“Reconciliation Education”- Part 5

“Resistance, Conflict, and Opportunity”

The Oka Crisis - The Canadian Enclcopedia

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 & Part 4)

By Igor Stravinsky (Teacher, commentator)

So far in this series, I discussed the revisionist history being taught to students in the Peel District School Board: They’re told the abysmal conditions so many Indigenous people live in today are the fault of the “settler colonialism”, life pre-contact was good, and the problems that arose with the arrival of the Europeans were the result of the greed and cruelty of the newcomers towards the innocent and peaceful Native people. Actions taken by the Government of Canada, are described as intentionally damaging, rather than sometimes flawed attempts to engage Indigenous people with the modern world thus saving them from extinction. Nuance and complexity are ignored to present a simplistic good vs evil narrative. This is a great disservice to Indigenous and non-Indigenous people alike. 

This narrative of Indigenous victims suffering under the boots of oppressive settler colonialism continues with the claim that Indigenous people bravely fought back against the evil oppressors- it was, and is, David vs Goliath. Students in Peel Schools are told that 

• Indigenous people resisted attempts to destroy their cultures and lands: But other than the Indian Residential Schools (IRS), no specific examples of this purported attempted cultural destruction are provided. There are of course plenty of examples of environmental impacts from industrialization and population increases, but these are side-effects or collateral damage of the process which, overall, has vastly improved quality of life for all Canadians by any measure. That does not excuse past negligent and  environmentally destructive industries, nor does it abrogate the responsibility of those who caused the damage to clean it up or compensate the people affected, but it is a far cry from intentional destruction by governments or anyone else. 

  It is also certainly true that as the non-Native population rapidly increased and that of the Indigenous people declined, areas traditionally occupied (with small, scattered populations) by Indigenous people came to be inhabited by much denser and rapidly growing populations of newcomers. By 1900, there were about 100 thousand Indigenous and nearly five million non-Indigenous people living in Canada. In Peel Region, the Mississaugas of the Credit arrived in about 1700, settling there, and “displacing” other Indigenous people who had been living in the area. Their population was initially about 500, but declined to 200 or so by the 1850s (the population of Upper Canada in 1850 was about a million). In the 1850s the Mississaugas of the Credit voluntarily moved, with a payment of $9 million (2024 dollars) from the government of the day, to a reserve near Brantford Ontario, where they are still located today (population < 800), having received an additional $240 million in 2010. 

• Some parents tried to prevent their children from being sent to residential schools: Doubtless there were some parents who objected to their kids being sent away to an IRS, but the vast majority of the kids sent to the schools were either registered by their parents, abandoned, or orphaned. That is to say, in general few objected to a child being sent to an IRS- on the contrary most parents were eager to send their kids to a place where they could prepare for a modern future while being fed, housed, and clothed, usually in far better conditions than those that existed on the reserves. 

• Other parents were forced to send their kids to residential schools: By the early 20th century school attendance was mandatory for all children. If a local school did not exist, then yes Indigenous kids would have been expected to attend an IRS. The truth is that school attendance enforcement was lax, and about 1/3 of Indigenous kids never attended any kind of school at all during the IRS era. 

• Elders and “knowledge keepers” secretly maintained ceremonies, languages, and traditions: This claim likely induces kids to imagine that police were going around arresting Indigenous people for conducting ceremonies, speaking their languages, or practicing their traditions. This is of course absurd since doing these things was never in principle illegal, and rather, far from trying to discourage these things, non-Indigenous anthropologists and other academics struggled to record and preserve them. This was particularly crucial for the preservation of Indigenous languages since Indigenous people were illiterate. An early example is the Reverend James Evans who learnt the Ojibwe language and translated  and printed various texts. All that said, there were clearly some traditional activities, such as owning slaves, that were not compatible with modern Canadian laws and morality, and had to be stopped. Laws that attempted to curb self-destructive behavior such as alcohol abuse and potlatches, in which large quantities of valuable goods were intentionally destroyed, are now widely viewed as oppressive or even “genocidal”. Of course, when governments do not intervene in such kinds of activities that too is characterized as genocidal.     

