The laudable goal of reconciliation between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadians means different things to different people and groups.
According to the federal government, as formally set out in its reconciliation Principles, reconciliation requires creating a third order of constitutional sovereignty comprised of from 60-80 consolidated, self-governing First Nations bands, which bands will legally co-exist as “partners” with the federal government and the provinces.
The perspective of former Attorney General and Minister of Justice of Canada Jody Wilson-Raybould and that of other Canadian Aboriginal elites is set out in her recent book, True Reconciliation: How to be a Force for Change, reviewed by the writer in a companion article. According to Ms. Wilson-Raybould reconciliation requires, in addition to the cold and legalistic reallocation of political and constitutional power called for by the Principles, that each and every non-Aboriginal Canadian, including all our new Canadians, get out of our colonialist mental “silos”, learn about the alleged theft of Aboriginal lands and destruction of Aboriginal cultures by Euro-Canadians, understand all the alleged harmful legacies of colonialism suffered by Aboriginals, which, according to Ms. Wilson-Raybould, they are still suffering from today, and act so that Canadians, one way or another, give back these stolen lands and pay to have these cultures restored and these harmful legacies erased.
There’s a spectre of forced reparations and forced re-education in True Reconciliation. The sanctimonious and condescending tone and substance of the book in general, gives ita kind of dark and creepy brainwashing feel. It’s an unrealistic, impractical prescription for reconciliation that ordinary Canadians are not going to take to. “Virtue and merit can become their opposites if they are exacted or compelled”.[i]
On the other hand, Aboriginal Chief Robert Joseph’s book, Namwayat -A Pathway to Reconciliation[ii], appears tooffer a positive prescription for reconciliationthat Canadians can relate to and fully support, “Appears”, because it would only be feasible ifChief Joseph wants the literal and spiritual meaning of Namwayat he sets out in his book to be the basis of reconciliation.
Chief Joseph never actually specifically says how he sees the wonderful spiritual insights he favours the reader with actually playing out on the politically fraught ground of contemporary Aboriginal-non-Aboriginal relations. This is the big flaw in Namwayat.
The word “Namwayat” means, in Chief Joseph’s Kwakwala language, “those with whom you are one”. As Chief Joseph writes:
We need to talk more about our highest humanity, about our highest collective selves, making sure that nobody gets left behind, and understanding that everybody matters. We have to start transforming relationships with ourselves and each other.
Reconciliation belongs to all of us. Reconciliation embodies the spirt of Namwayat, the idea that we are all one. One people, one community, one environment. One spirit.
When we speak the word “Namwayat” we are talking about the forests, the animals, those that fly and those that swim in the ocean, and the things we can’t see or feel or touch in spirit. That which is everywhere and that which is nowhere.
Namwayat is one simple little word. It is an old-fashioned greeting. But this word also invokes the universe and the universal. This word invokes the music of the interconnected, the everything that we are together, all of the elements, all of the dimensions of what we know and do not know. (Italics added)
Namwayat, the book,with its emphasis on the human and spiritual interconnectedness and essential oneness of all Canadians, from which the idea of political interconnectedness and oneness must logically follow,thus appears to offer a Nelson Mandela/Gandhi vision of reconciliation as a process of Canadians embracing the racially blind, humanist, pluralistic, cosmic spirit of Namwayat, with the political consequence of that being all Canadians, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, acknowledging our country’s past, apologies being given and accepted, forgiveness happening, and finally all Canadians, while never forgetting our history and historical differences, essentially putting them behind us and advancing into the future as civic equals.
This is exactly what the vast majority of ordinary Canadians want. We want to be spiritually and politically united with Aboriginal Canadians, not to be further divided from them, as the cold and materialist reconciliation prescriptions of the Principles and Ms. Wilson-Raybould’s True Reconciliation would inevitably cause.
The acknowledgments and apologies have already happened, in spades. But forgiveness on the part of Aboriginal leaders has clearly not happened. Nor do they want all Canadians to move forward as legal and soclal equals.
Therein lies the rub for Canada.
