This
article was written for and first published in
Captive Canada:
Renditions of the Peaceable Kingdom at War,
from Narratives of WWI and the Red Scare to the Mass Internment of Civilians
Issue #68 of
Press for Conversion (Spring 2016),
pp.15-21.
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First Nations, First Captives:
Genocidal Precedents for Canadian Concentration Camps
By Richard Sanders, Coordinator, Coalition to
Oppose the Arms Trade (COAT)
WWI
was not the first time that thousands of people had been forced into captivity
for threatening the “peace, order and good government of Canada.”1 In fact,
Conservative and Liberal governments alike already had a well-established
modus operandi that used mass captivity to subjugate so-called “foreign”
enemies on the homefront.
Canada’s
20th-century internment camps did not arise in a vacuum. They continued a
long-standing tradition of forcing targeted populations into isolated rural
locations across the country. Canada’s system of mass confinement followed the
US
model for segregating Aboriginals into remote ghettos, called reserves. But this
was only one weapon in a multidimensional war to destroy First Nations. Besides
restricting physical movements, elites used a diversity of tactics, including
residential schools, to hold Indigenous people in place. They were also confined
within the bounds of a genocidal legal framework that restrained religious,
linguistic, social, economic and political freedoms.
Such
multidisciplinary genocide cannot be committed by a few sociopaths. Large scale
atrocities can only be achieved by an institutionalised sociopathy. Those
with “Antisocial Personality Disorder” are defined by the US Department of
Health as individuals with “a long-term pattern of manipulating, exploiting or
violating the rights of others. This behavior is often criminal.”2 When state
agencies, NGOs or corporations run programs or businesses that inflict these
same abuses —albeit on a vastly more devastating scale—they go
undiagnosed, at least by those rendered prisoner by the reassuring narratives of
captive institutions.
Those
who are able to free themselves from the confining frames of thought and
language imposed by sociopathic institutions, sometimes dare to speak out
against the normalisation of antisocial policies. By trying to liberate those
who remain enslaved within the narrative webs spun by abusive institutions,
activists may be diagnosed as rebels, radicals, conspiracy theorists or,
ironically, as psychopaths with “Antisocial Personality Disorder.”
A
century ago, racist and xenophobic views were the norm in Canada. Widespread
antisocial pathology was pandemic throughout the country. The largest and most
highly-respected religious bodies were captivated by this social illness. This
is well illustrated by the Churches’ enthusiastic collaboration with government
agencies to plan, conduct, justify and cover-up the genocidal programs of mass
captivity inflicted on Indigenous peoples.
But
long before Aboriginals were forced into the confinement of reserves and
residential schools in the 1880s, Canadians happily profited from the
institution of chattel slavery. For two centuries, Blacks and Indians were
subjected to the “legalized” captivity and forced labour practised by British
and French colonialists. While prominent members of Canada’s Catholic and
AngloProtestant churches owned slaves, these institutions also helped perpetuate
slavery with Biblical narratives to rationalise their antisocial pathology.
These
long-standing patterns of racist, institutionalised abuse and exploitation are
the sociopathic precedents for Canada’s widely-supported, mass internment of
foreigners and political radicals that began with the pretext of WWI.
Perhaps the most alarming aspect in this history of sociopathy is that
progressive, reform-minded Christians—both Protestant and Catholic—were
entrapped by Canada’s mass psychosis. Although genuinely sincere in their work,
missionaries were restrained by the straightjacket of a widespread, cultural
pathology.
Those
captured heart and mind by predatory institutions, and working within the strict
confines of their myths and narratives, felt compelled to “uplift” peoples who
they saw as inferiour, uncivilised, unChristian and unCanadian. Unable to
perceive social reality, and blind to the horrors that their actions were having
on others, well-meaning Christians were spellbound by the sociopathy of Canada’s
domineering Eurocentric delusions of grandeur.
