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Truths from a ‘settler colony’ that needs to embrace a united future
Canadians need to acknowledge the injustices of the past but also credit the successes of today
Like Americans, Australians, New Zealanders and the British, Canadians are being schooled to believe that their country is essentially a “settler” colony, whose very existence largely echoes the racist European past. This ideology holds that everyone, except the First Nations, are essentially illegitimate colonialists from whom penance is required but forgiveness is forbidden.
Canada’s past record of settlement — once the source of pride — has been turned into a tale of unrequited evil. It has been held responsible both for real crimes, and ones, like systematic murders of Indigenous children at residential schools, that are likely highly exaggerated.
The settler concept was perhaps best articulated by the Australian anthropologist Patrick Wolfe in his 2006 article “Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native.” Under this formulation, settlers are cast as the historical equivalent of a potboiler villain. Wolfe saw settlers as having an enduring legacy, possessing “the logic of elimination” and wiping out the economic, spiritual and social lives of the Indigenous.
Canadian academics seem to be attracted to this notion. The deprivations and starvation of First Nations on the Prairies in the 1880s, argues James Daschuck, was not a consequence of climatic conditions or the disappearance of the buffalo, but the result of a purposeful policy of “genocide” that lay behind prime minister Sir John A. Macdonald’s “sinister policies.” Dominion efforts to save Indigenous lives, argues historian Nigel Biggar, were rather well-intentioned if late and often inadequate.-
