various ages of other countries, nevermind civilizations, I think we’d all accept that Canada is still a relative youngster…. After all, haven’t Indigenous peoples inhabited Turtle Island for at least 12,000 years? That’s 100 X 120… 118.5 centuries + 150 years…. Wowser! Now that’s got a bit of gravitas behind it, and deserving of some serious props… yes? Maybe another time…. For now let’s get back to the big year at hand: Canada 150. 150 years of confederation. A tiny drop in the sap bucket of time, a blink of an eye, 7 generations give or take – uhhhh yeah, mostly take, I guess…. I don’t know about you, but if I had to make an analogy for the purposes of this exposition, I would have to place Canada in its late teens / early twenties in human years…. Yes? That’s rhetorical.
When I look back on my early twenties it was a time when finally, thankfully, a few lights started to flicker on. The beer commercial I’d been living in for 4 or 5 years was somehow starting to lose its appeal (shame on me I know – what a fool!) But there I was having all these pangs of conscience and moments of self-reflection. It was developing into a full-blown “I.C.” (Inner Conflict as a friend at the time so aptly put it).
The party, Partaay, Parrrrrteee just wasn’t doing it for me anymore. I kept doing it all of course, but now I felt bad instead of good. Oh, what was a poor-rich-privileged, angry young white man to do?
Scenes from my myopic past played like a compilation reel of epic fails on YouTube – before there was a YouTube. What a schmuck…. But you gotta start somewhere, right? So I started to make my amends. To my folks, my sisters, my friends…. I apologized for bad behaviour and bad decisions. I realized that my life was up to me; that I, and I alone, was responsible for my future. What? Oh shit…. Now what?
I started to look beyond myself into the machinery of society. Studying literature, I took a Russian history course at McGill with an amazing professor – card carrying Commie! We were fully indoctrinated and intoxicated with the ideas of social justice and equality, a sharing of the wealth, people over profit. A classmate and I went to his office one day to ask if he believed if violent revolution was the only way to affect real change in society. He looked at us intently and stroked his Lenin-esque beard. “Perhaps it is.” He said. “Perhaps it is.” The teaching assistant went for the door…. A few days later hundreds of us rallied in front of the registrar’s office chanting “divest now”. There was a big metal oil barrel garbage can out front of the building painted McGill red. I wondered what would happen if I picked it up and threw it through the big picture window of the office. I didn’t do it. But McGill did divest. It was 1982. Apartheid was falling, but back in here in Canada it was business as usual in terms of the oppression, marginalization and murder of Indigenous peoples – a dirty fucking business that I knew nothing about and had never heard of. And I wouldn’t hear, or learn, or investigate anything about it for another 33 years….
Canada’s 150th birthday on July 1st played out mostly as expected – a red and white beer commercial – all plaid bikinis and Muskoka chairs – moose and maple syrup, hockey sticks and Timbits. It played out with platitudes about acceptance and diversity writ large over images of snow-capped mountains and pristine streams. It played out like this, but it’s just not true. And we all know it. Or at least we should all know it by now. There were enough demonstrations and op-ed pieces to at least get our attention – to at least dredge up the racist rhetoric of “stop living in the past and get over it already” and “they don’t pay taxes so what do they have to complain about….”
Here’s a handful of the many great articles written about Canada 150. Please read them.
Tide is turning on Canada’s relationship with Indigenous people
How to turn Canada 150 into a celebration for everyone
This Canada Day, let’s reconcile the truth about treaties
How to turn Canada 150 into a celebration for everyone
Resistance 150: Unsettling Canada’s Hidden Economic Apartheid
And here’s one from south of the border. After all, July 4 is close enough to our July 1…
Born on the Fourth of July: Counterinsurgency, Indigenous Resistance, and Black Revolt
So where was I? Ahh yes. Canada 150. I’ll come back to that soon…. For now let me take you back to last summer: Canada 149! I went to Israel with some of my family for my nephew’s Bar Mitzvah. I had never been to Israel and I didn’t, and don’t, consider myself a religious person – just not a big fan of big institutions of any kind.
On our first day we went to Yad Vashem – The World Holocaust Remembrance Center. It’s a series of connected rooms that takes you through the history of the times, starting with the rise of German nationalism, Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and the steady growth of hate and anti-Semitism that picked up steam and spread like fire across Europe. But what really started to strike me as I moved from display to display, from room to room through the 1920s, 30s and 40s, were the disgusting and terrifying similarities between the treatment of Jews and our treatment of Indigenous peoples (the treatment of Indigenous peoples the world over). And by “our” I mean the Settler Colonial culture of North America: Canada and the U.S. of A. And, of course, this goes for slavery and the treatment and portrayal of African Americans too, but one Genocide at a time please!
