Eye View 

by David Charbonneau

First people had a big role in the History of Canada

 

August 5, 2010

 


Shawn Atleo wants the government to stop treating his people like clients. The charismatic young National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations told the annual meeting of the assembly in Winnipeg that it was time to dismantle the oppressive Indian bureaucracy. Atleo has a dream: "Imagine a time . . . when we give up all that the current system provides - the highest suicide rates, the highest rates of incarceration in the country, the lowest education rates, the lowest income rates."

The Indian Act is a product of counterfeit history. Canadian writer and thinker John Ralston Saul outlined that pseudo-history in a lecture introduced by Atleo at the University of British Columbia. "We as aboriginal people are looking to thinkers such as John Ralston Saul to share his thoughts and expand the conversation so that we might revisit our relationship with one another," Atleo told the enthusiastic crowd.

We need to pick up the treads of that old conversation, Saul explained. Canada is not a new country. At 400 years, we are the oldest continuous federation in the world. For the first 250 years of the federation, aboriginal people were dominant or equal partners in the formation of Canada.

But you would never know that by reading our history. Instead, we learn about early Canada as reported by early European immigrants in letters sent back home. Wishing to paint a bright picture for their sponsors, they tell tale tales of noble savages and success in the new world. This fiction shaped our history.

The reality was that immigrants couldn't have survived without the support and generosity of their native hosts. If left to their own resources, the scurvy-ridden immigrants who staggered off the boat would have perished. Instead, they were greeted and nurtured by a society of two million aboriginal people.

Canada's history marvels at the development of European technology and enlightened thinking yet is silent about the innovation of our first people during the same period. Reading that history we would assume that nothing of any significance happened in Canada.


 

 But the native technology of the canoe was superior to that of the wheel though the rocky, water-strewn land. The great idea of multiculturalism was superior to the feudal system because it embodied the great circle, a concept of coexistence that endures in the Canadian psyche today.

The written word is an easy deceit. The early immigrant could send back sagas of conquest and who would doubt it? Oral tradition is harder to fake. Imagine facing a circle of your peers and telling such fabrications. Faced with conspicuous reality, who would believe it?

Only recently have the oral records of Canada's first people been recognized as historically valid by the Supreme Court in the Delgamuukw decision. Now a true history of Canada can be told.

However, we don't need to wait for that history to unfold because it already exists in our collective unconsciousness. If we allow our culture, as shaped by aboriginal thinkers, to become articulated then those ancient ideas emerge. Even if we are not prepared to wait for the oral history of Canada, rare glimpses of it occur in the written record. One such speech was delivered by B.C. chiefs at Kamloops in 1910 as part of their memorial to Sir Wilfred Laurier. It carried embedded wisdom of chiefs from centuries before regarding the relationship with newcomers. "These people wish to be partners with us in our country. We must, therefore, be the same as brothers to them and live as one family. We will share equally in everything-half and half-in land, water and timber, and so on. What is ours will be theirs and what is theirs will be ours. We will help each other to be great and good." These ideas must have seemed revolutionary or even naïve to immigrant listeners who were accustomed to conquest and assimilation.

Canada's first people shaped the character of our fledgling nation and nurtured the fragile minority of immigrants who were barely surviving. Without aboriginal food, technology, and ways of the environment, Europeans would have perished.

Foreign concepts of conquest and assimilation remain embedded in the patriarchal Indian Act. A new day is dawning in which Canada's true history and collective foundations are being revealed through oral traditions. Canada has matured to the point where we throw off the colonial version of our history and embrace an authentic vision of our past.



 David Charbonneau is the owner of Trio Technical.
He can be reached at dcharbonneau13@shaw.ca
 





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