Tenured Professor Fired for Trying to Help Canadian Indians

 

Tenure is designed to prevent exactly this. 

The Three Forms of Racism or of Abuse

Europe's scapegoat: everybody gets to blame the Jews.

There are three kinds of children in a dysfunctional family. All three are abused, but in different ways.

First, there is the scapegoat. He or she is abused because the parent, and perhaps also the siblings, envy them. This will be the smartest, most moral, or most attractive child—like Cinderella. And hated for it, as Cain hated Abel.

Second, there is the black sheep. He or she is not hated, but looked down on. He is pushed around on the probably false premise that he is irresponsible, not capable of looking after himself—like Jack of Jack in the Beanstalk. He may be neglected, but not actively abused. He may even be cared for, but contemptuously.

Third, there is the golden child. He or she is actually pampered and favoured. But this too is a sort of abuse. He or she is “taken care of” like a pet, but is not allowed to manage his or her own affairs—like Sleeping Beauty. Not a hard life, but lacking in human dignity.

These roles should sound familiar. We see the same triage among groups in a sick society. One minority group will get picked on for being too successful; another gets picked on for being shiftless and lazy, the black sheep. A third gets pampered, but controlled.

The Jews are an example of the first, and blacks in America of the second. It is important to notice, and nobody seems to notice, that they are discriminated against in more or less opposite ways. Nobody talks about the blacks secretly controlling everything. Quotas at universities or in employment never work against blacks. And, most importantly, nobody wants to kill all the blacks. That level of hatred is reserved for the scapegoat.

The Jews still get this attitude, as they always have, but the scapegoat role has more recently been shifting to “straight while males.” Everybody gets in a free kick at them. They are in a very dangerous situation.

Women are an example of the third form of abuse, the “golden child.” Traditionally, they have been given favoured treatment in all kinds of ways. Everything they do is wonderful; they can do no wrong. They are much less likely to be charged or convicted of a crime; if convicted, they will get a lighter punishment. In some traditional societies, they are immune from prosecution. They are exempt from military service; in many societies, they are not obliged to earn a living, but can always demand to be supported by the nearest male relative.

They were, however, not allowed to make their own decisions. They are treated like pets.

Not all forms of abuse are equal; surely the scapegoat has a far greater grievance than the black sheep, who has a far greater grievance than the golden child.

Given human nature, however, it is the golden child who will complain most loudly, and be the hardest to satisfy. They are, after all, used to getting whatever they want. They expect to be taken care of, and so feel it is incumbent on the rest of us to make them feel better. Think of The Princess and the Pea.

Accordingly, feminism demands far more changes from the rest of society than the Jews or the blacks do or ever did.

In a way, this is the hardest form of abuse to ever overcome. For the abused, or for those around them. It is more than likely that, no matter what is done, reconciliation will never come. They will naturally want more responsibility, but at the same time will object to the withdrawal of any privileges, and will refuse to accept responsibility when things go wrong.

Canada’s “First Nations” have sometimes been seen as black sheep, but more often, they have been Canada’s “golden children,” “noble savages,” kept on their reserves, as Buffy Ste. Marie has observed, like wildlife on a game preserve. Or like huggable pets.

Cornwallis the War Criminal

The statue in Cornwallis Park

The city of Halifax is now pulling down the statue of Edward Cornwallis that has stood for over 75 years in Cornwallis Park; having originally been a charitable donation by CN hotels. Cornwallis has been traditionally felt worthy of the honour as the founder of the city. He has, however, fallen afoul of modern politics because he put a bounty on the scalps of local Micmacs.

I fear this is a manufactured controversy, and mostly a case of little brother Canada feeling the need to emulate big brother America, in his recent flurry of iconoclasm involving Civil War heroes.

Edward Cornwallis can plausibly be accused of war crimes. But not so much in Nova Scotia. The better case would be his behavior in the Scottish Highlands after the Battle of Culloden, in which he burned down barns and scattered cattle to punish the population for rebellion. In his defense, he was acting on clear orders from his superior, the Duke of Cumberland. And such scorched earth policies have been followed elsewhere: by Sherman in Georgia, or by the allied bombing campaigns during World War II.

More interestingly, in a place named “Nova Scotia,” largely settled by Highland Scots, there has never until now been an outcry against his commemoration.