Oh I can hear the angry voices of my tribe already…. “You can’t compare the treatment of Indians to the Holocaust! Six million Jews were systematically murdered! Hitler and the Nazis were evil incarnate, Fascists of the worse order. You can’t compare them to “Us”….. Ok. Duly noted. No doubt Hitler and the Nazis top the list, but indulge me just a little, will you? That’s rhetorical.
One of the first rooms was filled with anti-Semitic propaganda – from posters to ashtrays, books and coins to medical devices for measuring Semitic noses and ears…Oi vey!
And here is a sample of how Indigenous peoples have been portrayed. Interesting, eh? As I said in my first post … it is only possible to accept the subjugation, mistreatment, marginalization, oppression, abuse, displacement, and systematic state-sanctioned elimination of Indigenous culture and peoples [and Jews in this case] if you accept that they are inherently inferior….The dehumanization of the “other” is an oldie but a goodie, and it is alive and well all over the so-called democratized world.
So the Nazi propaganda machine did a great job at dehumanizing and demonizing the Jews. The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 “officially excluded Jews from German citizenship and limited their rights as members of society. Also included in the Nuremberg Laws were specific definitions of who was legally considered a Jew. These laws defined Jews, not by their religion or by how they wanted to identify themselves, but by the religious affiliation of their grandparents. Between 1937 and 1939, new anti-Jewish regulations segregated Jews further and made daily life very difficult for them. Jews could not attend public schools; go to theatres, cinema, or vacation resorts; or reside or even walk in certain sections of German cities.”
I’m not sure if Hitler or the administrators of his government ever read the Indian Act and the various amendments made through the years, but they might have found it inspiring…. No right to legal representation, no right to congregate, bans on religious and cultural ceremony and practices, having to apply for a pass to leave the reservation, and of course, all the amazing “blood quantum” stuff and how the government decides who is an “Indian” and who is not…. If you mother is a “Status Indian” but your father is a non-Indian, or just “non-Status” then you’re not considered Indian and so on…. It’s funky misogynist math. The math of state-sanctioned extinction. If you want to learn something about it, read this.
And so the rhetoric and violence were ratcheted up (in Germany I mean). Soon the Jews found their businesses, synagogues and buildings destroyed (the infamous Kristallnacht or “Night of Broken Glass” in November of 1938), and then they were forced from their homes, all their valuables seized. In return they got snazzy armbands…. And for those that didn’t or couldn’t flee, they soon found themselves in overpopulated and fenced-in ghettos. But don’t think for a second that I’m comparing this to the Reservation system in Canada. Numerous treaties negotiated in good faith were broken by the crown and successive Canadian governments, and Indigenous peoples were forced off their homelands to small, ill-prepared parcels of land to make way for waves of European settlers. In some cases they were moved repeatedly, far from their ancestral lands to places that didn’t even have shelter. Don’t get me wrong, these were not the death camps of Auschwitz and Birkenauu. Camp 10 was nothing like Treblinka, Belzec, Sobidor, …. Camp 10? Haven’t heard of it? Don’t worry, it’s not a Canadian concentration camp, but it was no summer camp either…. This was where our government took the Sayisi Dene in 1956. Manitoba officials said the Dene were killing too many caribou (they were wrong) so they picked the Sayisi Dene up off the shores of Duck Lake in 1956 with a cargo plane (they had to leave their hunting equipment and dogs behind) and plopped them down on a barren piece tundra. Here’s an excerpt from an article in the Winnipeg Free Press by Alexandra Paul.
The forced relocation of the Sayisi Dene of northern Manitoba is one of sorriest but least-known chapters in Canadian history. That first year, they wintered on the rocky shores of Hudson Bay in the canvas tents they’d brought from Little Duck Lake. The second year, Ottawa moved them to a cluster of 16 clapboard cabins next to the Churchill graveyard. Finally, they were sent to the notorious Dene Village, deliberately set apart from Churchill, on the town’s outskirts. With no education, little English and no ability to hunt, the Dene spent the next 18 years dying off, victims of rampant violence, fire, alcohol poisoning and abuse. Everyone had tales of ‘shopping’ at the dump for discards and scraps of food. Almost every girl had horror stories of being molested or raped. They were considered the lowest of the low. Within a decade or so, 130 of the original 300 were dead.
