Two hundred years ago, on June 1, 1812, United
States President, James Madison, declared war on England and its North American
Colonies. Now from a 200 year old perspective, 2012 is going to be a reflective
and patriotic year in Canada as it goes down memory lane to revisit the events,
meaning, and impact, of this war on Canadian identity as a nation. In 1812, the
conquest of New France in1760 by England was still a recent painful memory for
those living in Lower Canada; for those in Upper Canada, the majority, as
Tories, had chosen to remain loyal to Britain during the American revolution of
1776, and had, as Empire Loyalists, emigrated largely to the area we call Ontario
today, and to the Maritimes. The war of 1812 involved what existed then, Lower
and Upper Canada, (Quebec and Ontario) and the Maritimes. Now scant decades
after these social political dislocations and migrations, the death and
destruction by American militia type incursions into Canadian Communities
around the great lakes affected both English loyalists and French Canadians, and
a deepened sense of Canadian identity was forged. Some Canadian historians have identified the
war of 1812, more than the loyalist migration from revolutionary United States,
as being the significant beginning of Canadian nationalism (Mac Kirdy, Moir and
Zoltvany, 1971, p. 117). But read any Canadian History book and you will likely
not hear much of the war’s effect on, or participation of, First Nations
peoples.
The two Canada’s and the Maritimes would
experience significant internal conflict and sectionalist dissent and rebellion
during the years between 1812 and Confederation in 1867. Federalism was chosen
as a form of governance to affirm the particularities of cultural-regional differences
in an attempt to address the conflicts of sectionalism and dissent. These were
important foundational years in my opinion, in defining a Canadian way between
the libertarian egalitarianism of the republic, and the more traditional
organic and communitarian values of Catholic Lower Canada and Protestant Upper
Canada. Canadian nation building had at work within it the loyalist, ancient, Tory
vision of an organic society of communities, a social vision that differed from
liberalism’s individualistic and laissez faire
theories of the American republic, a republic that was more heir to the
perspectives of the British Whigs, to Thomas Paine and John Locke. In the
development in emerging Canada, it is possible to regard as positive the effects
of the challenges and dialogue in the conflict resolution of the sectional
debates between the two colonial cultures; yet we can lament and wish that the Aboriginal
voices could also be said to have been represented. George Grant in His, Lament for a Nation (2005), has
indicated the toxic dangers of individualistic liberalism with its inherent
movement towards a homogeneous, absolutely differentiated human society, a
homogeneous continentalism (pp., 23, 40, and 41). I suggest that the sectional debates in Upper and Lower
Canada during the 19th century, and continuing today in the separatist stream of
thought in Quebec, has left an
important inclination towards an inherent vision of a pluralism of Communities
in Canada; not a plurality of individuals, attached remotely only by contract,
but the plurality of particular communities. In Canada we have used the term, cultural mosaic, to affirm the
importance of the particularities of the many immigrant communities which exist
in Canada today. Ron Dart in his, The
Canadian High Tory Tradition: Raids on the unspeakable (2004), alludes to
an inherent originality of virtue and goodness of the parish, or shire, and
citizens of the local community (pp. 151,153, 203).
2012 will be a good year to look at the
war of 1812, as well as at the significant post-war events in Canadian history,
and to renew a vision of what it means to be Canadian in the 21st
century. Post-war of 1812 considerations could be extended to the American
Civil war, the Boer War, World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam
War, not to forget Afghanistan; all have had a defining effect on Canada qua Canada. However, I do want to focus
on the Canadian colonial social-cultural issues. Social cultural conflicts have
also had a defining impact on Canadian identity. I wish to suggest that Nation
building two hundred years ago was quite insensitive to the nations and
communities that had existed on North American soil for thousands of years. The
question is important to reflect on: how sensitive are we to Canadian First
Nations issues today; and are we willing to respect the integrity of their
traditional teachings about land and community? Perhaps there is an affinity of
the ancient Celtic Tory way Dart alludes to (2004, pp. 199-203), to that of
First Nation’s perspectives that places sacred inherent value on the
environment and community, a vision lost in the rush towards individual liberty
and technological progress in developing western Canada. I would like to think
that it is also more than the experience of war, or fear of war (including fear
and public safety), that defines us as a nation. The questions and issues that
George Grant (2005) raised in the 60’s are as relevant now, as they were then,
in gaining insight into our implicit Canadian identity. I find hope in the last lines of Grant’s lament for a nation; he concludes that we can reflect and lament, but as
people of hope we recognize that ultimately the events of Canadian history take
place in an “eternal order” of love, (p.95). However, the history of Canadian
nation building is multi-factorial with social-psychological and cultural world
view issues entwined with political philosophy and economic political theory.
