There’s Nothing To Celebrate: It’s dominionists’ day

In 1879, July 1 was labelled “dominion day”, and retained that name until 1982 when the constitution was ratified and the name changed to “canada day”.  (The lower case spelling is intentional.)  Considering how white Canadian governments have behaved over the last 150 years, dominionist is a better name for it.  Remember what was done to the Metis in Manitoba?  It turns out we’ve been doing that the entire time, one long, slow genocide of the First Nations people that never ceased.  And current politicians hope a few dollars and a mealy mouthed apology will make up for it or allow it to continue.

John A. Macdonald should not be forgotten, nor celebrated

The recent decision by the City of Victoria to remove a statue of Sir John A. Macdonald from in front of city hall has sparked much discussion about whether statues and other commemorations of historical figures should be removed or replaced.

This is not the first time a statue of Macdonald has caught the attention of Indigenous people.

For many Canadians, there is a fear that removing statues or changing names of buildings will erase the country’s history. Others charge that we cannot judge a historical person’s actions based on contemporary standards.

But even by historical standards, a story by Rachel Décoste in the Huffington Post shows that Macdonald was “way more racist than his contemporaries.”

Excerpts from the article by Rachel Décoste linked in the item above:

Sir John A. Macdonald: 5 Frightening Facts About Our First Prime Minister

1. During the American Civil War (1861 to 1865), Montreal served as refuge to Confederates ― southern Americans who wanted to keep slavery and secede from the United States union. The Southern slavers found a friend in John A. Macdonald.

2. John A. Macdonald may have named Canada a “confederation” in deference to the Southern Confederates with whom he sympathized.

3. John A. Macdonald was a sinophobe, according to Timothy J. Stanley’s research.

In 1885, PM Macdonald told the House of Commons that, if the Chinese were not excluded from Canada, “the Aryan character of the future of British America should be destroyed.” This was the precise moment in the histories of Canada and the British dominions when Macdonald personally introduced race as a defining legal principle of the state.

4. John A. Macdonald was way more racist than his contemporaries. For John A. Macdonald, Canada was to be the country that restored a pure Aryan race to its past glory. Lest it be thought that Macdonald was merely expressing the prejudices of the age, it should be noted that his were among the most extreme views of his era.

5. John A. Macdonald’s policies of forced starvation helped clear First Nations from the prairies in order to build the railway, according to James Daschuk of University of Regina. An excerpt from his book, Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation and the Loss of Aboriginal Life:

“For years, government officials withheld food from aboriginal people until they moved to their appointed reserves, forcing them to trade freedom for rations. Once on reserves, food placed in ration houses was withheld for so long that much of it rotted while the people it was intended to feed fell into a decades-long cycle of malnutrition, suppressed immunity and sickness from tuberculosis and other diseases. Thousands died.”

The problem is, MacDonald isn’t history.  His attitudes are still modern practice.  Why do First Nations homes still not have adequate water, sewage and construction?  Why do their kids not receive adequate education, which does not include instruction in their own peoples’ languages?

Why are the Racist Corrupt Misogynistic Pricks (RCMP) permitted to murder First Nations people with impunity and pretend they “are not systematically racist” despite their own racist actions?  Racism is as endemic amongst Canadian cops as among US cops.  Pretending they’re any better is part of the problem.

And most currently, why has no one been held accountable for the culturual and bodily genocide of First Nations children at “residential schools”?  Why did Trudeau permanently allow the catholic cult to escape its financial obligations to pay restitution and reparations to First Nations people?  (Probably because he is a fanatical catholic.)  That was not a “legal misstep”, it was intentionally done to protect the cult’s finances and force taxpayers to foot the entire bill.

Why are the government’s and catholic cult’s records being kept secret except to protect the guilty?  Why is investigating property damage (a few burnt churches) deemed the “priority” and not identifying thousands of children who have been systematically murdered in those “schools”?  Why is naming their murderers not a priority?

And on “canada day”, another 182 bodies have been found outside a “school” in Cranbrook, BC.  Meanwhile, the RCMP again display misplaced priorities, more concerned with another burnt church in Alberta instead of identifying the bodies.

Even if these were the only issues, there is nothing to celebrate today.  And I haven’t even mentioned the repeated racism and atrocities perpetrated towards Canadians who are Black, of Japanese or Chinese descent, which are all horror stories unto themselves.

 

 

There have been numerous protest songs over the years, written by or about First Nations people in Canada.  I would like to link to all the lyrics, but most are not available (especially the first, which is impossible to transcribe).  Songs and links are below the fold.

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A Word To Define: Maplewashing

Maplewashing is, according to wikipedia (apologies for not having a better source):

Maplewashing or maple washing (a portmanteau of maple and “whitewash”) refers to a tendency by Canadian governments, institutions, and media to perpetuate the notion that Canada is morally superior to other countries, thus sanitizing and concealing negative historical and contemporary actions.

