“Reconciliation Education”- Part 4

Did an Incipient Canada engage in damaging actions with regard to Indigenous people?

Image from the Canadian Association for the Club of Rome

For new Woke Watch Canada readers: Welcome! This series is easy to get through, each installment takes only a few minutes to read. Start at Part 1. (And here’s Part 2 & Part 3)

By Igor Stravinsky (Teacher, commentator)

In the first three parts of this series, I described how students in Ontario schools are being indoctrinated into a narrative with regard to Indigenous people/history in the Peel District School Board, a narrative based on selected, distorted, de-contexed, and even blatantly false information.

I debunked some of the things schools kids are being told- that non-Indigenous people, past and present, are to blame for the disproportionate levels of social ills from which Indigenous people suffer today, that before first contact with Europeans life was good for Indigenous people, and that after first contact things went from bad to worse entirely due to the greed and cruelty of the newcomers. 

In this installment, I will discuss what happened next. Students are told “As Canada takes its first steps as a country, it enacts a series of damaging actions towards Indigenous people”. What are these “damaging actions”

1. The Indian Residential School System (IRSS)

Readers of this Substack have read plenty about the false narrative of the IRSS being propagated by the Indigenous Grievance Industry, so I’ll keep this short. Kids in Ontario schools are “learning” that

• All kids for seven generations were forced to attend residential schools. Facts:

  • Only 30% of status Indigenous kids (1/6th of all indigenous kids) attended the schools and for an average duration of less than 5 years. 

  • Parents had to apply and many schools had waiting lists. 

  • The schools, by default, served as orphanages to many Indigenous kids who were abandoned or whose parents died or were incompetent often due to alcohol abuse.

• The schools were set up to assimilate the Indigenous people and “kill the Indian in the child”. 

  • This infamous quote is often attributed to a variety of Canadian historical figures including Sir John A. Macdonald and poet, writer, and civil servant  Duncan Campbell Scott, but it was never documented to have been said by any historically significant Canadian. 

  • Scott was clear about his view at the time that Indigenous people must modernize and the goal was for them to be financially independent, not a controversial point of view although the way he expressed it may seem blunt in today's politically sensitive climate.

  • Indigenous parents, including chiefs and other leaders, lined up to send their kids to the schools because there were no local alternatives and they realized that an education was going to be crucial to success in the modern world. 

  • Many IRSS graduates went on to become leaders themselves, and the education they received, which included the ability to speak, read, and write in English allowed them to connect with hundreds of groups of other Indigenous people and advocate for their rights. 

  • “Assimilation” has become a dirty word, but is in fact the way that people survive in a changing world. It has always been so and what possible alternative existed for a group of about 100 thousand Indigenous people living alongside 5 million newcomers and their descendants (as of 1900 CE)? Assimilation does not mean abandoning your culture, it means adapting to a new social and economic reality.

  • Many of the IRS took deliberate steps to maintain some vestige of the local Indigenous culture, and speaking Indigenous languages was generally only forbidden in classes or other formal school events. 

• The schools were cesspools of neglect, abuse and even murder. 

  • While there were certainly cases of abuse and neglect, these things were sadly the norm in all institutions of this type at the time. 

  • There is no evidence they were any more frequent in the IRS than in other types of residential schools or orphanages. 

  • Claims of mass murder, based on ground penetrating radar images of soil disturbances, are completely unfounded. There is not one single documented case of the murder of an IRS student at an IRS.

The Indian Act of 1876. 

Students are being told that the Indian Act was intended to relegate Indigenous people to second class status, similar to Jim Crow Laws or South African Apartheid.  While this Act clearly infringed upon what today are considered universal rights of citizenship with respect to Indigenous people in Canada, it also protected Indigenous peoples’ status and privileges, which is why Indigenous leaders do not want to abolish it, even today. 

Students are not told that full and equal citizenship for Indigenous people was in fact always the ultimate goal of the government of Canada up until the late 1960’s, culminating in the White Paper of 1969, which, had it been accepted, would have eliminated all legal distinctions between Indigenous people and other citizens. This vision of equality for all was rejected by Indigenous leaders in favor of a strategy (ideology?) of parallelism (often referred to as the “two row wampum”) of separate development. The idea was that each of the over 600 “First Nations”(some with fewer than 200 members) would exist as an equal sovereign entity alongside Canada. This absurd idea remains the operating principle of the Government of Canada today and is so deeply entrenched that changing it anytime soon seems impossible. For a full discussion of this topic read Separate but Unequal by Frances Widdowson.