• Inside Residential Schools, children continued to try to speak their languages despite being punished for it: In general, students were not prohibited from speaking native languages except in class or at formal school events. The policies on this varied, though, and as with all other school rules, enforcement was based on corporal punishment. This seems harsh and counterproductive today, but was the rule at all schools of the era, residential, day, Indigenous, or non-Indigenous. 

Conflict 

Students in Peel schools are taught that in all cases of conflict between Indigenous people and others, the former are the good guys and the latter the bad guys. Of course, while Indigenous people and groups have their share of legitimate gripes, reality is far more nuanced than a good/bad binary. 

As mentioned in my previous installment, the pathway towards equality for Indigenous people came to a dead end with the rejection of the 1969 “White Paper”, which would have abolished the Indian Act and made all Canadians equal under the law. By rejecting what was formally known as the “Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy,1969”, Indigenous leaders set a course for separate development (see my comments in part 4). This led to the establishment of Indigenous rights in the new Canadian Constitution of 1984. This set the stage for conflict as Indigenous groups set out to carve out sovereign areas within Canada, for example the OKA crisis of 1990. When these crises are discussed they are presented as a black and white cases of oppression of the Indigenous people involved. 

In the OKA crisis, local Mohawks objected when the municipality gave the green light for development on a piece of land they claimed. In the violent protests that followed, a police officer was killed. Ultimately, the development was canceled and the land was purchased by the federal government which did not establish the land as a reserve nor was any of the land transferred to the Mohawks. 

The Oka crisis was followed by other similar incidents such as the Ipperwash Crisis (1995) in which a small, ragtag group of Indigenous people, who were not even supported by the local band council, occupied Ipperwash Provincial Park. During a botched attempted mass arrest by the Ontario Provincial Police, which was found later to have been incited by the newly elected provincial government, an Indigenous protester was shot dead. In the aftermath a $95 million settlement from the federal government was paid out that included return of the land as well as about $20 million in compensation to band members and $70 million for future development of the land. 

Although the deal was ratified by one of the 2 Indigenous groups involved, some of its members opposed it as they did not believe that members of the other group should receive compensation. This type of conflict between Indigenous groups has been going on for thousands of years and was characterized by warfare, slavery, and genocide in pre-contact times but that is rarely, if ever, mentioned in classrooms.  

Opportunity 

Canada is a land of great opportunity. Many millions of newcomers have come here and prospered, contributing to the advancement of our country and society overall in the process. Likewise, many indigenous people have modernized and acclimated to life in our modern nation without sacrificing their cultural identity and have been very successful. These people can be found in all facets of our society- the arts, sciences, health care, education, and of course politics. But the focus at school is Indigenous people as victims. Why?

Sadly, too many people, both indigenous and non-indigenous, have recognized there is a lot of money to be made by getting on the Indigenous Grievance Industry bandwagon. This powerful class of politicians, academics, lawyers, and civil servants of various stripes is in league with Indigenous leaders to perpetually extract rent and compensation payments from taxpayers. Students are being brainwashed into accepting the victim narrative so as to ensure that, as adults, they will keep the taps flowing for the industry in the future. 

In my next installment, I will talk about attempts by governments and other institutions to satiate the Indigenous Grievance industry: Commissions of Inquiry leading to ever-increasing payments. The taxpayer is paying dearly. Indigenous spending continues to rise as a proportion of the federal budget: From 6.1 percent in 2019-20 to 7.7 percent in 2026-27: That’s a staggering $74.6 billion or $41,444 per Indigenous person, is an increase of 26 percent in seven years, and shows no sign of that slowing down. This is clearly unsustainable and will bankrupt the country. Are students learning about that? I’ll let you take a wild guess.

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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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