Institutions includes “education systems”, libraries, public records, chamberpots of commerce, and others.  But that definition fails to include the growing public individual and mob tendency to assume and claim Canada has been and remains infallible.  The country no longer aspires to do better, we wrongly assume that it is better than other nations.

Witness the rise of poppy fascism over the last 20 years, the willingness to ape the worst nationalistic tendencies of the UK, US and other countries. Poppy fascism (the forced wearing of poppies or face harassment and violence) is the Canadian and UK equivalent of US flag fascism (mandatory lapel pins, violence against flag burners).

Noticeably, flag waving nationalism grows in Canada every time Canadian terrorists . . . I’m sorry, “military” have been exposed as committing war crimes and other human rights abuses.  It grew after the Canadian military abused and tortured Somalis in the 1990s, in Serbia where they stood by and did nothing as mass genocide happened, and after Canadian participation in war crimes in Afghanistan. It’s as if people would rather deflect than genuflect.

The fiction of “Canadian do-gooders” likely began in 1957 with then-foreign minister (later prime minister) Lester Pearson’s invention of “peacekeepers” to police the Suez Canal, and Pearson winning a Nobel Peace Prize for it. In reality, the Canadian military in Egypt were there to do the bidding of the UK.  It was all about controlling “our oil under their sand”.  That “peace prize” was as much parody as Kissinger being given one.

“Heritage minutes” is a long series of propaganda designed to create the fiction of a “noble country” that can and has done no wrong.  Or when we did, “that wasn’t us”.  Apparently the propaganda I and others learnt in public high schools wasn’t enough in some people’s eyes.  They wanted millions of public money to pay for national indoctrination.

Heritage Minutes: History, culture, and propaganda

Accounting for Histories: 150 Years of Canadian Maple Washing

What does a racist look like, as the anti-racist protester asked in the item below?

Me.  We’re all racist, and we had better acknowledge and stop pretending.  If you benefit from systems of racism, you are one, even if you know it or not, actively participate or not.  You can’t solve a problem if you don’t admit to having one, and Canada’s problem is a history of racism as bad as any nation in the world.

The Conversation: Dear white people, wake up: Canada is racist

Approximately 4,000 people gathered at Vancouver’s City Hall on Aug. 19 to protest an anti-immigration and anti-Muslim white nationalist rally. They far out-numbered the white nationalist demonstrators. Later, one counter-protester interviewed by CBC-TV news said: “I’ve never seen a racist.”

Did that counter-protester come to the rally hoping to see a racist? What do racists look like, anyway? Are they easily identifiable? Perhaps he was imagining a stereotypical neo-Nazi?

Although his statement was naive and problematic, it actually reflects common misunderstandings of white supremacy and racism in Canada.

It also reflects the mythical Canadian narrative of inclusivity and diversity. Canadians widely believe their country to be a peaceful, multicultural country without racism.

The University of Toronto published the following document (PDF) on the racist systems within Canada during the first half of the 20th century, what they are how they were constructed.  From the inside front page:

COLOUR-CODED: A LEGAL HISTORY OF RACISM IN CANADA 1900–1950

Historically Canadians have considered themselves to be more or lessfree of racial prejudice. Although this perception has been challenged inrecent years, it has not been completely dispelled. In Colour-Coded,Constance Backhouse illustrates the tenacious hold that white supremacyhad on our legal system in the first half of this century, and underscoresthe damaging legacy of inequality that continues today.

Backhouse presents detailed narratives of six court cases, each givingevidence of blatant racism created and enforced through law. The casesfocus on Aboriginal, Inuit, Chinese-Canadian, and African-Canadianindividuals, taking us from the criminal prosecution of traditional Abo-riginal dance to the trial of members of the ‘Ku Klux Klan of Kanada.’From thousands of possibilities, Backhouse has selected studies thatconstitute central moments in the legal history of racism in Canada. Herselection also considers a wide range of legal forums, including adminis-trative rulings by municipal councils, criminal trials before police magis-trates, and criminal and civil cases heard by the highest courts in theprovinces and by the Supreme Court of Canada.

The extensive and detailed documentation presented here leaves nodoubt that the Canadian legal system played a dominant role in creatingand preserving racial discrimination. A central message of this book isthat racism is deeply embedded in Canadian history despite Canada’sreputation as a raceless society.

Constance Backhouse is Professor of Law at the University of WesternOntario and author of Petticoats and Prejudice: Women and Law in Nine-teenth-Century Canada.

And this is without addressing Canada’s role in the ongoing environmental collapse.  Canadian consumption and waste of energy and resources is among the highest per capita in the world, the worst among any country with more than 10 million people.  We have been labelled “hewers of wood and drawers of water” to describe our dependency on natural resources which overlooked the mining industry: oil, metals, uranium, and asbestos which have poisoned the planet.

There are some useful images below the fold.

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