This
social illness went far beyond mere racism and ethnocentrism to become an
enslaving cultural narcissism. Those enthralled by the anti-social narratives of
Canada’s
dominant religious and political institutions were confined by arrogant hubris,
an entitled sense of superiourity, and a fearmongering paranoia that “strangers”
are inherently inferior, dangerous and evil.
Hamstrung by myths of national exceptionalism, many Canadians took up the
imperialist call of the “white man’s burden...to serve your captives’ need,”
those “new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child.”3 Good Christians
justified their genocidal efforts to rend other cultures asunder, with such
altruistic goals as civilisation, education and morality. Immured by grand
imperial delusions, Canadian nationalists believed that they were building a
model country that was bound by destiny to lead the world. As Prime Minister
Sir Wilfrid Laurier proclaimed in 1904, to cheers from Liberals and
Conservatives alike, “the Twentieth Century belongs to Canada.”4 This
nonpartisan fantasy of national superiourity was ingrained, not only in the
patrician psyche, but in the mindset of mainstream citizens. The country was
gripped by a widespread social malady that can aptly be called the Canada
Syndrome. (See pp.2-4.)
The
delusion that as a superior nation we should sow our “Canadian values” abroad,
grew from an earlier narrative meme of so-called “Christian values.” George
Emery, in his pioneering history of prairie Methodism, described the prevailing
AngloProtestant hegemony saying Canadians believed “Christian values would be
menaced throughout the dominion if the west, with its enormous material
potential, were not won for Christ.”5 (See “Occupation(al) Psychosis...,” p.18.)
Social Gospel and Social Progress
Some of the loudest voices
of Canadian nativism were leaders of the Social Gospel, a progressive strain of
Christianity that prospered from the 1880s until the early 1920s. Historian
Richard Allen defined this reform movement, by saying the
“social
gospel rested on the premise that Christianity was a social religion, concerned
...with the quality of human relations on this earth.... [I]t was a call for men
to find the meaning of their lives in seeking...the Kingdom of God in the very
fabric of society.”6
The Social Gospel included
“advocates of direct social assistance; social purists; those who advocated a
change of attitude as the means to social change; state interventionists; and
socialists.”7
Leaders of the Social
Gospel were usually white, middle-class, AngloProtestant missionaries or
clergymen. Driven to “uplift” the less fortunate, these reformers wanted to help
inferiour classes and races to deal with growing social, moral and economic
problems of industrialisation.
The Social Gospel, said
Mariana Valverde, was an effort to “humanize and/or Christianize the political
economy of urban-industrial capitalism.” Valverde is a University of
Toronto criminology professor who authored a classic text on
Canada’s social purity movement. “Prophets” of
the Social Gospel, she has said
“were
generally moderately left of centre, but included such mainstream figures as
W.L.Mackenzie King, who ... was influenced by social gospel ideas in his popular
1919 book, Industry and Humanity.”8
Before
becoming Canada’s
longest-serving Prime Minister, King was “an ardent social gospeller,” said
historians Douglas Francis and Chris Kitzan. King believed that his political
mission on earth was divinely inspired. Calling himself “a true servant of God
helping to make the Kingdom of Heaven prevail on Earth,” King explained: “This
is what I love politics for.”9
Methodism Led the Way
Most Social Gospel leaders
belonged to the Methodist Church, which adopted its “Social Creed” in 1908. Capturing the reformist
spirit of the Social Gospel, it was a rallying cry for the whole progressive
movement. The Creed declared it “the duty of all Christian people to concern
themselves directly with certain practical industrial problems.” Among these
were achieving “the right of workers to some protection against the hardships
often resulting from the swift crises of industrial change,” “the abolition of
child labor,” and “the abatement of poverty.” Methodists also offered a “pledge
of sympathy and of help” to those “seeking to lift the crushing burdens of the
poor, and to reduce the hardships and uphold the dignity of labor.”10
Canada’s Methodist
Church was a powerful force in Anglocentric settler culture. Like an invasive
non-native species, it spread quickly across western
Canada, and had a devastating impact on
Indigenous peoples. Between 1891 and 1911, Canada’s prairie population rose
almost fivefold, from 220,000 to 1.32 million.11 Between 1896 and 1914, during
the Social-Gospel heyday, there was a tripling in the prairie Methodist fold,
and its churches grew in number from 180 to 562.12
Emery described prairie
Methodists as “part of the predatory white settler population”13 that did not
lament the devastation of the Aboriginal population. In fact, he points out
that:
“During the 1870s and 1880s
Methodist missionaries acted as advance agents for the white settler society.
