CityStates: Commentary on an Urban World

Indigenous Cultures: Urban, Sophisticated -- and Controversial

What has followed from Dick Pound's casual remark on the historical "savagery" of North America's indigenous cultures is fascinating, not only on its merits but for what it says about the conceptions of Aboriginal culture in mainstream thought. It is not Pound's comments that have created the greatest controversy, but rather the Globe and Mail's Margaret Wente, who wrote a column in defence of Pound, stating that pre-contact Indigenous peoples were not sophisticated and their cultures were in almost every way inferior to those of the Europeans:

"North American native peoples had a neolithic culture based on subsistence living and small kinship groups. They had not developed broader laws or institutions, a written language, evidence-based science, mathematics or advanced technologies. The kinship groups in which they lived were very small, simply organized and not very productive. Other kinship groups were regarded as enemies, and the homicide rate was probably rather high. Until about 30 years ago, the anthropological term for this developmental stage was 'savagery.'"

To be fair, Wente was careful to state that these "deficiencies" were not inherent to race but rather environmentally determined, citing Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, which analyzed cultural trajectories based on the availability of large game, draught animals and nourishing domesticable plants, to name just a few factors. Yet the the response was swift: the paper was deluged with hostile letters and email, and a Facebook page was created called for Wente's dismissal from the paper:

"Wente's right-wing commentary has long been inflammatory and notable for its scant regard for serious research or facts, but this column has taken her over the edge. In it, she attacks an entire segment of society in a demeaning and degrading fashion."

In today's Globe, Hayden King provded a more formal rebuttal, countering that Indigenous cultures were in fact, extremely sophisticated:

"Perhaps most impressive...is that indigenous peoples were adept farmers, originally cultivating and harvesting two-thirds of the foodstuffs the world consumes today. These include the tomato, peanut, potato, chili peppers and corn. In fact, at the time of contact, and long before Gregor Mendel's experiments with pea plants, the Huron in Ontario had genetically engineered 17 different varieties of corn...They lived in cities larger than those in contemporary Europe, had greater populations, taller buildings, sophisticated governance structures, varied art forms, tested scientific knowledge and on, and on."

This historical portrait of advanced Indigenous institutions and formal -- even urban -- settlements is also central to Ronald Wright's new book, What is America? (which I recently reviewed for the Winnipeg Free Press). Where Wente argued that liberal white guilt over the genocide and cultural destruction meted out by Europeans is being salved by a romanticized portrait of advanced original North Americans, Wright contends quite the opposite: that the advanced state of pre-contact Indiginous cultures was -- and continues to be -- deliberately refuted as a means of rationalizing and justifying those crimes.

These contrary notions do, however have one thing in common: both are premised on the need for contemporary liberal Canadian society to make some sense of a past which has scarred all of us, and for which no modern remedy can fully atone. If nothing else, this conflicted and confused debate highlights something more fundamentally wrong than alleged historical misconceptions and inaccuracies: rather, that -- just as Wright argues in the case of the United States -- centuries of injustices and cruelty remain essentially unconfronted by Canadian society, and this lacunae leaves unaddressed and unresolved both the problems facing Aboriginal peoples and the nature of the relationship between all Canadians, Aboriginal and otherwise.

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On "Apologizing" for Residential Schools

Among the constituents most in need of policy and programming interventions in Canada's cities are our country's aboriginal people, who continue to suffer disproportionately from poverty, homelessness, low educational attainment and ill-health. Many of these terrible outcomes have been attributed to the legacy of Canada's "residential school" system, which for decades sought to assimilate First Nations people by stripping them of their cultural identities.

On June 11th, the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper will officially "apologize" to Canada's aboriginal people for the cultural genocide meted out in residential schools.

"Many among the roughly 90,000 surviving former students have stressed an acute need to hear Prime Minister Stephen Harper say he's sorry in the House of Commons. More than compensation cheques, more than healing programs, they have staked any hope of reconciliation on an apology from the highest place of political power."

But some voices argue that apologies and financial compensation are nowhere near enough to atone for what actually happened -- that the thousands of dead children lost to the system represents a crime against humanity requiring nothing less than a war crimes trial.

This is the argument of the Rev. Kevin Annett, who wrote an open letter on the matter and sent it to 10 Canadian newspapers, none of which so much as acknowledged the submission, much less published it. Yet his article, Residential School Genocide: Why "Apology" Isn't Enough, should be required reading for all Canadians, and is worth quoting here at length:

The truth is, Euro-Canadian society still doesn't understand what these "schools" were, either at a "head" or a "heart" level. If one believes the officers of the churches and government, the residential schools "issue" is all about money and verbal gymnastics. Yet none of these officials, as far as I know, have broken down and wept in public over the deaths of so many innocent ones; nor have they even offered to return their remains to their families for a proper burial.

