Canada's Looking-Glass Genocide

Then... and Now

Now magazine, Toronto's free entertainment newspaper, has apparently gone full SJW.

Last week’s cover story: "Canada's Genocide"

The feature article inside, titled "Genocide Coverup," begins:

"It is no longer up for debate. Canada is guilty of genocide. The National Inquiry into Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls has found that Canada has and continues to engage in ‘race-based genocide.’"

This claim that the debate is over is demonstrably false. The next piece in the newspaper, “The Media’s Odious Defense,” laments that the Globe and Star have both in official editorials rejected the “genocide” claim. Both publications are editorially on the left, and probably Canada's two largest-circulation English papers. So obviously it is still up for debate.

Insisting it isn’t is a transparent tactic when one knows one will lose any debate that might ensue.

The article goes on:

“Canada’s governments used premeditated acts like the mass distribution of smallpox-infected blankets and placing bounties on scalps to kill off indigenous peoples. They engaged in policies aimed at starving indigenous people to death to clear the prairies for settlement. Canadian governments have also engaged in covering up the disproportionate number of deaths of indigenous people in police custody and the over-incarceration of Indigenous people to keep them locked up and out of sight.”

None of these claims are true. They constitute a blood libel designed to promote racial hatred against non-indigenous Canadians. If the “hate laws” were applied justly, they would be actionable.

There is no evidence at all that any Canadian government ever distributed smallpox-infected blankets to Indians. Nor is this a likely way to spread smallpox. There is no evidence that any Canadian government ever put bounties on the scalps of indigenous people—and it would be very hard to do so without leaving any documentary evidence. Indigenous people, on the other hand, regularly scalped their enemies, indigenous or European. There is no evidence that any Canadian government attempted to starve indigenous people to death—rather, they sent food aid to the Indians of the Prairies at times of starvation. Before this, periodic famines and death by starvation were a typical aspect of the Indian experience. To charge “over-incarceration” of indigenous people is to assume that Indigenous people are imprisoned for crimes they did not commit, or are given harsher sentences than non-Indians for the same offenses. In fact, the opposite is true, by law. The so-called “Gladue rule” more or less requires judges to give Indigenous offenders lighter sentences. If you want to argue that the mere fact that a higher proportion of Indigenous than non-Indigenous people are imprisoned automatically proves intended genocide, then, to be consistent, you must also hold that the state is committing genocide against men. Far more men than women are in prison.

“The Indian Act was also created to make a legal definition of Indian that would result in the legislative extinction of Indians over time, by targeting Indian women and children for expulsion from their First Nations.”

Rather obviously, Canadian legislators of that day considered being a Canadian citizen a good thing, and thought allowing Indian women who married non-Indian men automatic full citizenship was a benefit, not a punishment. Just as they would not have thought it genocide against Jews to allow Jews to immigrate. Would Hitler have been equally guilty of genocide had he accepted Jews as fully German, with the same rights as other Germans? His inclination was rather the opposite.

The Indigenous author of a second piece, "The Media's Odious Defense," laments his personal dilemma. Because he was aboriginal, the CBC, his employer, gave him full control over the story when the Royal Commission on Aboriginal People report came out. Even though he was only a summer intern, and did not even intend to go into journalism.

Does this really show discrimination AGAINST aboriginal people? He was given a plum internship even though he was not interested in journalism. Then he was given full control over a story ahead of senior reporters—presumably all because he was indigenous. Poor fellow.

So what is his complaint?

His problem is that, when news reports are not sufficiently pro-aboriginal, Indigenous journalists like himself “are questioned by their communities about why these views would be published, why higher-ups at their outlet would think this way, and why they continue to work there.”

Transparently, what is the real problem? Is it the Canadian media lacking good intentions towards Indigenous people—or is it these unspecified “indigenous communities” lacking good intentions towards indigenous people? Who is trying to advance the careers and life situations of indigenous people, and who is trying to get them to sacrifice their careers and their best interests?

This author seems to be a victim of Stockholm syndrome. It is the reserve system that is holding indigenous people back.

Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women

Last post I dealt with friend Xerxes’s charge that Canada was a “white supremacist nation.” But I left out his main point, which was, inevitably, Canada’s relations with its “First Nations” and/or indigenous people. His comment was ultimately prompted by the recent report of the Commission on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women.

He laments, as so many do, including the recent Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the supposed historical attempt to assimilate Indians into the Canadian mainstream. That, supposedly, is the root of all aboriginal problems, and amounts, says this latest commission report, to “genocide.” Xerxes was dutifully agreeing.

In fact, however, the problem with government policies towards Canada’s Indians has always been the opposite. The problem is segregation, never an attempt, to use Xerxes’s term, to “homogenize.”
This is obvious: who else since the fall of old apartheid-regime South Africa is kept apart, as if quarantined, on “reserves”? Other, perhaps, than wild animals.

And yet this apartheid approach is just what our government commissions are aggressively pushing for more of. We are headed with all deliberate speed downhill.

Nor is this previous or present segregation primarily the fault of the elected Canadian government or the “white man.” The Canadian government or “the white man” cannot unilaterally abrogate the treaties. And the Indian leadership insists they remain. Forever.