Aboriginal
Day for me this year (2012), personally
culminated 21 years of experiencing
Aboriginal Day events in the prisons where I have served (as chaplain) for that
long. This year again, I recognize the importance and value these annual events
have in educating and connecting both young modern aboriginals, and
non-aboriginals, with an aspect of Canadian history about which we seem to have
amnesia. Perhaps it is selective memory,
avoiding the pain of cognitive dissonance regarding the prejudicial
exploitation Canadian first nations’ peoples experienced in colonial and recent
history. I look around me in prison and note painfully the overrepresentation
of Aboriginal and Metis prisoners, a consequence of the rapid destruction of
the social fabric of First Nations’ traditional community way of life as a
result of rapid colonial expansion, specifically in the opening of the Canadian
West to settlement, to mechanized agriculture, western commerce, and resource
exploitation. Canadian prisons are, also of origin, within the legacy of John
A. MacDonald’s Canadian national policy; but, they have nothing particularly
Tory about them. The Canadian government did place an emphasis on having law
and order provided by the North West Mounted police preceding the settlement of
western Canada to prevent the kind of frontier justice of the western United States.
However, in the suppression Red River resistance of the Metis and Cree, (North-West Rebellion) the Police had no
choice but to force the submission of the Metis and Cree to the justice of western national expansion, and to
allow the progress of the CPR over their traditional lands. History, it has often been recognized, has
been written by the victors of conquest; little has been written of the truth
of dark side of colonialism, of war, prisons, and ceding (extinguishment of title), of the shadow side of Canadian
Nation building. If there are any
memorials or cenotaphs of the war of 1812, they will probably celebrate the
accomplishments of the two “founding races” leading up to confederation, the
English and the French; the presence, contribution and participation of the
First peoples of Canada did not seem to count, or warrant publication. Of the
century of nation building, there seems to be a lack of awareness of, and a
dearth of memorial markers, to the suffering and death of thousands of Canadian
first nations’ people under the onslaught of ceding territory, of disease, and
of, let’s use the well-known sociological term, anomie. Their loss was not only of a traditional way of life, but also
of the death of their languages and community narratives, and of cultural-spiritual
practices. The legitimacy of their human communities was implicitly and
explicitly invalidated; and, their sense of self had been inextricably tied
spiritually to their ancestral lands. Becoming wards of the state cut to the
very core of their spirituality and identity.
Canadian 19th century social-cognition
was largely Victorian, European, dominantly, Anglo-Saxon or French; the Canada
that was emerging was conceived of as that of two “races.” It must be said
though, that the concept of race had not yet accumulated the toxic of pure race
or master-race thinking as developed by later eugenic and Nazi ideology. With
some historical insight and its lessons, this year, no doubt, in commemorating
the War of 1812, we will hear more of the support of various native communities
supporting the British efforts, the Huron’s, the Iroquois, and of Chief
Tecumseh, without whose help the Americans might have conquered Canada. Chief
Tecumseh, as well as other First Nation leaders at that time, regarded the
governance of Britain as more favourable for the wellbeing and historical affirmation
of their communities, than the republican rule of Jefferson and Madison. Some
stories of past wars have achieved mythical proportions; some are ones sided
and need to be revisited. It is an apothegm
that the truth will set us free; selective memories can only keep us trapped in
a pattern of thinking that is at the very root, the cause of many 21st
century social political crises.
