True Reconciliation-How to Be a Force for Change, by Jody Wilson-Raybould, McLelland & Stewart, 2022 (“True Reconciliation”)
In May 1633, when Champlain came back to his settlement at Quebec…a large party of Montagnais arrived in their canoes to see him. Champlain gestured at the building works, including the fort, and said, “When that great house is built, our young men will marry your daughters, and henceforth we shall be one people.[i]
Everywhere there is abstraction, abstract duty…official, rhetorical morality without any relation to practical life…a doctrinaire earnestness with excludes all forms of self-questioning. -Alexander Herzen[ii]
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One of the salient features of the 20th century was the existence of illiberal “ism” movements, like fascism, nazism, communism, marxism, and extreme forms of nationalism and socialism. These movements were all purportedly movements of “the people” but in fact were controlled by harsh-ruling alpha dictators and oligarchs. Many of these movements were based on a false and sentimental view of an illustrious past, which, as their leaders assured the faithful, the success of the movement would restore to its former glory.
They all denigrated the concepts of the sovereign individual and his individual civil liberties in favour of the “rights” and imperatives of their particular collective and its supposed higher manifest destiny. The sacrifice of civil liberties, and even of innocent lives, was a small and necessary price to pay for the collective’s greater good.
Many advocated, on the grounds that the status quo was weak, “diseased”, corrupt or otherwise expendable, the total rejection of the laws, traditions, values, faiths and institutions- the inheritance of their past- and the replacement of it with their new utopian, ‘ism” plan and worldview, to be based on the re-engineering of human souls, and carried out, as the result of this righteous rejection of the Old Order, by steely-eyed, resolute, clear-minded New Men and New Women, all led of course, if only “temporarily’, by those alpha rulers.
The inevitable results of all these “ism” movements was the rule of men instead of the rule of law, and consequent upon this, wars which killed millions, unprecedented property destruction, mass murders, genocides, forced population transfers, millions of refugees, slave labour camps, and the nihilistic rejection generally of centuries of arduous, life-enhancing moral, artistic, legal and material civilizational progress on the part of countless generations of the ancestors of the Vandal-like New Men and Women who carried out these crimes against humanity. In all these cases there was a rejection and betrayal of the positive inheritances of the past.
“Reconciliationism” is Canada’s past-renouncing, utopian “Brave New World” contribution to the new collection of de-stabilizing and dangerous “isms” building up in the twenty-first century.
It is not and will never be an evil, lethal and physically destructive ism like those that humanity suffered through in the twentieth century. It’s a minor and benign junior league ism.
But because it shares certain fundamental features with those major league isms, it deserves the name, and, because no collectivist ism movement ever ends well, Canadians should think hard on the lessons of the twentieth century and fear it.
Reconciliationism in Canada is the joint movement of the Trudeau federal government and Aboriginal leaders to end the dual Canadian federal state and replace it with a tri-level federal state, with 60-80 collectivist, Indigenous “nations” having co-equal constitutional sovereignty with the federal and provincial governments. The Canadian taxpayers would pay all the initial and ongoing costs of this new, third level of government, as they do now for all aspects of the present, more limited version of Aboriginal “nation-to-nation, self-government”.
Reconciliationism is based on the false idea that the migration of British, French and other European people to what is now Canada, and, over centuries, the mainly peaceful and collaborative establishment by them of cultural, social, economic and political dominance over the land– “colonizing” it- leading ultimately to the creation of modern Canada, was wrong and shameful. It was supposedly so because the previous control over the land exercised by the numerous Aboriginal tribes encountered and engaged with by the European migrators was eventually ended as the result of this colonization process. This, to proponents of reconciliationism, is the cardinal-sin, harmful “legacy” of colonialism- (but only the largest of many)- which must be reversed.
