Like Americans, Australians, New Zealanders and the British, Canadians are being schooled to believe that their country is essentially a “settler” colony, whose very existence largely echoes the racist European past. This ideology holds that everyone, except the First Nations, are essentially illegitimate colonialists from whom penance is required but forgiveness is forbidden.
Canada’s past record of settlement — once the source of pride — has been turned into a tale of unrequited evil. It has been held responsible both for real crimes, and ones, like systematic murders of Indigenous children at residential schools, that are likely highly exaggerated.
The settler concept was perhaps best articulated by the Australian anthropologist Patrick Wolfe in his 2006 article “Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native.” Under this formulation, settlers are cast as the historical equivalent of a potboiler villain. Wolfe saw settlers as having an enduring legacy, possessing “the logic of elimination” and wiping out the economic, spiritual and social lives of the Indigenous.
Canadian academics seem to be attracted to this notion. The deprivations and starvation of First Nations on the Prairies in the 1880s, argues James Daschuck, was not a consequence of climatic conditions or the disappearance of the buffalo, but the result of a purposeful policy of “genocide” that lay behind prime minister Sir John A. Macdonald’s “sinister policies.” Dominion efforts to save Indigenous lives, argues historian Nigel Biggar, were rather well-intentioned if late and often inadequate.
Professors at both the University of British Columbia and Queen’s report with favour the imposition of the settler/colonial ideology not just on college students but also at grade schools. For its advocates, notes the University of Toronto’s Alan Hayes, Canada’s colonial settler history transcends all other concerns. He notes: “Writers in settler colonial studies claim that it structures Canada more fundamentally than any other divisions, whether class, race and ethnicity, gender, or francophone/anglophone biculturalism.”
It’s clearly true that Indigenous peoples in Canada, the U.S. and Australia all experienced brutal suppression. But settler paradigms tend to miss the role of collaboration between peoples. In fact, Quebec, for example, grew largely in what historian Fred Koabel describes as “hybrid European/Indigenous communities“ that were critical to the functioning of early Canada. Many of this now growing population, notably the Métis, are of mixed race.
The settler paradigm is often confused by history. Take the history of Israel and Palestine. Rather than simply being a region where peaceful “natives” were displaced by brutal Zionists, the area constantly shifted from one dominant group to another. Canaanites, Hebrews, Assyrians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs and Turks all came and conquered peoples who themselves were descended from past settlers. Close to half of Israel’s own population consists of non-European descendants expelled from Arab countries.
Read the rest of this piece at National Post.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo: Terry Bridge / Postmedia News.
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