A note from the author: This article was written in 2020, one year before the tragic residential school findings sparked a significant reaction from the average non-Indigenous population. As a result, there has been an impressive shift in social awareness concerning the detriments of celebrating a day that overlooks and, in a sense, tries to hide such realities. This article should therefore be interpreted within the correct context - one that recognizes progress but still demands justice for Indigenous peoples today.
Also, although I am in fact Métis, I am still white, and my struggles with imposter syndrome may be better suited for a different article, so I am speaking solely from my experience as a privileged white person. Marsee.
When I was young, I was taught that "being Canadian" is something to be proud of. I learnt that, as a social representation of this pride, Canadians are generally expected to engage in Canada day festivities with enthusiasm. "After all", I was told, "we are lucky to live in Canada." So if I refuse to celebrate Canada's 153rd birthday by spending $30 at Dollarama and getting drunk with other white people dressed in red and white, the assumption is that I just don't realize how good I have it.
Now, before my readers insist that I stop overreacting and start being more grateful, let us first establish a mutual understanding of what it is exactly that I am reacting to by considering the following questions: What if I have it so good as a white "Canadian" because other non-white Canadians have it so bad? What if Canada - with a b-day budget of half a billion dollars in 2017 - isn't all it's cracked up to be?
What if its current state is so deeply rooted and continues to grow in a heap of cultural and literal genocide; and this virulent growth is perpetuated by the fact that many Canadians instinctively avoid changing the soil in which it was planted by instead changing the subject and pointing fingers at anyone or anything else that has more apparent faults?
With that being said, I tend to feel particularly irritated on Canada day, and I do not believe that this is a dramatic response. For the past couple years I have been, for the most part, quiet on the matter despite my irritability and despite my rather expressive personality. So it's about time I break the streak of silent frustration and explain my reasoning for continuously condemning Canada day.
It has less to do with the fact that this place was already occupied around 15,000 years ago by Indigenous peoples and more to do with the fact that it's used as an assimilative tactic against these same people today - because yes, they are still here.
"It's my birthday and I'll oppress if I want to!"
I shall start by stating a simple critique of (Canadian) nationalism that might help elucidate my frustration with this holiday: Canadians who get offended by those who are not necessarily "proud to be Canadian" have not seen Canada's true colours, or they have but aren't bothered by it. They have never been threatened by anything "Canadian", whether that be laws or cultural norms. These same Canadians are usually the ones who celebrate Canada day with a genuine sense of national pride.
On the other hand, there are some Canadians who are somewhat aware of Canada's exaggerated stature, but still participate in celebrating the depiction of Canada's quirky piety as if it were not just that. It seems harmless, really.
So you might be one of those Canadians who simply enjoys taking advantage of a day where your government encourages you to avoid work and get drunk. You might even be thinking, "What's so wrong with loving Canada, anyway? We aren't nearly as bad as other countries. Just look at the US!"
The problem with your hypothetical train of thought is this: If everyone knew what Canada is really up to when it's not busy bragging about how it's so much more polite than America, then surely no one would want to show up to its birthday party. Unfortunately, everyone (including those who are less oblivious to Canada's truth) expresses a similar degree of confusion when they see other people who live here and make a point not to attend.
In her extremely witty and informative book "Indigenous Writes", Chelsea Vowel accurately summarizes this global illusion of Canada’s progress as an innocent country: Even if more people are starting to acknowledge its history, many present issues concerning the lives of Indigenous peoples are still lacking attention. Therefore it only makes sense for the issue of Canada day being an issue to lack attention as well.
Vowels informs us that "when Canadians consider the injustices faced by Indigenous peoples, those injustices are nearly always located in the past”; as if injustices faced by Indigenous peoples today are due solely to their own abject choices. Thus glorifying the idea that colonization and racism are mistakes of the past is Canada’s attempt to avoid total responsibility for current Indigenous issues. It also makes it easier to enjoy and therefore capitalize off of its national holiday without feeling guilty.
If everything is seen as having "been taken care of", then a sense of moral desert is awarded to Canadians for honouring their birthplace, leading them to believe that a highly-budgeted party for this same place that has created and continues to enable its own third-world problems for Indigenous peoples is not only justifiable, but well-deserved.
However, despite Canada’s recent efforts to acknowledge its history of colonization and racism towards Indigenous peoples through truth and reconciliation, the country’s narrative is still being guided by national myths. These national myths are based on white-washed perceptions of Canada’s global reputation, namely as a diverse country that quickly mended and got over any historical injustices of the past; A country worthy of celebration!
The truth is that Canada day is nothing more than its attempt to maintain this reputation. By fostering national myths that serve the country’s ongoing assimilation process and with Canada day as a leading tactic, Indigenous peoples are deliberately misrepresented so to avoid formally addressing their oppression.
