Racism: Federal government policy

Page 5

To:ske - It's true

The recent confrontations over Mi'kmaq fishing in the east and Native logging in British Columbia have shown just how strong the prejudices against our people run among the immigrants to our territories who call themselves Canadians. People show their true nature in times like these, and right now it seems that the heart of whiteness is a very cold and hard place. When it comes to attitudes about Indigenous people, this is a country with a pretty thin veneer of toleration hiding an ugly mass of racism.

I say "toleration" because smug and self-satisfied white people often tout Canada as a tolerant country. I doubt many of our Indigenous sisters and brothers (or any other non-white) would agree with this statement on the surface. But even if it were true, what does it mean that Canadians see themselves as tolerant, anyway? To tolerate something means that you put up with or endure it. It is a distant and arrogant attitude rooted in a superiority complex; it tells us a great deal about the way Canada sees non-white and especially Indigenous people. I believe that in the hostility and violence that come our way whenever we assert our rights and defend what is ours, we find out what it means to be a tolerated people.

We often forget just how thin even the veneer is. It has only been one generation since our people were forced to live with a system of open and organized racist oppression in this country. Until the 1960s, the kind of back-of-the-bus and separate washroom apartheid made infamous in the United States' treatment of blacks was commonplace in Canada toward Indians. Things have changed, but have attitudes? Open racism is seen to be impolite and crude these days, but that doesn't mean that mainstream Canadians are not racist. It only means they don't show it. Am I overreacting? Consider the fact that the Reform Party has a huge political constituency, millions of supporters and great influence on the government as the Official Opposition in Parliament. The same Reform Party has an official policy of promoting the legal and social assimilation of Indigenous peoples and a cancellation of Canada's historic treaty obligations toward our peoples. This is fancy wording for a simple idea: terminating Indians.

When the Mi'kmaq achieved a limited recognition of their treaty rights in the recent Marshall decision, the Reform Party called for a "stay" of the decision, meaning they called for the government of Canada to ignore the Supreme Court. The fact that there is no legal process or constitutional way to do such a thing as "stay" a Supreme Court decision didn't seem to matter.