Beyak Ejected from Conservative Caucus

Senator Lynn Beyak, the Ontario Senator who was thrown off the Senate aboriginal affairs committee last year for saying residential schools were not all bad, has now been tossed out of the Conservative caucus. Her offense this time was posting comments in her support that were, according to CPC leader Andrew Scheer, and a lot of other people, racist.

Scheer quotes one such comment, presumably the critical one leading to his decision:

"I'm no anthropologist but it seems every opportunistic culture, subsistence hunter/gatherers seeks to get what they can for no effort. There is always a clash between industrial/organized farming culture that values effort as opposed to a culture that will sit and wait until the government gives them stuff.”

Scheer says:

"Promoting this comment is offensive and unacceptable for a Conservative Parliamentarian. To suggest that indigenous Canadians are lazy compared to other Canadians, is simply racist. I demanded Senator Beyak remove this content from her website. She refused. As a result of her actions, the Conservative Senate Leader Larry Smith and I have removed Senator Lynn Beyak from the Conservative National Caucus.

Racism will not be tolerated in the Conservative Caucus or Conservative Party of Canada."

I can understand why Scheer might have felt he had to remove Beyak from caucus. Indians vote, and are entirely likely to feel insulted. Not to mention the widespread popular support they command. True or not, saying this was not good politics.

Moreover, it is not true. The commentator is wrong on the facts. Obviously, sitting back and relying on government cannot be an aspect of traditional hunter-gatherer culture—there is no government, in traditional hunter-gatherer culture. It is more or less every man, or every family, for himself; the very opposite of this.

But the more troubling thing is that Scheer calls this “racist.” That is profoundly irresponsible of him. This is a dangerous mischaracterization, and it shows why we have every reason to worry about the effects of the recent M-103 and proliferating similar measures. Too many any longer seem unable to understand the difference between race and culture. The author of the comment was criticizing Indian culture, not Indians as a race or as individuals. He even makes this clearer by adding, in the same comment,

“I'm not saying all of them are like that but right now the Canadian society guilt trip route to more money and power is golden and being opportunist they're grabbing all the hotel room towels and silver ware they can.”

Not all Indians, then, and it is due to the circumstance they are in—the culture.

If we cannot criticize culture, in the end, we cannot even object to racism. Some cultures are racist. We also cannot object to female genital mutilation, slavery, the beheading of unbelievers, wife beating, the immolation of widows, child sacrifice, or genocide. All are or have been established cultural practices somewhere. Some of them, indeed, among traditional Canadian “First Nations” groups.

Even more disturbing, Global TV editorializes, in its story on the matter,

“Global News reviewed the 103 ‘letters,’ some dated as recently as Oct. 4, 2017, and found that the majority — which do not include full names of the writers— contained what could be described as racist or anti-Indigenous sentiments.”

What you see quoted by Scheer above is in fact, as you would expect, the worst of the lot. I went to Beyak’s web page and read a large chunk of them myself. You can too. Almost all are simply expressing their agreement that the residential schools, while they certainly had failings, were not all bad. That is the real gist of the majority of the letters. To say this is now apparently “racist and anti-indigenous.”

Global quotes a few of the comments. We must presume they consider these the most racist of the lot:

“Do not back down, the Indians, First Nations or whatever they want to be called have milked this issue to their decided advantage,” 

“This mood will only grow with Justin Trudeau running around doing selfies with minority groups,” 

“The handouts have taken their people nowhere, and their constant backward-looking mentality serves no useful purpose. Aboriginals seem to be well schooled in getting media pity and they have become very good at getting media coverage.” 

“To expect the Canadian government to continue to subsidize a culture which is often damaging to new generations of Indigenous youth, is just bizarre.”

These are surely simply reasonable disagreements among taxpayers regarding the disposition of public funds. In a democracy, it is necessary to be able to have such discussions. To tar any such comments as “racism” is simply a way to avoid addressing the argument. After all, the last two clearly express sympathy for aboriginals.

Charlie Angus has demanded that, for hosting such thought, Beyak should be thrown out of the Senate. “These are not letters from constituents or an open dialogue on ideas," he writes. "These letters are promoting an insidious negation of the lives, culture, rights and place of Indigenous people living in Canada."

