The Aboriginal rights movement in Canada can reasonably be described as a separatist movement, inexplicably supported by our governments, courts and other power elites, with the goal being the establishment of separate, independent, self-governing Aboriginal nations existing island-like within the territorial boundaries of Canada while being permanently supported in all material respects by Canada.
Rationales offered by Aboriginal leaders in support of their separatist goals are based on a combination of interpretations of history, the existence or non-existence of treaties, legislation and Supreme Court jurisprudence.
Running through and anchoring all these rationales is the controversial concept of racial “blood quantum”- a way to define Aboriginal identity. It is a measure used to authenticate the amount of so-called “Indian blood” a person has by tracing his or her individual and group ancestral identity.
There is no legal requirement in Canada that a person have a prescribed amount of “Indian blood” to have Indian status under the Indian Act or any other related law.
But that is law, not flawed and frail human nature, the latter of which the law, for the purpose of ensuring proper social order, is intended to control.
All humans identify with something bigger than themselves, such as their family, clan, tribe, social group or nation. Iterations of the idea of “blood and belonging”,[i] a social reality always afforded its due by wise statesmen, have played a profound role in human behaviour since the dawn of humanity.
But in affording it its due, the same wise statesmen, at least since the Enlightenment, have never afforded it the status of moral superiority. Rather, they have regarded it as an ugly cost of doing the business of governing: an inevitable, troublesome aspect of the human psyche that should be officially controlled and even caged at times by the rule of law and by the good society’s unwritten rules of virtuous social conduct.
A society that touts blood and belonging as its connecting main feature fosters neither its own preservation nor the maximum human potential of its individual citizens. It fosters only the dark ends that eventually befall all race societies.
Nazi Germany, with its noxious idea of Aryanism, is the most famous example of this.
Aryans were those Germans who were supposedly united by the “inner laws” and “spiritual union” of so-called pure, unmixed German “blood, kinship and language”. [ii]Only those who were blessed by the accident of being born into this select, “pure” blood and kinship group could truly belong in and to this express race society.
And, if fortunate enough to be born into this race society, the newborn was deemed to have an innately superior personality that he or she would have forever: an innate, superior personality given by the mere accident of “pure” blood birth, and not at all acquired by merit or otherwise affected or influenced by the vicissitudes of that person’s life.[iii]
Aryanism also focussed on the romantic idea of the race nation’s pastoral or agrarian soil having unifying, connective and spiritual qualities, including even “soil memory”, contrasted with those living supposedly spiritually and morally inferior, more mobile, urban and cosmopolitan lives, such as the German Jews. The “belonging” ones were in essence long-settled and stationary people, who “sacralised” their space- their “soil” or “land”- in opposition to the unbelonging “others”, who in society were tolerated as in effect mere “rootless”, semi-permanent resident aliens.[iv]
This “blood and soil” racism was not confined to Germany. In France, when Leon Blum was elected Premier in 1936, a right-wing leader lamented the fact that “this old Gallo-Roman country will be governed by a Jew, a subtle Talmudist, rather than someone rooted in the entrails of our soil”.[v]
“Blood and soil” theory, (in German, “blut und boden”), posits that family, clan and blood “national” identity and knowledge, (when the “nation” is “pure” and racially exclusive), can be passed down the generations through a select, racially exclusive bloodline aided by a racially exclusive and racially unique and “special” connection to and relationship with “the soil” or “the land”.
History weepingly tells us where this kind of superstitious blood/race-thinking ultimately can lead.
So, it is shocking that Canadian Aboriginal leaders and spokespersons, in pursuit of their power and money goals, use the same kind of noxious blood and soil race thinking and race talk, with no pushback from anyone of public stature.
In fact, the opposite is the case. Disgracefully, it’s tolerated, and often encouraged, by all our elites.
