Vincent J. Curtis
13 Nov 2018
A controversial part of the “reconciliation” between Canada
and aboriginals, is the disgracing of what were once Canadian heroes. Statues to Sir John A. Macdonald are being
removed everywhere in Canada because he instituted the residential schools
movement. Hector Langevin and even George Ryerson are being disgraced for their
connection with residential schools.
So far, no one has focussed attention on Pierre Elliott
Trudeau and Jean Chretien as bad actors also to be disgraced in this reconciliation
process - and their sins are more personal than those of Macdonald, Langevin,
or Ryerson.
Pierre Trudeau’s great project as Prime Minister of Canada
was the patriation of the Canadian constitution and to have entrenched within
it a Charter of Human Rights. He accomplished
this goal in 1982. In the opening phases
of this great project, Trudeau and his Minister of Indian Affairs Jean Chretien
proposed abolishing Indian status, abolishing all Indian treaties, abolishing
all Indian reserves, and abolishing the Indian Act. All references to Indians would be wiped from
Canadian law. This policy proposal was
put forward in a 1969 White Paper entitled, “Statement of the Government of
Canada on Indian Policy.”
Why would a good, progressive Liberal propose abolishing
Indian status? To understand, you have
to know the times and how they related to the aim of entrenching a charter of
human rights in the constitution. The
1950s and 1960s saw tremendous turmoil in the United States concerning civil
rights. These were the days of Brown v. Board of Education, of Rosa
Parks, Martin Luther King, the Ku Klux Klan, the freedom riders, the Civil Rights
Act, the Vietnam War and the assassinations of JFK, MLK, and RFK. This turmoil was over the equal treatment in
law and in fact of black and white Americans by civil authorities. The justification for equal treatment was
that blacks were as much a human beings and as American as any white American.
That all human beings are equally human and that justice
requires the equal treatment of equals was the irrefutable logic of the Civil
Rights movement. In Canada, Indians (and
I am going to use that term of law and custom) were regarded as a people apart.
Canada had a duty of care towards
Indians, but from 1867 to 1950 Indians were not
Canadian. They were not British
subjects. The passage of the Citizenship
Act granted Canadian Indians citizenship status, with all the rights and privileges
thereof. But they retained these other
rights and privileges as Indians.
Pierre Trudeau, to create a charter of equal human rights,
sought to eliminate this anomaly in Canadian law that was based on race - to create only one class of persons in law whose
rights could be specified without qualification. There being only one class, all within it were equal. Pierre Trudeau believed that after a hundred
years of exposure to western civilization and with the prospect of hundreds of
years more exposure, Indian culture was done - changed irretrievably; racial
purity was being lost, and assimilation was inevitable for the Indian race.
Negative reaction to the White Paper killed it, and
aboriginal activism and aboriginal land claims began as a reaction against the
White Paper. This failure to abolish
Indian status in law is why the Charter of 1982 has anomalous carve outs for
aboriginal rights.
The sense of “First Nations” status among Indians is
sincerely felt. They accept Canadian
citizenship as unavoidable and convenient, but Canada is not their
“nation.” The term and concept of nation
is borrowed from western culture and is used to helps the western mind
understand the distinction between Canadian and Indian. Yes, Indian and Canadian are both humans, but
that is irrelevant. Indians are distinct
from Canadians on the basis of race and origin.
Indians and Canadians belong to different nations and occupy different
spaces, with some overlap forced on Indians by Canada.
In February, 2014, the Liberal Party “renounced with regret”
the White Paper of 1969, but the issue of assimilation, of loss of culture and
of racial purity - the definitive terms of what it means to be Indian - remains, and will plague indefinitely the Indians of Canada.
If
reconciliation requires the condemnation of Canadian heroes, Trudeau and
Chretien, for observing the obvious, seem to deserve it as much as Macdonald.
-30-
Vincent J. Curtis is a Canadian free-lance writer.
No comments:
Post a Comment