One can only heal and reconcile the pain of
the past if first recognized, and then felt. I will suggest that our current
emphasis on reconciliation of residence school survivors is an absolute must;
however, the residence school abuses issue is not the root problem, it is
rather a symptom related to the underlying cause of utilitarian, Darwinist
thinking, and social prejudice in nation building. Let’s be honest and fair,
recognizing that as human beings, we all have difficulties recognizing our own
biases and theoretical assumptions…our emotional intelligence, then as much as
today. 2012 can be the year we face the whole truth, so that we can move
forward as a true reconciled multi-cultural and multi-faith nation, a
federation taking the best of English, French, and Aboriginal virtues into a
collaboration of common goods, along with the added value of the multitude of
immigrant streams that have served to build Canada as the nation it is today. We
can’t solve social problems with the same thinking that caused them in the first
place. Confederation, Meech Lake and Charlottetown, all struggled with the
tensions of an inherent Canadian social cultural “mosaic”; Canada is not a
republican melting pot. Elijah Harper, at Meech Lake, certainly opened the door
to important reflection on the absolute need to include First Nations, Inuit
and Metis, in on the creation of local and national policy and legislation
affecting their communities and the land they live on. This should not be a
problem; Canada is used to not being a homogeneous atomistic society of an absolute consensus of individuals,
but rather a pluralistic nation of communities a bi-lingual, or rather,
multi-lingual, multi-cultural society.
1812 was still of the era Canada Gordon
Lightfoot sang about in his Canadian
Railroad Trilogy: “a time in this fair land when the railroad did not run”;
a time before the violence of technology on the Canadian landscape, being broken
by hammers and dynamite; and of its victims in railroad and nation building, of
a silence, and of dead men “too silent to be real.” Rupert’s Land and the North
West territories and its developing Metis society, and traditional Aboriginal
societies, all lay as it had since time immemorial. Assinaboia (Lower Manitoba
today) had become a thriving Metis community. The fur trading era had made its
impact in these regions, however, social-economic development had been slow,
and the first nation’s people benefited some during this era. The Quebec Act
and the policies of mercantilism had provided a protection for this ancient
realm of nature with its first societies. The past need not be vilified or
romanticised, but it does need to be set free by telling the whole story so
that healing can occur, and for life to move forward in a collaborative way.
Specifically, the story of how the Canadian West was “won” must be reviewed. As
one reads of the “development” of the nation, it is apparent how national
policy aggressively and progressively “dispossessed” the first inhabitants of
the plains and the Metis of Manitoba, to make room for the CPR and settlers. This
job was sealed in the Manitoba act in 1970 (Treat #4 in 1874). No numbered
treaties were made with the Metis; they were not even consulted at the outset,
though some script was offered for compensation of the expropriation of the
land they had built their communities on. In 1885, Louis Riel was executed as
well as 11 Cree supporters (31 Cree were incarcerated) for sedition in the
North-West Rebellion. This, and the incarceration of the signatories of the
plains treaty #6 (1876; concerning Central Saskatchewan and Alberta), was a sad
moment in Canadian history in the, of “opening up” the west for settlers and
resource exploitation more along laissez
faire lines. The year the Cree chiefs,
Big Bear, Poundmaker, and One Arrow, spent in the new Stony Mountain Federal
Penitentiary was humiliating, demeaning of their humanity, status, and health,
and the experience hastened their death.
James Douglas in pre-confederation BC, had
made treaties with the inhabitants, and insisted that they have as much land as
they wanted. However, Robin Fisher (1992) says of treaty making, that the
concept of land was based on then current theories of the nature and use of
aboriginal land tenure, and did not take into account native realities (p. 66).