They favoured the slaughter of the buffalo herds, the government’s native
treaties and...the reserve system.”14
To aid
in this genocide, the church was happy to cozy up to Canada’s economic elites.
As political scientist Kenneth McNaught said, “the Methodist church in the
1880’s and 1890’s was consolidating itself as a church of the
well-to-do.”15 Methodists were later central in forming the United Church of
Canada (UCC). In 1925, when Methodist, Presbyterian and Congregational churches
merged, the UCC took over the fifteen Methodist and nine Presbyterian
residential schools.16
Teaching
“The Three Cs”
As Methodists and other
Christians spread across the Canadian prairies in the 1880s, they brought a
growth in residential schools. Rather than imparting the traditional “Three Rs,”
church schools targeted Aboriginal children with “The Three Cs,” Civilise,
Christianise and Canadianise.
Of the sixteen Methodist
residential schools built between 1838 and 1975, all but two were in the West.
Their earliest efforts to “uplift” Indian children began with two Ontario
schools in 1838 and 1848. Its first three residential schools in western Canada
began in the late 1870s. Six more were founded there in the 1880s, two in the
1890s, another two in 1900, and their last one opened in 1919.17 Using opening
and closing dates of these well-meaning, but genocidal, Methodist schools, we
can calculate that each school operated for an average of 66 years. Cumulatively
then, the 14 Methodist residential schools in western Canada inflicted the
“Three Cs” for a total of 925 years. The toll on Indian lives is still being
felt.
Among the Methodists who
lavished praise upon missionaries for their fine efforts to Canadianise,
civilise and Christianise the Indians under their control, was
Rev.J.S.Woodsworth. In his Social-Gospel classic Strangers Within Our Gates
(1908), Woodsworth noted that:
“
"Much missionary work, evangelistic, educational, industrial and medical, has
been done among the Indians. Many are devout Christians living exemplary lives,
but there are still 10,202 Indians in our Dominion, as grossly pagan as were
their ancestors, or...half civilized, only to be debauched.”18
Strangely enough,
Woodsworth’s book on “strangers” and “newcomers” to Canada included a section on
Indians. It relies heavily on two tracts from the Methodist Department of
Missionary Literature: Indian Education in the North West, by
Rev.Thompson Ferrier, and The British Columbia Indian and his Future, by
Rev.R. Whittington. Ferrier’s work concluded:
“
"The Indian problem is not solved, but it must not be given up, and it
need not be deserted in despair until there is a proper and final solution.
I believe it possible to civilize, educate and Christianize the Indian.”19
(Emphasis added.)
Rev. Whittington, who led
the Methodist Indian Missions in BC, also praised his Church’s residential
schools by speaking of “the noble band of teachers, who daily and quietly are
really laying the foundations of the future in the souls as well as the minds of
our Indian children.”20
The
rapid population growth of prairie settlers and the boom in churches and
residential schools, benefitted the imperial project known as Canada. Westward
expansion of Canadian “civilisation” was a national crusade of Biblical
proportions. Methodists, like Woodsworth, with their blessed rage for Social
Gospel progress, took themselves and their godly mission far too seriously.
