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| The New Colonialists don't look like the old ones |
It is a day
to remember residential schools for Indigenous people, which, as the national Truth
and Reconciliation Commission said in its final
report, “were a systematic, government-sponsored attempt to destroy
Aboriginal cultures and languages and to assimilate Aboriginal peoples so that
they no longer existed as distinct peoples.”
Across Newfoundland
and Labrador, schools featured special events to tell the story of residential
schools in Canada. CBC Newfoundland and Labrador ran two stories, one of which
was written by a young
journalist from Labrador whose grandmothers attended a residential school.
His first sentence is both evocative and typical of the emotion that
accompanies stories of residential schools.
“For years,
the Lockwood School in Cartwright housed Indigenous children taken from their
homes all in the name of "killing the Indian within the child."
Another of
these “localizer”
pieces – ones that give a local angle to a national or international story –
explained that “[r]residential schools were established by the Canadian
government in the 1800s, with a guiding policy that has been called ‘aggressive
assimilation.’ The federal government sought to teach Indigenous children
English and have them adopt Christianity and Canadian customs, and pass that —
rather than Indigenous culture — down to their children.” That one was written by a journalist from
northern Ontario now living in St. John’s.
In 2017, CBC reported on Justin Trudeau’s apology to
Indigenous people in Labrador for the treatment they received in residential schools.
The CBC story at the time explained
that “[b]etween 1949 and 1979, thousands of Indigenous children were taken from
their communities to attend five residential schools that were run by the
International Grenfell Association or Moravians.”
There’s only
one problem with these stories: they aren’t about residential schools in
Newfoundland and Labrador.
These
stories about Canadian residential schools are imposed on something different,
namely the schools in Newfoundland and Labrador, without acknowledging the meaningful difference.
The two are distinctly different.
One of the biggest differences is that the schools in Newfoundland and Labrador weren’t exclusively for Indigenous children. They weren’t created by the Newfoundland government to assimilate Indigenous children into white culture. They were schools open to anyone, including non-Indigenous children. There were also differences between the schools run by the Moravian mission and those run by the International Grenfell Association that are important to understanding what happened and why it happened.
Indigenous
people in Labrador felt left out of the apology offered by the federal
government for the abuses they suffered in schools run in Canada with the
express objective of assimilating Indigenous people.
People in
Newfoundland and Labrador frequently complain they are treated differently from
other Canadians. Most times, that isn’t justified.
But here’s a
case where they should have been treated differently if the objective was – in the
words of the commission’s name – truth and reconciliation. Only by understanding the whole story of the
relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in Newfoundland and
Labrador can those people find the truth they share that would form the basis
of any reconciliation.
And in a
national sense, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians deserve to know
the truth of what happened in Newfoundland and Labrador, fully, and to embrace it
as part of their national history.
As it is, the
national commission that traveled the country collecting stories of Indigenous
people and abuse in residential schools failed when it did not deal truthfully with
the residential schools in Newfoundland and Labrador. The commission also failed when it produced
a report that ignored the differences in the history of the two school systems.
Newfoundlanders
and Labradorians, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike, deserve to know their
own history for themselves. To say that
does not deny or diminish the experiences of Indigenous people in residential
schools or their desire for acknowledgement of harm. Rather, it says that we must find out what our
own story is, whether we are Indigenous or non-Indigenous. We must understand our different perspectives
and different experiences of the same time and place.
Mimicry
and Content Assembly
What we
should note of this experience with residential schools is how much it reflects
the way local elites these days either take their cues on what is important from
external sources or adopt external narratives.
We see it in the residential schools stories and in the minor flap over taking
down statues last summer. We saw it
in the other examples from the post last summer about mimicry
and pantomime. We saw it plainly in
the story about Roger Grimes, the
supposed reactionary.
Around these
parts, your humble e-scribbler has started to call it Content Assembly instead
of journalism. The drive to produce
content means that large media organizations like CBC, PostMedia, or even
Saltwire pay less attention to the calibre what they produce in favour of
producing content to fill space. It
lines up with another trend, namely the way people look something up
quickly, read a bit here and a bit there to meet a need and then forget it. Increasingly people can find tidbits of
information on the Internet but they either lack the capacity to string them
together into a coherent, persistent thread or lack the interest in doing
so. Information is transient. Knowledge – understanding - is almost
non-existent. It’s part of living in the Age of
Unformation.