Reconciliationism, by ridding Canada of the alleged harmful legacies of colonialism, seeks to restore Canada’s Aboriginal “nations/peoples” to their former state of supposed political power and cultural glory. It seeks to turn back the clock of history, oblivious to the truism that all attempts to recreate the past are masquerades.
It’s a movement with the express aim of ending Canada as it now exists, and re-constituting it as an equal “partnership” amongst the federal government, the provinces, and these as-yet defined, collectivist “Indigenous nations.”
The fact that the new “partner” in this proposed new Canada is made up of “nations” whose sole “citizenship” requirement is based on race, legitimately damns reconciliationism as a benignly racist movement.
The federal government’s official endorsement of reconciliationism is contained in their official reconciliation policy statement , the Principles respecting the Government of Canada’s relationship with Indigenous Peoples, (the “Principles”), the subject of a contemporaneous companion article written by this writer, “Canada’s Plan for “Reconciliation Will Destroy Canada”. The writer adopts and incorporates this article herein and will endeavour not to repeat its more federal government -focussed contents.
Proponents of reconciliationism naively think that no constitutional amendments are required to attain their goal. Rather, they say, this goal “fulfils the promise” of section 35 of the constitution and can be attained within the parameters of existing international and domestic law.
Reconciliationism is a movement that, if successful, will destroy the remaining sovereignty of the federal and provincial governments, (already much reduced by Supreme Court judgments and supine federal laws and policies), and in so doing, amongst other things, will introduce so much more jurisdictional squabbling and resulting uncertainty into our laws- more than the harmful amount that already exists- with more paralyzing litigation, that the rule of law itself, which depends on certainty, will further erode to the extent that a legal absence- a situation of legal chaos- will occur, replicating the seed ground of moral danger and chaos that led to the tragedies of the twentieth century referred to above.
Reconciliationism is a reckless, delusional and destructive idea.
Strong government sovereignty is crucial for the maintenance of the rule of law, which is the bedrock of our property rights, our personal freedoms and of a well-functioning economic system. Reconciliationism, after chaotically fracturing, impoverishing and bankrupting the Canadian state, will destroy it.
The Aboriginal elites’ rationale for their embrace of reconciliationism, similar to the federal government’s, is set out by Jody Wilson-Raybould in her recent book, True Reconciliation- How to be a Force for Change[iii], now occupying prominent space in Canada’s bookstores.
For Ms. Wilson-Raybould, just as for the Trudeau federal government, the enemy to be “confronted”, conquered and extirpated is “colonialism” and the “tremendous harms” it has supposedly caused. She defines colonialism as “a practise based on beliefs about cultural and racial superiority, the taking of lands and resources, and the domination of some peoples by another”.
According to Ms. Wilson-Raybould, just as for all ism proponents, the accomplishment of her stated goals will require the complete re-making of Canadian society- the re-engineering of the collective Canadian psyche. Echoing Marx and Mao she writes:
What true reconciliation requires, in addition to new relationships, are changes in how society is structured and organized, how we collectively live with each other, and the way we make decisions, including about governance, economics, culture and the environment. And being an agent of true reconciliation means understanding how we all need to contribute and support these larger societal shifts through our conduct and choices in our daily lives.
If Ms. Wilson-Raybould ever got back into power and was put in a position to carry out these goals, Canadians could reasonably expect to see the establishment of mandatory re-education camps for those who fail to get with this totalitarian-leaning program.
Both Ms. Wilson-Raybould and the federal government, with a simpleton approach often veering into delusion, declare that the way to achieve reconciliation is to “decolonize” Canada.
It’s frequently noted that wrongheaded government and public policy usually emanates from highly educated and sophisticated people. Historian Robert Conquest[iv] wrote:
Real prowess in wrongheadedness, as in most other fields of human endeavor, presupposes considerable education, character, sophistication, knowledge and will to succeed…It was basically common sense that kept the mass of people in Britain and America less liable than the intelligentsia to delusion about Stalinists. As Orwell said, they were at once too sane and too “stupid” to accept the sophistical in place of the obvious. The explicit habits of mind of the public are often more sensible than the prescriptions elaborated in the minds of the intelligentsia.
