“Reconciliation Education”- Part 2

Pre-Contact Indigenous People

By Igor Stravinsky (Teacher, commentator)

In my previous missive of this series, I outlined the socio-economic problems facing Indigenous people in Canada and identified the official narrative, promoted by the federal government, Indigenous leaders, and their non-Indigenous allies. This narrative is basically that colonialism, racism, and oppression are the sole (or at least the major) causes of the long list of socio-economic difficulties so many Indigenous people are suffering from today. The narrative focuses on colonialism, oppression, as well as “intergenerational trauma” and “genocide”, neither of which claims stand up to the slightest bit of objective scrutiny and analysis. The genocide claim is particularly laughable in that the Indigenous population has increased from about 100 thousand in 1900 to nearly 2 million today, which is at least four times the pre contact Indigenous population. 

Pre-contact living conditions for Indigenous people

In order to blame all the problems on European settlers and their descendants, the  narrative starts out by implying that life in pre-contact Canada was idyllic. Students are led to believe that this was a time of peace, cooperation, and prosperity based on teachings and knowledge systems that were superior to what we have now (the Western enlightenment-based ethos and the scientific method). Students are told that people lived well- sustainably, with little environmental impact, and with a respect for each other and the land, with which their relationship was one of stewardship and symbiotic coexistence.

This is presented in contrast to the purported European world view, which kids are told was, and still is, characterized by exploitation and a belief in European superiority. Europeans are described as ruthless and greedy people who just wanted to enrich themselves by maximally extracting any and all resources without regard for impacts on the environment or Indigenous people. It is presented as a case of good vs. evil.

But what was life really like for pre-contact Indigenous people? Certainly their stone age way of living combined with their small, scattered population was eco-friendly, but was their standard of living, on balance, better than that of modern Canada? Were they more moral, or wiser than modern non-Indigenous Canadians? An honest answer to these questions demands a hard look at the available evidence and a willingness to draw conclusions wherever that evidence may lead. 

And that evidence shows that pre-contact indigenous people demonstrated the full range of behaviors we find in all stone age hunter gatherer/horticulturalist societies. While there is much to admire about these people, who were able to survive in a challenging environment with only the most rudimentary of wooden, stone, and bone tools, the evidence is clear that, compared to modern times

• life expectancy was very low

• child mortality was very high

• warfare was endemic

• slavery was a common practice

• violence of all kinds was common

• people suffered a great deal from simple health problems which would now be easily treatable with antibiotics and surgical techniques. 

It should also be pointed out that while the allegation that Indigenous people were the victims of genocide at the hands of the government of Canada is ridiculous, it is a well-established (but rarely mentioned) fact that Indigenous people carried out genocides against one another on a regular basis, for example the genocide of the Hurons by the Iroquois.

Wiser and more moral?

Students are constantly told we “settlers” have much to learn from the Indigenous people. It has been my experience that I can learn things from just about anyone, so I don’t doubt there is some truth to that. But Indigenous activists like to promote “Indigenous ways of knowing” which they are holding up as equally valuable as the scientific method. What are these “ways of knowing”?

Anthropologists tell us that pre-contact Indigenous people employed a kind of pre-scientific approach, which consisted of making observations about their environment and drawing conclusions from those observations. While not entirely without merit, this simplistic approach often leads to misunderstandings and erroneous conclusions, however, because the additional steps of forming hypotheses, making predictions, and conducting controlled experiments are lacking. These steps are essential to understanding the nature of physical reality. Thus, Indigenous people believed things like beaver bones  “were to be burned or thrown into the water to help make new beavers”.  

This goes a long way to explain why Indigenous technology evolved so little in thousands of years, and demonstrates that an honest look at how Indigenous people lived cannot lead to the conclusion that they were any wiser than Europeans. Their sustainable way of living was a consequence of their low population and low level of technology. As soon as they acquired European technology such as horses and firearms, the impact was  “disrupted subsistence economies, wrecked grassland and bison ecologies, … new social inequalities, unhinged gender relations, undermined traditional political hierarchies, and intensified resource competition and warfare” Based on their actions, it is not really fair to claim that Indigenous people were any wiser than Europeans, nor can contemporary Indigenous people be considered wiser or more moral than modern day non Indigenous people.

In my next installment of this series, I will look at the early contact period, a period which is largely glossed over in schools today. It was during this period that Indigenous people made a major switch from subsistence hunter-gatherer horticulturalism to economic engagement with the newcomers. 

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Thanks for reading. For more from this author, read There’s a Teacher Shortage in Ontario

BREAKING NEWS:

1. A new long-form essay by Dr. M - Fulcrum and Pivot: The New Left Remaking of Toronto School Policy

2. James Pew has contributed a chapter to the new book Grave Error: How The Media Misled us (And the Truth about Residential Schools). You can read about it here - The Rise of Independent Canadian Researchers

Also, for more evidence of the ideological indoctrination in Canadian education, read Yes, schools are indoctrinating kids! And also, Yes, The University is an Indoctrination Camp!

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