You’re listening to Back in the USSR on 93.3 FM CFRU. I am Siegfried, and I want to issue my first ever content warning, comrades and friends. This is something that I should have done last week. It’s something I should have done on numerous occasions before, because many of the things that get mentioned on this show are pretty heavy and potentially triggering for members of the audience. I don’t want anyone to be in a situation that’s too much for them, so I’m going to warn you right now that this episode of the show is going to be dealing with residential schools and the genocide of indigenous peoples in Canada. If you’re not comfortable getting into that right now, please take the time to care for yourself.
September 30, 2021 was the first ever National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. This was made into a federal statutory holiday in Canada, although we didn’t get any time off in Ontario because Ontario is one of several provinces which refuse to recognize the holiday. September 30 was being marked as Orange Shirt Day since 2013 by Indigenous peoples in this country seeking to honor the survivors of residential schools and to commemorate those victims of residential schools who never came home. In particular, it centers around the story of Phyllis Webstad, whose first-hand story I’m going to read for you right now:
I went to the Mission for one school year
in 1973/1974. I had just turned 6 years old. I lived with my grandmother on the
Dog Creek reserve. We never had very much money, but somehow my granny managed
to buy me a new outfit to go to the Mission school. I remember going to
Robinson’s store and picking out a shiny orange shirt. It had string laced up
in front, and was so bright and exciting – just like I felt to be going to
school!
When I got to the Mission, they stripped me, and took away my clothes,
including the orange shirt! I never wore it again. I didn’t understand why they
wouldn’t give it back to me, it was mine! The color orange has always reminded
me of that and how my feelings didn’t matter, how no one cared and how I felt
like I was worth nothing. All of us little children were crying and no one
cared.
I was 13.8 years old and in grade 8 when my son Jeremy was born. Because my
grandmother and mother both attended residential school for 10 years each, I
never knew what a parent was supposed to be like. With the help of my aunt,
Agness Jack, I was able to raise my son and have him know me as his mother.
I went to a treatment centre for healing when I was 27 and have been on this
healing journey since then. I finally get it, that the feeling of worthlessness
and insignificance, ingrained in me from my first day at the mission, affected
the way I lived my life for many years. Even now, when I know nothing could be
further than the truth, I still sometimes feel that I don’t matter. Even with
all the work I’ve done!
I am honored to be able to tell my story so that others may benefit and
understand, and maybe other survivors will feel comfortable enough to share
their stories.
I’m going to put a link on the blog so you can read more about Phyllis and her background. The Canadian Government chose to make Orange Shirt Day into a federal holiday. I went to one of the ceremonies that was held here in Guelph, at the Sacred Fire in Royal City Park. I listened to the elders, observed the ceremony and the drumming, inhaled the smoke from the Sacred Fire, personally confronted MP Lloyd Longfield once more about the water crisis on reservations, and generally did what I could under the circumstances. There were a lot of settlers there, a lot of clapping, a lot of talk about reconciliation, and I was reminded of a quote by the African revolutionary Amilcar Cabral in which he exhorted fellow revolutionaries to “claim no easy victories”. And it was all too easy for settlers, like myself, to watch the drumming, inhale the smoke, and feel righteous for simply caring.
There was a lot of high-handed rhetoric coming from public officials on September 30: talk about moving forward and re-building trust and just tons and tons of stuff about reconciliation between indigenous people and the settler-colonial state which continues to kill them. As someone who participated in the Wet’suwet’en protests in early 2020, just before the pandemic hit, it was truly surreal. Everyone back then was saying that reconciliation was dead and yet suddenly it’s back on everyone’s lips now, as though a new federal holiday could substitute for actual, concrete policy change…of which there’s been practically nothing.
This is what the Wet’suwet’en Checkpoint Instagram account had to say on September 30: “Reconciliation is nothing more than a catch phrase to the colonial government – and this day comes across as nothing more than a pacification.”
It’s notable that Justin Trudeau chose to go on vacation that day in Tofino rather than accept an invitation by an indigenous nation to honor the memory of the 215 children recovered from the former residential school in Kamloops. As now, the remains of more than six thousand children have been unearthed on the sites of former residential schools.
