Conrad Black has been found dead in his rented Toronto home. Due to a decade-long slide into relative penury, and the impending demise of his vanity project, the National Post, his death is of little importance to Canadians. However, it will be solemnly marked by two groups of people. The first group is Canada’s media, which, broken and cowed by Black in his prime, continued to give free rein to the embodiment of pomposity to make a fool of himself. The second group is Indigenous people — Inuit, First Nations, and Métis — who had been at the receiving end of his addled rantings for the last decade.
It is impossible for Canada’s media to ignore Black’s failures and his fall from a position at the edge of power. Even a fawning press cannot divorce the picture of Black in his Bay Street days, clad in a double-breasted suit, from the picture of Black as Florida inmate number 18330-424, shedding that suit to present his posterior for the search which is a mandatory component of prison induction.
Canadaland: Joseph Boyden Won’t Find Indigenous Identity In A Test Tube Of Spit
In anticipation of a fall book tour for his new novel, Seven Matches, Joseph Boyden is back in the pages of Maclean’s magazine with an article restating his claim of First Nations ancestry, and anchoring that in the results of a DNA test.
Boyden’s ancestry first came into question late last year when I, along with APTN and a number of other Indigenous activists, questioned Boyden’s right to speak on our behalf. We looked at his shifting claims of ancestry — covered here on CANADALAND — and his misuse of basic First Nations concepts like being “two-spirit,” and we presented the questions to the public for them to decide.
Broadly speaking — though with many notable exceptions — Indigenous people on social media took the position that he was not Indigenous. And broadly speaking, non-Natives, especially those in the media, claimed that he was, and that we had no right as Indigenous people to determine who belonged to our communities.
The Walrus: Where Is Our Nation-to-Nation Relationship, Mr. Trudeau?
No federal candidate raised First Nations expectations and hopes more than Justin Trudeau did in 2015. While other politicians had addressed our issues at leadership debates, or in parliament, Trudeau seemed to go out of his way to connect with Indigenous people and to make our issues central to his campaign. When Attawapiskat leader Teresa Spence was asking to meet Stephen Harper during her 2013 hunger strike over the housing crisis on her reserve, it was Trudeau who visited her. When he took the leadership of the Liberal Party later that year, he cited the Idle No More movement as inspiration.
His connection to Indigenous peoples appeared to go beyond symbolism. In an APTN town hall, he promised us a veto over resource development. To the Assembly of First Nations he promised a new nation-to-nation relationship. He promised to end the boil water advisories in five years. He promised to launch an inquiry into the 1,200-plus Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. He promised us equal funding for education. He also promised to implement all ninety-four recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
The Walrus: Canada’s National Parks are Colonial Crime Scenes
Vancouver Stanley Park—a place known for its dense forests and primeval atmosphere—was, as recently as 150 years ago, home to Squamish villages. People lived there for thousands of years. On the eastern edge of the park, facing downtown, there is a little island known to the Squamish as “skwtsa7s.” Salish oral histories record that the island was the site of a siege, one that ended with a sacrifice described here by Pauline Johnson in her Legends of Vancouver:
Out before a long file of southern warriors they stood. Their chins uplifted, their eyes defiant, their breasts bared. Each leaned forward and laid his weapons at his feet, then stood erect, with empty hands, and laughed forth his challenge to death. A thousand arrows ripped the air, two hundred gallant northern throats flung forth a death cry exultant, triumphant as conquering kings—then two hundred fearless northern hearts ceased to beat.
Globe and Mail: Sir John A. doesn’t need a school to be remembered. He lives on in Indigenous pain
At their recent conference, the Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario passed a motion calling for a debate to be opened over the renaming of schools named after Canada’s first Prime Minister, Sir John A. Macdonald. The motion states that this should be done “in recognition of his central role as the architect of genocide against Indigenous peoples.”
Few Indigenous people would oppose this motion in principle – the consensus is that Sir John A. Macdonald’s name shouldn’t be on anything other than his tombstone. However, in our communities, few people are discussing this issue, nor do we see it as a priority when looking at decolonizing the public school system.
Ontario’s public schools makes frequent appearances in the Indigenous press. Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen stories on the slow implementation of recommendations made by the inquiry investigating the death of seven First Nations youth in Thunder Bay; and we’ve seen the grieving family of Barbara Kentner, the First Nations victim in what I believe to be a racially motivated killing, forced to flee their homes because of threats made against their children at school.
CBC: Canada Wasn’t and Isn’t Ready for an Indigenous Governor General
Sure, an Indigenous governor general would be a symbol, but primarily one to non-Natives — to white Canada — and a dangerous one that could derail reconciliation, at that.
Canada might receive its first Indigenous governor general in much the same way that the U.S. received its first black president. When Barack Obama was elected back in 2008, the message to American people of colour was that change was possible and that we’re powerful enough to elect one of our own: a person who knows our struggles and our ambitions, and who can help to pave the way for others.
But while a symbol of hope and change to black America, Obama was also a symbol to many in white America that racism had been conquered. In a 2008 Forbes Magazine article entitled “Racism in America is Over,” Manhattan Institute fellow John McWhorter wrote: “Our proper concern is not whether racism still exists, but whether it remains a serious problem. The election of Obama proved, as nothing else could have, that it no longer does.”
National Post: The Great Indigenous and French Rebels Who Made Canada
The bilingual, bi-national federal state that turns 150 this year wasn’t the preference of Canadian founders like Sir John A. Macdonald. He and others wanted a unitary state, one that wouldn’t be at risk of falling into sectionalism and civil war, as was then happening in the United States.
But the country that we have today was a compromise—between Macdonald’s vision and that of the rebels who had overturned the existing order in the colonies.
A rebellion by a French minority helped shape the country into something very different than what Macdonald had in mind. Today, Canada’s Indigenous minority are playing a similar role, pushing the country beyond the structures put in place at the time of Confederation, and making space for a third founding nation.
Thirty years before Confederation, the colonies that would become Canada were thrown into turmoil by the 1837 Patriote Rebellion. The most important battle of the rebellion was fought in the village of Saint Eustache, in what is today Quebec. There, a militia of 200 French-speaking farmers made their last stand against 1200 heavily armed and well-trained British soldiers. By dawn, the Patriotes’ defeat was absolute.
