Chapter 5

Racism

Added to the sense of entitlement on the part of Canadian settlers is their schizophrenic image of native people, as explained by Daniel Francis in The Imaginary Indian: The Image of the Indian in Canadian Culture.1 Francis describes the reaction of Duncan Campbell Scott as he led a party of European intellectuals across Canada in the year following the negotiations for Treaty 9. Scott explained to them that, ‘In the early days the Indians were a real menace to the colonization of Canada.’ When they visited the Cree and Ojibwa, this party was surprised to find that they were peaceable. Scott attributed this to western education and ‘contact with a few of the better elements of our society’ – never, Francis remarks, to the nature of the people themselves.2

In his conclusion Francis observes:

Our responses to Native peoples reveal more than racism, fear and misunderstanding. It is more complicated than that. Our thinking about Indians relates to our thinking about ourselves as North Americans. Despite the stories we tell ourselves about ‘discovering’ an empty continent, stories told mainly to console ourselves for getting here second, we have to admit that we were latecomers. Native people claim the land by virtue of it being their home. For Whites, the issue has been more problematic.

Francis counterposes the cinematic image of the noble savage against the primitive, work-shy, alcoholic figure perpetuated by the press. This last image took no account of months spent out on the land coping with harsh conditions and long heavy portages. Most settlers live close to the 49th parallel and few venture onto the Canadian shield to experience these conditions for themselves. Henry Youle Hind, one of the few Europeans who did so, describes a portage:

At 4am we dispatched the men with a load, instructing them to carry it as far as a beaver meadow on a high valley between conical hills about half a mile from our camp, and then return for breakfast … After breakfast, the canoes were sent forward to the beaver meadow, and we broke up camp. It was heavy work carrying them up the steep [hill], 320 feet up an incline of 45 degrees, the remains of former landslides, thinly covered with slippery black mould. This morning’s work bruised the shoulders of the men and damped their spirits. We were compelled to use the line with the big canoe and haul it inch by inch up the steepest parts.3

It is hardly surprising that, on emerging from the interior, the Innu had little time or energy for the wage economy. Moreover, until very recently, almost all settlers were unaware of the ravages of the residential schools on native communities – they attributed the alcoholism, violence and abuse to weakness rather than to a social experiment gone very badly wrong.

Giving an aboriginal perspective on Canadian human rights, Krista McFadyen refers to the findings of the Aboriginal Commission on Human Rights & Justice in 2009. Aboriginal people interviewed by the Commission reported, among others, the following experiences:

• I experience discrimination in public at least once every single day of the week.

• Discrimination has become normalised in society; it begins with the media.

• Education is the worst! I experienced bullying, teasing and name-calling when I was in school. Teachers ignored it.

• As soon as hospital [staff] noticed my last name, I felt categorised. Their tone changed and I didn’t get assistance.

• From my childhood I experienced discrimination in foster homes I was placed in. Now I experience it in general community almost daily.

• Discrimination can be very subtle, difficult to name or prove.

• There is another form of discrimination – perceptions from non-natives that you’re not the right ‘type’ of aboriginal, they think that you are not Native enough.4

Of the 303 aboriginal people interviewed, 100 per cent had experienced discrimination in the past ten years, 63 per cent had experienced it in the last year and 33 per cent had experienced it in the last month.

Krista McFadyen concluded from the Commission’s Report that:

While systemic discrimination through education, employment, or by police was considered to be the most commonly cited reason for human rights violations, most respondents also experienced discrimination from mainstream people such as racist jokes, offhand comments or differential treatment in informal settings such as shopping centres or social settings. In addition, discrimination within and among Aboriginal community members and leaders was also cited.

We might postulate that these examples are relatively consistent across Canada. Therefore, it may be appropriate to suggest that oppression against Aboriginal people is ongoing, that Canadian institutions discriminate, that mainstream Canadians are socialized to perpetrate human rights violations on a daily basis, and that Aboriginal people experience human rights violations in all aspects of their lives and on an ongoing basis.5

Professor Patricia Monture-Angus delivered a paper recounting her own experience of racial discrimination as a Mohawk law student and subsequently in the academy.6 She tells us:

When I finished law school, I quite often described the feeling at graduating as the same feeling of relief combined with fear I had after leaving an abusive man. It felt like I had been just so battered for so long. Finishing law school is an accomplishment, yet I did not feel proud of myself – I just felt empty. This feeling forced me to begin considering why I felt the way I did. It was through this process that the ways in which law is fully oppressive of Aboriginal people began to be revealed.