With this in mind, it’s very hard not to view this new holiday as a PR stunt by the Canadian Government. They were really on the backfoot after the Wet’suwet’en protests and now they’re trying to rehabilitate themselves and reclaim some of the legitimacy they lost amidst all the RCMP crackdowns and mass arrests that took place back then…and are taking place again at Fairy Creek. They wanted to put reconciliation back onto everyone’s lips and make it seem like they care, despite having done nothing to alleviate the suffering of oppressed Indigenous communities.
As I took part in the event at Royal City Park, I couldn’t help but think of the word “catharsis”. The event could have been framed as a way to “blow off steam” and vent emotion before effectively returning to normal. Aristotle, that arch-misogynist and apologist for slavery, talked approvingly about tragic dramas that were put on once per year in the Athenian amphitheater; describing how they allowed men in particular to let their pent-up emotions go so they could be cool-headed and rational for the rest of the year. It was like a social safety valve. With regard to the truth and reconciliation ceremonies on September 30, not only settlers but Indigenous people as well, including residential school survivors, were given an official outlet for their grief, which Trudeau and his government hopes can be kept contained and manageable.
Another thing that the ceremony reminded me of was Edmund Burke’s political ideology of “reconciliation”. Burke was the 18th century founder of modern conservative politics and sought to “reconcile” the masses of working class and oppressed people to the system by invoking the idea of a shared history and a supposedly “harmonious” past where everybody got along and knew their place. It’s an inherently reactionary idea, but Trudeau is basically pushing the same thing here today. Reconciliation implies that there was a time when settlers and Indigenous peoples lived together in peace, and that this time can be returned to somehow. This is nonsense. As some commentators pointed out on September 30, settler interactions with Indigenous nations were always characterized by colonial violence, culminating in the genocidal violence of the residential school system and other violent attempts to eradicate Indigenous culture and communities entirely. There is no promised land to go back to or rebuild. Any justice that we can forge will be in the context of a new system that allows justice to be built in this land.
Dismantling colonialism in Canada will be very hard. Even though we’ve seen settler-colonial regimes fall in the past, they’ve been very different from the modern Canadian context. Apartheid South Africa was propped up by a hyper-militarized settler minority that used brutal violence to suppress the Indigenous masses of Black South Africans. Colonial Algeria in the 1950s was treated as an extension of France itself and had a White minority population numbering in the millions, yet the indigenous population still outnumbered it many times over and was able to fight for independence.
In Canada the Indigenous population is a small minority, surrounded by great masses of settlers. No country like this has ever successfully decolonized. The genocide here was so bad that it reduced Indigenous people to minority status on their own land. In terms of decolonization, we’re in uncharted territory here. Settlers are going to have to be part of any anti-colonial liberation struggle, but for that to happen, settlers are going to have to want something better for themselves. You cannot build a revolution on altruism. Many struggles, from labor to the environment, are going to have to combine in the struggle for Indigenous liberation if justice is to be done and colonialism finally overthrown on occupied Turtle Island.
In this year’s federal election, the Communist Party of Canada campaigned on a “new, equal & voluntary partnership” that would recognize the right of nations within Canada to self-determination, up to and including secession and draft a new constitution based on an equal, voluntary partnership of Indigenous nations, Quebec, Acadians, and English-speaking Canada. This was in addition to ensuring a just settlement of Indigenous land claims, respecting Indigenous rights under the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP) to veto pipelines and development on and near their lands, as well as enacting the Calls to Action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and the Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. This was the only electoral platform that I saw that really challenged the foundations of colonialism and called for radical change. The empty words that most politicians speak about guaranteeing the rights of Indigenous people don’t mean much when the fundamental oppressive relationships of settler-colonialism remain intact, Indigenous people remain marginalized and the prisons remain packed with them. Society as a whole needs to be re-structured for genuine decolonization to be achieved. It’s not impossible, but for such revolutionary change to happen, all the peoples of this land have to want something more.
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