Detail from Richard Shorty’s work “Genesis 1:20-25”
Wednesday is National Aboriginal Day and ten days later, Canada commemorates its 150th birthday. Since the centenary in 1967 and even since Canada 125 in 1992, the whole enterprise of Canada has become deeply informed by the need for reconciliation between indigenous people and communities, and settler people and communities.
We are all treaty people. Everyone in Canada who has citizenship is also a beneficiary to the treaties that were signed and made as a way of acknowledging and making binding, the relationship between settler communities and indigenous nations. The ability to own private land, for example, is one way in which settlers benefit from treaties that were signed long ago, even if those treaties were made hundreds of years ago in other parts of the country. Canadian society depends on the ability of governments to provide access to land and resources, and that access flows directly from treaties. Not from conquering and taking. From legally binding agreements. You are a treaty person.
The promise of Canada has never been properly delivered to indigenous communities. Over decades courts have declared this. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission declared this. The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples declared this. It is evident in data and research and popular culture.
The need for reconciliation is long overdue.
For thirty years I have worked in this space, and lately I have been working with a small set of principles, when settlers ask me about reconciliation. Here they are:
- Reconciliation requires restitution. For reconciliation to be real it must be accompanied by restitution. Reconciliation efforts aimed at increasing awareness are fine, but they should have a direct and material benefit to indigenous people and communities, When indigenous communities do well, we all do well. Restitution can happen in all kinds of ways including the return of lands and property, but it also requires the honouring of the ongoing relationships embedded in the treaties in which mutual benefit was supposed to flow for the future.
- Reconciliation is unsettling. My friend Michelle Nahanee talks about “emotional equity” which is one way of thinking about what it costs for indigenous people to interact in non-indigenous contexts. It is inherently unsettling. For non-indigenous people a true commitment to reconciliation means unsettling notions of what you take for granted. Just understanding how you are a treaty beneficiary is one way to suddenly become unsettled. And I have often said that the only job for settlers in reconciliation is to be unsettled. It is from that place that we can all meet and work on a different set of ideas than colonization.
- Settlers need to make the first move. Still with the idea of emotional equity, it is important that settlers make the first move in a reconciliation initiative. Indigenous people cannot be expected to be the ones to make it easy for everyone to do reconciliation. Settlers must make the first moves, and must do so in all the vulnerability and fear that comes from making the first move. Do something, do it badly, be open to learning and keep going.
- Reconciliation is a verb. The right term is “reconciling” because we aren’t ever going to acheive a place wher ethe world is reconciled. It is an ongoing project. If the project of the last 150 years was about creating a Canada where there were once only dozens of nations, perhaps the project of the next 150 years should be about figuring out how to make a country possible that reconciles the interests, duties and obligations of it’s history and privilege with the results of the colonization that enabled that privilege. There is no certain answer, but I have faith that together we can create a place that is better than either of us can do separately.
- Its about relationship. The reason why Canada has to confront the horrible legacy of colonization is that Canadians entered into and then promptly forgot the nature of the relationships that were set in place by the laws and policies of 1763. In that year King George proclaimed that nations west of the Atlantic watershed needed to be dealt with as nations, and according to the rule of law. That proclamation, recognizing the importance of relationship over domination, became the basis for all Aboriginal law in Canada and is still to this day the standard upon which adherence to the rule of law is applied. All Canadians are born or move into a relationship with indigenous people and the relationship is direct, personal and beneficial. Reconciliation needs to restore this sense of mutual dependancy and correct the balance.
I will be hosting conversations on reconciliation at Canada Day commemorations on (Nexwlelexwem) Bowen Island this year with my friend Pauline Le Bel, who is running a series of interesting events this year called “Knowing Our Place” about the relationship of Bowen Islanders to the Skwxwu7mesh Nation and to our At’lkitsem (Howe Sound). If you’re on Bowen, join us. If not, host your own and think about why reconciliation matters to you.
While we are known as a country of tolerance and peace, and we largely are, there is a longstanding thread that runs through our history and right into our present that claims a kind of Eurocentric supremacy, and it has its impact against immigrants, indigenous people and people of colour who were born here.
In the Red Deer story a group of high school kids are punished for fighting, in an incident that involved Syrian refugee kids and others. The response was a protest against the Syrian kids, because some people believed that the Syrian kids were getting different punishment for their role in the fight. That wasn’t true.
