...From native protestors and spokespeople there is a vigorous resort to current radical jargon — referring to Canadians as colonialist, as settlers, as having a settler’s mentality. Though it is awkward to note, there is a play to race in this, a conscious effort to ground all issues in the allegedly unrepentant racism of the “settler community.” This is an effort to force-frame every dispute in the tendentious framework of the dubious “oppression studies” and “colonial theory” of latter-day universities.
Then there is also an even more deplorable effort to frame the interactions between Canadians and Canada’s aboriginal peoples as a genocide — an accusation both illiterate and insulting...
Read the whole column at NATIONAL POST
Plus, check out: Selling a fake Canadian "genocide" for fun and profit
3 comments:
Three events in what is now Canada that might reasonably be described as genocide (off the top of my head):
I - Beothuk, extinction of. The last Beothuk "People", Shanawdithit died in 1829, the culminating event of centuries of contact with colonizing newcomers. Epidemic disease, an inadvertent consequence of contact with Europeans, is certainly partially to blame. This is not to deny the effects - and responsibility - of the colonizers (see next example).
II - Dorset culture (or Dorset tradition), a Paleo-Eskimo culture dominating the north of what is now Canada from 500BC-AD1500, with the last know remnant surviving on three islands in Hudsons Bay until 1902-03. The destruction of the Dorset people arose as a result of colonization and conquest by the Inuit, the current occupiers. cf. Beothuk (above). Having destroyed Norse settlements in Greenland, the Inuit (and Mi'kmaq) had driven the people who would become the Beothuk from Labrador to their last redoubt in Newfoundland at about the time Europeans "discovered" the Americas.
III - Wyandot (Huron). Having been driven out of West Virginia and upstate New York, the Wyandots settled the north shore of Lake Ontario, later moving north to Georgian Bay to avoid further predation by the Haudenosaunee Confederacy (Five, later Six, Nations), "the oldest participatory democracy on Earth." The Wyandot alliance with the French in 1609 could not prevent their destruction in 1649, after which the last survivors were taken in as refugees at Quebec City.
Due to the Six Nations (as of 1722) alliance with the Crown during the American Revolutionary War, many chose to colonize ethnically cleansed Wyandot territory, which they occupy to this day.
I look forward to Idle No More setting forth demands for reparations from the Inuit and Mohawk settlers still benefiting from the historical legacy of colonization and genocide.
Under First Nations rule, slavery was widely practiced by the "fishing societies", such as the Yurok hegemony dominating the Pacific coast from Alaska to California. The Haida and Tlingit, in particular, were widely famed as fierce warriors and slave-traders.
In Canada, slavery was hereditary, with captured slaves and their descendants held in bondage until slavery was abolished on Turtle Island by the British in 1833.
Idle No More must act to ensure the current Haida and Tlingit governments, successors to 19th century slave-states and indeed "time immemorial" (see guide, linked below), are held accountable for their collective, hereditary guilt.
Works Cited
Since Time Immemorial. (August 2008). The Office of the Treaty Commissioner.
http://www.otc.ca/siteimages/Kindergarten%20STI.pdf
Very poignant points, flea, that all too often get left out of any discussion on the matter.
The "genocide" yarn that we're seeing now is the usual publicity scam and professional grievance-mongering we're used to seeing.
And considering the individuals pushing it, who do that for a living, the ahistorical idiocy we're getting from them is no surprise.
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