Typically of one who is about to tell a terrible howler, he begins by denying they are what they obviously are: letters from constituents, and an open dialogue on ideas. This is insidious Orwellian newspeak: war is peace, freedom is slavery, and race hate, discrimination, and apartheid is “reconciliation.”

Saskatchewan “independent” (i.e., formerly Liberal) Senator Lillian Dyck has called for Beyak to be prosecuted for a “hate crime.” "Maybe someone should consider laying a charge of hate speech against her because she is using her public website in a way against an identifiable group that might be considered inciting hatred."

This is fantastically dangerous: this is pretty much exactly why we need laws protecting free speech. Allow censorship of views relevant to the current public debate, and democratic government is no longer possible. The public can no longer make informed decisions. Such freedom of speech is especially necessary to parliamentarians; which is why not even libel laws apply in parliament.

We are sailing close to the rocks here.

Dyck complained to The Walrus that, if the same claims were made against, for example, the Jewish community, it “wouldn’t be tolerated.”

I’m not sure that is the issue. Isn’t the problem instead that if the same claims were made against the Jewish culture, it would sound absurd?

Let’s try:

"I'm no anthropologist but it seems Jewish culture seeks to get what they can for no effort. There is always a clash between culture that values effort as opposed to a culture that will sit and wait until the government gives them stuff.”

The thought is simply ludicrous. Jews sitting and waiting, doing nothing for themselves, expecting the government to give them things? Jews getting special favours from the government? Say it, and you do not sound racist: you sound unhinged.

I think Senator Dyck is demonstrating the opposite of what she thinks she is demonstrating.

It is hard to come up with an obvious parallel, since the original terms are so broad: industrial/settled farming culture, on the one side, and hunter-gatherer cultures, on the other. What is left outside the original parameters to compare them with?

But one rough recent parallel does occur: the crisis with the Greek economic insolvency and the Euro. Let’s try it, then:

"I'm no anthropologist but it seems Greek culture seeks to get what they can for no effort. There is a clash between German culture, which values effort, and a culture that will sit and wait until the government gives them stuff.”

Yep, that works. That was said, more or less, and there was no public uproar or charge of racism.

Similar things are said in Canada about the Maritimes. Stephen Harper once said something like this. It did not play well in the Maritimes, but nobody called him racist. And Pierre Trudeau once said it about the West, more or less: “Why should I sell your wheat?”

Sauce for the Canada goose is sauce for the Canada gander.

Senator Beyak and the Residential Schools

Senator Lynn Beyak is in trouble in the press and with her colleagues for rising in the Senate chamber and saying recently:

“I speak partly for the record, but mostly in memory of the kindly and well-intentioned men and women and their descendants — perhaps some of us here in this chamber — whose remarkable works, good deeds and historical tales in the residential schools go unacknowledged for the most part.”

As a result, she has been asked to step down from the Aboriginal Affairs Committee. Her comments, Lillian Dyck, chair of that committee says, were “ill-informed and insensitive.”

“While I respect the right of all senators to express their own opinions, I am concerned that Senator Beyak's comments may have tarnished the good reputation of the [committee] and that her opinions may negatively impact the future work,” Dyck said in a statement.

“Aboriginal people must be able to feel that they can trust the members of the committee and that we respect them.”

This reaction is revolting, and tarnishes Canada’s reputation in a way the residential schools did not.

The majority of those who worked in the residential schools are not just guiltless, but unusually admirable people. They tended to be motivated by compassion and idealism—rather like the folks who volunteer for Habitat for Humanity today. They accepted a life of isolation, often of hardship, in order to help the native people.

And now they are reviled for it, and anyone even speaking in their behalf is reviled for it.

“In the 1960s, when I lived and worked in residential schools,” recalls one former staffer, “it was the evangelistic calling for committed Christians similar to rebuilding houses following disasters in South America. Most residential school employees worked for very little pay, less recognition, and many sleepless nights.”