“[I]n concert with other Protestants, Methodists were the self-appointed
guardians of Protestant Christian values in society,” said Emery. “[T]hey
assumed that the perpetuation of Protestantism was vital to the nation-building
process.”21 As prominent Presbyterian Social Gospeller Rev.Charles Gordon
proclaimed in 1909, “it is the Christian Church ...more than all other forces
put together, that has to do with the making of a nation.”22
The
Methodist Church, Emery wrote, also exhibited “an aggressive nationalism” that
“opposed the penetration of the west by rival cultures from French Canada and
Europe.” The church fought hard for English-language public
schools because it was preoccupied with assimilating Francophones and other
nonAnglo aliens. Methodists also created missions to “Protestantize the
Europeans.”23 These were tasked with assimilating east Europeans, mostly
Ukrainians, in the so-called “Austrian Missions” of northern Alberta, and
Winnipeg’s All People’s Mission24 where Woodsworth worked (1908-1913).
Nation-Building Myths
The
role of religious narratives in Canada’s nation-building experiment is explored
by Douglas Francis and Chris Kitzan. In The Prairie West as Promised Land,
they show how Biblical illusions were used to express and structure the
narrative myths of Anglo settlers. The “Promised-Land” image that they
fabricated “became the dominant perception of the region during the
formative years,” from 1850 to WWI.25
Francis and Kitzen see
three main versions of the Christian mythology that captured Canadian settlers’
imagination:
(1) The
“myth pictured the Prairie West as an Edenic paradise” that was “flowing with
milk and honey,”
(2)
“Social gospellers believed that the Prairie West was destined to be a New
Jerusalem,” where “virtuous and morally upright” settlers could establish their
“Kingdom of God on Earth,” and
(3) The
prairies were a “land of opportunity” “free of the limitations of privilege and
traditions that hampered advancement.” They saw it “as a tabula rasa—a
blank sheet—upon which each individual could write his or her own destiny of
success, wealth and happiness.”26
Trapping Natives & Nativists
But all was not perfect in
the Social Gospel paradise, especially for Aboriginals. While building a “New
Jerusalem” paved the way for Christianity to be writ large across the “empty”
prairies, it was a death knell for First Nations. Long before AngloProtestants
turned their bigotry against east Europeans in WWI, they had pegged Indians as
the needy targets of uplift. Penned as a primitive savages and heathens,
Aboriginals were the first nations to be forced into mass captivity by Canadian
settlers.
From the first visits of
Europeans to what they came to call Canada, Indigenous people had been
kidnapped, enslaved and converted. European monarchs and their churches
authorised imperial agents to conquer and control the human and natural
resources of the new-found lands. Forced to relocate their communities,
confined to reservations, coerced into residential schools and bound by the
Indian Act, Aboriginal people have been held physically, socially and legally
captive throughout Canadian history.
But
members of Canada’s
captor society were also held hostage. Trapped within the narrow-minded confines
of a racist worldview, many settlers were bound by the nativism that riddled
Canada’s largest religious, economic and political bodies. Among the leading
advocates of this xenophobia were the Social Gospel’s top, influence pedlars.
Their bigotry against Indians was as boundless as the prairie sky. Thus
shackled, Social Gospellers mounted no resistance to
Canada’s
genocide of Aboriginals. They saw no need.
In
fact, these progressives were bound and determined to administer the very
injustices that they should have been protesting. Brimming with good
intentions, many well-meaning souls stepped forward to clear the path toward
what they saw as heaven on earth. But instead, they forged a genocidal road to
hell for all Indigenous peoples standing in their way.
By the
late 1800s, Canada’s
crusade to expand Britain’s imperial vision across the prairies, was in full
swing. To implement this plunderous policy, which dispossessed Indians of their
land, Canadian authorities imposed severe restrictions on Aboriginal mobility
and culture. Churches and state institutions united to impose genocidal programs
of physical captivity and cultural assimilation that could only succeed with the
willing participation of many, well-intentioned Canadians.
Bound by Legal Fictions
The
ludicrous idea that western Canada was an empty slate, devoid of humanity, was a
restatement of the ancient “Discovery Doctrine.” For 400 years, this legal
fiction justified the genocidal conquest of the Americas for the profit of
European monarchs and Church authorities.