This kind of thinking also influenced the treaty-making that was going to “open
up” the west; the first plains’ treaties # 1 and #2 were made in 1871, involving
southern Manitoba; treaty #7 was signed in 1877, and it involved southern
Alberta. Fisher’s (1992) insights are important as he further notes, that it is
unlikely that the local inhabitants understood fully the concepts of the
treaties’, written, legal, language: “In the pre-settlement period the Indians
had no way of learning about European concepts of land ownership, and the
signatories of the treaties probably thought that they were surrendering the
use of the land rather than the title of it. But in spite of the many
inadequacies, implicit in these treaties was the notion that the aboriginal
race exercised some kind of ownership over the land that ought to be extinguished
by the colonizing power” (p. 67. Emphasis mine). That Europeans of the time had little cross-cultural
understanding of the seasonal and migratory patterns of Aboriginal land-use is
also evident in hindsight. The numbered plain treaties were signed by
signatories, overpowered, starving, and desperate, seeking the survival and wellbeing
of their communities upon the disappearance of the buffalo, and of the
apprehension of vast swaths of their land by railroad magnates and settlers. One only needs to read Rudy Wiebe’s, The Temptations of Big Bear (1999), to
get a sense of the incommensurability of the oral organic culture of the first
nations, and the Lockean legal positivism and “contractarian” treaty making
with the First Nations of the Canadian West.
A
prejudicial spirit of supremacy was also at work in the undoing, the “reallocations”,
of James Douglas’s treaties in BC by William Trutch, who was to become BC’s
first Lieutenant Governor after BC joined Confederation in 1871. Douglas’
maximum land allotments were reduced to his absolute minimums; the aboriginals
did not need much land according to Trutch, and he indicated that they were
savages, mostly immoral, in communicating with the Prime Minister in 1872
(Fisher 1992, p. 161). Later in
Laurier’s long Liberal term as prime minister, Minister of the interior,
Clifford Siffton advertised Canada’s western lands as the “Last best west.” The
20th century, he proclaimed, was to be Canada’s century (Callwood
1981, pp. 223,225). One recognizes that the Canadian West was open for business
with the flood of settlers eager to get 160 free acres per family; fist nation’s
rights as equal human beings-in-community did not seem to enter the minds of
the time. The needs of Aboriginal communities’ survival in the face of loss of
land based on migratory and seasonal patterns of nature seemed absurd to most
European settlers and politicians at the time. Dart (2004) notes that the
social values of Victorian England’s Tory’s were impacted by Darwin and Adam
Smith; but also that abuse of the Tory vision does not disqualify its
legitimacy and use (pp. 120 and 144).
By the time the 19th century
ended, most aboriginal communities were devastated by disease and the effects of
the legislation involved with nation building. It was hard to stop the steam
roller of corporate Canada at work in the rail transportation and resource
industries, the private sector as Cree Chief Piapot learned. When oil was disovered in Northern
Alberta on unceded Indian lands, land considered wasteland previously, treaties
# 8, and later, #11, were hurriedly made in 1899 and 1921 respectively, after the oil discoveries (Fumoleau,
1973, pp. 153-159).Today with oil (and minerals) from these same areas still of
vital national importance with current debate regarding the building of more
pipe lines across sensitive ecological territory and first nations’ lands, we
must enter into discussion and serious collaboration with those most locally
affected. We cannot address these enterprises with the same attitude and thinking
of the treaty-making of a century ago. There must be strong, compassionate,
impartial governance, able to intervene in aggressive corporate enterprises
which are likely to do harm to the land and its people; expropriation of land
for the “common good” today is likely to be mostly for the “common good” of the
corporation and stockholder, and the abstract universalized consumer, not for
the local communities and their inhabitants. The ecology and the most
vulnerable and powerless need a strong state to protect them from abuses and
pressure from high profile corporate lawyers.