But hey, to be fair, there was no barbed wire or ovens…. In 2016 there was a formal apology and some compensation. Case closed… Here are some more links on this story that we never hear about.
The Story of the Sayisi Dene of Northern Manitoba
Meanwhile, back in ghettos in Poland, (and about half way through the museum), Jews were forced into labour to repair war damaged roads and railways and to work in factories for the Nazi war machine. Starvation rations, humiliation, rape and murder were daily occurrences. And the ability to work was no guarantee for survival. There is a lot of information available online about forced labour and the Polish ghettos – the Lodz Ghetto, the Warsaw Ghetto. Not surprisingly, it is not widely known here in Canada that residential school children, aside from being mentally, physically and sexually abused, were often forced to work as labourers on school farms or in the schools themselves, doing laundry, working in the kitchens, or performing janitorial duties. Education was an afterthought in some schools, the rationale being that these heathens were better suited for manual labours. It was also done to save costs….
“The residential school archipelago, when it was created in the 1870s and 1880s, was modelled not after European boarding schools but after the British reformatories and industrial schools designed in the early 19th century to support a child-labour regime – and which were gradually abolished in Britain after 1848. This Canadian system was meant to receive no government or private financing whatsoever: It was to be funded entirely (and in practice was funded “on a nearly cost-free basis,” according to the report) from the products of the unpaid labour of its “students.” The resulting revenues proved grossly inadequate to the nutritional, physical and health needs of the children, and as a result, more than 4,000 of them died.”
Like I always say, there’s nothing like a little forced child labour to get the nationalistic juices flowing…. And let’s not forget that these schools remained in operation well through the 1950s, 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s….
In addition to the forced labour and the death camps, the Nazis also performed scientific experiments on their Jewish prisoners. The good news is that the stories of soap made from human fat and lampshades made of human skin have largely been debunked (though the Nazis did give and also collected tattoos from their victims). The bad news is that they did a wide range of barbaric tests on Jewish prisoners including hypothermia, genetics, pharmacological, sterilization and more.
But guess what? Awww you guessed it! The Canadian government also sanctioned experiments on Indigenous girls and boys who were captive in residential schools. Hard to believe, but they did. You see, the kids were extremely mal-nourished, shockingly, horrifically so. This was also a huge factor in the spread of tuberculosis and the significant number of deaths it caused (they put healthy kids in with the sick ones)…. But rather than address these issues with proper nutrition and medication, which could have easily been done, numerous experiments were devised to study the effects of malnourishment, among other things. I guess starving Indigenous children were just too good an opportunity to pass up! Read this for a brief summary of the experiments. Dr. Ian Mosby, uncovered these studies. You can read his paper here. And here is a video of one of his lectures.
And… there are a lot of stories, accounts and cases of forced sterilization of Indigenous women. Here’s one from August 2017: Saskatoon Health Region apologizes for forced tubal ligations….
So now the death camps are in full swing even as Germany is losing the war – the hungry ovens churning day and night. The allies maintained that they didn’t know. They bombed refineries and factories but somehow didn’t or couldn’t identify the smokestacks of the crematoriums…. Local townsfolk wondered about the funky smell. Better not to ask. Just a bunch of dirty Jews, criminals and Gypsies anyways. Out of site out of mind. Besides, there was a lot of furniture and valuables to choose from! When the gas chambers and ovens couldn’t get the job done fast enough they turned to mass executions and mass graves. The Pits of Ponary claimed about 100,000. Victims were forced to strip naked before the machine guns opened up.
Thankfully, mercifully, I have no comparisons for this. The scope of this brutality, the overwhelming thought of millions butchered…. Unimaginable atrocities day in and day out… living, breathing, loving people imprisoned, starved, humiliated, beaten, raped and reduced to bone and ash. Why? Because they were Jewish. It’s almost unfathomable – the deliberate evil we are capable of.… If you want to read an account of what is was like in the camps AND how one man attempted to understand and overcome it, read Man’s Search for Meaning, by Viktor E. Frankl. You could also read The Weight of Freedom , by Nate Leipciger. He is a family friend and his story of survival provides a harrowing account of his experiences before, during and after the war.
In one of the last rooms of the museum, an old wooden train car fills the space – more of a cattle, or box car really. It’s a train car that carried the frightened families to their deaths. Families like yours and mine. The trains were unloaded, the men and women and children separated. The mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, and children. No time for a goodbye hug, one last embrace. Millions sent straight to the showers where, standing crowded, terrified and naked, gas, not water, streamed in. Zyclon D is a pesticide. You choke. Drown in air. It can take up to 30 minutes to die. Victims clawed at the walls and doors, their nails gouging marks into brick and steel.