Oddly enough, the very same officials continually and glibly speak about "healing the past", without even knowing their own history, and about "solutions" to the "residential school problem", as if they understand what that problem is - not realizing that, to quote William Shakespeare, "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves."

For in truth, there is not now, nor has there ever been, an "Indian problem" in Canada. Rather, the problem is a "white" one. The problem is with us.

I won't point to collapsing eco-systems or troops in Afghanistan to prove this point. Nor need I pose the paradox of how educated men and women, with families of their own and a professed "Christian morality", could drive needles through infants' tongues at Indian residential schools, throw three year olds down stairs, sterilize healthy kids, and deliberately allow children to cough their lives away from tuberculosis, and then bury them in secret graves.

The evidence of the problem is more immediate, and far closer to home, in our continued segregation of aboriginal people into a lower standard of humanity that allows them to die at a rate fifteen times greater than other people of this country.

After all, if we Canadians are who we imagine ourselves to be - an enlightened society that "assimilated" native people into our ranks, and made them our equals - then why has not a single person ever been brought to trial for the death of a residential school child? Why is the disappearance of tens of thousands of native children in these schools not the subject of a major criminal investigation? And why is there an Indian Act, and not an Irish or an Italian Act?

Being, in reality, an unofficially apartheid society that operates, in practice, with two standards of justice - one for native people, and one for the rest of us - Canada can no more cure the legacy of the residential schools than it can stop chewing up the earth for short-term comfort and profit. At least, not this side of a fundamental moral and social revolution.

The fact that we are far from such a change struck home to me a few months ago when the the government announced that, although criminal acts did indeed occur in the residential schools, there would be no criminal investigation of these schools: an unbelievably brazen subversion of justice that evoked not a peep of protest in the media or among the good citizens and politicians of Canada.

Regardless of this, there are things that can be done to overcome the genocidal residential schools legacy, and do justice, for once, to the survivors. Rather than issuing verbal and self-serving "apologies" which change nothing, the government and all of us could take these kind of bold measures:

1. Declare an Official Nation-wide Day of Mourning for Residential School Victims, dead and living.

2. Fully disclose what happened in the residential schools - the crimes, the perpetrators, and the cover-up - by launching an International War Crimes Tribunal with the power to subpoena, arrest and prosecute those responsible.

3. Bring home the remains of all children who died in these schools for a proper burial, and establish public memorial sites for them.

4. Create a National Aboriginal Holocaust Museum.

5. End federal tax exemption for the Catholic, Anglican and United Church of Canada, in accordance with the Nuremburg Legal Principles concerning organizations complicit in crimes against humanity.

6. Abolish the Indian Act and Indian and Northern Affairs.

An Irish relative once told me that the way her country is evolving away from eight centuries of warfare is through a simple formula:

"First you remember; then you grieve; then you heal".

Instead of skipping the first two steps, as Mr. Harper and too many of our people are trying to do "apologetically", it is time that Canadians found the courage to truly remember and admit to the world what we did to the first peoples of this land, and grieve our actions in the manner of people who truly rend their own hearts and want to change.

Perhaps then "healing and reconciliation" can become something more than an overworked political catch-phrase.

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Focus on Urban Aboriginal Peoples

The recently-released Statistics Canada Report, Aboriginal People Living in Metropolitan Areas reveals that there have been significant gains made by Aboriginal people living in Canada's cities (for a more thorough discussion see the recent IUS blog entry). In light of this report -- and to support interest and research in this increasingly important topic area -- IUS would like to highlight items in its collection, as well as key online sources.

In 2003, the Policy Research Initiative published Not Strangers in These Parts: Urban Aboriginal Peoples. (The full text of the book is also available online). Topics covered by this book include, mobility and migration, challenges facing urban Aboriginal women, urban Aboriginal economic development and urban governance issues.

Outdated Policies not Keeping Pace with Canada's Urban Aboriginal Population

A new report from Statistics Canada shows that Canada's urban Aboriginal population is growing, but also gaining better access to jobs and education:

"Aboriginal people living in the nation's largest metropolitan centres were faring better overall in 2001 than they were two decades earlier, according to a new report. Nevertheless, these Aboriginal urban dwellers still faced many challenges, especially those living in urban centres in the western provinces, where large gaps remained with their non-Aboriginal counterparts."