Instead, the outcry has come from the Indians, or their spokespeople, over the more dubious case of his actions in Nova Scotia during Father LeLoutre’s War. Yes, he put a bounty on Micmac scalps. But it seems unfair to single Cornwallis out on this basis; he was following established custom of the time. The French already had a bounty on English scalps; the British in New England already had a bounty on Indian scalps. And, of course, scalping was standard practice among the Indians during war. Given the position and the times, Cornwallis was more or less obliged to follow suit; just as, once the Germans in WWI resorted to poison gas, the Entente were more or less obliged to use it as well. Notably, Cornwallis limited his bounty to scalps of Micmac “fighters”; Indian civilians, women and children, were not supposed to be so molested. This was not the Indian practice.

Moreover, it seems that few Indians were actually affected. According to historical records, the bounty was deemed to be “ineffective.” As a result, Cornwallis raised the scalp price. With the raised bounty, precisely one scalp was ever presented for redemption during Cornwallis’s tenure. That’s some historical atrocity. Indeed, the French Father Maillard, on the other side in the conflict, recorded Cornwallis’s term as governor as free of any atrocities.

Cornwallis is being used, in a thoroughly cowardly way, as a scapegoat.

By All Means, Let's Have More Aboriginal History

Saskatchewan Education Minister Bronwyn Eyre (Government of Saskatchewan photo)

Bronwyn Eyre, Saskatchewan's Education Minister, is facing heat for supposedly saying in the legislature that she fears there is too much aboriginal history in the school history curriculum. There is currently a petition circulating demanding her resignation. At last count, it had over 2000 signatures.

Eyre was especially troubled, she said later in a reporters' scrum, by a French assignment brought home by her son, which asked him to contrast traditional understanding of the Earth among First Nations with traditional understandings among Western Europeans. First Nations, it suggested, felt a sense of responsibility towards Mother Earth. Europeans, by contrast, saw the Earth as of only economic value.

Troublingly, Eyre's actual speech does not seem to be posted anywhere online—including at her own site—which means we must take the media's word for what she said. Which is often not reliable.

The quote I keep seeing, however, is that Eyre said “there has come to be at once too much wholesale infusion into the curriculum, and at the same time, too many attempts to mandate material into it both from the inside and by outside groups.”

If this is the essence of what she said, she is certainly right. There is something gravely wrong with the fact that her comments are controversial.

We ought to keep politics out of the school curriculum. We ought not to have a French assignment that obliges us to accept as truth some assertion that is itself debatable, and actively debated in the wider society. That is child abuse and attempted mind control. It is antithetical to education. It is the sort of thing I myself, as a teacher, find too common, and profoundly offensive.

It would be fine to have a French assignment that dealt with an issue of the day; it would be fine to have a French assignment that asked students to compare and contrast European and First Nations views of the environment. It is not okay to have a French assignment that, in doing so, tells the students what they are supposed to think those views are. The more so since in the assignment given, the information presented as indisputable fact is false.

The issue has been twisted by special interest groups into the Minister supposedly saying we should have less aboriginal history in the schools. If she did say this, however, it is not in the quote always given. That looks more like a plea that we have more actual aboriginal history in the schools, rather than just assertions snuck in to other subjects.

If there were more aboriginal history in the schools, it might not be happy news for present-day First Nations lobbyists. It is probably the last thing they really want. History is based on written sources, and the written sources we have pretty systematically contradict the claims of the aboriginal lobby.

It would be instructive for many, for example, to actually read the texts of the treaties agreed to and signed. They bear no relation to the current First Nations claims. It would be instructive to read the accounts by early explorers and missionaries of the environmental practices of the First Nations. They were the very reverse of solicitous towards the natural environment. They were profligate and wasteful, to European eyes.

Western European civilization is historically almost unique in seeing the natural environment as something of intrinsic value, and under our care.

By all means, let's have more aboriginal history.

The Discussion Is Over

Hey--you know where you can put it?

Someone is demanding that Louis Riel’s walking stick, now in the Manitoba Museum, be “repatriated” to “the Métis.”

This is odd. Riel is commonly considered the founder of Manitoba. What spot could therefore be more apt for his walking stick than the Manitoba Museum? Why should it be in private hands?

And why should any government entity be handing public property over to some private entity, without compensation?