But Canada used trains too. They took stolen children hundreds of kilometres from their homes to deliver them to residential schools and the neglect, abuse, trauma and death we should all now know about. Children that ran away often tried to follow the train tracks home. Chanie Wenjack froze to death beside them as he tried to walk home – some 600 kms – after running away from Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School in Kenora, Ontario in 1966 – a school where ear experiments were conducted on some children.
But if I have offended anyone with these comparisons, I sincerely apologize. However, I would also like to understand why the offence? Is it the numbers? The fact that this Jewish history is so well known and documented? Were the Nazis simply more determined and efficient than Canadian governments from confederation to today? Did the Nazis make their inhumane intentions unequivocally clear and in so doing lay bare the cruel, barbaric and hateful depth of their souls? Whereas we still largely deny the genocide perpetrated on these lands? If the holocaust is the big enchilada, the holy doughnut of genocide, then what is the Canadian version? A Timbit? A little maple-flavoured Timbit of a holocaust? holocaust-lite? Is the word “holocaust” leaving a bad taste on your conscience? Is it making me seem a little extreme?
The word “holocaust” is synonymous with the systematic murder of 6 million Jews by the Nazis. But by most reputable accounts, millions more Indigenous people have died as a result of contact than Jews in the holocaust. By most reputable accounts, there were 50 to 90 million Indigenous people in the Americas at the time of first contact with death tolls ranging from 50-90% by the 1700s. But I do understand that you can’t compare machine guns and showers filled with Zyclon D, to influenza, measles, and small pox. The former were very deliberate, the latter, well, let’s jut call them a happy accident (it certainly helped the land grab). Though it would appear that General Jeffery Amherst’s suggestion to give small-pox infected blankets to the Delaware people was carried out at Fort Pitt in 1763 – giving Amherst the dubious distinction as an early adopter of biological warfare….
The forced starvation of Indigenous Peoples? Well, that might have been a bit more deliberate. Lots of detailed accounts here…. Read Clearing the Plains by James Daschuk. But hey, shooting all those buffalo sure was fun…. And it’s not like there were Rembrandts, Monets, diamond jewellery and gold fillings to collect. The land was empty, un-used, Terra Nullius, God’s will, manifest destiny, go west young man, and all that.
What about barrels of mercury buried by mill workers in Grassy Narrows? Confrontations at Restigouche, Oka, and Caledonia shouldn’t be compared to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising…. What about the over fishing, mining, clear cutting, fracking and tailing pond spills that have poisoned the lands; ruined and taken the lives of so many? Is our resource extraction on lands that were never ceded to us the new small pox? Our way of life is considerably predicated on the revenues from these activities. Many of the amazing things this country has to offer are paid for with the profits that we have refused to share equally, despite many promises to do so.
So before you accuse me (again) of gross hyperbole, let me make this clear. Canada is not and was not Nazi Germany. But, as a nation, we are guilty of genocide. And now that we’re here in our 150th year of confederation, we need to put the flags made in China down for a minute and really consider, for a moment, our history as it relates to Indigenous peoples. We have significant amends and important decisions to make. Like my twenty-something self, we have to take responsibility for all that we are – good, bad and some very, very, ugly. There’s a little more to it than having a few beers and joyriding around in the family car…. It’s centuries of systemic state-sanctioned genocide. And it makes no difference that some of this occurred a long time ago. It’s still happening today.
In a recent article by David Moscrop – Rewriting history? That’s how history is written in the first place, he says: “…revisiting our history—reassessing it and how we think about it—is central not only to correcting the record in some cases, but also to moving forward as a country. History is not a static moment or series of moments; history is an ongoing project that connects past generations to the present, and it is built by human beings who make choices about what we admit to, what we ignore, what we celebrate, and what we condemn.
The preferences, norms, and values of a society change over time; the present is a reflection of what we want to represent us, right now—and so it is perfectly reasonable, and often necessary, for a country to revisit what in its history it chooses to emphasize and celebrate. This is, after all, how history is written in the first place.”