These words apply all too well to Ms. Wilson-Raybould, an immensely clever and privileged Canadian.
Ms. Wilson-Raybould’s “story” (one of her favourite words in the book), needs little recitation here. It’s basically one of a fully urbanized, assimilated, middle class half-Aboriginal, (her mother is white, as is her husband), climbing to the heights of political power, with every job or position held by her along the way funded directly or indirectly by the Canadian taxpayer.
This remarkable woman epitomizes the positive reality that an Aboriginal Canadian can completely assimilate into the mainstream of modern Canadian society and, taking her many words in the book about her Aboriginal cultural purity at face value, still fully retain her racial/cultural heritage. She fully personifies the benefits of assimilation, and her “story” fully justifies and endorses the idea of it.
Unfortunately, she also personifies the demoralizing and destructive tendency of Canadian elites to attack and undermine the very societal conditions that created the foundation for their own personal success, and for the general success of Canada.
Ms. Wilson-Raybould, who unconvincingly projects herself as a hard-pressed victim of colonization and oppression, claims ancestry from the Kwakiutl people, who inhabited the northern tip of Vancouver Island. They spoke the Kwak’wala language.
She writes affectionately of being part of a hierarchical, harmonious and culturally intact Aboriginal clan community, with it’s oral “creation stories”. They’re oral because, as she says, “we emphasize the role of the spoken word rather that the written word.”
She neglects to mention that the reason for this emphasis is that pre-contact Aboriginal culture was pre-literate. Aboriginals couldn’t read or write. All they had was word of mouth as a means of communication.
Ms. Wilson-Raybould asserts that she “grew up in a fishing village on an island off the west coast of Canada”. She writes that her father is a Hereditary Chief and that accordingly, as she immodestly says, she is a “woman born to noble people” who was “raised to lead.”
The reader is given no explanation as to how she could have “grown up” in this fishing village, and how she could be such a pure product of this harmonious, near-monarchical, Aboriginal upbringing, given that, as revealed by her Wikipedia biography, her parents separated and divorced when she was a small child, and she was raised by her white mother alone, attending elementary school in Port Hardy, high school in Comox, undergrad in Victoria, and living in Vancouver for law school and her various careers after that.
This self-professed Kwakiutl princess writes of “my culture”, and how Aboriginal cultures are uniquely defined by creation stories. She tells a few in the book, which are only remarkable for their similarity to charming, child-like folk and fairy tales the world over.
She writes that when sharing creation stories is “culturally appropriate or permitted”, (not choosing to explain why it would be inappropriate or why anyone’s permission would be needed to tell a story explaining one’s culture), “Indigenous Peoples” will share them “as part of conveying who we are, how we view the world, and what values and teachings we hold.”
The creation stories she “shared” in the book reveal that Indigenous peoples are exactly the same as all people of all the ages of human time and from all places everywhere. There is no difference.
She writes:
At the core of my Kwakwaka’wakw worldview is the belief that all things are in their greatest state of well-being when there is balance. This includes balance between humans and the natural world, between genders, between groups of people, within a family or community, or in how we live and organize our own lives. Balance is viewed as the proper state of things, where conditions of harmony and justice flourish, while imbalance is what gives rise to conflict, contention and harm.
Really? There’s nothing distinct or “Indigenous” about this commonplace, commonsensical, world-wide, almost banal philosophical idea: the idea of balance. It goes back to Confucius and to Aristotle’s Golden Mean. It’s reflected in the Bible. It’s a standard self-help book concept. It’s a part of all cultures, past and present, the world over. Balance forms the basis of the Canada Food Guide and is uttered daily in every yoga and Tai Chi class in the land.
