Our Home on Native Land?

 

Jully Black sang “O Canada” to begin the NBA All-Star game in Salt Lake City recently. She made headlines the world over by changing the lyrics from “O Canada, our home and native land,” to “O Canada, our home on native land.”

According to her version, Canada belongs to the native people, aka “First Nations.” And not to its citizens. 

To understand how offensive this is, imagine she had sung, instead, “O Canada, our home on Spanish land.” After all, the Spanish have a traditional claim, since they “discovered” the Americas, and were assigned them in the Treaty of Tordesillas. I do not believe they have formally renounced this claim.

Unlike the First Nations of Canada, who formally renounced any claim of sovereignty many years ago, and passed it to the British crown in the Treaty of Niagara. And in all the other formal treaties with the British and then the Canadian government.

Or what if Black had sung “O Canada, our home is on French land.” The French once claimed us, and had settled here; the land was taken from them by conquest. The Acadian were actually expelled. Is that fair? By contrast, the ceding of sovereignty from the natives was by agreement and with compensation.

But either of these phrasings, surely would be intolerable. They would sound like treason. Like the Poles singing “Our home on German land.” Or the Americans singing “Our home on British land.”

If we leave aside racial prejudice, Black’s version of the anthem sounds just as treasonous.

As are the interminable "land recognitions" now found at almost every public event.

In a video interview, Black complains in explanation that aboriginal history was not taught to her in school, that the Indians had been “erased.” 

This is not true. Any check of old Canadian school texts—many are available online at the Internet Archive—shows Canada’s Indians have always been prominent in the curriculum. Unless Black went to some uniquely bad school, she seems to be thinking specifically of the supposed horrors of the residential schools.

This was not taught, of course, because until recent years it was not known. No prominent historians supposed there was anything especially wrong with the residential schools. Maybe a bad policy; maybe not. Not especially worth teaching about, any more than the history of denominational schools in Newfoundland, or Canadian orphanages.

And what is currently taught about the residential schools—and, I warrant, in every school in Canada—is not true. They were mostly just schools like any other, with some lousy cafeteria food. 

The notion of “genocide” in the residential schools is, in the end, a moral panic like the witch hunts of Renaissance Europe, or the Medieval dancing hysteria.

I hope we awaken from it soon. And without, say, selling Canada down the river.