The
Discovery Doctrine was grounded in a much older legal fiction, called terra
nullius. Originally used by lawyers in ancient Rome, this Latin legalese
refers to empty, barren or vacant territory belonging to no one. During the “Age
of Discovery,” the Catholic Church redefined terra nullius to encompass
new lands coveted by European monarchs. As the Manitoba Justice Inquiry, noted:
“terra
nullius was expanded…to include any area devoid of ‘civilized’ society. In
order to reflect colonial desires, the New World was said by some courts to fall
within this expanded definition.”27
Stretching this term’s boundaries began a litany of new crimes to enclose and
capture Aboriginals. This framing of Indigenous peoples was aptly described by
Canada’s Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, as a “restrictive
constitutional circle drawn around First Nations by the governance sections of
the Indian Act.”28
Imprisoned on Reserves
Erased
from the metaphoric map, like chalk dust from the supposed tabula rasa of
the prairies, Aboriginals were swept off the land in an ethnic-cleansing
campaign that confined them to reserves. These were Canada’s first POW
concentration camps. Corralling Indians into captivity kept them out of the way
of European settlers who were then being poured into the prairies.
As
James Daschuk said in Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation,
and the Loss of Aboriginal Life: “Reserves became centres of incarceration
as the infamous ‘pass system’ was imposed to control movements of the treaty
population.” And, as Sir John A.MacDonald told Parliament, we “are doing all
that we can by refusing food until the Indians are on the verge of starvation,
to reduce the expense.”29
More
than a century later, the Canadian government finally admitted:
“
"The notorious pass system was never part of the formal Indian Act regime. It
began as a result of informal discussions among government officials in the
early 1880s in response to the threat that prairie Indians might forge a
pan-Indian alliance against Canadian authorities. Designed to prevent Indians on
the prairies from leaving their reserves, its immediate goal was to inhibit
their mobility. Under the system, Indians were permitted to leave their reserves
only if they had a written pass from the local Indian agent.”30
To the
Mounties, the blatant illegality of enforcing mass internment was irrelevant.
Under the Indian Act, Indians were not even allowed to hire lawyers to challenge
the Canadian government’s crimes.
Besides using the “Pass System” to arrest Indians caught “off the reservation,”
Mounties also jailed them for trespassing and for vagrancy. This was appreciated
by leading Methodist Social Gospellers like J.S.Woodsworth. In Strangers
Within Our Gates (1909), he used a five-page quotation from L.M.Fortier,
Chief Clerk of Canada’s
Immigration Department. Speaking of the Mounties, he said: “Colonizing the
North-West would be a very different matter without the aid of this splendid
organization.” Using his racist wit to lump together crooks with all Indians
found guilty of being “off reserve,” Fortier said Canada’s Mounties kept a
“sharp lookout” for “smugglers, horse thieves, criminals, wandering Indians, and
such like gentry.”31
Although racism was the norm in Woodsworth’s circles, it was opposed by
radicals, not just with words but with actions. In 1906, when local 526 of the
anarchosocialist Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) was formed in Vancouver,
it was led by Squamish First Nation activists. Though mostly Indigenous, this
Lumber Handlers’ union also had Chinese, Hawaiian, Anglo and Chilean members.32
Capitalism and religion were under attack by atheist radicals like Jack London.
In The Iron Heel, published one year before Woodsworth’s xenophobic
tract, London’s hero was Ernest Everhard. In arguing with a well-meaning but
naive Bishop, he said the “Indian is not so brutal and savage as the capitalist
class” and noted “The Church condones the frightful brutality and savagery with
which the capitalist class treats the working class.”