However that did not stop some of the more seedy xenophobes and dogwhistle racists from getting their voices heard on the matter, and the Euro-centric white supremacy thread again surfaced. Consider this quote from Steven Garvey who organizes against Muslims:
“Who we are as a people, as a country, as a heritage, it’s all getting pushed aside and if we don’t stand up for us as a people, as our country, we’re going to lose it,” Garvey said. “We welcome people coming to our country, but they have to integrate into our society. It’s not about accommodating their values.
“It’s about standing up for Canadians, our freedoms, our civil rights and our liberties. And some of these cultures that are coming are incompatible with our own.”
Garvey’s voice is not at all unusual, and the sentiment is not at all uncommon. Many non-indigenous Canadians, if you ask them, will tell you that immigrants should integrate into their idea of society, and that we should not accommodate their values, and that our own laws and cultural practices should be respected, as if this has been going on from time immemorial on this continent.
And of course this begs two questions. First is, where were you from 1500 until now? Because without having done exactly this to the tens of millions of indigenous people here, there would be no basis for a man of immigrant European heritage to claim that his particular set of values is “Canadian” and therefore supreme in this place.
The second question is “which values?” which is a question that Kellie Leitch has spun into a dog whistle political campaign to attract racists and xenophobes to her leadership bid for the Conservative Party. Those that voted for her are now members of that party, and despite the results of the leadership race, they will remain members of that party unless they quit.
The question of “which values?” is totally confounding in a country as big and diverse as Canada. We have a Constitution, and that’s as close as it gets to a collective expression of values. The Constitution dictates the legality of our laws. Break the law, you’ll be punished by the courts. So we already have a mechanism for doing what Garvey says we should be doing.
Except he’s not saying that our current rule of law is good enough. He and others like him want to pick and choose what Constitutional rights apply. For example, he wants to exercise unfettered freedom of speech but he would like a limit of the freedom of religion – his organization is called the Worldwide Coalition Against Islam, after all. I suspect that he values the ability to freely associate or have access to equality before the law, but I’ll bet he quibbles with the protection of Aboriginal rights as defined by the Royal Proclamation of 1763. All of those rights are equally protected in our Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Justice demands that Canadians uphold and live by this Charter, something we’re not always very good at.
So what does he really want? Garvey’s ideas – that are readily shared by many with the merest of prompting across this country – are not fundamentally Canadian. They are not compatible with our Constitution or the laws we have set in place to help everyone who lives here get along.
Worse they are a perfect example of the ongoing imposition of a colonial mindset on the Canadian psyche. Canada is not a “nation-state.” this is not a country that is composed of a single nation of people with a shared history, language and set of values and standards. There are many many expressions of what it means to be Canadian and they are allowed within the framework of the laws we have made to try to balance rights and responsibilities. The shadow of the colonial violence that sought to erase indigenous cultures and laws is that the colonizers somehow became the victims. It isn’t true. Colonization still proceeds apace, and Euro-centric racism and xenophobia drives the seedier parts of the civic conversation on immigration policy.
Bigots like Garvey should not be left unchallenged as long as news outlets like the CBC see fit to give his ideas daylight.
It is both our right to do so, and our responsibility.
Yesterday I spent most of the day honouring people who have worked for decades to preserve and grow the Skwxu7mesh language. I’m on the advisory board of an organization called Kwi Awt Stelmexw, which supports Skwxumesh language learning and fluency. Kwi Awt Stelmexw translates roughly as “everyone who is here in the present moment” meaning ancestors and descendants. It is for these people that we are all doing our work.
There are only a handful of fully fluent Skwu7mesh speakers currently. When I say a handful, I mean 7. My friend Khelsilem has been ramping up fluency capacity with an immersion program at Simon Fraser University and we are now about to witness the graduation of that first cohort of 14 people who are well on their way in their fluency journey.
Yesterday Khelsilem hosted a ceremony to honour everyone who had done so much to keep the language alive, and who had brought us to this point where we can build a fluent future.
During the ceremony yesterday several speakers shared their thoughts and a few powerful images came to mind. Chief Ian Campbell talked about the return of the herring to our inlet, Atl’kitsem (Howe Sound) which has signalled a shift in the story that people have about this place. People are beginning to harvest herring eggs again using the old practice of placing cedar or hemlock bows in the water and allowing the herring to spawn on them
I reflected that alongside the return of the herring comes the return of the language. Just in the last five or six years as we have seen numbers of these fish increasing, we have also seen the use of the Skwxw7mesh language increasing as well. It is as if every herring is a word and every language learner is one more bough placed in the water upon which the language can spawn.
