Table of Contents
- Lakehead University Philosophy Professor Sandra Tomsons negatively critiques There Is No Difference, in which scholarly paper Professor Tomsons states, amongst other very stimulating and thought–provoking statements, that “Canada is an illegitimate nation on Turtle Island.”
- The Novelist Anthony Trollope as a Guide and Moral Support for an Unpopular Political Argument.
- Book review of Tanya Talaga’s overrated Seven Fallen Feathers.
- Book review of Frances Widdowson’s very worthwhile Separate but Unequal- How Parallelist Ideology Conceals Indigenous Dependency.
- Book review of Harold R. Johnson’s useful but angry, unjustified and impractical Peace and Good Order- The Case for Indigenous Justice in Canada.
- Book Review of Pamela Palmator’s Indigenous Nationhood-Empowering Grassroots Citizens
- What Can Harold Cardinal’s The Unjust Society Tell Us About the Indigenous Situation in Canada Today?
- Book review of Unreconciled– By Jesse Wente – Through A Glass Darkly and 90% Empty.
- Book Review of Permanent Astonishment – By Tomson Highway – Positive and Universal.
- Reflections on Reflections: The Relevance of the Writings of Edmund Burke to the Passage, Interpretation and Implementation of Section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982
- How the Wisdom in the Writings of the Novelist George Eliot Can Inform Views of the Indigenous Situation in Canada
- A Distant Canadian Mirror- The Indians of Canada, Written in 1889 by John McLean: Christian Missionary, Philologist and Ethnologist
- Frontier Center for Public Policy version of A Distant Canadian Mirror
- Canadian Academia’s Betrayal and Abandonment of Historical Scholarship Relating to Aboriginal Peoples in Favour of Present-Purposed, False-Narrative Propaganda- Academia’s Betrayal of Aboriginal Peoples Themselves- A Case Study.
- Canada’s New Destructive Ism: “Reconciliationism”: The movement to reverse history, divide Canadians and destroy Canada. True Reconciliation-How to Be a Force for Change, by Jody Wilson-Raybould, McLelland & Stewart, 2022
- Namwayat- A Pathway to Reconciliation, by Chief Robert Joseph, Raincoast Books, 2022
- The Hypocrisy, Wrongheadedness and Tragedy (for Canada) of the Talented Chief Clarence Louis, McLelland & Stewart, 2021
- A Defence of the Decency and Good Faith of the Anti-Segregationist, Treaty-Honouring Duncan Campbell Scott, Canadian Civil Servant, (by way of a book review of A Narrow Vision- Duncan Campbell Scott and the Administration of Indian Affairs in Canada)
- The book Grave Error Exposes the Betrayal of Canadians by Their Elite Classes
- Following the Canadian Heritage-Belittling Crowd – A Review of Conversations With a Dead Man – Indigenous Rights and the Legacy of Duncan Campbell Scott, written by Mark Abley
- Historian Robert Kaplan’s Loom of Time Warns Canada to Abandon the UNDRIP Action Plan
- Frontier Centre for Public Policy’s edited version of Loom of Time article, posted July 9, 2024
- Lakehead University Philosophy Professor, Sandra Tomsons, in her most stimulating December, 2021 scholarly paper entitled Seeing Differences Differently: Peter Best and Morally Relevant Differences, negatively critiques, but in admirable and high-minded tone and substance, There Is No Difference.
https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/csspe/vol7/1/2/
2.
The Novelist Anthony Trollope as a Guide and Moral Support for an Unpopular Political Argument.
I wrote and self-published a book, There Is No Difference, an argument based on the Enlightenment principle of equality under the law- an argument that is seemingly and strangely forbidden entry into the Canadian marketplace of ideas- for the repeal of all laws underlying the existence of Indian reserves and all other special rights and privileges possessed by Canada’s Aboriginal peoples, and for the completion of what I regard as the already well under way process of the social and economic assimilation of Canadian Aboriginals into the mainstream of modern, urban, 21st century Canada. Follow the link below to see what the heck this has to do with the amazing, brilliant, insightful, super-prolific English novelist Anthony Trollope.
3.