A praise-worthy country or a collection of national myths?
One of the strongest yet most overlooked myths within Canada is the legitimacy of its corrupt and non-Indigenous legal system. As a result, Canada is perceived as a fundamentally progressive and apologetic country even though it still uses its government as a means to intentionally assimilate and dehumanize Indigenous peoples.
Canada’s legal system is primarily anti-Indigenous because it is based on a European legal theory that justifies racism towards Indigenous peoples. It is only in recent legal analysis that “the image of the non-Indigenous legal system as rational, objective, universal and purified of mythology, narrative and collective memories” is being interrogated, with many legal theorists now exposing the bias surrounding these systems.
Peter Fitzpatrick points out that such legal systems come from “the mythology of European identity founded in an opposition to certain myth-ridden 'others'." This is precisely the case with Canada. Like other Eurocentric legal systems, Canada’s government was developed through the prejudice contrast “between state-centric law and chaos and savagery". Through a false universality of the system, Indigenous peoples and their legal traditions were labeled as the primitive “others” unfit to be included in a rational and civilized non-Indigenous legal system.
Antony Anghie argues that “the current formulation of international law developed in response to the novel circumstance of colonizing new continents inhabited by Indigenous peoples”. Thus in order to maintain the colonial narrative of universal and morally objective European values, Canada’s non-Indigenous legal system remains with a national display of contempt towards Indigenous peoples and their ideals.
As a consequence of Canada’s non-Indigenous legal system, a common myth that being an Indigenous person requires “Indian status” has been propagated, encouraging further prejudice towards the Indigenous population. Chelsea Vowel informs us that Indian status “is an administrative category created and applied by the federal government of Canada” and not by Indigenous peoples.
More importantly, it “is not the same as Indigenous identity”. Indigenous peoples do not have any control over the extremely detailed yet somehow vague definition, and it is in this way that Canada still controls the narrative surrounding what it means to be Indigenous. It functions to dehumanize genuine Indigenous peoples by placing or removing them from an artificial and variable category. The tricky thing about status is that it is one of the few ways Indigenous peoples can be at least acknowledged, if not anything else.
Still, according to Vowel, “the Canadian government basically takes the position that, ‘you’re an Indian if we say you’re an Indian’”. This is a fair criticism since many Indigenous peoples do not have status while there are some non-Indigenous peoples with status. In fact, only about 45 percent (though probably even less) of Indigenous peoples in Canada have status.
A direct cause of this and the devaluing of Indigenous identity by means of federal policies is Bill C-31 and its effects. Implemented in 1985, the Bill was advertised as a way to fix Indigenous gender equality and end the process which Canada labelled as “enfranchisement”. Vowel explains how enfranchisement was “a concrete way to assimilate Indigenous peoples out of legislative existence, extinguish their rights, and solidify colonial control over lands and resources”.
While non-Indigenous peoples saw it as a technique to cease exclusion, Indigenous peoples experienced it as a non-consensual process which abolished their right as a legally recognized Indigenous person.
Bill C-31 was supposedly designed to “reverse sexual discrimination that had caused Indian women who married non-Indians to lose their status, while men who married non-Indian women not only kept their status but also passed status on to their non-Indian wives”. Indigenous women and their children were penalized while non-Indigenous women were allowed to, in a sense, take their status.
By misrepresenting this federal policy as a means to improve equality among Indigenous peoples, its initial purpose to penalize Indigenous women and children remained. Today, there are “two categories of status Indians, called 6(1) and 6(2) Indians” which “determine whether the children of a status Indian will have status or not” (29). It is important to know that both categories imply full status, because “half-status” does not exist. In all possible scenarios except one, the child will have 6(1) status. The outlier is the scenario in which a 6(2) Indian marries someone without any status. In that case, the child will have no status.
This means that status can be totally eradicated after only two generations of out-marriage. In Vowel’s words, “it does not matter if you raise your grandchildren in your Native culture. It does not matter if they speak your language and know your customs. If you married someone without status, and your grandchildren have a non-status parent, your grandchildren are no longer considered Indian; not legally”.
What does this say about Canada? It says that Canada uses contemporary policies to control the narrative of Indigenous identity by treating it as a modifiable legal term rather than belonging to rich and diverse groups of culture and customs.
Consequently, the misconception of Indian status produces more controversial myths, such as the various forms of special treatment that Indigenous peoples are thought to receive because of it. Such myths affect a type of resentment towards the Indigenous population which makes it easier for Canadians to believe more detrimental myths concerning negative stereotypes, and to feel more pride in identifying as a non-Indigenous person, or rather, as a Canadian.