You can see this
transience of information or the lack of understanding in other media stories. CBC ran a piece a few
months ago about two Indigenous actors from this province. One of them found success nationally and
another is able to make living acting in St. John’s. But for some reason, both the writer and the
editor thought that references to pre-Confederation Canada applied in
Newfoundland and Labrador. The result
was a bizarre disconnect between a story that was generally positive and the
historically false - but deliberately negative – references that, quite
literally, had nothing to do with Newfoundland and Labrador today.
The New
Colonialists
It’s no
accident that these stories all came from CBC.
Canada’s largest media bureaucracy is also rapidly becoming its leading
content assembly facility. The pressure
to produce content for multiple platforms coupled with the bureaucracy’s centrally
controlled approach to stories makes it easy to insert false narratives into
stories to serve large bureaucratic objectives. The motive to do so comes from
nothing other than the Canadian Broadcasting Centre’s ability to do so, being
as it is located in the centre of the Canadian universe.
Take, for
example, the CBC reporter
in northern Ontario who could tweet about how proud she was of taking a “new approach for me, trying to
actively de-colonize my journalism. Resisted journalistic compulsion to
‘humanize’ victims, instead attempted to contextualize Indigenous deaths within
Canada’s colonial project.”
The story
was about the number of Indigenous people who have died in police custody in
Ontario. There’s plenty in the story to
connect the deaths with a common theme across Canada, namely mental illness.
What the
reporter meant by “de-colonizing” her writing was her reliance of the opinion
of one academic to transform the story into a narrative about race. There might be a case to be made but, in an
age when local stories are easily accessible nationally, it’s this false claim
that leaps out:
“In Canada,
policing was founded on the premise that Indigenous peoples needed to be
removed from the land and false beliefs that Indigenous peoples are both less
human and more-threatening than white people, says Jessica Jurgutis, whose
academic research looks at the relationship between settler colonialism and
imprisonment in Canada.”
Jurgutis’ doctoral
thesis does precisely what happened in the residential schools story and
what she did in the CBC interview. It
takes a sweeping narrative and applies it generally and without apparent
concern for the importance of the details that do not fit with her objective. A fine example is in a footnote, one of three
references to Newfoundland in her study that looks at the relationship between Indigenous
communities and imperial Britain as an international relations question.
“In the 1850s," Jurgutis notes, “the federal government also opened a number of schools across the country with the exception of Newfoundland, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island.” Just as all policing in Canada did not come from a desire to move Indigenous people from their land, so too was it impossible for something that did not exist in 1850 – the federal government – to establish schools in places over which the non-existent government would have had no control at the time. Even if she used Upper Canada as synonymous with modern Canada, Jurgutis would still be wrong factually, ethically, and in the context of her academic discipline. That she got her doctoral degree using such nonsense is more a testament to the sorry state of modern academia than anything else.
There is more to this than laziness or the difficulty that some social scientists have in coping with the concept of time. Jurgutis reflects a common attitude in central Canada toward what some would call figuratively or others literally the periphery of Canada. The mindset defines Canada and Ontario as synonymous and treats the regions furthest away not just as external borders but – as the word itself also means – lesser or insignificant parts.
After a
while, these things start to look like colonial attitudes. The local elites in the region or on the periphery ape the metropole they
desire to be part of. The outsiders treat
anything local as insignificant. It is
an expression of power, to be sure, to erase document facts and one not without brutal hypocrisy. Academics
who might wince in fear of judging one culture by the standards of another - they call it ethnocentrism - have no problem doing the same thing when looking at people in the past. It's called presentism. In other cases, as in Jurgutis thesis she is, in effect treating Indigenous people on the periphery in the same way. Their experience, their history is so insignificant that she can make one up and impose it on them. The same is true of journalists
who fancy themselves impartial tellers of truth yet who, in their “de-colonized”
writing, simply take up a new ideology that looks remarkably like the
old one. Or a national commission that tells the story of only one part of the country but pretends it is the only story.
Nor is this
just old central Canadian wine in new skins.
Lately, Atlantic Canadians have seen an influx of western Canadian money
and western Canadian politic attitudes.
Whether it is from the national Conservative Party or from organizations
like the Canadian Taxpayers Federation and the Fraser Institute, western
Canadian money is pushing a narrative at Atlantic Canadians with no concern that the narrative is, from an Atlantic perspective, an entirely false one. One of the easiest to spot is the notion that
we are all welfare bums who refuse to develop our own resources because we can
get Alberta to pay for it through Equalization.
It’s all horseshit, of course, but they have
the money to pile it higher and deeper.
And they'll keep doing it as
long as we let them.
That is the way colonialists operate.
-srbp-