It is obvious too that, contrary to the familiar talking point, the old Indian residential schools were never an attempt to either erase Indian culture or assimilate Indians. Self-evidently, the way to do that would not be to segregate Indians in their own schools, with a separate curriculum. Ask Martin Luther King Jr. It would be to send them to the same schools as other Canadians. Captain Richard H. Pratt, the founder of the American residential school system, himself pointed this out: “Indian schools,” he warned, “are … well calculated to keep the Indians intact as Indians.” The Indian residential schools systematically preserved a distinct Indian culture, although not the authentic Indian culture, for whatever it might have been worth. They deliberately taught students only the skills they supposedly needed so long as they stayed on the reserves, and discouraged any ambitions to assimilate. Egerton Ryerson wrote, in advising the Canadian system, “such institutions should not give instruction in ‘white man's trades,’ but should concentrate instead on ‘common school learnings and the acquisition of agricultural skills and knowledge’.”

“It would be not merely useless,” wrote another bureaucrat of the day, “but mischievous, to try to give a taste for the town life of the Palefaces to those who are destined to go back to the wigwam, to travel on snow shoes, and to use no other implement than the fishing net and the gun.”
And so the schools, although apparently with good if paternalistic intentions, deliberately kept Indians from assimilation and held them on the reserves.

Xerxes quotes a familiar figure: a supposed 50% death rate among residential school pupils. This shocking number has entered the popular consciousness. It seems to have been simply invented by one author, Thomas King, who gave no source. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission could not come up with a figure higher than 2%, despite their best efforts; they were mandated from the start to make the residential schools out to be as bad as possible. This was worse than the general Canadian population at the time—tuberculosis was the problem—but still better than on the reserves the schools took them from. The schools were their best chance of treatment.

Along with many others, including many Indians, Xerxes quite rightly blames the Indian Act: “The Indian Act, despite several amendments, still treats Indigenous people as semi-competent children, who need wiser adults to make decisions on their behalf.”

But the Canadian government has wanted to ditch the Indian Act for generations. Ask Jean Chretien about his 1969 “White Paper.” Even when the Act was passed, and the original treaties signed, the government’s intent was that the need for special treatment for Indians would only last for a generation or so. You cannot, at the same time, as Xerxes does here, blame the government for wanting to assimilate, and for not wanting to assimilate. That is simply, and obviously, scapegoating the government and the “white man.”

 The problem is that, by framing it as treaties, they left it up to the Indians; or rather, to a bureaucracy the Act and the treaties set up, both Indian and non-Indian. They were determined from the start not to force the Indians into anything. They foolishly did not foresee the iron determination of any bureaucracy, once established, whether Indian or “white,” to self-perpetuate, and never surrender power once acquired. And in this case, the bureaucracy was, by treaty, allowed to write their own ticket, outside the usual democratic control.

This has been demonstrably to the detriment of ordinary Indians, and ridiculously expensive to Canada in general, but to the ongoing profit of Indian and no doubt also federal government bureaucrats. It is the reserve system and the Indian Act that keeps Indians in a state of permanent wardship, as though not responsible adults. And it is the “Indian leadership,” a system set up by the treaties and by the federal bureaucracy, that demands it.

The best way to foster and perpetuate that cycle of dependency is to continue to blame everything on the “white man” and the government.  It is always up to the white man and the government to do more for the Indians. And everything they do is wrong. This assumes and demands Indian helplessness. It assumes government and “white” omniscience.

The perils faced by young indigenous women, the supposed subject of this latest of endless Royal Commissions, are obviously the direct result of the failure or incapacity of the Indian family. It is because they have no functioning family that these adolescent girls are vagrants on the highways and sometimes in the cities. Often they are fleeing abuse. So too the high incarceration rate among indigenous young men, who most often commit the violence: these are abandoned, derelict, abused, or fleeing kids; kids with no effective adult supervision or guidance. The two problems are the same problem.

And the root of the problem is that the Indian family often does not function. This may have been an existing problem in Indian culture, before the treaties or the Indian Act, but it can only have been exacerbated by the passing of all responsibility, authority, initiative, and income from the individual and the family unit to the band council and the government.

The residential aspect of the residential schools was an extremely well-meaning attempt to solve this problem. Over 50% of the attendees were there because they had no other functioning or viable home. The schools were orphanages. The “Sixties scoop” was another good-faith attempt.
For both of these attempts to help, the schools and the adoption program, the government and the “white man” is now scapegoated.

They will be scapegoated again for whatever they do now.

In the meantime, these kids are trapped. It is for many a vicious spiral, ending in suicide, drug dependency, or death by violence. And it cannot be broken out of as long as the solution must come from government and the “white man.” Government and dependency has been the problem, not the solution.

Doubling down on that, as these commissions are forever doing, demanding more government and more aid from the evil “white man,” will make it worse. Indians must be treated as equals, and that means Indians must take matters into their own hands.

Passing more powers and money to “band leadership,” as these commissions demand, is the worst of it. The “band leadership,” a concept alien to Indian culture, has done more than anything to crush individual initiative. And it is further removed from any democratic control than is the government bureaucracy. Band leaderships are usually now nominally elected. But a democracy cannot function when the government controls all income, and owns everything. They can buy votes, and any opposition can be crushed or driven out before it can organize. It does not work in the Third World, it did not work in Eastern Europe, and it cannot work on the shores of Hudson Bay.

For more, see my book Playing the Indian Card. Available from Amazon and Smashwords, and soon from other outlets.