The Assembly of First Nations asserts, without evidence, that Aboriginal peoples:
… “have a special relationship with the earth and all living things in it. This relationship is based on a profound spiritual connection and inherent responsibility to Mother Earth that guides First Nations Peoples to practice reverence, humility, and reciprocity”. (italics added)
Similar blood and soil views of First Nation Chiefs across Canada are reflected in Osoyoos Band Chief Clarence Louis’ book, Rez Rules, which is disturbingly racist in tone and which, by using such terms as “blood”, “bloodlines” and “blood connection to the land”, adopts Aryan racist tropes.
In Jody Wilson-Raybould’s 2022 book True Reconciliation, (it should be titled “Never Reconciliation”), she writes about her race-based, so-called “worldview”:
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 about this commonsensical, almost banal philosophical idea: the idea of balance. It goes back to Confucius and to Aristotle’s Golden Mean. It’s a standard self-help book concept. It’s a part of all cultures, past and present. 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 and human commonplace to the racially unique and distinctive, Ms. Wilson Raybould neglects to inform the reader that part of her so-called “balanced” “Kwakwaka’wakw worldview” was/is the undemocratic practice of feudal-like, rigid social stratification, similar to the caste system in India, the practice of slavery, and, as was common with all Aboriginal tribes and cultures, constant, murderous, inter-tribal warfare.)
Aboriginal academics, all embodying the great betrayal of the Enlightenment values, standards and practices that made Canada great, assert, again without evidence or examples, that “Indigenous ways of being and knowing are inherently tied to the land”, and, implicitly granting the earth magical personhood with sentient power, that Aboriginals are “taught by the land” with which they must “build relationships.”
These anti-intellectual, juvenile, mystical, racist fantasies are held tightly by these unlearned, self-seeking academics, whose careers are dependent upon them never being questioned. And this despite these people never deigning to give even one example of a unique, Aboriginal “worldview” or “way of being and knowing” that is not shared by all other humans. And further, this despite the inconvenient fact that about 75% of Aboriginal Canadians live fully assimilated, off-reserve, “settler”ways-of-being-and-knowing lives, in Canada’s towns and cities.
Aboriginal literary elites spout the same blood and soil nonsense.
Former CBC film reviewer and one-quarter “Indian”, Jesse Wente, (but who self-professes as a full-blooded Anishinaabe), now comfortably ensconced in a high-paying, low performance-demanding “colonial” civil service Ottawa job, in his dark, race-obsessed screed, Unreconciled, went on an extended, highly ironic rant about “cultural appropriation”,an offshoot of race theory, which he defines as:
“…exploiting a culture you don’t belong to, and doing so without crediting, compensating or properly consulting with that culture.”
Unreconciled doesn’t explain how a “culture” can be the subject of property rights, who would enforce those rights, who one would “consult with” about them, and how one would “compensate” a culture.
Self-professed full Anishinaabe writer, Tanya Talaga, (who is alsothree-quarter “white”), in her new book, The Knowing,[vi] writes silly, sentimental, racially exceptionalist things about eggs, animals and soil thinking like Aboriginal humans, “spiritual, magical” Aboriginal forest places where rivers “make a choice” about which direction to flow, and about Aboriginal peoples: as in “our peoples”, “the soil remembers our footsteps”, “the sweet sound of ten thousand generations of our families”, “our knowledge”, “our singing”, “we moved around the land, taking care of it”, “our way of life”, our very being is tied to it”.
According to Ms. Talaga, the “knowing” is supposedly knowing that:
“Our eggs hold our secrets. Passed down through our mothers. Through the womb, regenerating, carrying forward the lines of our families, whichever corner of the earth they come from. They also carry our lived experiences, our love and pain. Eggs travelling like beavers swimming in the rivers, moving gently but purposefully before stopping and deciding that this is where they should make their homes…”
All this is dangerous, racist, blood and soil drivel, bringing to mind the gibberish about Leon Blum’s lack of French blood and his deficient soil “entrails”.
Joseph Goebbels couldn’t have expressed Ms. Talaga’s racist thoughts better.