Book Review- A Criticism of Tanya Talaga’s Seven Fallen Feathers
In chapter 12 of There Is No Difference, entitled The Essential Humanity of the Migrators to Canada, I defend our Canadian ancestors, and decry the modern literary and cultural bien pensants’ tendency to casually and offensively stereotype present-day non-Indigenous Canadians and our non-Indigenous ancestors as “colonialist”, land-stealing, (and worse) racists. I review four books by prominent, modern-day Canadians whose books epitomize this Euro-Canadian culturally self-denigrating-self-castigating trend to falsely portray modern and ancestral non-Indigenous Canadians in such shallow, cartoonish, offensive and racially stereotypical ways. These basically anti-Euro-Canadian-culture books, all lauded but vastly over-rated, are Thomas King’s The Inconvenient Indian, the late Richard Wagamese’s Indian Horse, John Ralston Saul’s The Comeback, and Bob Rae’s What Happened to Politics. Since my book was published Tanya Talaga’s Seven Fallen Feathers came out, continuing this dreadful trend on the part of our cultural elites to completely abandon their critical faculties and fall all over themselves, mainly because of the Indigenous subject matter, to celebrate and extol harmful, victimhood-obsessive, racially-stereotyping, high-on-sanctimony but low-on-mature-intellectual-quotient works. Ms. Talaga, a fly-in Indigenous supporter who lives and works in Toronto, who is mainly “white” but, veering close to Pretendianism, presents herself as fully Indgenous, lets the reader know early on that all the heart-breaking Thunder Bay tragedies suffered by the subjects of her book are all the fault of “the whiteface, who wears button-down shirts, eats at the Keg, and lives in a cookie-cutter house in a brand new subdivision with a Kia parked in the driveway.” (What a dehumanizing, racist stereotype! The exact thing she decries in her book!) The book continues at this juvenile, racially insulting, cartoonish and divisive level to its reality-avoiding conclusion, which is boiled down to… “Just send us more money so we can organize more “programs”!” (Not one mention throughout the book that it’s the very existence of the reserve system, that is not amenable to improvement by means of more money and programs, that is the fundamental cause of the tragedies so well-described in her book.)
4.
Book Review of Professor France Widdowson’s excellent new book Separate But Unequal- How Parallelist Ideology Conceals Indigenous Dependency
Frances Widdowson was one of the first writers in Canada to, in her and her husband Albert Howard’s book, Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry-The Deception Behind Indigenous Cultural Industry, point out that “the Emperor has no clothes” with regard to many aspects of the Indian Industry. It was a brave book. She took a lot of ad hominem heat for it, but as far as I know it stands unrefuted. A review of her excellent follow up book is immediately below. My only complaint about it is that its recommendations don’t go far enough- don’t logically follow from her excellent and scholarly analysis of the hopeless and near-fraudulent Indigenous status quo. A prime example of the revolt against reason and against free and open debate and enquiry now happening at our liberal arts universities, this courageous, serious and principled scholar was wrongfully dismissed by Mount Royal University in December of 2021.
Book Review of Separate But Unequal, by Frances Widdowson
5.
Book Review of Harold R. Johnson’s Peace and Good Order- The Case for Indigenous Justice in Canada
Harold R. Johnson was a criminal lawyer in Saskatchewan who, over a 20 year career, acted as both prosecutor and defense counsel. He was on the front lines of the collision between Indigenous reserve wrongdoers and the criminal justice system. In his former book, Firewater, he ascribed the major cause of this tragic, ever-repeating collision to alcohol addiction. It was a very useful. eye-opening, searing description of the scourge of alcohol on reserves. In Peace and Good Order he repeats this description, (confirming my view that the reserves, for the sake of saving lives, have to be eventually done away with), and offers as a very unreal solution to all this tragedy the establishment of a separate Indigenous justice system. The presentation of the evidence is excellent but the arguments that this obviously good man makes based on the evidence, tragically for Indigenous peoples, constitute fantasy-thinking.
Book Review of Peace and Good Order- The Case for Indigenous Justice in Canada
Book Review of Pamela Palmater’s Indigenous Nationhood- Empowering Grassroots Citizens
Ms. Palmater, another urban near-Pretendian, is an associate professor and “Chair in Indigenous Governance” at Ryerson University, now shamefully renamed the more Stalinist-sounding, “Toronto Metropolitan University”. Her book, reviewed here, is a fairly nasty screed against her fellow Canadians, whom she accuses of being racist in all sorts of ways, (notwithstanding that, personally, she seems to be doing very well by us). The contents of this book are interesting but a bit much to take at times, especially knowing that we, the Canadian taxpayers, (federal, Manitoba and Nova Scotia) paid for its publication. We can’t be all bad if we contribute towards the cost of our own character assassination! In my book, There Is No Difference I have chapters called Devolving Control of Education to Indians, A “First Nations” Education, and The Academic Gyp of “Identity Studies. Ms. Palmater’s book bears out much of what I wrote there about the dreadful decline of professional standards in Academia.
7.
What Can Harold Cardinal’s The Unjust Society Tell Us About the Indigenous Situation in Canada Today?
Indigenous elites were really upset when Pierre Trudeau introduced his White Paper in 1969, recommending what There Is No Difference argues for: the phasing out of the reserves and, over time, making Indigenous peoples equal under the law with all the rest of Canadians. They clamoured successfully to retain their Indian Act legal wardship status, and thus to stay bound by their golden chains. (Freedom is just another word for…adult status responsibility.) This Indigenous anger found voice in Harold Cardinal’s Indigenous rights book, The Unjust Society, published the same year. This book was a wish list of everything Mr. Cardinal said would, if granted, solve all Indigenous social and economic problems. Over the past 50 years most of Mr. Cardinal’s wishes for his people, as set out in The Unjust Society have been granted. So how has that worked out?
Harold Cardinal – The Unjust Society
8.
