This Racism Stinks. Literally!

Vincent J. Curtis

29 Mar 2018

Apologies and feign embarrassment for the success of European civilization knows no bounds in Hamilton.  Sucking around Aboriginals is the latest example of this craze.  It appears that the city council is going to permit a traditional aboriginal smudging ceremony to take place in city hall.  The ceremony includes the burning of tobacco and other things.  Burning tobacco sounds suspiciously like smoking, a practice forbidden other people at all other times.  But racism is okay, so long as it is of the reverse kind.

RE: Plan coming for Indigenous events in public buildings

Racism stinks.  Racism is especially odious when it is practiced as a form of patronizing a racial group.  The city, it seems, is about to engage in the rankest of racism.  Never mind the “No Smoking” signs, the city is going to permit “Indigenous” literally to stink up municipal buildings by allowing them to burn tobacco, sage, sweetgrass, and other dead vegetation inside them.

Systemic racism does exist as a matter of law in Canada.  It is enforced through the Indian Act and permitted in the Charter.  Indigenous affairs are a Federal matter, and for the most part Indigenous people don’t even recognize provincial authority.  But in a misguided act of propitiation for who knows what misdeed, settled civic policy regarding smoking and burning of garden waste in municipal buildings is going to be set aside - for “Indigenous” only.

Many businesses nowadays don’t even allow the wearing of perfume and cologne on premises lest some sensitive person react to them; but for the sake of “reconciliation” for whatever Hamilton did wrong, the city is going to allow Indigenous to burn smudge in city hall itself.  I’m not sure that a sackcloth and ashes treatment is a proper recompense for the city’s crime of mere existence.

This is the worst kind of patronizing.  You would hope that after a couple hundred years of contact with European enlightenment pagan ceremonies which Indigenous once practiced would be discarded.  Not because the enlightenment is of the conquerors, but simply because it is right.  But here, pagan ceremonies are going to be tolerated as the equal of western enlightenment, as if enlightenment was simply an arbitrary choice from among many.  And in doing so the enlightened patronize the Indigenous, as if so say, “there, there.  We don’t expect you to grasp what unity of truth means.”

After allowing city hall to be smeared with smudge, what comes next?  Having admitted that the city stands on traditional Indigenous land, are the city fathers going to give the city back to the Indigenous?  Or only the parts that they don’t live on?

This whole thing stinks.

-30-