Canada's Shame

 

Monument to "Evangeline," Grand Pre, Nova Scotia.

Friend Xerxes speaks in his latest column of Canada’s “shame”:

“The difference between guilt and shame becomes relevant in our time, in the troubled relationship between white settlers and indigenous peoples. ‘We’ – that is, people like me – took their land. Incarcerated their children. Tried to wipe out their language, their customs, their culture.”

None of this is true. The relationship between white settlers and indigenous people in Canada was mostly harmonious; at a minimum, more harmonious than most relationships among the First Nations themselves. European settlers “took” no indigenous land. All was done by treaty and by consent. If there ought to be any corporate guilt or shame about taking land, try what was done to the Acadians. Yet for them, we make no “land acknowledgement.” Why no land acknowledgement to the King of France?

Indian children were not incarcerated. They were sent to school, like other Canadian children, and as requested by the Indians in treaties. There was no desire and no attempt to wipe out native languages, customs, or culture—aside from a few customs, like the potlatch or the sun dance, or torture, or cannibalism, which were seen to violate human rights. The schools were designed, perhaps unfortunately, to preserve Indian uniqueness.

This generally honourable part of Canadian history has been systematically falsified.