Two years ago Ottawa’s big-budget celebration of “CANADA 150” conveyed a notion this country spontaneously began with 1867’s Confederation. Indigenous peoples, idle no more, registered the point there was additional history – in Muskoka, some ten thousand years’ worth – so raised a flag to “Canada 150+”.
In 1956 the village librarian wrote when assimilation was in full force; by 2015 the country’s prime minister declared “the Indigenous relationship” his government’s most important priority. But what had really changed?
European’s sought to achieve dominion in the Americas by a doctrine that “ownership by discovery” enabled taking other peoples’ lands, by a cover mission of “Christianizing heathens” to eradicate native cultures, and by a policy to assimilate “racially inferior barbarian Indians” out of existence. The spring-force of all three was arrogance.
Generations of Muskokans received only fragmented schooling about those centuries when Indigenous peoples and this territory were one. Even less was said about what happened once colonization began. For Indigenous people the trauma of assimilation policies implemented through Reserves confinement, loss of freedom, violation of treaty rights, Indian Act subjugation, the long-running Residential Schools program, the Sixties Scoop, even removal of Inuit tuberculosis patients to southern locales, has stretched down anguished generations of fragmented families. Impacts of all that, stirred in with poverty and loss of self-respect, created downward spirals across First Nation communities. The tragic consequences became the face of Indigenous peoples that “mainstream” society glimpsed in shadows, if it saw at all.
A miracle has been the survival through dark and troubled times with today’s resurgence of First Nations culture in contemporary contexts, not feathers and war-paint but Jody Wilson- Raybould as Canada’s minister of justice. Though still fragmented and “foreign” to many non-Indigenous Canadians because of trepidation, guilt, and the endless complexities of North American native societies themselves, consciousness is rising about the enduring uniqueness of this country’s First Peoples.
Commission reports, documentaries, news stories, books, movies, conferences, and museum exhibits are causing the sun to rise over a darkened landscape. “Reclaiming Power and Place,” the Commission report on Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls, sharpened public awareness of First Nation realities. Evacuation of residents from Northern Ontario reserves, in spring for flooding, in summer for forest fires, revealed dire conditions on several. Many non-native adults say they’re “learning things for the first time.”
“You weren’t supposed to know!” That’s how Christopher Stock, a Wahta Mohawk band member, sums up all that was done to First Nation peoples out of sight and without public report. A story kept from non-Indigenous people delivered double-whammy marginalization and blank memory.
Learning the story is hard, if unreported. But dispelling ignorance is even harder, if one retains arrogance. So deeply embedded in settler culture it created constitutional provisions and social norms, such unacknowledged arrogance still hovers in the atmosphere.
But good things are afoot. Two historic turning points are emerging in Muskoka. Next week we’ll see the spirit of “truth and reconciliation” taking life on the ground at specific places in the lives of real people.