In any legal sense, the Manitoba Museum is the rightful owner. According to the National Post story, Riel gave the walking stick to a driver named Will Banbury on his way to prison. Banbury’s family donated it to the Winnipeg Rifles. The Winnipeg Rifles donated it to the Manitoba Museum. Each in turn was the legal owner; nobody stole it from anyone. Did Riel not have the right to give his stick to Banbury? Did Banbury not have the right to give his stick to the Rifles? Did the Rifles not have the right to give the stick to the Museum? By what right does a third party now step in and claim ownership?

Is it on the grounds that the members of the designated Métis organization share some ethnic heritage with Riel? So what? Must all memorials to Sir John A. Macdonald belong exclusively to some Scottish-Canadian Society, and all memorials to Sir Guy Carleton belong to some Order of Irish-Canadians? What about the fact that Riel, as Métis, was half French? How can you ignore the ancestral rights, then, of French-Manitobans, to anything he once owned?

And it is not as though any Métis organization can claim to represent all those of Riel’s ethnicity. Any such group is a self-selected private organization, democratically elected by nobody; and even who is and who is not Métis is open to debate. Why should this particular group of self-declared Métis get the artifact, and not this other one?

There is only one fair and honourable solution: Riel’s walking stick should be in the Manitoba Museum, open to and owned by all Manitobans.

Canada 150

The Canada 150th Anniversary celebrations are coming in a few days, and of course, the media have to find some First Nations angle. And it has to be a complaint.

So CBC informs us that some aboriginal Canadians will not be singing “O Canada.” Canada Day, apparently, celebrates colonization. It commemorates “150 years of forced segregation, assimilation, cultural genocide.”

“Drawing attention to and celebrating Canada's 150th year, or any other anniversary of Confederation, completely ignores the history of Indigenous peoples —a group that's been here for more than 150 years, said Real Carriere.”

Uh, no. Apparently neither the aboriginal people interviewed nor the reporter, nor the CBC editors, actually know what Confederation was.

It was not a moment when a large ship appeared from Europe disgorging people with white skin. My ancestors have been here for more than 150 years too. The non-aboriginal ones, that is. Are they being ignored too?

We need to teach better history in the schools.

Aboriginals and Immigrants

Canadian Governor-General David Johnston

So now I hear our Governor-General, no less, is in trouble for speaking an obvious truth, and one meant to bring Canadians together: that we are all, including the “indigenous” people, immigrants.

I hear that some commentators have since been demanding his resignation.

Even though he is obviously right. Our best science tells us nobody is indigenous to Canada. Some of us simply came before others. What on Earth can be valid grounds for objecting?

In a Tweeted apology, Johnston said “I want to clarify a miscommunication. Our Indigenous peoples are not immigrants. They are the original peoples of this land.”

This makes no sense. The dictionary definition of immigrant does not exclude the “original” inhabitants of a place. Merriam-Webster: “a person who comes to a country to take up permanent residence.”

So what can possibly be the problem?

But even if the term did exclude the original inhabitants of a place, it is quite unlikely that any Indian groups qualify as anything but immigrants on these grounds. Just about everyone supplanted somebody else, even, for the most part, during historical times—which is to say, since the first Europeans have been here.

Let’s put that another way, to make it clear: some European groups, notably the French, the English, the Scandinavians, and the Irish, are more genuinely aboriginal to Canada than most “First Nations.”

Some of us, it seems, have become confused by a euphemism. What we really mean, here and elsewhere around the world, when we refer to a specific group as “aboriginal” or “indigenous,” is “primitive.” That is, “aboriginals” are people whose culture has not advanced over time in material or organizational terms, and is well behind those around them technologically.

In about the Sixties, people decided this term sounded pejorative and unpleasantly “judgmental,” as we said then, and so they substituted the nicer-sounding “aboriginal.” The latter term was never literally true, and nobody thought it was.

It still isn’t.

Call Them Indians

The 2005 Washington First Nations take the field.

Before we go any further, we need to settle on terminology. Apparently, this is important. We would hate to give offense. In a previous incarnation, I was the designated editor for the Centre for World Indigenous Knowledge at Athabasca University. The bulk of the introductory course in the offered major in Indigenous Studies was devoted to the matter of what to call its matter. Native People? Indigenous? Aboriginal?

And this only in the Canadian context. Never mind that the concept of “indigenous” becomes wholly inconsistent beyond the borders of North America and Australasia. But using the correct terms has apparently become a big deal. When you're oppressed, little things become important. Like peas under the mattress.

So I guess “redskins” is completely out, then?