Consider the hardships the first missionaries encountered to bring knowledge to the various First Nations groups. One might have heard of the slow torture of Jean de Brebeuf or Isaac Jogues? But even more recently,

“There are no more arduous mission fields in the world,” writes William Withrow in 1895, “than those among the native tribes of the great North-West.” 

The devoted servant of the Cross goes forth to a region beyond the pale of civilization. He often suffers privation of the very necessaries of life. He is exposed to the rigour of an almost Arctic winter. He is cut off from human sympathy or congenial companionship. Communication with the great world is often maintained by infrequent and irregular mails, conveyed by long and tortuous canoe routes in summer or on dog-sleds in winter. The unvarnished tales of some of these missionaries lack no feature of heroic daring and apostolic zeal. But recently one, with his newly-wedded wife, a lady of much culture and refinement, travelled hundreds of miles by lake and river, often making toilsome portages, once in danger of their lives by the upsetting of their birch-bark canoe in an arrowy rapid. In midwinter the same intrepid missionary made a journey of several hundred miles in a dog-sled, sleeping in the snow with the thermometer forty, and even fifty, degrees below zero, in order to open a new mission among a pagan tribe.”

“With the conveniences which civilization has placed at the disposal of the modern wayfarer,” writes Adrien Morice in 1910, “it is impossible to form a correct idea of the perils and fatigues such a voyage [to a Northwest mission] involved.”

Barring the dangers due to the wild hordes of Indians, constantly clashing with one another and ever ready for robbery and pillage, the missionary had many a time to ford swollen rivers with the water up to his neck, or swim across streams while clinging to the mane of his horse. And then who will adequately picture to himself the weariness of a six-month ride under the deadly rays of the sun, tempered by no other shelter or shadow than that afforded by one’s horse, with improper food, numberless accidents and unmentionable hardships?

If it was difficult for some Indian children to be separated from their families for most of the year, how difficult was this for their first European teachers?

Once at the mission, things were little better, according to Morice. 

The extent of the poverty common to all the northern posts was truly amazing. Even flour was then, and remained for many years afterwards, a veritable luxury in the north, many missionaries passing several years without tasting bread. If we consider that most of these hailed from France, where the daily diet is based on bread incomparably more than it is in America, we will better realize the intensity of their privations.

As a rule, two sacks of flour were sent yearly to each mission, one of which was for the priests themselves, and the other for their engage and his family. Nor should we forget that the missionaries were generally two, sometimes three, in a place. A few bags of pemmican, tough, stale and rancid from age, were added to this, and the fathers, in spite of their bodily exertions while building up their homes or appurtenances and toiling during their travels over several feet of snow, had to rely on the denizens of the lakes for their staple food.

This was fish, annually caught in large quantities for themselves and their sleigh dogs. After having been cut open, and spread out by means of wooden spits, this was left to dry hanging from poles laid on scaffoldings. As a result of this treatment, it lost all the flavour it might have originally possessed, when, in course of time, the stench it emitted and the “animation” of which it became the theatre did not render it absolutely repulsive to anything but a famishing stomach. Famine was indeed a familiar experience with all the missionaries in the north, who usually made light of it, and replaced a missed meal by tightening their belts, as they would good-humouredly put it.

If therefore we add these privations to the fatigues and discomfort of long voyages on foot, or, worse than all, on snowshoes (the inexpressible agony of which one must experience to properly appreciate it), we will understand why a publicist felt warranted in writing that “it is well known among all the religious Orders that the missions of Athabasca-Mackenzie are the most difficult and painful in the whole world, without excepting those of China, Corea and Japan.”

And would the children have been better off in the care of loving parents? It is not clear this was always an option.

“By 1960,” the Truth and Reconciliation Commission itself reports, “the federal government estimated that 50% of the children in residential schools were there for child-welfare reasons.” “Some children had to stay in the schools year-round because it was thought there was no safe home to which they could return.” Shubenacadie, the one residential school in the Maritimes, was always primarily an orphanage. “In 1977, Aboriginal children accounted for 44% of the children in care in Alberta, 51% of the children in care in Saskatchewan, and 60% of the children in care in Manitoba.” Today, although aboriginals are only 4% of the Canadian population, half the children in foster care are aboriginal.

