We’re not so different
Ignorance of aboriginal history is likely playing a part in the hostile reaction of many Canadians to aboriginal protests, writes ROBERT MCGHEE.
Where did all the hatred suddenly come from? Over the past weeks, the comments sections of media articles have seen increasingly virulent rants against the aboriginals who are asking for a new deal with the federal government. A few of these commentaries are by outright racists, others by writers who are merely repeating and embellishing the talking-points of the current government. But most seem to be taking the simplest route to explain a situation that is far too complex for easy understanding.
In a recent interview with the CBC, ex-prime minister Paul Martin noted that misconceptions and hostile reactions to the Idle No More movement are aggravated by the fact that “Canadians don’t know and have never been taught aboriginal history adequately.”
A common flashpoint for this anger surfaces when aboriginal leaders talk of “nation-to-nation” discussions, and of “treaties between sovereign nations.” To most commentators this is annoyingly artificial rhetoric ungrounded in the actuality of small, poverty-stricken communities facing a modern nation-state. A small dose of history might help in comprehending what is going on here: When the legal and constitutional basis for relations between aboriginals and settlers was established, nation-to-nation agreement was a reality.
Behind the dismissal of the “sovereign nation” terminology lies an assumption that the difference in scale and power that exists today between aboriginal and federal governments has always existed. And underlying this view is a strange quirk of perspective. Euro-Canadians seem to naturally think of our own ancestors as modern people dressed in oldtime costumes; we understand their motives and perspectives and intellectual abilities as very similar to our own. In contrast, contemporary aboriginals are viewed as ancient and unchanging people who happen to use iPhones. We tend to forget that, when Europeans first encountered American aboriginals, all of our ancestors were much less sophisticated than we are today.
Almost 500 years ago, when Jacques Cartier visited the town of Hochelaga on Montreal Island, he encountered the eastern outliers of an agricultural civilization that stretched westward to the Great Plains, and from there southwards to the Amazonian forests and the deserts of Chile. When Champlain travelled through southern Ontario four centuries ago, the population of the area was estimated at between 50,000 and 75,000, living in farming towns with up to 1,000 or more inhabitants. Similar levels of social complexity existed among non-agricultural peoples living in productive environments such as those along the coasts and salmon rivers of British Columbia.
Before the devastating effects of Old World diseases, offshoots of the great civilizations of Mexico extended up the Mississippi Valley as far as the neighbourhood of St. Louis, where between 1,000 and 1,200 AD the city of Cahokia had a population estimated at 20,000 people — about the same as that of London during the same period. Economic links, and probably political and religious influences, stretched northward to reach the farmers of Ontario and the buffalo-hunting peoples of the western Plains.
There were certainly technological and social differences between the peoples on either side of the Atlantic when they first came into contact, but these were nowhere as great as we generally assume.
When Cartier visited Hochelaga, my own Scots ancestors were illiterate farmers living in tiny communities of huts built from turf and boulders, barely surviving on what they could grow in rocky soils or catch along the local coast. Unless chased from their homes by the local wars that plagued the region, they probably never travelled more than a few kilometres from their native village and they knew little of “European civilization.” The world that they occupied — a world of small, familybased communities living directly from the land — was much closer to that of 16th-century aboriginal Canadians than to that of their 21st-century descendants.
The Spaniards and Aztecs who confronted one another in postconquest Mexico also had much more in common — in the scale and organizations of their societies, their ferocious piety and their joy in conquest — than either have with their Mexican successors of the present day. In 16th-century Canada, “nation-tonation” encounters were realities, as they continued to be at the time of the 1763 Royal Proclamation that laid the groundwork for subsequent treaties.
Another problem arising from the neglect of historical knowledge is the assumption that Europeans alone developed the technology and the economic system underlying the advances that have occurred over the past few centuries — progress which European settlers then “brought” to more benighted peoples such as aboriginal North Americans.
But the creation of the modern world is a product of inventions and processes that appeared on many continents and among many peoples. Not the least important of these were the food plants — from avocados to corn, potatoes to tomatoes — domesticated and developed by generations of aboriginal American plant breeders.
It has been argued that the introduction of these crops to Europe triggered the rapid population growth that caused the post-Renaissance economic expansion and led to the Industrial Revolution.
At a time when a historical perspective is so important in trying to understand the relationship between aboriginal and non-aboriginal peoples, it is more than unfortunate that the current government has chosen to neglect the study and presentation of indigenous history.
Within the past year, 80 per cent of the archaeologists employed by Parks Canada — the largest archaeological agency in the country — have lost their jobs. The Canadian Museum of Civilization, the lead federal institution engaged in researching and presenting aboriginal history, is being transformed into a Museum of History focusing on the relatively recent political, military and sporting achievements that the current government thinks will make Canadians proud of their past.
However, pride is not a substitute for understanding, and understanding will be the more important tool in untangling the intricate knot that has been gradually tied through the centuries of history linking Euro-Canadians and First Peoples.