I'm not entirely sure why. But any reference at all to Indians in the names of sports teams is now considered offensive. Yet nobody has a problem with the Queen's Golden Gaels, the Montreal Canadiens, the Vancouver Canucks, or the Notre Dame Fighting Irish.

To my mind, nothing could be more offensive than the claim that a common name for an ethnicity, not itself pejorative in its literal meaning, is “offensive.” Especially when it was considered inoffensive when first coined. That is, in the end, a profession of faith that there is something offensive about being a member of that group in itself.

If that is the problem, changing words will do nothing. Over time, the new word will just gain all the associations of the old. Once, it was most polite to say “coloured.” Soon that sounded pejorative, and you had to say “negro.” Then that started to sound offensive, and thoughtful people said “black.” Then that sounded rude, and you started to say “African American.” Something else will come along soon; we are just dogs chasing our tails. There is nothing wrong with any of those terms.

Odd that “redskin” and “black” are now both considered offensive, yet nobody complains about “white.” Similarly, one can say “Caucasian,” but not “Mongoloid” or “Negroid”; “Brit” or “Yank” or “Canuck,” but not “nigger” or “Paki.” McGill University has been able to preserve the traditional name of their sports teams, the “Redmen,” because they were able to convince the public that the original “red men” referred to were not American Indians, but Scots, because of their red hair. So apparently it is okay. Scots deserve whatever they get.

McGill Redman.

“Redskin” was apparently originally coined by Indians themselves to describe their racial group, in distinction to the white skins and black skins of their fellow Americans. Granted, their skin is not really red. My skin is not really white. Barack Obama's skin is not really black. A certain amount of poetic license seems to be allowed here. The term was later adopted by the French, and finally the English (http://anthropology.si.edu/goddard/redskin.pdf). It is actually a useful generic term, to refer to American Indians as a group.

Nevertheless, to use the term “redskin” would now seem deliberately provocative. In any case, it is an informal term, in English, not the standard one. That would be “Indian.”

Almost nobody in Canada uses “Indian” any more. This is a bit unfortunate, because in Canada “Indian” has a legal definition, thanks to the “Indian Act,” and none of the alternative terms do. There is, again, nothing in the term itself that is pejorative or insulting. If it were, we would be equally concerned about using it to refer to natives of the Indian subcontinent. The objection can only be that it is inaccurate. At first glance, it preserves a geographical error on the part of Columbus and the early European explorers, the notion that they had reached India.

Granted, we see no similar problem with the geographical designation “West Indies.” But in that case, the addition of the qualifier “west” might make all the difference.

Yet objecting to “Indian” on these grounds still seems a bit of a quibble, if not a modern misconception. When Columbus and the first Europeans visited the Americas, there was no country called “India.” My grandparents' atlas, only a couple of generations old, clearly marked the large pink British South Asian possession as “Hindoostan.”

So there was no question of Columbus thinking mistakenly that these people were “Indians” in the modern sense, residents of that land mass squeezed between Pakistan and Myanmar, Nepal and Sri Lanka. He need not have supposed he had reached Chennai. In Columbus's day, and until quite recently, “India” was any place east of the Indus River from the perspective of Europe; and “Indians” were any people who lived there. Until it got its own name from a Spanish king, inhabitants of the Philippines were also called “Indians.” When Hermann Hesse sailed to “India” in 1911, documenting the trip for a German audience, his ports of call were Penang, Singapore, and Borneo. In practical terms, the word until recent times meant little more than “non-Europeans.”

Granted, it is a bit of a stretch to us to see North America as to the east of the Indus River. But here again, the ground has shifted beneath us all since Columbus lost his sea legs. If you accept the fiction of the Greenwich meridian being the centre of the world, zero degrees longitude, and determine East and West from there, it is true, the Indians of North America are West, not East, of Europe. The map as based on Greenwich divides neatly down the middle of the Pacific Ocean. However, the world is round—you would have thought Columbus had proven that--and so any designation of west and east is ultimately arbitrary. On top of that, the Greenwich meridian was not proposed until 1831. If you sail east from Europe, passing the Indus River on the way, you will indeed eventually arrive at North America. It is to the east of the Indus River. Very far east. But not so far that the Spanish did not administer the Philippines from their regional capital in Mexico.

So what might look like a misnomer in modern context, was a reasonable term when first applied.

Granted, there is some awkward ambiguity since the creation of the state of India. But that, after all, came later.

“Indian” is still generally acceptable in the US. But here in Canada, where we have fewer natural antibodies to the PC virus, it has been mostly supplanted by “First Nations.”

