Assimilation argument in article infuriates Natives

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National Post editorial page editor Jonathan Kay may be the most unpopular person in Indian Country.

His piece in the Saturday, Dec. 8 edition has Native people all over the country fuming. Kay wrote "The case for assimilation," a lengthy editorial essay that concludes that First Nations should give up the fight for self-government and just blend into the mainstream. To make his case, he quotes former Reform Party analyst Tom Flanagan, a Lutheran pastor from Australia and a mining company official, among others. He bases his argument on anthropological theories that anthropologists say are relics of a less-enlightened era.

Even Robert Nault, the federal minister of Indian Affairs, found fault with the piece.

"Well, you have my assurances that as long as I'm the minister there will not be a policy of assimilation. That's a policy of the past and I don't believe that's the intention of our reference group of ministers or the intention of the prime minister or this party," the minister said. "That's not our objective. Our objective is to create a good quality of life for Aboriginal people on reserve and off reserve and we have to find the right policy, processes and programming in place and governance structure to make that happen. I read that article as well and was quite surprised by the way it was put together and I certainly don't agree with it."

Dr. Elizabeth Furniss, a University of Calgary anthropology professor, said most of the arguments Kay relied upon to make his case are based on outdated science and a distinctly Canadian style of racism. Furniss is the author of The Burden of History, an academic study of racial attitudes towards Native people in Canada. Her book is a less technical version of her doctoral thesis.

The anthropologist lived and worked in a reserve community near Williams Lake, B.C. for several years before she began the research that earned her a PhD. She concluded that racial stereotypes of Aboriginal people are so deeply ingrained in the Canadian consciousness even non-Native people who believe themselves to have good intentions can display the symptoms of racism. She said Kay's work exhibits classic Euro-Canadian attitudes towards Aboriginal people.

"This kind of argument is easily recognizable to me and I think it's best to challenge it, not based on fact, because he's not really basing his opinion on fact, he's basing it on myth," she said of Kay's essay. "So my strategy has been to culturally situate that kind of argument and look at it as the product of a colonial legacy in Canada and as a style of, it's almost like a ritual tradition in Canada of talking about the Indian problem."

Furniss pointed out that attitudes about Aboriginal people -particularly the "drunken Indian" and "Indian as criminal" stereotypes-are accepted by non-Native people as conventional wisdom, what she calls "common sense" racism, even though statistical studies don't support them.

"The stereotypes of Indian people as drunks or as criminals are part of the Canadian tradition of viewing Native people. If you want to define racism as the belief that Native people are inherently inferior based on either their biology or their culture, that's my working definition. So when people say Native people are drunks, that's kind of a belief that they're inherently that way-that's just the way they are," she said. "Part of redefining the relationship between Aboriginal people and Canadian society is for Canadians to become aware when they're engaging in these kinds of discussions, which are really uninformed and so pervaded by misconceptions and myths that it defeats the whole purpose.

"You stand on a street corner in Williams Lake at 5:30 on a Friday afternoon and you don't see drunk Native people. So the actual evidence that was out there didn't seem to support these stereotypes. So the question I had was how can people believe these things? These beliefs that are so obviously racist. Then I had to put myself in he shoes of the ordinary Euro-Canadian resident of a small town and say, 'OK, there's actually a systematic way of socializing Euro-Canadian residents that leads people to believe that these ideas are common sense.' This is where the invisibility of racism comes in because, for example, if we just take the myth of the drunken Indian, despite the fact that there really doesn't seem to be much evidence, this kind of stereotype is circulated on a daily basis in conversations between Euro-Canadians. So it's part of the conversational reality."

Negative attitudes towards Native people come from many places, she said.

"When people go through public schools, they read about drunken Indians in their high school history textbooks. They go to popular histories on the bookshelf and read about Indians and alcoholism. It gets reported in the newspaper. It gets constructed as a social problem in the way politicians talk about it. Statistics get interpreted in ways that reinforce the stereotypes. So in a real sense it is part of the constructed reality of Euro-Canadian culture, but it doesn't have any real impirical basis. That's why the whole idea of common sense racism is so important to deconstruct because just arguing on the basis that there's no evidence to support it doesn't really get at the heart of why people believe these things."

Furniss believes denial is a major social issue in this country.

"The denial of Canada as being a racist society is part of the myth of national identity and history that we have grown up with for over 100 years. Probably earlier than that. We have always told ourselves that Canadians are a nice people; we have treated our Indians well; the typical kind of paternalistic statement. I think our conviction of our own benevolence blinds us to looking critically at who we are as a nation," she said.

"Sometimes it's difficult for people like politicians to actually believe that there might be a kernel of truth in the idea that we actually area racist country. I was thinking of Jonathan Kay's article and part of the way these convictions of benevolence and superiority get worked out is in these traditions of talking about the 'Indian problem' as if the Indian problem is something that is inherent to Native people and that doesn't implicate Canadian society at all.

"It always gets constructed as an Indian problem and I think it is important to recognize the cultural dynamics that underlie that because in Canada, along with everything else, we have this tradition of constructing things as an Indian problem, which then authorizes people like Jonathan Kay to talk about these issues as if they were informed. But they're simply drawing on myths of Canadian identity and history which then authorizes them to talk as if they know something about the subject without ever having to talk with Native people."

The anthropologist took on academics that pontificate on Native issues by relying on "common sense racism" rather than hard research.

"Have they done in-depth research in a Native community using recognized social scientific methods? Have they lived in a Native household and participated in community life? If they haven't, they are not informed by fact," she said. "Academic institutions are no less influenced by myths of history and by traditional styles of talking about the Indian problem as are ordinary Canadians and I think it's important to recognize. So when Jonathan Kay draws on different scholars to back his argument for Native assimilation, he's selectively choosing academics who are deeply entrenched in the colonial ideology. That again excludes Native people from having any participation in the conversation."

The flash points in recent Native/non-Native conflict seem to be over land and resources. Non-Native people are angered when their jobs are threatened by land claims. But Furniss argued that disagreement doesn't necessarily have to produce racial tension.

"Racism isn't just a matter of compting over resources, it's a Canadian tradition. People mobilize these in times of competition, but they are very much a latent part of the fabric of Canadian society. Because if it was simply that easy to challenge them on impirical grounds, the problem would have been solved long ago," she said.

And arguments by non-Native people that they're not responsible for the past deeds of their ancestors miss the point entirely.

"It's not just history," she said. "It's history that lives on in the present so, regardless of what our grandparents did or thought, we are still perpetuating that colonial culture."

Although Kay's essay was an ambitious attempt to make sense of a very confusing and vexatious area, his cultural conditioning as a Canadian steered him away from more useful analysis, she said, and persuaded him to rely on thinking that is contaminated by out-dated colonial ideas.

"Those ideas of cultural evolution were prevalent in late 19th century. They have long been discarded in anthropology. They're just incorrect. There's no other way to say it," she said. "The idea that hunting cultures are incompatible with industrial societies is totally without merit. There's just no social scientific evidence to support that. Hunting cultures have to make accommodations to their inter-connections with capitalist society, but there's absolutely no reason why people can't maintain that culture with proper structural support in terms of government legislation and so on."