The flip side of this “Racespeak” is the putdown of the unlucky ones who don’t “belong”: non-Aboriginal, “white face” Canadians. In this regard Ms. Talaga pulls no punches. In The Knowing she lets us well know of our spiritless and unconnected inferiority, and in her previous book, Seven Fallen Feathers, she gives it to us straight:
“The white face is the face of business and commerce and the rule of law. It 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. The people who live there are the doctors, the lawyers, and the proprietors of the twin city. On Saturdays they zip around in their cars to the big-box stores on the way to their cottages, or “camps”, so they can play with their powerboats and Jet Skis.” (sic, sick)
This is exactly how the Nazis described the Jews: again, like Leon Blum, rootless, cosmopolitan and materialistic- as essentially soulless and shallow human beings.
This is the very racial stereotyping of which Indigenous leaders are always (falsely) accusing non-Aboriginal Canadians.
Seven Fallen Feathers won awards and was lauded by Canada’s non-Aboriginal bien-pensants. The Knowing is a Canadian best seller.
Cultural/racial self-denigration on the part of Canada’s non-Aboriginal elites together with Aboriginal racial self-aggrandizement is very much a “thing” in contemporary Canada.
It’s supported by the very best jurisprudence.
The Supreme Court of Canada, in its 2016 Daniels decision, which declared that Metis persons were potentially entitled to unspecified rights traditionally granted only to Indian Act “Indians”, gave its seal of approval to the application of Aryan race theory in Canada to the situation of Aboriginal peoples generally.
The Court wrote that if a person possesses “sufficient racial and social characteristics to be considered a “native person”, that individual will be regarded as an “Indian”.
The Court defined legal rights based on considerations of “mixed ancestry” and “Native hereditary basis”- race terms.
It even made an uncritical reference to “Indian blood”, as if it were a biological fact, when in fact it is scientifically nonsensical.
Inspired by Daniels, some non-Aboriginal Canadians are now reverse-applying the racist one-drop rule to obtain benefits intended only for “true” Aboriginals.
The Daniels decision highlights one of the great contradictions and mysteries of our age: i.e. how liberal societies, especially Canada, can tolerate and even promote the dangerous and illiberal idea that “blood” should be a determinant of rights and/or lack of rights in a just society.
Adding to this mystery is the fact that the author of Daniels, former Justice Rosie Abella, is a Holocaust descendant. That event was a horrific, logical end-result of Aryan blood/race myths, which were epitomized in Germany by the Nuremberg Laws, the laws which decided whether a German could peacefully ride a streetcar in Berlin or whether he or she would be forcibly transported in a cattle car to Auschwitz.
Justice Abella’s tolerance and even promotion of these false and dangerous blood/race ideas inadvertently betrayed her ancestors. This mirrors the betrayal by all our elites of the liberal, Enlightenment, universalist legacies inherited by all Canadians from our ancestors.
In addition to Daniels, the Supreme Court has further legitimized race and (mythical) racial “difference” as a foundational, State-organizing theory.
It has ruled that Aboriginal peoples are a partial third fount of constitutional sovereignty, that Aboriginal peoples still “co-own” large parts of Canada, that Aboriginal peoples should have a virtual veto on resource development, that because of so-called Aboriginal racial “difference” Indian reserves can be Charter of Rights-free zones, and, for the same false reason, that Aboriginal peoples should have their own child welfare systems.
The policy of the Canadian government, laid out in its formal UNDRIP legislative Action Plan, officially encourages and promotes Aboriginal race-based separatism, thereby bringing to fruition in Canada Hannah Arendt’s idea expressed in The Origins of Totalitarianism of a race society becoming a permanent way of life.
Ordinary Canadians helplessly look on as our elite classes, without ever consulting us, divide us in this terrible manner. We don’t buy this illiberal obsession with “Indian blood” and the race-based separatism it is supporting.
We know that no one has “pure” blood. We know we are all basically mongrels in this regard. We know that this is better and healthier, individually and for society, than being of any so-called “pure” racial group. We know that being “mixed” in this way makes it harder to fall back on the tribal and racial identities that have so disastrously determined so much of recent human history.
Ironically, it is the history of the Jewish peoples in Canada that Aboriginal leaders should look to in order to realize the folly of relying on race/blood myths in support of the pursuit of their goal of achieving the optimum place for their peoples in the Canadian mosaic.