The Reserve System

While kids in school are taught that the misery that so often characterizes life on reserves, where the socioeconomic issues discussed in part 1 of this series are most severe, is due to the Indigenous people being forced onto reserves, the reality is far more nuanced. The reserve system has a complex history. It  made some sense at its inception but is a total anachronism today. By now the whole system should have been dismantled, but as mentioned above, we are going in the opposite direction. 

The Destruction of Lands

Students learn that our modern way of living is destructive and unsustainable. We are supposedly on a pathway to Armageddon due to greed and a disconnection from nature. The Indigenous people are lionized for having lived in concert with nature while modern ways of life are denounced. If only we had the wisdom to listen to the Indigenous people and learn their “ways of knowing”. 

The hard truth is, as I discussed in part 2 of this series, that the standard of living pre-industrial people had was very low. Life was short and very hard. By comparison life today, even for relatively poor people, is easy. That said, the price we have paid, in terms of environmental impacts, for these massive advances in quality of life has undeniably been high. But what is needed is modern solutions to modern problems, not delusions about reverting to pre-industrial economic systems or ways of living. The truth is that no one, Indigenous or not, really wants to live the way people did centuries ago.

Modern things are not all bad, and we are not, as a species, in a situation of existential crisis. An excellent book on the subject is Apocalypse Never by renowned environmentalist Michael Shellenberger. In it, he debunks the hysteria about current environmental challenges, proposes practical solutions, and puts the lie to sensational (but false) claims that we are going to turn the Earth into a planet like Venus or engineer a 6th mass extinction by continuing to enjoy a high standard of living and working to improve the quality of life for everyone. 

Renaming Places and Spaces

Saskatchewan. Manitoba. Ottawa. Lake Huron. Lake Erie. Mississauga. Algonquin Provincial Park. Etc. etc. etc. Canada has hundreds (thousands?) of place names that are Indigenous. When it comes to place and space names, the activists are rebels without a cause. Are we supposed to rename everything to what Indigenous people called it hundreds of years ago? Hundreds of languages were being spoken back then and these places all had multiple place names. Which one should we use? Canada has changed entirely since the precontact days, and many of our place names should reflect that too. 

These place names were not chosen at random but rather have a historical context. For example, the former British Columbian town of Queen Charlotte was recently renamed to Daajing Giids (DAW-jing GEEDS). According to The Macmillan Book of Canadian Place Names, by William Hamilton, “The name ‘Queen Charlotte’ dates back to 1787 when Captain George Dixon- English sea captain, explorer, and maritime fur trader, was on a trading cruise along the coast. He named the island for his two hundred-ton vessel, the Queen Charlotte.^]“ This name thus encapsulated an important point in the history of the area, that is to say the history of the future Canada. On the other hand, Daajing Giids apparently means “the hat of a child of a chief”. The sole purpose of the name change is thus to draw attention to the fact that Indigenous people were the first inhabitants of the area, as if anyone didn’t know that. 

Canada did not engage in any intentionally damaging actions, on the contrary it made extraordinary efforts to support and include Indigenous people, who nevertheless suffered due to the basic fact of a clash of civilizations. Exposure to European pathogens and being dragged from a stone age mode of existence to the industrial age in the blink of an eye together took a devastating toll, but Canada’s consistent effort to educate and include Indigenous people has led to a population increase from 100 thousand in 1900 to nearly 2 million today. What is holding back Indigenous people now is the belief that their over 600 puny communities can prosper on a “nation to nation” basis with the Government of Canada. With that ideology firmly in place, their long term dependency on rent extraction and reparations, rather than economic engagement with other Canadians and the world, will ensure that the social problems they are facing will continue indefinitely. 

In the upcoming installment of this series, I will discuss the next part of the narrative: That the proud and valiant Indigenous people fought back against the attempts of the settlers to destroy their cultures and lands. In fact, what remains of Indigenous cultures is largely thanks to the very colonialists kids are being taught to despise. 

___

Thanks for reading. For more from this author, read The Peel District School Board Claims to Hire Based on Merit

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!

There are now two ways to support Woke Watch Canada through donations:

1) By subscribing to the paid version of the Woke Watch Canada Newsletter for - $7 Cdn/month or $70 Cdn/year

2) By making a contribution to the Investigating Wokeism In Canada Initiative, which raises the funds necessary to maintain and expand Woke Watch Canada’s research and investigation into Dysfunctional Canadian School Boards, Education, Indigenous Issues, Free Speech, and other areas of Illiberal Subversion and the Canadian Culture Wars.