Indigenous people are increasingly rejecting their Canadian identity in favour of an enhanced aboriginal one..Pan-indigenous socio-cultural and political self-awareness is no recent innovation because its origins lie in first contact with Europeans more than 500 years ago. It slowly grew over the centuries but accelerated with the American Indian Movement in the 1960s..Though less developed in Canada, indigenous political identity took off in 1968 with the formation of the National Indian Brotherhood (NIB) — forerunner of the Assembly of First Nations. Harold Cardinal, an influential Alberta chief and lawyer, led the NIB’s attempt to block Prime Minster Pierre Trudeau’s implementation of the 1969 federal government White Paper meant to abrogate all special rights that distinguished indigenous people from other Canadians..By 1982, a chastened Trudeau did a complete about-face by enshrining indigenous rights in the new Constitution Act. Around the same time, highway signs that had identified “Indian Reserves” were replaced with those pointing to “First Nations.” Canada was being transformed into a nation of nations, a questionable logical and potentially dangerous political contradiction..Soon after, indigenous people began formally using indigenous names for their bands. The Kamloops band, for example, became known as the “Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation,” and the Sarcee band started calling itself “Tsuut'ina First Nation.”.Bands in Saskatchewan went even further by using the collective name “Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations.” Again, this represented a fundamental paradox: How can a sovereign nation be composed of other sovereign nations? Still, such politically questionable symbolism highlighted the desire of treaty-based bands to regain a measure of independence, spurious or not, from other Canadian citizens and the nation-state called Canada..More recently, indigenous people have begun publicly identifying themselves with unique indigenous names. For example, one CBC reporter identifies herself as “Ka’nhehsí:io Deer who is a Kanien’kehá:ka journalist.” Similarly, a University of Manitoba academic calls himself “Niigaanwewidam James Sinclair [who] is Anishinaabe (St. Peter’s/Little Pegus.)”. First Nations Chief, Calgary StampedeFirst Nations Chiefs at the Calgary Stampede. (Source: WikiCommons) .As part of this trend, many Canadian organizations are acknowledging they are situated on land that was once populated by specific indigenous groups. For example, the University of Calgary begins meetings with the following declaration: “I would like to take this opportunity to acknowledge the traditional territories of the people of the Treaty 7 region in Southern Alberta, which includes the Blackfoot Confederacy (comprising the Siksika, Piikani, and Kainai First Nations) as well as the Tsuut'ina First Nation, and the Stony Nakoda (including the Chiniki, Bearspaw, and Wesley First Nations). The city of Calgary is also home to the Métis Nation of Alberta, Region 3.”.These relatively new or resurrected affirmations of identity, often by people not even fluent in their native tongues, are said by their proponents to provide them with the psychological and other resources needed to deal with their present and future challenges. But a closer look shows they are rooted in an ideology of systemic victimization. This victimhood is said to have begun with the conquest and colonization of Canada, exacerbated by Indian Residential School (IRS) attendance..Although the settlement of Canada by Europeans forever transformed indigenous lifeways in both positive and negative manners, the role of the residential schools in this process is disputable. Even at its apex, only some one-third of aboriginal school-aged children attended residential schools and then for an average of 4.5 years, thereby playing a minor role in this transformation..This has not prevented the repeated pan-indigenous declaration that all aboriginal peoples, whether they or their ancestors attended these boarding schools or not, continue to suffer from the same massive intergenerational trauma. This unsubstantiated assertion allowed nearly all indigenous leaders and activists to compile a long list of costly victimization-based grievances against the Canadian state, and the churches that operated most of the schools..The Justin Trudeau-led government of Canada has been zealous in accepting the entire indigenous victimization narrative since the May 27, 2021 announcement of the 'discovery' of the remains of 215 Kamloops residential school students in a nearby abandoned apple orchard..The two latest examples of bowing to indigenous demands rooted in this discovery have been the government announcement it would set aside $321 million to help bands identify, recover, and commemorate the bodies of missing IRS students and the enactment on June 3, 2021 of a National Day for Truth and Reconciliation as a federal statutory holiday. (The second anniversary was celebrated on Friday, September 30.).The inconvenient fact that over a year later there is no evidence supporting the claim of secretly buried IRS student bodies in unmarked graves at Kamloops or elsewhere in the country, is never mentioned..Burying inconvenient burial truths has done nothing except exacerbate the tension between indigenous and non-indigenous people. People who disagree with the indigenous “genocide” narrative are labelled racists, colonialist, and “deniers.” This rhetorical debate is polarizing Canadian society. As tension grows, it will seriously cripple or even destroy our country because a state with no shared national identity has no transcendent reason to survive..Intensifying all this is the realization by anyone who cares to look the daily lives of indigenous people are as dismal as they were in 1969. This can best be seen in the social, economic, and health differentials between indigenous people and other Canadians..Placed in a comparative national context, these show indigenous people on — and off-reserve — exhibit the highest rates of criminality and incarceration; the lowest incomes; the highest levels of unemployment, poverty, welfare dependency, and homelessness; the worst housing; the highest rates of infant mortality and the lowest life expectancy; the highest disease, illness, and suicide levels; the highest school dropout rates; the highest proportion of child apprehension, fostering, and adoption; the highest rates of sexual abuse; the highest proportion of single motherhood; and the highest rates of murdered and missing women..Truly, these are horrific and shameful socio-economic outcomes in one of the richest and most advanced countries in the world..All these long-standing deprivations and pathologies were well known when Pierre Trudeau failed in his attempt to enact his 1969 White Paper calling for the extinguishment of the separatist Indian Act, gradual privatization of reserve lands, abolition of the paternalist Department of Indian Affairs, and the removal of “the specific references to Indians from the [1867] constitution … to end the legal distinction between Indians and other Canadians.”.After his efforts were aborted in 1970, following a huge outcry from the indigenous establishment led by Harold Cardinal (who argued “we would rather continue to live in bondage under the inequitable Indian Act than surrender our sacred rights,”) Trudeau angrily retorted: “We'll keep them in the ghetto as long as they want.”.Sadly, both men have been proven correct because this is exactly where too many Aboriginals have languished ever since..Not so for the power and wealth of their leaders and activists, which have kept rising for more than five decades. More particularly, there is no reason to believe the enhanced elite indigenous privileges and growing sovereignty efforts ignited 53 years ago, together with the new and pretentious naming symbolism now attached to them, will ever elevate the downtrodden status of ordinary aboriginals..With the gap between rich and powerful vs. poor and dependent aboriginals growing by leaps and bounds ever since, with the gratuitous but lucrative demonization of the residential school system in overdrive since the announcement of the Kamloops burials, and with no rational discussion of why destructive indigenous policies are reinvented time and again, there is little hope that a proud and confident indigenous people will ever be recognized, and recognize themselves, as full and equal citizens of Canada instead of seeing themselves, and being seen by others, as a race apart and as Canada’s eternal victims..***.Rodney A. Clifton is a professor emeritus at the University of Manitoba and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. His most recent book, with Mark DeWolf, is From Truth Comes Reconciliation: An Assessment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report (Frontier Centre for Public Policy, 2021. The book is available from Amazon.).Hymie Rubenstein is editor of The REAL Indian Residential Schools newsletter and a retired professor of anthropology at The University of Manitoba.