There are negative forces in the human psyche “forever in collision with beauty, virtue and the gentle uses of life.” (George Eliot) We all have to wage a daily fight against these forces. Like Ms. Talaga and Ms. Palmater, Mr. Wente, another totally urban, 100% Canadian taxpayer dependent, three quarters “white”, but acting like a “full-blood Native”, (and thus almost a total Pretendian), doesn’t even try to do this in his biography Unreconciled, a harsh, wretched and dark screed against his country and his fellow Canadians, at least those Canadians unfortunate enough to be born “white.”
Unreconciled– By Jesse Wente – Through A Glass Darkly and 90% Empty
9.
On the other hand, Tomson Highway, in his biography, having had a much tougher and more challenging childhood than Mr. Wente, personifies man’s better angels aspirations and inclinations towards beauty, virtue and the gentle uses of life- towards, not the darkness, but the light.
Permanent Astonishment – By Tomson Highway – Positive and Universal
Abbreviated version of this book review published by Frontier Centre for Public Policy, January 4th, 2022
https://fcpp.org/2022/01/04/perpetual-astonishment-showing-a-way-forward/
10.
11.
How the Wisdom in the Writings of the Novelist George Eliot Can Inform Views of the Indigenous Situation in Canada
12.
13.
Frontier Centre for Public Policy’s edited version of my review (#12 above) of John McLean’s wise and humanistic book.
https://fcpp.org/2022/12/07/1889-book-provides-a-way-forward-for-aboriginal-policy-in-canada-today/
14.
“Too many young historians enter the profession aiming at activism rather than truth…By giving in to the zeitgeist and writing lop-sided narratives in order to score social media points with activist peers, these historians feed the public’s susceptibility to sensationalism and unreason. Their books contribute to the unraveling of democratic society and the debasement of the scientific method…It is fine and good to criticize the West, but it is another thing to distort the past to such an extent that we no longer recognize the true origins of the blessings we enjoy or the institutional foundations that sustain them.” – Historian Jeffery Fynn-Paul.
” Fancy-pants post-structuralism was the ticket to ride for ambitious, beady-eyed young careerists on the make. Its coy, showy gestures and clotted lingo were insiders’ badges of claimed intellectual superiority. But the whole lot of them were mediocrities from the start. It is doubtful that much if any of their work will have long-term traction.” –Camille Paglia
“Gradually, over the next few years, I got the lay of the professional terrain I’d entered into. It was marked not only by a relentless animus against the works of the past (and the “dead white men” who wrote them), but by a constant effort to enlist them in contemporary battles; by an enthrallment with jargon, a commitment to verbal opacity, and a suspicion of clear, conversational prose; by intellectual dishonesty and flabbiness and sloppiness, all implicitly excused by the alleged rightness of the cause; by an adolescent sense of moral superiority; by a pervasive atmosphere of ideological surveillance.
But what disgusted me the most was not the intellectual corruption. It was the careerism. It was the sense that all of this—all the posturing, all the position-taking—was nothing more than a professional game. The goal was advancement, not truth. The worst mistake was to think for yourself. People said things that they obviously didn’t believe, or wouldn’t have believed if they had bothered to subject them to the test of their own experience…The whole enterprise seemed completely self-enclosed. People claimed to aim to change the world, to exert some influence outside of the academy, when it was perfectly clear that their highest ambition was tenure.” – William Deresiewicz, Why I Left Academia (Since You’re Wondering), Quillette, August 17, 2024 (italics added)
The above quotes are amply demonstrated in the below article.
15.
Canada’s New Destructive Ism: “Reconciliationism”: The movement to reverse history, divide Canadians and destroy Canada.
True Reconciliation-How to Be a Force for Change, by Jody Wilson-Raybould, McLelland & Stewart, 2022
16.
Namwayat- A Pathway to Reconciliation, by Chief Robert Joseph, Raincoast Books, 2022
17.
The Hypocrisy, Wrongheadedness and Tragedy (for Canada) of the Talented Chief Clarence Louis
18.
19.
The book Grave Error Exposes the Betrayal of Canadians by Their Elite Classes
20.
“A nation that no longer worships its great men has begun to die as a nation.” -Francois-Albert Angers
Following the Canadian Heritage-Belittling Crowd – A Review of Conversations With a Dead Man – Indigenous Rights and the Legacy of Duncan Campbell Scott, written by Mark Abley
21.
Aboriginal chiefs and other elites do not consider the idea of the Canadian state to be of fundamental importance, despite the fact that they and those they purport to serve are 100% dependent on it. Rather, for them, their primary regard and loyalty is to their own respective blood, soil and race-based folk communities -their respective “nations”- which they regard as existing apart from and in semi-opposition to the Canadian state. Their relation to the Canadian state, to them, is one of permanent, justified taking. They want to further separate from the Canadian state, while increasing this taking. For many reasons this is patently unreasonable and unworkable. And it will backfire on individual Indigenous Canadians, greatly imperiling their civic well-being.
Historian Robert Kaplan’s Loom of Time Warns Canada to Abandon the UNDRIP Action Plan
22. Frontier Centre for Public Policy’s edited version of Loom of Time article, posted July 9, 2024