Jewish leaders would tell them to get rid of the reserve system. They resemble the old Jewish ghettos too much.
Just as Jewish leaders would protest the existence of a “Jewry Act,” they would tell Aboriginal leaders to protest the existence of the Indian Act and urge them to demand the repeal of it.
Jewish leaders would tell Aboriginal elites to drop their dangerous, superstitious obsession with blood/race myths.
Jewish leaders would tell Aboriginal elites to join their world (and all our world): the modern, urban, cosmopolitan, mobile, “mixed blood” mongrel world.
They would tell them to stop whining about the past, pointing to the eternal resiliency of the Jewish people in the face of mistreatments and horrors infinitely worse than ever befell Aboriginals.
In this regard they would point to how Israel settled its profound business with Germany, and now have a relatively normal, non-perpetual-grievance based, non-extractive relationship with it, unlike the grievance-extraction relationship Canada’s Aboriginals now have with Canada.
They would point to the words of Aboriginal William Wuttunee, one of the founders of what became the Assembly of First Nations, who urged his people in his book, Ruffled Feathers, to break from their blood/race-based, “separate but equal”, ghetto-like, dependency-ridden past and present, and joinand contributetomodern Canadian life as legal equals. Wuttunee’s wise words:
“The new breed of native cannot look at the past as a form of defeat, but only as a necessary period of transition. These people must look at today’s events and the past from a viewpoint which will keep them going ever-forward into the mainstream of society. Indians had great leaders in the past, and there is no reason why they cannot have great leaders in the future. If they continue only to cry about broken promises and broken treaties, they can never obtain much for their people.”
Jewish leaders would tell Aboriginal leaders that, like the Jewish people did for almost two thousand years in every place on earth their harsh fates landed them, they can assimilate into the societal mainstream, participate fully in the duties, obligations and benefits of citizenship, and still fully retain their core Aboriginal identities.
In this regard they would tell them that it is theassimilative nature of Jewish culture that enabled it to survive and thrive over those many years, and would refer them to the words of the great Jewish moralist, Amoz Oz[vii]:
“What does Jewish culture comprise? It comprises everything we have amassed over the generations. Elements born inside it, as well as those absorbed from the outside, which become part of the family. “
They would tell them that the road to success and “reconciliation” in Canada is to eschew all Racespeak, all noxious blood/race myths and policies and to follow the inspiring, civically assimilative example of Jewish Canadians, who would refer them again to the wise words of William Wuttunee in Ruffled Feathers:
“Indians can learn from the Jewish people, who number about the same as the Indians in Canada. Their contribution towards the economy of this country is considerable, as they are in business throughout the entire length and breadth of the business community. Although they integrate into Canadian society, they still retain their own religion and a special affinity in their hearts for Israel. They have not given up the Jewish faith or their way of life. They have succeeded in business and their children are well educated. Many have become professional people. They have enriched their culture with these new interests and developments. This same process must be the aim of the Indian people. They must participate in the non-Indian society, bringing with them their culture and taking the time to contribute to Canada as a whole.”
The times and circumstances are fitted for the fulfilment of these quintessentially human, enlightened and civically virtuous assimilative purposes.
Peter Best
November 29, 2024
[i] The title of an excellent and relevant book by Michael Ignatieff.
[ii] As confidently asserted in a 1939 German editorial in Volkischer Beobachter, as related in Rachel Maddow’s Prequel- An American Fight Against Fascism, Crown New York, 2023
[iii] The idea of the “belonging” citizen of a race society having an “innate personality” at birth was first posited by Hannah Arendt in her 1950 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, my copy published by Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt Publishing Company, New York 1976
[iv] General concepts, “rootless” and “sacralized their space” from The Jewish Century, by Yuri Slezkine, Princeton University Press, 2004
[v] From France on Trial- The Case of Marshal Petain, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2023
[vi] Harper Collins Publishers Ltd, Toronto, 2024
[vii] From his book, Dear Zealots -Letters from a Divided Land, Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt, New York, 2018
