I used to know who I was. Well, I thought I did, but now I’m not so sure. The values that I thought were mine have been called into question, and I don’t know how to respond. (Well, I do, that’s what I’m trying to do in this essay.) I’m suffering from what is known as cognitive dissonance—there is serious disagreement between what I thought I was, and what it appears now I may be.
I read the Inconvenient Indian by Thomas King recently, and it has disturbed my understanding of not just Canada but the world as well. That’s not all I’ve read but it is a turning point, in my understanding of our, collective, treatment of the land and peoples of this world.
I was raised as a middle-class Brit, with no pretensions to any kind of social position. We lived in a homogeneous white, Anglo-Saxon, Christian neighbourhood, and for all reasonable purposes, country. I have no recollection of any black or brown faces in my school. There was one Jewish family and no Muslims.
But I was brought up to make judgments. Some things were better than others. Not just different, but better. You cut your hair in a particular way, you always wore clean clothes, you didn’t swear, you tried to treat everybody fairly and equally. You looked after your property and land, you didn’t litter, you stood to attention for the national anthem, which you sang.
I became, I thought, an honest, English-speaking citizen of Canada. I got my news and views from solid reliable sources. I still prefer the BBC to the CBC, the Guardian to the Globe. Throughout my 50 years here, I have lived and moved in the same circles of predominantly white Anglo-Saxon communities. I have not been required to face racial inequalities on a daily basis. I have not been required to meet people of different racial and social backgrounds, except peripherally. I have not been required to adjust to a multi-ethnic society, because my society has been essentially singly ethnic. It has not been evident that the land that I have used has been unceded aboriginal territory.
The challenge for a white Anglo-Saxon Brit is now that so many of the ills in the world are laid at our feet. There was a time it was called the white man’s burden. We collectively left our homelands, often under the direction of our kings and popes, to find resources to feed the increasingly voracious capitalist society of that homeland. We brought that capitalist culture to our new homeland, that has now shaped the lives of all around us. Capitalism and colonialism are responsible for the plight we find ourselves in.
(As a Welshman, or one of Welsh descent, it is small comfort today to allow that we were driven into the hills by other migrants, the Angles and the Jutes, Norse and Saxons. We all eventually got along and melded into the country that then migrated to the rest of the world.)
Can we put some of this into perspective? Every single one of us, is a migrant or is descended from a migrant. I’m a migrant; I’m a settler. I left my family to explore the world. Every single inhabitant of Canada is or is descended from other migrants. All our aboriginal peoples are descended from migrants. Just because some are more recent than others, does not alter that logic: we are all migrants and settlers. The fact that today, there are 38 million Canadians, of which only about two million are Aboriginals, maybe tough to take as an aboriginal, but they have been just as destructive of the North American land as their more recent neighbours.
Long before Europeans colonized North America (and the other continents) Aboriginals had arrived. As we did later, they proceeded to shape the land to their convenience. The continents (north and south) lost their megafauna. They became settlers and custodians of this land. Their reluctance to share is understandable; their insistence today that they have been seriously wronged is understandable. They’re right; they were grievously wronged. The treatment they received at our hands is appalling. If not over the last 2–3 hundred years, certainly the failures of the residential school system of the last century are unforgivable. But reconciliation does not mean redressing those wrongs today. We need to recognize that wrongs were done, and then move on to the more pressing issues of today: how to find a way to cooperate in fixing the challenges of a mutual society in which all have a role to play.
Let’s keep our ethnicities to ourselves and work with respect for our humanity to build a better world.
I see no particular merit in aboriginal philosophies. They are based on myths every bit as archaic as the myths brought over from Europe. Turtle island is a lovely fanciful story, that does not explain our existence or propose an ethic for our survival. Nor do the religious myths offer any greater prospect for future sanity in this world.
At the same time that the Aboriginals of North America were developing their philosophy, so were the settlers of the Middle East developing theirs. We graduated to adopt and accept the merits of the ancient Persian, Greek, Roman and Jewish philosophers. Theirs has proven to be a philosophy of far greater reach than that of the aboriginal traditions. The fact that it has led in part to the evils of colonialism and capitalism is unfortunate, but nevertheless accords it better survivability as a scientific endeavour, one to adopt as the better interpretation of reality.
I used to think that historical personages were appropriately revered for the good they had done. Nelson was respected for the battles he had won. Columbus for the discoveries he had made. Captain Cook too for the voyages he had made. Cecil Rhodes for his journey into Africa. Churchill for his success in ensuring Hitler was defeated.
But nearly all of these heroes were also responsible for the killing or murder of hundreds if not thousands of people. Churchill took part in battles in South Africa against the Zulus, as did another hero of mine, Baden-Powell. Churchill was responsible also for the killing of Welsh miners in the strikes of 1912. And here in Canada we cherish the memory of Sir John A.
Our problem is we are being held hostage by a small minority of our population who feel they have been mistreated. Their ancestors may have been, but not they themselves. This is asking us to redress a wrong done by our ancestors. We cannot be held accountable for the sins of others, despite the sense of some arcane texts.
What we can do is attempt to integrate into society as a whole; we can attempt to adopt appropriate traditional approaches of others. We should not accept without question the traditional beliefs of others that have no relevance or truth to offer today’s society. Turtle island and the consideration of therapeutic benefits of dream catchers are as relevant and meaningful as the traditional beliefs brought across the ocean from Europe. It is way past time that we should reject gods and myths of any nation. They have no relevance to the reality of today.
Well, I’m still a white Anglo-Saxon, but maybe I’m a little more sympathetic to others’ existence and points of view. I’m not prepared to ignore my philosophical background because someone else thinks I have been disrespectful of theirs.
Is this racist? I’m not denying you the right to believe whatever you want. I don’t want your beliefs to govern how we run our society, any more than my beliefs should. We need to develop a shared sense of reality that enables us to cooperate in the management of our civilization that enables us all to survive.
But even in that shared reality, we need to understand that we live in a pluralistic society, that depends on reaching consensus. And if we cannot reach consensus, then our democratic norms, as much traditional indigenous as European, dictate that the majority will rule. Once the majority have then decided, then we live with that decision. We did with the pandemic decisions; we did with the GST. So too with our attempts to address climate change.
The enlightenment that I am claiming began for me with Thomas King, may not have shown through in this essay. The view of North America of it having been stolen from our indigenous neighbours was not quite how history was presented to me. But it has become for me a more valid way of looking at the history of the Americas, and indeed of the world. It continues to this day with the destruction of the Amazon rain forest, to name but one calamity.
We live in a society that was founded on, and continues to thrive on, extracting natural resources from stolen land. Colonialism and its companion capitalism have a lot to answer for. Both need to be addressed by all of us, if our planet is to survive its rape by us.