More specificity on this fundamental “rub” issue is required from Chief Joseph than Namwayat, awash in pleasing generalities but devoid of practical, political calls to action, provides.
The ordinary Canadian reader of Namwayat is right to temper the hope for unity that the book inspires with a dampening wariness of the possibility that Chief Joseph, like so many contemporary Aboriginal leaders, when it comes to putting his interconnected-one people talk into action, will opt for raw, earthly, power and money, political solutions, similar to those of the Principles and True Reconciliation- solutionsthat guarantee only more disconnection, division and disunity.
There is enough in Namwayat to justify the reader’s wariness in that regard.
There are disquieting statements and omissions in Namwayat that cause the reader to worry that he’s never getting the full story on any of the factual matters written about in the book.
Chef Joseph is described as a Hereditary Chief of the Gwawaenuk People. This “People” is comprised of only 39 persons.
The Gwawaenuk People are a part of the geographically and numerically larger Kwakwaka’wakw People, speakers of the Kwakiutl language. Chief Joseph belongs to the same “People” and culture as Jody Wilson-Raybould.
As the writer’s review of True Reconciliation shows, Chief Joseph’s and Ms. Wilson-Raybould’s Aboriginal culture permitted slavery, and the murder of slaves. Murderous, even genocidal, warfare with neighbouring peoples was a constant. It was feudal and monarchical. There was a caste system, that forbade marriage outside one’s caste. It was not the love-suffused “paradise” described by Chief Joseph in Namwayat. The reader deserves the trust and respect of being told these balancing facts.
Like Ms. Wilson-Raybould, Chief Joseph shows that he knows very little about Canadian history.
He repeats the falsehood that residential schools were genocidal institutions established to “isolate Indigenous children from their families and cut all ties to their families”. The reverse is the case. Residential schools were established to save Aboriginal peoples, not to extinguish them in any way. Aboriginal leaders wanted them. They helped Aboriginal people, cultures and languages survive. On different occasions when the federal government proposed to close a residential school Aboriginal leaders inevitably petitioned the government to keep it open.
Despite this writer disagreeing with much of what Chief Joseph writes about residential schools, he does agree with his statement about Aboriginals not being defined forever by them. Chief Joseph writes:
We cannot be defined by that building, (referring to his old residential school building-writer), and that history. If we define ourselves that way, we will be doomed to pass on the same characteristics of pain, of fear, and of hunger to the next generation.
Chief Joseph writes that he thought Prime Minister Harper’s apology for residential schools read in the House of Commons was “beautiful” and that in this regard, “I had heard what I wanted to hear.”
Clearly, his healthy message in Namwayat to his fellow Aboriginal leaders about residential schools is, “let’s move on”.
Chief Joseph writes that he was a binge-drinking alcoholic in his younger years. He attributes this to the fact that he attended a residential school, merely assuming that the oft-repeated phrase, “intergenerational trauma”, will, in the mind of the reader, be the usual, supposedly self-evidently valid explanation for every social ill now facing Aboriginal people, including Chief Joseph’s alcoholism. With all due respect to Chief Joseph, this seems unlikely, given that only about one-third of Aboriginal children attended a residential school, given that the very concept of intergenerational trauma is deeply flawed and unproven, and given that Chief Joseph shows no factual connection in his book between his residential school experience, where he excelled academically, and his later alcoholism.
Chief Joseph, like Ms. Wilson- Raybould, decries “racism, colonialism, fear and violence” and attributes all Aboriginal problems to them.
Yet, like Ms. Wilson-Raybould, he neglects to point out that he was well educated in colonial institutions, following which, because of that, he was employed by the colonial Vancouver Sun and then the colonial federal government. He appears to have lived in a colonial house in colonial Vancouver his whole adult life. In his recent years Chief Joseph has capped off his obviously well-deserved and distinguished career by acting as Ambassador for Reconciliation Canada and Chair of the Native American Leadership Alliance for Peace and Reconciliation, both colonialism-based, colonial taxpayer-funded positions.
Colonialism has been deservedly good to Chief Joseph, and while he unfortunately, in blanket fashion, asserts “racism” against Aboriginals in his book, he shows very little directed against him. Rather, his impressive biography shows the opposite.