In addition to attempting and failing to elevate the Kwakwaka’wakw culturally commonplace to the profound and distinctive, Ms. Wilson Raybould neglects to inform the reader that part of the so-called “balanced” “Kwakwaka’wakw worldview” was the undemocratic practice of feudal-like, rigid social stratification, bearing similarities to the caste system in India, the formal practice of slavery, and, as was common with all Aboriginal tribes and cultures, constant, murderous, inter-tribal warfare.
For instance, in 1856 the neighbouring Nuxalt tribe, acting in a very unbalanced way, invaded the area, destroyed the main village of the Kwakiutl people, and massacred all the inhabitants. The village site was abandoned for over 30 years after that.
Diamond Jenness, in his seminal work, The Indians of Canada[v], for over 40 years the authoritative Canadian textbook on Aboriginal peoples, wrote of the Aboriginals of the Pacific Coast:
The Indians on the Pacific Coast …grouped themselves into clans and sometimes phratries. These British Columbia Indians, so far from being a democratic people, recognized three distinct grades of society, nobles, commoners, and slaves, of whom commoners made up the bulk of the population. Slaves were, generally, prisoners of war, or their children, and, although well-treated in most cases, possessed no rights of any kind. They could marry in their own class only and could be put to death at the whim of their masters. Theoretically too, commoners could marry only with commoners, and nobles with nobles; but the boundary line between these two grades was somewhat indefinite, and intermarriage not unknown.
There’s not a lot of “balance” in class and caste-like marriage prohibitions or in the institution of slavery, where even murder of slaves was culturally permitted.
Ms. Raybould-Wilson states that Canada was “constructed in ways that exclude or marginalize Indigenous worldviews”, and that part of reconciliation is to ensure that “there is recognition, support and space for Indigenous Peoples to rebuild their governing systems on their own terms, in ways that reflect their own worldviews.”
The abolition of slavery and caste-like marriage laws are “legacies of colonialism”. Is Ms. Wilson-Raybould proposing that these odious social practices, part of her Kwakiutl worldview, be encouraged and permitted to return to the “Indigenous Peoples” on the Pacific Coast of Canada? It would seem so.
Ms. Wilson-Raybould harshly criticizes past and present Canadians.
She writes:
Indigenous Peoples were left out of the founding of Canada. We were not there. We were out of sight and out of mind. Those “Founding Fathers” focused on francophones and anglophones at that time. But what about those who spoke Inuktitut, or Michif, or Cree, or any number of other Indigenous languages?… Indigenous governments-and our laws, jurisdictions, and authorities-were ignored, creating a massive and enduring obstacle for Indigenous Peoples. Indeed, not only were we, and our governments left out, but the experience of the founding of Canada was an intensification, and a deepening, of colonization and oppression.
When reading this the reader asks: What Indigenous “governments”? What “laws, jurisdictions and authorities”?
Pre-contact tribal customs and mores did not encompass any of these things. Pre-contact Aboriginals were pre-literate, generally pre-agricultural, pre-urban, paleolithic peoples. No such peoples anywhere in the world ever developed these political/legal manifestations of literate, hierarchical, urban societies.
She writes:
“Recognition” for Indigenous peoples across the country, and as a basis for true reconciliation, has meaning. It means that Indigenous peoples governed and owned the lands that now make up Canada prior to the arrival of Europeans. It means that Indigenous laws and legal orders that stewarded the lands for millennia, remain and must continue to operate in the contemporary world. It means that the title and rights of Indigenous peoples are inherent, and not dependent or contingent on court orders, agreements or government action for their existence, substance and effect. It means that treaties entered into historically must be fully implemented based on their spirit and intent, oral histories as well as texts, and consistent with the true meaning of a proper nation-to-nation and government-to-government relationship. It means that the distinct and diverse governments, laws, cultures, societies, and ways of life of First Nations, Metis and Inuit are fully respected and reflected.