London
also quoted Presbyterian, Baptist and Methodist leaders to prove the “Church’s
outspoken defense of chattel slavery.”33
London was influenced by US Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs,34 an
atheist cofounder of the IWW. He compared the state’s control of unions with
their control of Indians. Capitalists, he said in 1906, tolerated organised
labour
“so
long, only, as it keeps within ‘proper bounds,’ but ... put [it] down summarily
the moment its members, like the remnants of Indian tribes on the western
plains, venture beyond the limits of their reservations.”35
By
keeping Indians within their “proper bounds,” Canada’s pass system contributed
to genocide on every level: physical, economic, religious, social, psychological
and political. Confinement to reserves cut off access to food and other
resources, blocked trade and commerce, stopped travel to religious and social
events, prevented the building of alliances, and stopped parents from visiting
children kidnapped and held in government-financed, church-run residential
schools.
Penned in by Education
Residential schools were seen as essential to progress. To Social-Gospel
reformers on the cutting edge of Canada’s western frontier, the “Three Cs” were
the key to teaching Indians about the culture of their superiours. As UBC
Political Science professor Barbara Arneil has said, the “driving force” behind
this education was “to foster ‘civic virtue,’ to ‘morally uplift,’ and to build
‘civilization’ through the progressive vehicle of education and the social
gospel.”36 (Emphasis added.)
While
the government and its religious agents sometimes differed on how to impose the
“Three Cs,” they collaborated well. John MacLean, a Methodist missionary in
Alberta, who became a public school inspector,37 wrote in 1899 that the
government wanted residential schools to “teach the Indians first to work and
then to pray.” MacLean however said missionaries wanted to “christianize first
and then civilize.”38 Either way, the Three-C process was genocide. While First
Nations were dispossessed of land and culture, Canada succeeded in expanding the
boundaries of the British empire. To political, economic and religious elites, it was a
win-win-win solution to the “Indian problem” that they saw as a major obstacle
to “progress.”
Whatever their differences, church and state agreed on the value of residential
schools in destroying the symbolic core of Aboriginal cultures, their languages.
MacLean became the Methodist
Church’s chief archivist and chief librarian at the Social Gospel’s Wesley
College in Winnipeg (1922-1928). (See p.26.) He said that: “It is the desire of
the Government and the missionaries that the English language should become the
only medium of communication.”39 In Canadian Savage Folk (1896),
MacLean further remarked that:
“There
can be no legitimate method of stamping out the native language except by a wise
policy of teaching English in the schools, and allowing the Indian tongue to die
out.”40
Canada’s
religious schools for Indians were a major weapon in the all-out war to
exterminate Aboriginal cultures. During the 1880s, Canada engineered a “Perfect
Storm” to wash the prairies clean of First Nations and to usher in a golden age
for European settlers. As the government’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission
noted in 2012:
“From
1883 onward, the federal government began funding a growing number of industrial
schools in the Canadian West. It also continued to provide regular funding to
the church-run boarding schools. The residential system grew with the country.
As Euro-Canadians settled the prairies, BC, and the North, increasing numbers of
Aboriginal children were placed in residential schools.”41
In
1884, after a report contracted by Sir John A.MacDonald, Canada began pouring
money into the Churches’ existing program of residential schools. The report,
written by Nicholas F.Davin, a poet/playwright/lawyer and newspaperman-cum-Tory
MP, urged the Canadian government to copy the assimilation plan of the US
government’s euphemistically-named “Peace Commission.” He said this US program,
“known as...‘Aggressive Civilization,” had been “amply tested” since 1869. Its
“principal feature,” he said, was the “industrial school.” The “chief thing to
attend to in dealing with the less civilized or wholly barbarous tribes,” Davin
said, “was to separate the children from the parents.”42
Another feature of “Aggressive Civilization” was the concentration and
confinement of Indians. As Davin said, “the Indians should, as far as
practicable, be consolidated on few reservations.” Canada’s Aboriginal policies
were soon dominated by mass captivity, both physically on reserves, and
culturally by church schools. Christianity was absolutely central to the
genocidal plan. Europeans, said Davin, were “civilized races whose whole
civilization…is based on religion.” Praising their “patient heroism,” he said
the “first and greatest stone in the foundation of the quasi-civilization of the
Indians ...was laid by missionaries.” Davin extolled their schools as “monuments
of religious zeal and heroic self-sacrifice.”43
After
Davin’s report on “Aggressive Civilization,” the state boosted funding to
church-run Indian schools in the western Canada from $962 in 1877, to $53,000 in
1886, and $226,000 in 1906.44 (In 2015 figures, this was $39,000, $2 million
and $5.4 million, respectively.) These church schools were cheap yet effective
bricks in the apartheid wall that kept Aboriginals out of the “Peaceable
Kingdom.”
