It’s not dirt he’s shoveling

Vincent J. Curtis

14 Apr 23

RE: Giving away someone else’s history and heritage.  Op-ed by Paul Racher.  The Hamilton Spectator, 14 Apr 23.  Racher describes himself as an archeologist who lives in Burlington, ON.

As an archeologist for 35 years, Paul Racher has shoveled a lot of dirt in his day.  But it isn’t dirt he’s shoveling in his opinion piece at reference.

He talks about indigenous heritage.  Well, which indigenous?  The Niagara area was known as the “land between the lakes” and was subject of the 1702 “Dish with One Spoon Wampum” treaty between the Mississaugas of the Credit and the Mohawks.  The Mississaugas sold this land, lock, stock, and barrel to the British Crown in three tranches: in 1781, in the Haldimand Purchase of 1785, and the rest of it in 1792.

The Mississaugas were found by the British to be the Indians “in possession” of the land at the time.  But prior to 1648 the land could be said to have belonged to the Huron Indians, who were massacred along with Jesuit Fr Jean de Brebeuf by the Mohawks near Midland, Ontario, that year.  The Mississaugas moved into the vacant territory.

Hence, there are no legitimate indigenous with whom to consult on archeological artifacts, which are all found on the surface because the Indians built no stone structures with foundations.  After his lengthy discourse on the qualification required to be an archeologist, why Racher would have us consult with non-experts on the preservation of finds that aren’t theirs either remains a mystery.

When the British discover new Roman ruins and artifacts in the Cotswolds, they don’t consult with Romans at random to determine how those discoveries should be handled; they don’t even consult with the city council of Rome; but that is roughly what Paul Racher is proposing we do with finds of indigenous arrowheads in Niagara, as if those finds wasn’t ours too.

Racher expresses romantic notion that we can safely place our futures into the gentle hands of who-knows-what indigenous, granting them a new power of veto over anything we do.  That is not democratic, and flies in the face of law and the lessons of history.  Even to establish “consultation” will require the indigenous to organize themselves into creating a body that can speak definitively on their behalf.  If we’re going to play the us versus them game, it’s not up to us to solicit the opinions of individual indigenous and take that as definitive.

I’ll close with a rebuttal of another, offensive, statement Racher made, “Your heritage sets the initial conditions for your identity.  It’s who you are before you are even ‘you.’”  The human mind, at birth, is a tabula rasa; a blank slate; it has no innate ideas, and hence it is impossible for a heritage to be “who you are before you are even you.”  The idea of an innate cultural heritage is a racist fantasy, but the concept finds utility when attacking the success and, ironically, the progress of Western civilization.  If ‘inherent cultural heritage’ were true, Western civilization would be impossible, as would cultural progress.

Paul Racher speaks contemptuously of “white settler Canadians,” and it makes you wonder why he remains one.  The question of where he would “return” to (never having been there) has likely never occurred to him.  And if he were to “return” to, say, Britain, wouldn’t that make him a “settler” there too?

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