Canada Day: The choice before us

 

Canada Day: The choice before us

In nation-building, as in war, Truth is often the first casualty.

This Canada Day many Canadians are experiencing an identity crisis –a national identity crisis. The Canada they knew and loved turned out to be an imposter; a deceitful charlatan that was not the lovable and admirable entity so many of us thought it was. Across the nation Canada Day celebrations were cancelled. Flags were lowered to half-mast. It was not so much the deaths of innocent children in residential schools that so disturbed Canadians; the children that die on an annual basis in the Mediterranean, or in wars and famines don't elicit such a response. No. It was their beloved country's culpability in the matter, and the willing complicity of the Church to which the government had delegated the task of genocide. Patriotic Canadians were experiencing a loss of national innocence, like an adolescent in a coming-of-age story. They were experiencing a national identity crisis. But will Canada finally grow up and come of age? That remains to be seen.

An identity crisis is no small thing. It affects the very core of one's being. An identity is not easily replaced. Losing one's identity is a great loss, and coming to terms with such a loss entails all the steps of grieving –shock and denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and will hopefully culminate in acceptance. Acceptance that what is gone is indeed gone, or perhaps never really was, and now a new identity must be constructed on the ashes of the old. In a national identity crisis it is often the most patriotic among us who are the most adversely impacted –the ones who took the greatest pride in their country and its achievements, who vociferously defended her from all her detractors, and perhaps even fought for her in her wars. For those who strongly identify as Canadians it is also their own cherished self-image that is so mercilessly being taken away. Some may take years to work their way through the five stages of grief. Some will remain forever mired in denial and anger.

Our PM acknowledged the sentiment of so many Canadians by proposing that this year Canada Day should be a day for national reflection. That's what I'm doing here now. Reflecting and sharing past and present reflections on what it means to be Canadian. But our PM has also stooped to deflection. He wants to shift the lion's share of responsibility to the Church, and is repeatedly and loudly calling for an apology from the Pope. Although our PM may be sincere in much of what he's saying, I can't help but hear much of his rhetoric as an attempt at damage control. While the Church has undoubtedly been a willing accomplice in this matter, and the primary vehicle for implementing the government's agenda for genocide, the Church was not the intellectual author of these crimes. That said, it is nevertheless hard to overstate the role of the Church in this matter. Working out the details of this genocidal mission was largely left up to and carried out by the Church herself. Furthermore, the separation of Church and state is often exaggerated. In practice the two have often been deliberately conflated. Catchphrases such as “For God and Country” are cleverly designed to blur any distinction between loyalty to God and loyalty to country, thereby putting obedience to nation states on par with obedience to God herself. 

Colonialism, then and now

Historically colonialism, empire building, and nation building were justified by things like “The Doctrine of Discovery” (Catholic), and “Manifest Destiny” (Protestant). (Look them up if you're unfamiliar with them.) Today most colonialism, land and resource grabs, etc. are justified by much more contemporary jargon –the development of the under developed. Huge corporations and extractive industries have replaced the Church and often nation states themselves as the primary actors. While the justification has changed,  the primary objectives –the appropriation of other peoples' land and resources—remain largely unchanged. Genocide is no longer a stated objective of such endeavours. The brutal oppression and often extrajudicial killing of anyone who resists or otherwise gets in the way of such “development” is best understood as a form of collateral damage; genocide as an unfortunate byproduct of bringing development to the underdeveloped. As always indigenous peoples, earth, land and water defenders, and environmental activists are the primary victims. Canadian extractive industries are among the worst offenders in this on-going genocide, not only in Canada, but world wide. The reality is that what happened in residential schools is but one example of the many many lies on which our national identity is founded—the tip of a much larger iceberg.

In nation-building, as in war, 'Truth' is often the first casualty. Unless we are willing to exhume all the truths that lie buried alongside the bodies of these indigenous children—truths about our past and the racist colonial arrogant sense of superiority that fostered these crimes against humanity—we are destined to continue this criminal behaviour; our shameful history is bound to keep on repeating itself. The choice before us is ours to make: We can either forge a new national identity that acknowledges past atrocities, but includes a plan forward for restitution and reconciliation. A plan for becoming the best we can be --who we wish we were, and who we would like to be. Unless our newly-acquired knowledge of the past and its on-going repercussions in the present result in radical change all the re-opening of these still-festering wounds was for naught. If we dismiss our residential school history as an anomaly that in no way reflects who we really were and are; if we refuse to acknowledge and correct the imbalance of power that continues to shield the perpetrators of past and present crimes against humanity from justice; if we don't correct the omissions in our history books and only retain the wonderful accounts of our virtuous past in our self-delusional, self-aggrandizing, fake history books; if we do all these things our arrogance and sense of superiority will result in our committing similar and even more egregious crimes well into the future. The choice is ours to make.

---by Stewart Vriesinga

 

 

P.S. I don't mean to imply that there is nothing at all in our history that we can be proud of, or in our present that we can be grateful for, but even the building of the transnational railroad could not have been achieved without the importation, mistreatment  and exploitation of Chinese workers --navvies or coolies as they were often called. The work was very dangerous--using highly volatile explosives and such--and many of them died. The treatment, wages and housing of these workers was abysmal, much like the treatment of immigrant farm workers today.

This is by no means the first time I have reflected on these things. I have long ago come to see an unstated but assumed sense of superiority on the part of white colonizers as the reason for past colonialism and ongoing neocolonialism. Unchecked this assumed superiority represents an existential threat to life on this planet. At present it remains unchecked. I have written more extensively on this topic in an earlier blog post on a different blog:

The Dominant Culture as an Invasive Species: The end of History?