Of white heroes and old men talking

Page 4

The cover story in Time Magazine this past month focused on what it termed the "struggle over Native rights." My interest was piqued, but I didn't expect much, because I know Time caters to those simple-minded and white-of-shoe Canadians who can't understand things that are too complicated. I wasn't disappointed in my low expectations.

The Time story turned out to be a barely disguised attempt to glorify those whites who are hostile to our people. It had all of these ignorant racists portrayed in glowing terms as underdogs resisting the injustice of Indians stealing their livelihood and land. And, each white person was photographed and portrayed in classically heroic poses - you know the shot: black and white, shot from below to make the subject look big, a defiant pose with determined looks. Time Magazine's message to Canadians was clear: you are under attack by Native rights, beware and be against them! How appropriate a message, given the tone of the public debate these days. The white backlash against our people is in full swing, and the old goal of assimilation is once again the rallying cry against Canada's "Indian Problem."

The Time story was framed around the words of a pseudo-scholar and Reform Party mouthpiece named Thomas Flanagan (who happens to be a 1960s refugee from the U.S., now employed by the University of Calgary and McGill University.) Flanagan's main belief and argument is that Native people are uncivilized. (I am not making this up). He actually states as his conclusion that it is white people's responsibility to bring "civilization" to Indian reserves. This attitude is an echo from the past; Flanagan is just humming along to the song that so inspired Gen. Custer, Duncan Campbell Scott and all those creepy residential school priests. The song is so played out it's not even funny.

Most people have come to realize that there never was any such thing as white superiority. All of the old racist theories of history that went into satisfying their former cultural fantasies have been de-bunked by their own experience and by science. In fact, the major conclusion of scientific anthropology these days is that Europeans came to dominate the world not because they were superior, but because they were dirty and a tad too intimate with their domestic animals. Europeans spread their so-called "civilization" by simply breathing their nasty germs on our people. So much for European civilization.

Yet the fact is that the old song is still being sung and published by a reputable press and promoted for sale in Canadian bookstores. The subtle promotion of the racist agenda by supposedly liberal-minded white people is troubling. After all, the fact is that McGill-Queens University Press published an ignorant diatribe against human rights for Indigenous peoples. Scholarly presses normally abide by a code meant to ensure that the books they publish are indeed worthy of being considered and debated. Editorial boards and review by peers decide whether a book has merit in terms of the research the author conducted, and also consider the logic and soundness of the author's arguments. Are books on Indians exempt from these rules? For McGill-Queens, apparently so.

There is nothing original in the book; he does not address the latest scholarship in the field; he has done no research; there are factual errors. And above all, Flanagan proudly states that he has never visited an Indian reserve. McGill-Queens University Press has just published a book on Indian reserves by a man who has never set foot on an Indian reserve, and has never interviewed an Indian about Indian reserves. So much for Canadian scholarship, and for McGill-Queen's academic credibility.

But the new assimilationist camp is not only populated by far-right nutbars. As the decision by McGill-Queens to publish Flanagan shows, there is a lot of sympathy for anti-Indianism among the older generation of Canadians wherever they reside politically.

Another nw book by another old white guy who doesn't know much about Indians is making the rounds of Canadian bookstores. Alan Cairns' Citizens Plus argues the same point as Flanagan, albeit in a more sophisticated language. From the "centre" or "middle ground" of Canadian politics (this posture, by the way, is meant to create respectability), Cairns sings another verse of the assimilationist song. He tells people that we would all be better off if we stopped talking about Indigenous nations.

In effect Canadians should force us to buy into the idea that we are Canadians like everyone else. (Well, almost like everyone else because we get to keep our feathers and beads, thus the Citizen Plus term.) Cairns seems to be annoyed that even though the white people have stolen all our land and destroyed our traditional cultures, we still have our pride. He wants us to forget about those pesky little things that we call "facts," "rights" and "identity."

So much for toleration, and for Alan Cairns' place in the centre.

Listening to these grumpy geezers whine on and on about how Indians are screwing up their country is so tedious. Young people, white and Indian, know that this country is screwed up anyway, and that our people had nothing to do with creating the problem. Blame the victim - shall we say it? If white people had treated our people with maturity and respect in the first place, Canada would not be in the financial, political and moral mess it is in right now.

Those same old white guys who blame us for the crises are the ones who themselves created it. Their old ideas hold no hope because they demand a one-sided compromise.

Just like for Time Magazine's heroic racists, who refuse to accept history, truth and Native rights, things will never get better so long as white society refuses to acknowledge that they are both wrong and the inheritors of wrongs committed against our people.

People like Time's heroes and the old men talking about us are living in the past, olden dys when they were in charge and their way was the right way and anyone who disagreed was put down.

When it comes to our nations, they don't yet realize that their plans to destroy us have failed. They just cannot get it through their rock hard heads that we are here to stay.

Cairns writes at the end of his book, "It may be, of course, that I suffer from a failure of imagination. Possibly I am wedded to ideas that are anachronistic. Possibly a too cautious pragmatism, the product of inertia, impedes my ready acceptance" Indeed. So stop talking, and get out of our way.