It is important to note that the
loyalists brought to Canadian soil a model of strong compassionate governance with an implicit communitarian
social philosophy; and the French Canadians had a keen sense of the importance
of language (language is not an individualistic aspect of history) religion,
and community identity. However, it seems neither dominant group regarded with
much importance, the governance, language, culture, or religion of the First Nations
citizens of the land. It seemed normal to European people of that time and
culture to think as they did about social cultural realities of those different
from their own culture and religion. That land seemed to them a wasteland
unless settled by European settlers; Aboriginals were regarded it seems as
lesser humans unless civilized by Christian beliefs and practices. Victorian
era social values originated in a highly stratified, class oriented England and
Europe. In the pressure of the spirit of the times, and in terms of the profits
to be made in nation building, mistakes were made. To us, living after the lessons
of the holocaust, having learned much in the struggles for full humanity in the
civil and human rights movements of the 20th century, we recognize the toxic
social effects of racism and prejudice on the total Canadian social fabric. I
know from personal experience of being called a goddamed little DP (displaced
person) in 1949 when we immigrated to Canada from the Netherlands. I can
imagine the effects of being devalued as a human, (ascribed shame) because of
one’s language or race on the very soil of your ancestors. Gordon Lightfoot sings of the navvies who sweat, toiled, and died,
building the Canadian railroad so vital to the nation- building of
Confederation. The navvies refer to a class of workers in “navigations” in the
19th century British-European railroad and canal building boom. The labourers
of this vital work force were vilified and dehumanized, and all sorts of social
and moral ills were blamed on them. The Navvies on Canadian soil were mostly
men of Chinese origin; hundreds died in building the railroad. Yet, after the
last spike was driven (1985), John A. Mac Donald levied a head tax on all
Chinese, and disenfranchised them as well as the Aboriginal peoples and ”Mongolians”
(Callwood, 1981, pp. 214-215). Such thinking and the resulting policies may
have seemed “normal” to the people of Victorian times; but we know better today.
It is good to go down memory lane and
honour, celebrate, and grieve, the stories of the war of 1812, and to focus also
of that what was to follow on Canadian soil. We do need to learn from the,
lessons of history and social psychology. I have also heard it said that Canada
came into nationhood in World War I. War seems to forge identities. But
wouldn’t it be nice if our identity as a nation could be linked to, and defined
by, peacemaking and community building, and not war waging and corporatization.
Nationalism would be guided by an ancient vision based on natural law supporting
an organic, community wellbeing, defined by virtue, by common grace and common
good, and not by possessive individualism, socially distant contractual
relationships, or by racial, or exclusivist supremacy thinking. George Grant in
his lament for a Nation (2005), laments the policies of liberalism, individualism,
and the absolutization of technology, that lead to the erosion of a form of
governance that is strong enough to intervene when the needs of the human
community are endangered; strong and compassionate enough to reach out to the
powerless and marginalized. The ancient Tory vision is one that is grounded in
the eternal Good, and focussed on the local community, the shire, and parish,
according to Ron Dart in his, The
Canadian High Tory Tradition: Raids on the unspeakable (Dart, 2004, pp.
153, 199-203). Both Grant and Dart recognize,
as the first nations do, that there is an organic spiritual dimension to all of
life, a sacredness of the land and its people, and a concern for the commonweal
of community, for it is in community life that we are nourished, inevitably in
relationship with others near to us, and with the One who created us in whom we
live and move and have our being. We can do well to go down memory lane to
Lundy Lane, but it will be imperative to learn that war is hell, and peace
making and peace as shalom is divine, Prosperity is not necessarily synonymous
with more technology, more railroads, more pipelines, more oil, more money, or
more land, for corporate growth and private and individual consumption.
Bibliography
Callwood, J. (1981). Portrait
of Canada. New York: Doubleday & Company Inc.
Dart, R. (2004). The
Canadian High Tory Tradition: Raids on the Unspeakable. Dewdney, BC:
Syntaxis Press.
Fisher, R. (1992). Contact
and Conflict; Indian-European Relations in British Columnbia 1774-1890.
Vancouver: UBC Press.
Fumoleau, R. O. (1973). As
Long As This Land Shall Last; A History of Treaty 8 and Treaty 11 1870-1939.
Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Limited.
Grant, G. (2005). Lament
for a Nation: 40th Anniversary Edition. Montreal & Kingston:
McGill-Queen's University Press.
MacKirdy, K.A, J.S Moir and
Y.F. Zoltvany. (1971). Changing Perspectives In Canadian History. Don
Mills Ontario: J.M. Dent & Sons (Canada) Limited.
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