For Canada, recognition means resetting our foundation to properly reconcile- to finish the unfinished business of confederation. What is more, for many Indigenous peoples, recognition is the lifeline that will ensure the survival and rebuilding of their cultures, languages, and governing systems within an even stronger Canada.
Ms. Wilson-Raybould is not an historian, and it shows throughout her book.
Aboriginal peoples did not “govern” the lands that now make up Canada. They roamed over them in small groups and devoted most of their time, when not just fighting to survive, fighting, killing, kidnapping and enslaving each other.
They did not “own” the lands that now make up Canada. Even Ms. Raybould, elsewhere in her book, (page 259), admits that “the very concept of “ownership” was foreign” to Aboriginal peoples.
Again, there were no “legal orders.” This is mythmaking pure and simple.
Aboriginal peoples did not “steward” the land, and they show no signs of doing that now. They were eager participants in the near extinction of the beaver and the buffalo. Now, as fully assimilated inheritors of the Euro-Canadian capitalist ethos, they’re as heedless and exploitive of the environment and as ambitious for power and money as the rest of us.
Contrary to Ms. Wilson-Raybould’s assertion, there’s no such thing as “inherent” rights, just as there’s no such thing as divine or natural rights. These are merely abstract, romantic, aspirational concepts. Concrete rights can only be created by a functioning state, and it’s only through the institutions and written laws of the state that they can be enforced. Pre-literate, pre-urban, paleolithic Aboriginal tribes and clans never achieved state status and so they could never create legal rights.
By arrogantly asserting that Aboriginal title and rights are “not dependent or contingent on court orders or agreements or government action for their existence, substance and effect”, Ms. Wilson-Raybould demonstrates a haughty disregard for the fact that it’s only because of “colonial” court decisions like Tsilhqot’in, (aboriginal title), and Haida Nation (the duty to consult and accommodate), and it’s only because of government actions like the Royal Proclamation of 1763 and all the treaties that resulted from it, that Aboriginal Canadians have the special race-based, constitutionally entrenched rights they now have.
(She asserts with no evidence cited that governments “systematically violated” these treaties, but in fact, the reverse is the case. It’s Aboriginals who are now “systematically violating” them.)
Overall, Ms. Wilson-Raybould shows in True Reconciliation a remarkable, Trump-like contempt for any Canadian law or any sentiment of the Canadian people that goes against her myopic, racism/oppression/inherent rights narrative. She dismisses all past attempts by Canadian courts and governments to ameliorate the legal and social situations of Aboriginal peoples as merely “performative”. This is an uncompromising, “my way or the highway” attitude that can only produce the opposite of genuine reconciliation.
She showed a similar contempt for legal traditions and precedents, and a general contempt for the legitimate interests of her employer, the Queen in right of Canada, when she was Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada. In those roles she and her boss, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, presided over a continuous, country-harming, near-treasonous surrender of Crown sovereignty in favour of any Aboriginal group which filed a lawsuit against Canada, or even threatened to file one. She was the Assembly of First Nations’ reliable and productive fox in the henhouse of Canadian Crown sovereignty.
Discerning Canadians breathed a sigh of relief when her self-entitled, political tunnel vision, her hubris, and her lack of “balance” in her relations with her government colleagues, got her fired and turfed from the Liberal caucus. (Mr. Trudeau and his government continue their sovereignty-diminishing, country-harming ways without her).
Ms. Wilson-Raybould asserts that reconciliation means that “distinct and diverse governments, laws, cultures, societies, and ways of life of First Nations, Metis and Inuit (be) fully respected and reflected”.
The reader asks: “What “distinct and diverse governments”? What “distinct societies and ways of life”? Reserve life is distinct only in the sense that reserves are the most physically dangerous and socially dysfunctional places to live in Canada. Reserve residents can’t even count on the protection of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
The Charter is a “legacy of colonialism.” Is Ms. Wilson-Raybould proposing, in line with her anti-democratic, collectivist “Indigenous worldview”, that “Indigenous Peoples” be denied the guaranteed protection of the Charter in their home communities? It would seem so.