This is, for several reasons, a worse term.

First, the Indian tribes are not “nations.” Oxford defines nation as “a large aggregate of people united by common descent, history, culture, or language, inhabiting a particular country or territory.” Webster's 1913 (before current political correctness could creep into the definitions) gives “the body of inhabitants of a country, united under an independent government of their own.”

Neither definition applies here. Indian “nations” are usually only a few thousand people or less; and that is after a population explosion in recent years. There were fewer Indians at the time of treaty signing. Most Indian reserves in Canada even today have fewer than a thousand residents. Whether they ever occupied a particular territory for any long period or in a meaningful sense is, as noted in a previous chapter, debatable. They are all subject to the Canadian government, and before that the French and British, not independent. It would, after all, be absurd for a group of a few thousand people to be sovereign. They are not self-supporting, either, but rely on continued heavy subsidies from outside. Recent dictionaries may give “Indian tribe” as an alternative definition of “nation”; this is under the influence of the modern political correctness we are challenging. Even here, it is given as a second, separate meaning; it would be grossly misleading to suggest that Indian bands are “nations” in the same sense of the word as is Germany or Spain.

To use the term is to attempt to avoid the debate: it simply asserts that the Indian group has a claim to territory, and to its own government. This we ought not to allow without examining the premises. Otherwise, I might simply define myself as king of Portugal, and it would be so.

In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond makes a useful anthropological distinction. He gives four levels of social organization, from least to most complex: band, tribe, chiefdom, and state (which I think we can take to at least approach our “nation”). Bands, generally one extended family, have typical populations of dozens. Peace is kept with little supervision or direction from above, because everybody not only knows one another, but is related. No government is necessary. Tribes, also kinship based, can be hundreds of people. Still, peace can be maintained organically, because everybody knows one another well. Chiefdoms group thousands (Diamond, loc. 628-9). They require a strong leader and an incipient bureaucracy, because members can be relative strangers. As groups grow larger, you need a more developed social organization, a stronger government, to keep social order. Accordingly, a state or nation is a very different beast from a band or tribe.

The various Indian or Inuit groups in Canada all fall within the lower range in terms of size and social organization: they are bands, tribes, or chiefdoms. None are nations. The Iroquois, with an on-reserve population in the tens of thousands, come closest. They also have the strongest social organization of any Canadian tribe, the celebrated Six Nations Confederacy.

The term “First Nations” emerged in the 1980s, and seems to have been a deliberate response to the idea that Canada was composed of “two founding nations,” anglophone and francophone. This is no doubt why the term never gained currency in the US. If this is so, the intent from the outset was to deceive. “First Nations” would then consciously set up the various tiny Indian bands or tribes as equivalent in significance, organization, and strength to France or Britain. This is using the term “nation” in two very different senses as if they were the same. It is like saying apples are identical to oranges.

Or rather, it seems to set up the various Indian bands and tribes as having priority over Britain and France. There is that qualifying term “First.” If it is merely a chronological assertion, it is debatable, but not offensive. However, “First” also carries a connotation of “best.” One comes first in class. In the US, the “First Lady” is the president's wife. If this were not intended, “Earliest Nations,” or rather, “Early Tribes,” would have been better. If it is intended, it is offensive.

So let's discard “First Nations.” How about the often-heard alternative “Native Peoples”?

Unfortunately, this is almost as bad. It is literally untrue. Anyone born in Canada, by proper definition, is a “native person.” I am a native Canadian. In a nation still accepting a large number of immigrants, that is a useful distinction, and ought not to be confused. Moreover, none of the aboriginal groups is “native” in any deeper sense. All originally came from somewhere else. To the extent that they developed a distinct culture while in Canada, so has Canada. “Aboriginal” and “indigenous” have similar problems: no people outside of Africa, if any there, are either indigenous or aboriginal.

An alternative now gaining in popularity is to refer to the different Indian cultural groups individually by name, rather than using any generic term. Officially, this is better because the different Indian cultures were distinct, not all one thing. Not only were the Algonquins' languages, so far as we can tell, linguistically unrelated to the Iroquois'; the two were mortal enemies. Calling them all “Indians” is like calling all Europeans “Europeans.”

Except that we do that. But they are Europeans. They deserve whatever they get.