Davin
may not have identified himself a Social Gospeller, but he did have a
“progressive” side. In 1895, he introducing a bill to allow women (white ones,
at least) to vote. Although unsuccessful, Davin’s bill sparked the only
full-fledged Commons’ debate on (white) women’s suffrage between the 1880s and
WWI.45
Davin
was influenced by his lover Kate Hayes, with whom he had a long affair and two
children. Like other Social Go-spellers in the “social purity” movement, Hayes
used religion, class and ethnicity to belittle others. She believed, said York
professor Kym Bird, that “non-Anglo-Canadians were a godless impure breed that
required assimilation and civilization into middle-class Anglo-Canadian
values.”46
These
“Canadian values” taught citizens not only to ignore the genocide of residential
schools, but to see them as proof of the Church’s benevolence towards godless
savages. But, as David Langtry, the Acting Chief Commissioner of the Canadian
Human Rights Commission stated:
“Wilful
blindness to the horrors of the schools was government policy. Dr. Peter Bryce,
hired by the...government in 1907 to report on health conditions at residential
schools in western Canada, found that in Alberta the mortality rate was a
staggering 50%.
“Ottawa’s
response was to fire Bryce, abolish the position, stop reporting and repress the
facts. Shortly afterwards, it became mandatory for all Aboriginal children to
attend residential schools.”47
Bryce
is now being celebrated by progressive Canadians for exposing the negligent, if
not deliberate, spread of TB through the schools. However, this narrative turns
a blind eye to Bryce’s overt support for cultural genocide. The “wandering bands
of Indians would still have been savages,” said Bryce in 1907, “had it not been
for the heroic devotion of those missionaries.” His report also stated that the
“story” of Canada did not sufficiently credit Europeans for “transforming the
Indian aborigines into members of a civilized society and loyal subjects of the
King.”48
Occupied and Preoccupied
First
Nations were defrauded in one of the largest land grabs in the history of
imperial civilisation. Central to this Canadian success story was a
social-engineering scheme that imposed severe limits on Aboriginal mobility,
while promoting a massive influx of European immigrants.
Newcomers, including many east Europeans, were shifted onto the prairie playing
field like so many little pawns in the “Great Game” of empire. This achieved
Canada’s nation-building goals by:
Members of Canada’s
mainstream society aided and abetted not only the genocide of Indigenous peoples
but the rapid assimilation of nonAngloSaxons. But because good, decent,
ordinary people do not generally want to collaborate in callous anti-social
enterprises, the nefarious nature of
Canada’s
imperial project had to be kept hidden. Canadians had to be convinced that their
grand national project was not only morally justified, but essential to human
progress. The narratives that evolved to rationalise and cover up Canadian
crimes, relied on the entitled sense of superiority that preoccupied
AngloProtestant thinking.
Canada’s
nation-building myths were built on the firm bedrock of religious and political
delusions. The self-image that possessed the prevailing public mindset was of a
new nation, rich not only in “Christian values” but in Britain’s hallowed,
constitutional monarchy. Accepting this mirage required a studied ignorance of
imperialism. Besides turning a blind eye to the empire’s many wars, believing in
the fictive Peaceable
Kingdom
meant blissfully ignoring the savage treatment of Indians and Canada’s
slave-like exploitation of aliens, especially nonAngloSaxons.