Does Ms. Wilson-Raybould want police services, a positive legacy of colonialism, withdrawn from reserves? This would seem to follow her line of thinking. The grieving residents of the James Smith Cree Nation might beg to differ.
The abolition of hereditary, monarchy-like power in favour of democratically elected power is a positive legacy of colonialism. Is Ms. Wilson-Raybould proposing, in line with her Kwakiutl worldview, that the transfer of power and rulership, based not on democratic elections, but on gender and family blood ties, be re-instated in Aboriginal communities where those customs once prevailed? It would seem so.
Pre-contact Aboriginal culture was physically dangerous, illiberal and anti-Enlightenment. That’s the kind of world True Reconciliation proposes that Aboriginal citizens of Canada go back to.
Ms. Wilson-Raybould states that all Canadians must support efforts to “rebuild…(Indigenous) cultures, languages and governing systems”. This is pure folly. These human constructs are not susceptible to being “re-built.” They’re organic, and as such, like Latin, like all societies, like human life itself, are subject to constant change, decay and death, and once dead, they cannot be “re-built” or revived.
Ms. Wilson-Raybould writes, and it’s a big finale idea of her book, that “Canadian governments and all Canadians need to do the heavy lifting in addressing the terrible legacy of colonialism.”
This is an astonishing statement that could only by made by a spoiled, unimaginative child of privilege, who has no idea of the daily challenges facing less materially fortunate Canadians.
Modern Canadian life is a struggle for the majority of Canadians, especially our new Canadians. Most of them live in the big cities. Most of their time and effort goes into just putting food on their tables and keeping a roof over their heads. A distressingly large number of Canadians can’t even do that. Their anxious, preoccupied lives keep them mentally miles away from the narrow, elitist concerns and aspirations of well-off, pampered Aboriginal elites like Ms. Wilson-Raybould.
How could a rational person really think that ordinary Canadians, all struggling in and absorbed by the precarious exigencies of their own lives and that of their families, would want to devote the precious little personal time and energy they might have to learning about and trying to ameliorate the very debatable “harmful legacies of colonialism” allegedly suffered by mainly invisible, relatively small in number, remote, reserve-based Aboriginals, whose only public representatives- whose only “public face”- are city-based, prosperous, totally assimilated, generally sour, finger-pointing, middle-class people like Ms. Wilson-Raybould and her always complaining-never satisfied Aboriginal elite colleagues?
The impracticalities of the ideas expressed in the Principles and in True Reconciliation are staggering.
There are over 600 First Nations reserves in Canada, each one a jealously guarded, Canadian taxpayer-subsidized, tax-free fiefdom. Each one represents a sweet deal for the formidable alpha types who gain political control over them.
Canada’s Principles declare, without explanation, and Ms. Wilson-Raybould essentially confirms this, that in order to achieve reconciliation, from 60-80, collectivist “Indigenous nations” should jointly make up this new, Indigenous third order of Canadian governmental sovereignty.
How does Canada go from over 600 existing “nations” down to 60-80? What are the 60-80 proposed, new “nations”? Which First Nations bands will comprise them? Which Chiefs and Councils are prepared to give up their power? The indications so far are that none of them are.
There are dozens of obvious, relevant questions like these which come screamingly into the mind of the reader as he labours through True Reconciliation, which the serenely certain Ms. Wilson-Raybould shows no need to address.
Aboriginal leaders are burdened with a past of traditional, tribal rivalries and enmities. The Nuxalt raid referred to above is just one of countless examples of this. In this present indulgent, grievance-culture age, they have an overblown sense of their importance and entitlement. They’re spoilt by lavish taxpayer spending on them and divided amongst themselves over the allocation of it. Getting them to agree on anything is like herding cats: wildcats.