"A Canadian and a Native walk into a bar..."
Stereotypes are a useful way for Canada to avoid and place blame carelessly, which is exactly what the myth of “the drunken Indian” does. Though perhaps more easily exemplified with 20th century North-American films, there have been many cases of the belief (and often gentle misapprehension) of the stereotype found within Canada to this day.
Recently in 2014 there was a public guide published at a Manitoba fishing lodge, where there is a pronounced Cree population, which advised its clientele to refrain from offering alcohol to its Cree guides because "like all Natives North-Americans, they have a basic intolerance for alcohol." This shows how Canada’s social consciousness is laced with spurious stereotypes disguised as matter-of harmless facts.
According to Vowel, “the stereotype of the drunken Indian often confuses the history of alcohol in [Indigenous] communities with genetic theories”. This undermines the issue altogether. On one hand there is a common assumption that Indigenous people cannot metabolize alcohol. This gives non-Indigenous people a groundless incentive to relate the metabolism of alcohol to race or ethnicity as opposed to legitimate factors such as prior drinking history and body weight.
The relation of alcohol tolerance grants a false impression that Indigenous peoples are less evolved than non-Indigenous peoples, making it easier to dismiss the fact that alcohol was used as manipulative weapon against Indigenous peoples in North-America since contact. It also causes many Indigenous peoples to internalize the false idea of an inescapable destructive gene caused by race. Vowel argues that this internalization of alcoholism being genetic “can lead to a sort of fatalism”, especially among Indigenous youth.
And although race is not a scientific factor in how a person metabolizes alcohol, alcohol abuse has become an exceptionally neglected problem in Indigenous communities. According to Vowel, Canada’s Indigenous peoples have twice the rate of death due to alcohol use than the general population. That does not mean that all Indigenous peoples abuse or even consume alcohol regularly, yet it is a commonly held belief. In fact, many studies show that as far as casual and limited drinking goes, specifically First Nations adults abstain from alcohol more frequently than the general population.
Nevertheless these studies also found that there are more heavy drinkers in First Nations adults than the general population. The greater number of Indigenous people who do not consume alcohol compared to the general population reveals their clear understanding of alcohol as a very serious and damaging thing, especially since alcohol abuse in Indigenous communities is not a myth.
This is an extremely significant point that tends to be snubbed when discussing the myth of the drunken Indian. It obscures the fact that some of the first colonial settlers of Canada intentionally introduced alcohol as a means of harm. For example, “sexual violence against Indigenous women by European colonists and soldiers […] was very much linked to alcohol abuse. From the early days of contact […] Indigenous peoples were consistently exposed to modes of violence associated with binge-drinking”.
Consequently, since colonial authorities were unable to stop settlers from controlling their own alcohol consumption, they targeted Indigenous peoples instead. In 1874, a racist legislation was introduced so that Indigenous peoples could be put in jail for one month if they were caught consuming alcohol. It was only a small promotion for the stereotype of the drunken Indian but it helped establish the modern conceptualization that Indigenous peoples are prone to alcoholism.
Whether through genetic weakness or as a part of their cultures, it is embedded in Canada’s social consciousness that only Canada’s superior non-Indigenous legal system may fix the self-inflicted problems of Indigenous peoples. Thus the more problems it claims to fix, the more reason to be praised.
All of this confirms how Canada’s innocent global identity is protected by its affectation regarding the history of colonization, and that its national myths help control the narrative of how Indigenous peoples are perceived by non-Indigenous people and even themselves. By stultifying a collective image of Indigenous peoples as a mere category full of special treatment and weak genetics without referring to any historical context, their current struggles are delegitimized.
While simultaneously denying any modern attempts of assimilation, Canada oppresses the very people it claims to be helping and shames those who are enraged by this fact. Hence the implicit obligatory duty of all Canadians to help maintain its image by sticking those little plastic flags into their front lawns or whatever.
A taste of its own western medicine.
Refusing to celebrate Canada day does not mean that we cannot also appreciate how Canada acts as a safe-haven for many of its citizens. Compared to other countries, it is obviously not the worst.
But saying "nobody's perfect" could only be a plausible defence for Canada if it wasn't trying so hard to make it seem as though it was, despite its actions that say otherwise. Indeed, every country has its flaws and redeemable features. Unfortunately, simply acknowledging the former won't reverse the incessant damage caused. In order to improve as a country, an entirely new response to Canada's superficial attempts at avoiding much-needed criticism should be sought.
By relying on historical and scientific information to help us re-evaluate our own national pride, the choice to reject any invitation to celebrate a country that certainly doesn't deserve it might not be such a difficult thing to do next year.
For decades Indigenous people have been told to just "get over it". Now it's your turn, Canada.
Comments