It’s pretty clear to me that we are going to have to decide, and decide soon, if we are going to live up to all that we say we are: welcoming, fair minded, tolerant, compassionate, honest, ethical. We say and believe that we are this wonderous “mosaic”, that we judge each other by our merits and character and not skin tone, religion, sexual or gender orientation. Are we going to stand up for the most vulnerable and marginalized in our society? Are we going to repay our debts? Or are we going down the road of individual self interest – me and mine, finders keepers – keep your fucking hands off. Our history as it relates to Indigenous peoples is awfully clear. But the government continues to drag its feet, spends money on lawyers instead of solutions, and now, even as the idea of “reconciliation” gains some traction, pathologizes the generations we have wronged so profoundly that comparisons to the Nazis ring horribly true.
And the rest of us …. Well, for the most part we go on with our privileged lives, not understanding how and why they are so privileged, and getting defensive when someone who suffers at the hands of that privilege challenges it. We know that bad things happened in the past, that there are still a lot of problems, and that something needs to change, but we’re busy. We’re all really, really busy. And the dock at the cottage needs some fixing, and there was this big birthday party to plan….
So that’s how I see it at Canada 150. We’ve got a lot of work to do. Unsettling Canada will be very… unsettling…. And that’s ok. It should be. It has to be. We have a critical and important opportunity and responsibility to change the arc of our history. To make this place the partnership it was intended to be. A partnership to be proud of: a place full of diversity, rich with Indigenous and Settler communities and cultures. Languages, arts, stories, environmental stewardship…. We have so much to share with, and learn from each other. INAC (or whatever they’re calling it today) must go. The Indian Act must go. We must really and truly take responsibility for the injustices of the past and work for as long as it takes to establish the nation to nation relationships, equality and sharing envisioned by the treaties that were signed by all the founding peoples. Indigenous Nations must be given the authority and resources to establish self-government as they see fit. And the 0.2 percent economy must go and be replaced with a land base and the funds that enable all of us to flourish for next 150 years and more. We must, collectively, adopt a fierce and unconditional willingness to compromise and accommodate and embrace our vast differences.
As Viktor E.Frankl said, “we must trust to hear the voice of reason and to ensure that all who are of goodwill, stretch out their hands to each other, across all the graves and across all divisions.”
In the final room of the Yad Vashem museum there are collections of personal belongings. Combs and eyeglasses. Watches, wallets, and handbags. Passports, suitcases, family photos. The floor is made of glass and beneath it are hundreds – maybe thousands – of weathered and wizened pairs of children’s leather shoes. I see the children. I see their faces. I see the lives they never lived. I see them murdered. More than a million Jewish children butchered. I start to feel utterly overwhelmed. I’m having trouble catching my breath. My heart is pounding like a drum. And as tears fill my eyes they blur my vision. The combs look like feathers, the handbags like beaded pouches, and the shoes beneath the floor become piles of small, discarded moccasins.
Happy Birthday Canada. It’s time to grow up.
Postscript
Comparisons like this are fraught with peril…. As a close friend keeps reminding me, it’s a tricky bit of business…. I am not a historian. I am not an expert. I am a citizen who feels deeply betrayed by my country because it made me believe that we are good and honest and caring people and an example to the world of tolerance and acceptance. People of their word. People who care for “the other”. And we very well may be. I still believe that most are. So I have hope. But there is a profound blind spot when it comes to our Indigenous sisters and brothers and the dark and tragic legacies of settler colonialism.
My stated purpose is to educate non-Indigenous people with the hope that it will motivate to action. ReconciliACTION….. This post and my “where I come from…” post, present a lot of terrible truths, but, of course, they are not the whole picture. And I will do my best to fill that picture in as my journey continues. Anger and table pounding won’t bring us together. But neither will the denial, or whitewashing, of the past. So I will give the last word here to Nate Leipciger, a family friend and holocaust survivor who wrote this towards the end of his memoir, The Weight of Freedom.
“I had no intention of minimizing or whitewashing the crimes of the Shoah [holocaust], but I felt that Poland should not be blamed for the crimes it had not committed. There were enough proven crimes, and Poland had to live with its past. Crimes perpetrated by no matter how many Poles could not be transferred to a whole nation, and certainly not to the subsequent generations. I believe we must break the cycle of hatred based on past injustices. We must stay dedicated to educating the public and especially our children to be not only tolerant of other cultures but to accept them. It is easy to say that others should change and become like me and then I will accept them. Acceptance is not easy, but that is what must be done – only then will we destroy intolerance, achieve harmony between nations and individuals and keep hatred in check. The Shoah is the strongest and most poignant example of group hatred and intolerance. Nevertheless, I do hold the state responsible for the crimes of their citizens, especially if the state had benefitted materially from crimes of the previous regimes.”
The Treaty People 
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