…

Everything that we survived as individuals or as ‘Indian’ peoples, how was it delivered? The answer is simple, through law. Every single one of the oppressions I named [collective oppressions through the justice system, the taking of our land, the taking of our children, residential schools, the outlawing of ceremonies], I can take you to the law library and I can show you where they wrote it down in the statutes and in the regulations. Sometimes the colonial manifestation is expressed on the face of the statute books, other times it is hidden in the power of bureaucrats who take their authority from those same books.7

Patricia Monture-Angus cites the Indian Act 1876, under which the federal relationship with indigenous people in Canada was changed from partnership to status as wards of the Crown with no more powers than minors, as a target for resistance to racism. Speaking long before there were calls in Parliament for the replacement of the Indian Act by the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), she calls for its repeal, saying that as long as it remains on the statute book, colonialism will remain a vibrant force.8 She links the Act to the presence of poverty, suicide, child welfare interventions, lack of education and an unfair justice system.9 Later, she points to chronic underfunding and under-resourcing of indigenous communities, which in turns leads to infighting and favouritism as instruments of oppression: ‘These conditions perpetuate our oppression because they step on our hopes that things will change’.10

She points out that colonialism leads to a relationship of dependency in which one side is dependent on the other. In the case of aboriginal people, this leads to a stereotype in which they are seen as weaker, backward, uncivilised and non-human, etc.11 The stereotype ‘carries with it the personal pain of many individuals’. This, she says, is wrong. Later she points to the discriminatory way in which history is told:

History carries with it a credibility, a cloak of truth-telling, that hides the privilege of the discourse and who has done the telling. Aboriginal peoples do not have history, we have ‘oral history’. It is a variant, or some slice of what is real, that is history. Oral history is not seen as a complete thing (that is, that inferiority stereotype again). There has been very little rigorous examination of the conditions and consequences (the emotional impact and all other effects) on the colonizer. I see this denial as one significant source of the problem and why Canada has never been able to successfully eradicate ‘the Indian problem’. There needs to be a commitment to truth and truth-teaching.

In November 2013, the Department of Indian Affairs in Quebec ran a consultation process through which a governmental Action Plan to Combat Racism and Discrimination Towards Aboriginal People was to be established.12 In her introduction, Elizabeth Larouche, Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, said:

This event will provide an opportunity for sharing concerns and experiences and for coming up with potential solutions to the problems that deny thousands of Aboriginal citizens in our society the opportunity to develop their potential. In their daily lives and in almost all areas of public life, many Aboriginal people have to contend with prejudice and stereotyping. In the workplace, at school, and in the media, Aboriginal people are sometimes faced with a mindset and behaviour that, regrettably, are tainted with racism, discrimination, and harassment.

The stated aims of the consultation were to develop an understanding of the issues surrounding discrimination and racism and to identify potential solutions. Whether these recommendations will be heeded any more than previous attempts remains to be seen. Much has been written on possible ways of solving the ‘Indian’ problem.

When, in October 2013, Special Rapporteur James Anaya visited Canada, he reported13 on the present human rights abuses and significant inequality which beset indigenous peoples, finding no improvement since the visit of his predecessor in 2004. He noted the disparity in incomes, provision of services and infrastructure, health, education and other amenities. The report also pointed to the social consequences of the resulting poverty and deprivation: very much higher incarceration rates, murder rates and negative social indicators such as alcohol and drug abuse and domestic violence. He drew attention to the unexplained disappearance of aboriginal women.

The report also highlighted Canada’s failure to honour aboriginal treaties and to involve indigenous leaders in consultation and decision-making processes over new legislation which concerned them, all of which reinforced indigenous mistrust of government.

As Chief Perry Bellegarde, then a member of the Assembly of First Nations and now National Chief, pointed out in 2012: ‘Canada is number six [in the world quality of life index] but if you apply the same statistics to Indigenous Peoples, we end up being number 63, so there’s a great socioeconomic gap between Indigenous Peoples and the rest of society.’14

Personal and institutionalised racism is the lived experience of many, if not all, indigenous people in Canada. The province of Quebec has a clear intention to address these issues but will this, like the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) and UNDRIP, be another dead letter as settler Canadians continue to stand by?

In the next section, we shall examine the history of colonialism in North America and trace the roots of a system under which governments and corporations believe they can take indigenous land with impunity.