Unofficially, this approach of using individual tribe designations probably appeals for the same reason all this politically correct language appeals, but to a much greater degree: showing you know the terminology marks you off as well-educated and in attendance at all the right cocktail parties. A member of the upper class. Ironically, not someone who is likely to be seen rubbing shoulders with an ordinary Sarcee.

At the same time, needing to know many more individual terms means you need to spend more time studying, providing more employment for highly-paid experts. Of course the experts approve.

But there is a problem with this approach as well.

For most Indian groups, we have a choice of two names: either the name they call themselves, or the name their neighbours apply to them.

Let's start with the latter; it is the most common case. Historically, we non-Indians were usually first introduced to a new Indian cultural group through interviews with their near neighbours already contacted. So our familiar, traditional name for them is usually from their neighbours' language.

Bad luck: the term used by their neighbours most often enshrines a pejorative. The Indians did not know enough of future politics to be politically correct. Moreover, in most cases, they were at constant genocidal war with most nearby tribes, so tolerance and fellow-feeling was not in great supply. “Iroquois,” for example, is the Algonquin for “snake.” This was probably not meant as a compliment. “Slave” is a translation of the Cree name for their neighbours in the Mackenzie Valley. The term was descriptive and practical: this was the prime use the Cree had for them. “Blood” Indians were given that name with the intended meaning “bloodthirsty.” “Sarcee” means “stubborn.”

“Ojibwe” is less offensive. It means, in Cree, “people who stammer.” That is, people who do not speak proper Cree. It is cognate to the Greek term “barbarian”: unlearned frontier peoples who just make sounds like birds (“bar, bar”) instead of speaking good Greek. “Barbarian,” however, is not generally considered an enlightened term to use.

Ironically, one well-known name given by nearby tribes is not pejorative: the much-derided term “Eskimo.” Contrary to urban legend, it simply means, in the Cree language, “a person who laces a snow shoe.” Yet, based on a false etymology that it means “cannibal,” this is the one everyone “knows” is insulting, and avoids using.

Becoming aware of this problem, enlightened social justice warriors have increasingly come to use instead the terms the various Indian cultures use for themselves. The recent protesters over the proposed sculpture park at Wilfrid Laurier University honouring Canadian prime ministers, for example, objected that it was being built “on land that traditionally belongs to the … Anishnaube and Haudenausanee peoples...” That's Algonquin and Iroquois, to the uninitiated.

So why not the alternative? Why not use the terms these groups use among themselves? After all, isn't it better to use the names people prefer for themselves, instead of imposing our own names on them?

That, after all, is why we call the Germans “Deutsch,” or the Greeks “Ellinika,” Right?

Or not. The courtesy only extends, it appears, to non-Europeans.

This approach, however, has the notable advantage of requiring the unwashed to learn a whole new terminology introduced only over the last few years, so as not to appear out of it. Anything they learned back in high school will no longer serve. “Slave” becomes “Dene,” “Montagnais” becomes “Innu,” “Eskimo” becomes “Inuit,” and so forth.

Human beings, Davis Inlet, 1903.

But we still have a problem. What do these terms actually mean? “Dene,” in the Dene language, literally means “people,” “human beings.” So does “Micmac”—the new spelling “Mi'kmaq” is unjustifiable, as the original “Micmac” accurately reflects the sounds in English, and the original language, having no traditional writing system, has no traditional orthography. Not that there would be any reason for Micmac orthography to influence English. “Innu” also means “human.” So does “Haida.” So does “Inuit.” “Anishinaabe,” the Algonquin term for Algonquins, is a bit more specific. It means “good people.”

This might strike you as merely quaint. But it is a good deal less innocent than that. If you refer to your own cultural group as “humans,” there is the necessary implication that anyone not of your own group is not human. Forget, then, human rights. You owe them no consideration, any more than you do any other animal. You may kill them on sight, steal their horses, torture them, take their land, exterminate them, eat them if you are hungry. It is the same gambit used by the Nazis, referring to their own racial group as Aryans, and non-members as “untermenschen,” “subhuman.”

This is a rather unfortunate attitude towards their fellow-Canadians to encourage and endorse with our own choice of language. Particularly if we are not ourselves Dene, or Inuit, or Haida.

So let us be clear: from this point onward, this blog will freely use the terms “Indian,” or “Eskimo.” This is not because we have never been to the right schools, or invited to the best cocktail parties. Although perhaps we have not. It is because they are the most politically neutral, least prejudiced terms. It is because we consider ourselves, too, human.