Learn, understand Indigenous history
Another National Indigenous Peoples Day in Canada come and gone. How many of us even noticed?
You'd think our burning desire to have a designated day off in the only summer month without one would have created at least a passing interest.
Are we so indifferent, unaware and/or uncomfortable with Indigenous heritage in such that we can't even bear to consider this day as an excuse for a day off ? Don't we mock our American cousins for this very same reason?
The U.S. just recognized Juneteenth — a federal holiday to acknowledge the emancipation of slavery — with considerable controversy over whether it should be paying such homage. Not so very long ago Americans were embroiled in a similar controversy over its now February holiday, Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
Far too many Canadians find this far too delightful. This is disturbing, not to mention, a tad ironic.
We smugly revel in America's struggle with its Black history, yet we Canadians are similarly unaware of our own troubling Indigenous past. We have even less desire to think about how our history has contributed to present-day problems.
Canadians are only now finally getting around to acknowledging this was a country founded through treaties with First Nations, although barely a quarter of us will admit we live on unceded Indigenous territory. This seems rather close to that American stereotype we purport to loathe.
Yes, U.S. Indigenous history is far more entangled in violent military conquest. This was immediately worsened by the day's revisionism, followed by decades of historical whitewashing.
At least in Canada, First Nations people did not quite receive the same Hollywood treatment as those in the U.S., often depicted as foe to the “heroic frontiersman” (who was undoubtedly white). We did not have a John Wayne (unless you count the one on Wayne and Shuster).
Nor did we directly fictionalize then canonize actual historical figures like Gen. George Custer. Only now, are some Americans realizing Custer was actually as sadistic a military leader as he was incompetent — a man driven by his own lust for fame and glory, ample political ambition and his personal greed that saw him lead the expedition into South Dakota's Black Hills in search of gold. (Some 44 million troy ounces would be extracted. The Battle of Little Big Horn would ensure Custer never saw any of it.)
But while we Canadians may be smug that our history isn't peppered with such battlefield violence, do really know much about our Indigenous history?
That most us are, for the first time, seeing the graves of First Nations children like the 215 at the former Kamloops Indian residential school suggests we have our historical blind spots that won't be eliminated until we start observing and acknowledging Indigenous heritage.
Really, should it have taken until 2021 for so many people to notice First Nations kids were misused and abused in Canadian residential schools?
Our historical revisionism isn't literally carved into granite like Mount Rushmore's U.S. presidential memorial in the middle of Lakota territory. (This is Lakota land by virtue of 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty — a legal reality, upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1960.)
But most Canadians have grown up similarly oblivious to the residential school policies of first prime minister John A. Macdonald. In Regina, we have memorialized Nicolas Flood Davin and Edgar Dewdney, who borrowed the concepts of assimilation and residential schools right from the U.S. reservation system.
We have little understanding how this history of federal policies like residential schools — literally tearing apart generations of First Nations families — has contributed to today's problems of suicide, substance abuse and poverty.
We simply cannot permit those promoting the residential-schools-weren't-so-bad narrative to continue to whitewash our history.
It begins with frank acknowledgment of our past, like we saw Monday with the government news of the creation of a residential school memorial site.
But we need to do more. We shouldn't let another National Indigenous Peoples Day go by without understanding why it's so badly needed.