Out of Sight, Out of [One’s] Mind
Behind
the rich, dream-like mirage of a Heaven-on-Earth paradise that the
AngloProtestant mainstream believed they were creating in Canada, there lurked
the reality of a living hell for First Nations. Although reserves were places
of captivity, torment, deprivation and starvation, this truth was largely hidden
from mainstream Canadian consciousness. Being geographically removed from the
dominant settler society, reserves—and those trapped on them—were easy to
ignore. Other than Mounties, missionaries, and other agents of government, few
from the AngloProtestant community ever visited reservations.
So,
keeping Aboriginals confined to reserves not only facilitated European
occupation, it also swept natives under a mental rug. Keeping Indians hidden—out
of both sight and mind—helped settlers to avoid unsettling qualms of conscience.
Just seeing the living conditions of those forced onto reserves, let
alone hearing their disturbing narratives of genocide, might have upset
some settler’s blind faith in the powerful national mythology that building
Canada was a God-inspired enterprise.
Hiding
Indians on reserves shielded European settlers from the mental dis-ease that
might arise if they realised their complicity, witting or not, in Canadian
crimes against humanity. Cognitive dissonance was also avoided by non-physical
means. The physical boundary lines drawn around reserves were not as
effective in segregating Aboriginals from European settlers’ as the
storylines of superiority that separated Indians from mainstream Canada.
The official narratives of church and state created virtually insurmountable
walls of apartheid between the cultural worlds inhabited by Canada’s two main
solitudes.
First
Nations have also been held in place with linguistic weapons. Canada’s religious
and political institutions not only penned Aboriginals in place with such slurs
as “primitives,” “heathens” and “savages,” they also framed them as “strangers”
within the “Peaceable Kingdom.”
Old Narratives, New Enemies
Canada’s
largest political and religious institutions developed effective myths and
narratives to rationalise their use of structural violence against Indigenous
peoples. During the 20th century, lessons learned from the physical, social and
legal segregation of Aboriginals—and the old narratives that had evolved to
justify these diverse forms of mass captivity—were put to use against a whole
new set of enemies. With WWI and the Russian Revolution, east Europeans and
particularly “Reds” soon replaced the “Red Man” as the chosen enemy of both
church and state. New wine was placed in old bottles.
Although the “foreign”
enemy had changed, symptoms of Canada’s Settler Syndrome—that mass hysteria
which possessed mainstream AngloProtestant culture —remained intact. The racist
and xenophobic belief systems that permeated the country’s leading institutions
continued unscathed, as did the popular narratives and myths of Canadian
exceptionalism.
While the vivid, social
pathology of Canadian narcissism continued to capture the imagination of
Conservative- and Liberal-Party elites, it was also the norm within Social
Gospel circles. Even those heroic trendsetters on the vanguard of this reformist
Christian movement, like Rev. J.S.Woodsworth, were shackled and enslaved by
Canada’s national delusion.
Canada’s dominant culture believed it was their noble mission to civilise and
Christianise those seen as their inferiors. Citizens on the right, left and
centre all believed that they could not stand idly by while
Canada was besieged by Indians, east Europeans,
“Reds” or other “foreign” threats to the national good. Enslaved by narratives
of “Christian values” and west European superiority, captives of the so-called
“Peaceable Kingdom” suspended their disbelief in
Canada’s fictive myths. In doing so they were able to keep calm and carry on
imposing the audacious felonies of their self-righteous imperium.
References/Notes
17. Ibid.
18. J.S.Woodsworth,
Strangers Within Our Gates, 1909, p.194.
http://archive.org/details/strangerswithino00wooduoft
19. Rev.Thompson Ferrier,
“Indian Education in the North West,” 1906, p.40.
http://archive.org/details/indianeducationi00ferruoft
20. R.Whittington, “The
British Columbia Indian and his Future,” 1906, p.7.
21. Emery 1970, Op. cit.,
p.11.
23. Emery 1970, Op. cit.,
p.iii.
48. Bryce, Op. cit., p.7.