The number one job of settlers is to seek the places that unsettle you and just stay there, prepared to linger there a long time so that in your openness and vulnerability and confusion you might finally enter into relationship with the land and people you have unsettled.
My friend and colleague Bronagh Gallagher and I are in the early stages of creating a learning offering around complexity, facilitation and activism, whereby we try to bring complexity and participatory tools to the work of social change. We’ve been assembling some very interesting sources for our work and she recently introduced me to the work of Micah White who has written about protest and activism from a complexity perspective. I’m working my way through some interviews he gave in support of his book, The End of Protest. Here is one juicy line:
This is fundamental. All effective forms of protest are illegal until they succeed. All revolutions are illegal until they succeed, and then they become the government and all of the sudden these people are celebrated as heroes and all that kind of stuff. What we’re talking about is very real. This is what distinguishes fake protest from real protest. Fake protest is underpinned by the idea that our actions don’t need to be illegal, that we can get permits from the government, that we can have “free speech zones” or we can do scripted arrests; it doesn’t need to be illegal or dangerous or disobedient. I think that’s completely misguided. We didn’t get a permit for Occupy Wall Street. We asked people to bring tents knowing that it was illegal for people to set up tents. We did these behaviors because the legal regime doesn’t matter when you create a protest. You operate outside of the law.
It doesn’t mean they have to be violent. There are lots of different ways to be illegal. But it does mean that you have to say, “I’m trying to change a situation that is so important that I will disobey the law. My protest stands above the law.” And you also have to accept the consequences of that. For Occupy Wall Street seven thousand people were arrested. That’s an astounding number. People had their bones broken. People lost their jobs.
Absolutely. Real protest is always illegal. For sure.
There is an interesting observation here, that the socially acceptable forms of protest, innovation and radical change are only helpful in terms of creating incremental and socially acceptable change. You may shift things but they will be shifted WITHIN the acceptable boundaries. When you start pushing on the boundaries, or fundamentally breaking the boundaries, you will be operating outside of the law. In society, this takes the form of illegal activity. In organizational life this means fundamentally violating the organization’s norms and policies, some of which are unwritten and my not even be visible until you start acting in ways that make them visible.
It is this way with colonizing mindsets embedded in the ways that social institutions, governments and businesses operate in Canada, where there is hardly ever a fundamental challenge to some of the core ideas of colonization, such as the assumption that all private land was legally obtained or that all public land is owned by the Crown. In a society based on colonial power structures, everything goes along fine until some First Nation somewhere stands up to a Canadian law and challenges it’s authority. The act needs to be law-breaking in order for the laws to be rewritten. This is how Aboriginal title has entered Canadian Constitutional law as a valid, binding and important legal concept.
Likewise as organizations and businesses are trying to fundamentally change core practices, they are largely constrained by doing by having such change championed by an approved panel of change makers. Fundamental change comes to organizational life from the outside. It is disruptive. It calls into questions sacred cows about power, management policies, core purposes and priorities. Like activists, change agents are marginalized, dismissed reassigned, and often fired. At best if you are championing fundamental change within an organization you may suddenly find yourself without access to decision makers, left out of strategic cnversations and not allowed to work with and mentor junior staff.
Fundamental change is a threat. As I grow older as a middle class white skinned man, I have found myself on the receiving end of more and more challenges from younger people who don’t look like me. They challenge my assumptions and my ideas. I am beginning to discover that, despite having lots to offer, the way the world is changing around me must necessarily overturn the assumptions I make about the world, the ones that have allowed me to work relatively close to the core of social stability. I aspire to be an ally to those making change from the far margins, but it is not my place to declare myself an ally. People are given status as allies of fundamental change makers. It is not a title you can claim for yourself, no matter how well intentioned you are.
Social change, innovation and reorganization requires a kind of leadership at every level that works at the margins to provoke and overturn and works from the centre to, in effect, not defend the status quo too much from the “threats” from outside. There is no “other side of the fence” in the work of social change. While I’m not sure that there has ever been an orderly revolution in the world,the question for all of us is which side of the revolutionary Möbius strip are you on and what can you do to help what wants to be born?