The “fear and violence” that Aboriginals experience indeed exists, but tragically it’s mainly Aboriginal-on-Aboriginal violence that is to be feared, a terrible social consequence of the quasi-apartheid reserve system, that, tragically as well, influential Aboriginal leaders like Chief Joseph persistently neglect to call for an end to.
These omissions and mistakes, exemplifying the ahistorical, non-empathic, rote thinking prevalent in so much of contemporary Aboriginal writing, can be overlooked in the case of Namwayat, given its overwhelmingly positive and unifying spiritual message.
The cover of the book itself, containing a picture of smiling Chief Joseph in classic Dalai Lama bending, prayerful pose, with the true and inspiring phrase, “We Are All One”, emblazoned above the title, assures the reader that this iteration of an Aboriginal call for reconciliation is not going to be the usual bummer read, like True Reconciliation. It’s going to be different, and in a positive, hopeful way.
And, despite its flaws, it is.
Chief Joseph’s call for “societal reconciliation”, is a call for social reconciliation, connoting a refreshing lack obsession on power and money demands.
Namwayat asserts the fundamental, life-affirming truth, common to every spiritual and religious movement in the world, that:
There’s one Creation, one humanity. We are all interconnected, one human world. One celestial space, one animal world, one undersea world, and a spirit world all needing balance and harmony.
In calling for “societal reconciliation”- an apolitical, humanist version of reconciliation based upon the interconnectedness and brotherhood of humanity- Chief Joseph places himself squarely and deservedly in a long historical line of wise and transcendent Aboriginal spiritual and political leaders, who saw integration with non-Aboriginal Canadians as the best long-term goal.
Mohawk leader Joseph Brant, whose people were granted settlement land in Upper Canada by the British, while always fighting for Aboriginal rights and dignity, recognized that the old Aboriginal world was passing, and that education, religion, (for him, the Christian religion), and a life of hard work and self-support was the best and only way forward for his people. His advice to his people was “to live as good subjects, to fear God and to honour the King.”
Mississauga Ojibwe Chief Peter Jones, known in Ojibwe as Kahkewaquonaby, meaning “sacred feathers”, through his personal life example and his Christian evangelical work throughout Southern Ontario in the 1830’s and 1840’s, taught his people that they could and should compete and live as equals with the European colonists who were migrating to Upper Canada in ever greater numbers. So high was he held in esteem by both Aboriginal and white leaders of the day that his funeral in Brantford in 1856 was, until that time, the largest ever witnessed there.
Kah-Ge-Ga-Gah-Bowh, known in English as George Copway, the son of a Mississauga Ojibwe Chief, was also a convert to Christianity, who advocated for the need for Aboriginal education and temperance. A linguist and an ethnologist, he wrote two books that were best sellers. In his second book, The Traditional History and Character Sketches of the Ojibway Nation[iii], published in 1850, he wrote:
Education and Christianity are to the Indian what wings are to the eagle; they elevate him; and these given to him by men of right views of existence enable him to rise above the soil of degradation, (referring to alcoholism-writer), and hover about the high mounts of wisdom and truth…Give the Indian the means of education and he will avail himself of them. Keep them from him and let me tell you he is not the only loser.
The impetus for the establishment of residential schools came as much from great Aboriginal leaders like Brant, Jones and Copway as it did from caring and conscientious non-Aboriginal Canadians.
Chief Joseph’s “one interconnected humanity” insight reflects that of the great Lakota Chief Black Elk, who “was able to see the past and future of his own people, and also the ways in which Indian lives would meet and mix with the American future.”[iv] In a vision he saw that the sacred hoop of his people:
…was one of many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father.[v] (Italics added)
Chief Joseph’s call for societal reconciliation, surely meaning that in Canadian society Aboriginals and non-Aboriginals should live in the same communities as neighbours- rather than Aboriginals socially isolating themselves on reserves or in their “self-governing nations”, (which are simply reserves under a different name)- reflects the universalist wisdom of another Native Joseph, Nez Perce Chief Joseph:
Whenever the white man treats the Indian as they treat each other, then we shall have no more wars. We shall all be alike- brothers of one father and one mother, with one sky above us and one country around us, and one government for all.[vi]
Reading the positive, spiritual truths in Namwayat brought to mind the writings of the Nobel Prize-winning Mexican intellectual, Octavio Paz.