The august assemblage of Aboriginal Chiefs, the Assembly of First Nations, all well-fed and housed in Ottawa by Canadian taxpayers, are legally squabbling amongst themselves over allegedly corrupt handling of taxpayer-supplied money. The Metis are fighting amongst themselves in court over the issue of “Who is a Metis”? Again, the fight there boils down to who gets to control and dispense, and who should be race-qualified to receive, the vast sums of taxpayer money paid to them. The Inuit are refusing to support a new, proposed federal law that would create a national reconciliation oversight body, for, amongst other reasons, the fact that the law would force the Inuit “to sit with organizations that are not “rights-holders”.
All the Chiefs want the biggest piece of the government pie they can each get, and all have no interest in giving any of it up or sharing it.
These all-too typical human situations completely belie Ms. Wilson-Raybould’s Panglossian assertions of Aboriginal worldview harmony and “balance.” They reveal again that there is no difference between Aboriginals and the rest of Canadians, and that where there is essentially free money everywhere, and little to do but accuse and bluster and morally preen and posture to get it, the Aboriginal knives come out, and Bob Dylan’s line from Blind Willie McTell is proven again to be all too true: “Power and greed and corruptible seed, seem to all that there is”.
True Reconciliation parrots the historical lie that Euro-Canadians were motivated solely by feelings of racism and superiority towards Aboriginal peoples. In fact most contemporary Euro-Canadian historical accounts of Aboriginal peoples and their cultures, such as John McLean’s 1889 book, The Indians of Canada, while realistic and unapologetic about cultural differences arising from different stages of historical progress, show admiration, understanding and respect for them.
Ms. Wilson-Raybould parrots the historical lie that residential schools were institutions of “injustice and abuse” to which students were “forced to attend”. She repeats the lie that there are “mass grave sites” containing the remains of “thousands of children who never returned home”. Worse, she disgracefully leaves intact the obscene, false notion that many of them were murdered by priests and nuns.
In fact no more than one-third of Aboriginal children ever attended a residential school, and rather than being “forced to attend”, their parents had to apply for them to be admitted, two typical family examples of which are given by Aboriginal writers Jesse Wente and Tomson Highway.
True Reconciliation is based on the false assumption that “colonialism”, as it unfolded in Canada, was wrong and harmful. It wasn’t. The life today of every living Canadian, including every living Aboriginal Canadian, is better because of the British-French-European colonization of Canada.
All Canadians, including Ms. Wilson-Raybould, are children of colonialism, and we cannot forswear and forsake our parentage.
As stated, the existence of every job or position Ms. Wilson-Raybould has ever had is due to colonialism. The fact that she was taught to read and write, and follow a career path based on literacy, and ultimately write True Reconciliation, is due to colonialism.
The fact that this Kwakiutl princess could convey the message of True Reconciliation by way of a book, rather than by way of the long dead “oral tradition”, and thus have her message read by many thousands of members of her new, actual tribe- Canada– instead of by only a few Kwakiutl tribal members sitting in a longhouse or around a campfire, is due to colonialism.
The fact of her very life, which was given to her by her white mother, is due to colonialism. The fact of her marriage to her white husband, is due to colonialism.
The total “colonialism”-based life of Ms. Wilson-Raybould exemplifies the lives of all Aboriginal Canadians today, especially the lives of those mighty but immature Aboriginal elites we read about in the paper and see on television demanding more and better colonialism-based things: more money, more programs, more and better housing and drinking water, more capitalist control of resource projects, more health care, more of the entire panoply of modern, 21st century, colonialism-based life.
Aboriginal Canadians have voted with their feet in favour of modern, 21st century, colonialism-based life. They’ve voted with their feet against the totally abstract, mythical, return-to-nature, “Indigenous worldview” fantasy culture conjured up by the Principles and by Ms. Wilson-Raybould in True Reconciliation. They know, as we all know, that these conjurations exist, not for the purpose of actually realizing this fantasy world, but rather for the purpose of getting more of the best goods of colonialism-based, modern life.