This was an important reason for the original formation of the residential schools. “In February, 1884,” writes Andrew Brown, 

the Rev. Hugh McKay was designated a missionary to the Indians of the North West... and, after some exploring, found an opening among the Crees in the Qu’Appelle valley at Round Lake. He began in a small way to take a few starving and half-naked Indian children into the little log house that served him for bachelor quarters. He fed them, clothed them and taught them, and from this modest beginning has grown the circle of eight boarding industrial schools under the care of the Presbyterian Church.

A Grey Nun writes from the Northwest in 1867, 

I must give you a few instances to show you what is the depth of the moral misery which we are called on to relieve. What I tell you will shock you to hear, as it sickens me to tell. It was a rather general custom of the savages in these countries to kill, and sometimes to eat, the orphan children, especially the little girls. Religion has made a great change in this respect, but infanticide is still by no means rare.

A mother, looking with contempt on her newly-born daughter, will say, “Her father has deserted me; I am not going to feed her.” So she will wrap up the little one in the skin of an animal, smother her, and throw her into the rubbish heap. Another mother, as she makes her way through a snow-field, will say, “My child’s father is dead; who will now take care of it? I am hardly able to support myself.” Thereupon she makes a hole in the snow, buries her child there, and passes on. There was a case of an Indian father who, in a time of sickness, lost his wife, and two or three of his children. There remained to him one child still in arms. For two or three days he carried the little fellow, then he left him hanging on the branch of a tree, and went his way. I have said more than enough to grieve you. Now you will quite understand that all these wretched people would rather have given their children to us than have killed them, or let them die. 

Father Duchaussois tells of two of the orphans taken in to the Grey Nuns’ school, Gabriel and Rosalie: 

Gabriel … belonged to a pagan group of the Sekanais tribe, living near the Rocky Mountains, in the neighbourhood of Fort Nelson, in the northeast corner of British Columbia. He was about eight years of age when he saw his mother kill his father, and throw his little brother into the fire. He himself was saved from the same fate by his grandmother, who took him to a Sekanais named Barby, who had no children of his own. A few days later Barby’s wife sickened and died. Barby after some incantations, thought the Spirit told him that the adopted child was the cause of his wife’s death. Accordingly he left the boy alone, on the bank of the Nelson river, near his wife’s grave, and he removed his tent to the opposite bank. He left the little boy without food or fire, and almost naked, and watching him across the river, he took deliberate aim at him with his gun, whenever he saw the boy wandering around the grave, or coming to the water to drink, or pulling up roots to satisfy his hunger. At the end of ten days, a Trader of the Hudson Bay Company at Fort Nelson, Boniface Laferty, who had been one of the first pupils of the Nuns at Fort Providence, was passing northwards to Fort Liard. He heard of the case from the little boy’s grandmother. He told the two Indians whom he had with him to take the boy and hide him in a certain place, whilst he himself distracted the attention of the fierce Sekanais. The child, when found, was little more than a skeleton, on which vermin and mosquitoes had been trying to feast. He was left at Fort Liard, “for the Nuns,” by Mr. Laferty, and he was taken to Providence, 300 miles away, by Father Le Guen, O.M.I.

In the Orphanage there, Gabriel remained for two years, learning how to pray to the Great Spirit and His Divine Son. But Gabriel had brought lung disease from the Nelson river, and in spite of tender care, by day and by night, he died very young.

The story of Rosalie is different. .... Rosalie, when left an orphan at four years of age, went to live with her uncle. The Dog-Ribs are all Christians, so she was not killed. …

For a year Rosalie followed the camp, eating whatever she could find left over by others, and having for her only bed-clothes such odds and ends of peltry as were of no use to others. One night she felt she was getting frost-bitten, and she tried in vain to rekindle the dying embers in the hut. Next day, as she could not walk, she was taken away on a sledge, “for the Nuns.” At Fort Rae, on the North Arm of Great Slave Lake, the Company's officer, with his pocket knife, cut off both her feet, and so saved her life to be the baptized and educated. 

How depraved have we become, that these are now the people and the acts that we condemn as unspeakable?