Mexico was brutally conquered by the Spanish, and no treaties or reserves- no residual rights- were offered to the numerous Native tribes that fell under Spain’s merciless sway. Mexico is now a mixed-race society, with all its citizens equal under the law. As the result of this historical mix of identities, in his most famous book, The Labyrinth of Solitude,[vii] Paz challenged his countryman to see themselves as:
…a cosmic race…where the old pluralities of cultures, postulating various and contrary ideals, and offering various and contrary views of the future, has been replaced by a single civilization and a single future…
He urged his countrymen, as I believe Chief Joseph is similarly urging Canadians in Namwayat, to regard themselves as bound by the idea of living inter-racially, as absolute legal equals, in a new form of “creative participation”. Mexico today, standing as a chiding lesson for Canada, has a civil society, based on equality for all under the law, noted for its relative harmony.
Chief Joseph can take comfort in the fact that he is not alone amongst modern Aboriginal leaders in calling for a form of reconciliation focussing on harmonious and constructive social relations rather than on fracturing and destructive power and money reallocations.
Calvin Helin, whose father was a Chief of the Gitlan Tribe of the British Columbia Tsimshian Nation, wrote as follows in his book Dances with Dependency- Out of Poverty Through Self-Reliance,[viii]:
One solution is for all people of all ethnicities to start thinking less about our differences and more about the fabric that binds us together as a human species. Too often we forget that we must all answer to the same laws of nature regardless of the colour of our skin or the language that we speak; that we share a commonality of cultural wisdom and ancient learning.
The courageous, far-seeing, moral giant of modern theorizing on Aboriginal-non-Aboriginal relations is William Wuttunee, an Alberta Cree, residential school graduate, lawyer and co-founder of what is now the Assembly of First Nations, who wrote the following in his 1971 book Ruffled Feathers,[ix] his defence of Prime Minister Trudeau’s White Paper proposal to end the debilitating reserve system:
Indians can work with the white man in partnership to develop a country which will provide for each of our children a legacy of great value. It is not necessary to separate from the white man, either physically or spiritually. The long period of the separation of the races has now ended.
Let us unite in spirit, so that each of us can look forward to a peaceful old age in which we can see our children effectively participating in the creation of a new society. Many Indians have already taken the road ahead, to live in the land of the white man. They paved the way for their brothers and sisters on which they must learn to walk without fear.
As stated, Namwayat is a generally good book, but it leaves the “rub” issue referred to above unresolved.
Does Chief Joseph walk his spiritual talk or not?
Does he say that his spiritual beliefs, focussing on Canadians’ interconnected oneness, should be confined to the afterlife, or Church on Sunday, or to life in the clouds, or does he join all the excellent Aboriginal company referred to above and urge that his spiritual beliefs be put into practice in our day-to-day life on Canadian earth, in the form of political action and legal reform aimed at making all Canadians equal under the law?
The hopeful reader of Namwayat needs to hear further from Chief Joseph on this point.
Peter Best
Sudbury, December 22, 2022
[i] Christopher Hitchens, Letters to a Young Contrarian, Basic Books, 2005
[ii] Raincoast Books, 2022
[iii] Originally published in 1850 by Charles Gilpin, 5, Bishopsgate Without, London, re-published as a facsimile edition by Coles Publishing Company, Toronto, 1972
[iv] From the essay 2020 Vision, by Northern Minnesota Ojibwe David Treuer, Harper’s Magazine, January 2019
[v] From Black Elk Speaks, by John G. Neihardt, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 2014
[vi] From Native American Wisdom, Running Press, Philadelphia, 1994
[vii] Grove Press Inc. New York, 1972
[viii] Ravencrest Publishing, Woodland Hills, California, 2008
[ix] Ruffled Feathers-Indians in Canadian Society, Bell Books Ltd. Calgary, 1971
