Reconciliation proposals need to be enormous
Last week, Anishinaabe comedian Ryan McMahon released an episode of his podcast, Red Man Laughing — a hybrid of comedy and serious discussion of indigenous issues. This season, the podcast follows the theme “Reconciliation,” and to advertise the new episode “Land,” McMahon posted a two-sentence proposition to social media: “The colonial project in Canada was/is about LAND. Reconciliation is impossible without returning land.”
The bluntness of this statement and the inescapability of its conclusion were a stark contrast to the news of the day about indigenous issues. Within the past month, Trudeau’s Liberal government has stepped back from its oft-stated commitment to harmonize Canadian law with the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), a project for which it voted as a bloc last year, and for which Trudeau reiterated his support on the campaign trail last fall.
Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould called the UNDRIP a “simplistic (approach)” and “unworkable,” though she insists the Liberals still intend to “adopt” the declaration.
NDP MP Roméo Saganash, however, argued in May, “You adopt legislatively, and you implement through programs and policies. That’s the distinction the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) made, and it’s quite an important one.”
Wednesday, the government formally announced the opening of its National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW). It named the inquiry’s five commissioners (four of whom are indigenous, the last of whom is a non-Inuk raised in Igloolik and fluent in Inuktitut) and officially made public the terms of reference, which were leaked to media in July.
While the inquiry, which indigenous community leaders have been demanding for more than a decade, has been greeted with relief, one major fault identified by activists after last month’s leak is the inquiry’s apparent disregard for the issue of police conduct and practices in cases related to MMIW.
Despite widespread demand for investigations into the way MMIW cases were handled, there is no mention of police or the justice system in the terms of reference. The inquiry, instead, will focus on, “systemic causes of violence against Indigenous women and girls . . . including underlying social, economic, cultural, institutional and historical causes.”
That’s important, too. But the lack of a direct plan to inquire why police forces across Canada have done such terrible jobs protecting indigenous women, looking for missing indigenous women, or investigating murdered indigenous women is the sign of an inquiry not designed to do what indigenous people want it to, and have demanded it do.
In both cases, the gulf between the demand of what indigenous people want and what the Liberal government seems willing to give them remains enormous, and also ironic, considering the Liberals’ strenuous efforts to position themselves as a radically pro-indigenous alternative to the Harper government.
Nothing about harmonizing the UNDRIP with Canadian law or holding police to account would be easy. But that’s the problem of reconciliation. Nothing about it will be easy, either, and anyone who understands the gravity of Canada’s history of atrocities against indigenous people will understand that trying to make things right will demand enormous, difficult sacrifices, precisely as McMahon argued it will.
Canada is a wealthy country because of the land and resources it took from indigenous people, and few if any of those transactions were fair. Some were more savage than others, such as John A. Macdonald’s direction to starve thousands of Plains Cree people in order to move them onto reserves and off of the land he wanted for the Canadian Pacific Railway.
In so many of its dealings with indigenous peoples, Canada stole and sometimes killed. Once it had much of the land, Canada then engaged in a century-long Indian Residential Schools project of genocide to destroy indigenous cultures, traditions, languages, histories, communities and people.
Even with that over, Canada continues to maintain the status quo of underfunding reserves and other indigenous communities, directly contributing to crises, such as the suicide epidemic in the north.
If the Canadian government genuinely wishes to work toward reconciliation, then its proposals are going to have to be enormous. They’re going to have to involve land, and they’re going to cost Canada a fortune — the kind of fortune indigenous people would have had if their land hadn’t been taken from them.
Reconciliation is not going to happen by creating a MMIW inquiry on politicians’ terms, and it’s not going to happen by flatly rejecting the UNDRIP as legislatively unworkable (rather than, for example, seeking the means to adopt it legislatively as much as is absolutely possible).
If non-Indigenous Canadians want reconciliation for the crimes and atrocities that made this country wealthy, it’s going to cost them. But that’s the problem — few people even know about those crimes, and fewer still are interested in making the sacrifices that might set the stage for real reconciliation. So if reconciliation isn’t in Canada’s future after all, we’d better think carefully about what we’re going to have in its place, and what that says about us as a nation.