Orwell was right. The explicit habits of mind of Canadians, including the vast majority of Aboriginal Canadians, are simply too sensible to allow them to accept the sophistries of the Principles and of True Reconciliation in place of the obvious realities of life daily staring them in the face.
Aboriginal-Canadians occupy the bottom rungs of all the major indicators of social and material success in Canada. This tragic situation exists because the creation of Indian reserves and the enactment of the Indian Act has prevented the full and heathy assimilation of Canada’s Aboriginals into the mainstream of Canadian life.
No group can succeed in a country if it is treated as civic infants and segregated off from the general citizenry at large.
The solution to improve the lives of Aboriginal Canadians proposed by Canada’s Principles and by Ms. Wilson-Raybould in True Reconciliation- more separation and segregation from the general citizenry at large- more apartheid- is guaranteed to only worsen the situation of Aboriginal-Canadians and the situation of Canada in general.
As Nelson Mandela said in his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom:
The very first step on the road to reconciliation is the complete dismantling of apartheid and all the measures used to enforce it.
Nelson Mandela’s solution to apartheid in South Africa is the solution that Ms. Wilson-Raybould should be advocating for Canada: repeal section 35 of the Constitution, repeal the Indian Act and, in a measured and phased fashion, end the reserve system, thereby making Aboriginal Canadians equal in rights and responsibilities with all other Canadians, and Canadians then finally fulfilling Champlain’s 1633 dream, (headnote above), of all becoming “one people”.
But tragically, not for Aboriginal leaders like Ms. Wilson-Raybould, safe and warm in their comfortable perches, and personally thriving off all this racial and social division. Instead, notwithstanding that “colonialism” has worked out so well for them personally, they spin out, for the illusory benefit of those they purportedly serve and speak for, grandiose plans for a new race-based society that, even if the achievement of those plans was realistic, which it is not, would take decades to negotiate and implement.
Meanwhile, neglected Aboriginal babies continue to cry.
On the reserves and on the mean streets of Canada’s cities, the tragically sky-high rates of suicides, physical violence, substance abuse, alcoholism, domestic violence, teen pregnancies, babies and children having to be placed in government care, fire deaths, lack of school attendance and engagement, and the mental health issues,all continue and increase.
When John Beaucage, an Ontario Aboriginal leader, was commenting on these tragic realities of reserve life and on the time it would take to improve them, he answered in typical, detached, Aboriginal elite fashion: “We’re going to have to measure our success (in improving the situation) in decades and generations.”[vi]
Powerless, marginalized, poor, suffering Aboriginal Canadians can’t wait that long. They need help now. They need hope now.
The Principles and True Reconciliation offer them neither.
Reconciliationism is heartbreakingly cruel towards those suffering, Aboriginal Canadians.
Reconciliationism means the continued sacrifice of generation after generation of Aboriginal Canadians for the sake of a utopian future- the self-governing, sovereign, “Indigenous nations” chimera represented by the Principles and by True Reconciliation– a future that is nothing but glorified, messianic nonsense that will never come.
To continue with the status quo, or to worsen it, as implementation of the Principles or the ideas in True Reconciliation would do, is a course of conduct that if offensive to Canadian core values and destructive of the general welfare and ultimate best interests of Canadians, particularly Aboriginal Canadians.
Peter Best
December 9, 2022
[i] From Margaret MacMillan’s History’s People, Anansi Press Inc. 2015
[ii] The Discovery of Chance- The Life and Thought of Alexander Herzen, by Aileen M. Kelly, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2016
[iii] McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, 2022
[iv] Reflections on a Ravaged Century, W.W. Norton & Company, New York, 2000
[v] National Museum of Canada, Ottawa, 1972
[vi] Canadian Press article, July 31, 2011
