Let’s do it for Canada. Let’s do it as Canada.

As originally submitted for publication by CultKW, a project of THEMUSEUM, on June 17, 2021.

John Gast’s painting of “Manifest Destiny”, “American Progress” or “Spirit of the Frontier” — wikipedia

Canada Day is coming up soon, preceded by the rest of the “Celebrate Canada” events recognized by the Department of Canadian Heritage.

It begins with National Indigenous Peoples Day, on the summer solstice. 

The traditional Quebec holiday known as Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day, now Fête nationale du Québec, happens June 24th. 

June 27 is Canadian Multiculturalism Day. 

Before Brexit, I thought Victoria Day — Fête de la Reine — could be added to the lineup as a celebration of British Canada. Now I like to think of it as a kind of Fête nationale d’Ontario. 

There’s also Waterloo Day, June 18, the anniversary of the final defeat of the self-crowned Emperor Napoleon. It’s as good a day as any to celebrate this country as “the land of the Canadas,” of towns, cities, and other human habitations grounded in place.

Juneteenth — June 19 — has emerged as another celebration, in this case of emancipation form slavery in the United States with a Texas focus. The counterpart here, in the Caribbean and other parts of the world, is the anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the British Empire on August 1st, 1834. 

These are all full of promise as celebration opportunities. However, it has become increasingly clear, year by year, that there are matters that need to be considered, studied and adjusted before we can celebrate Canada and its constituent elements with anything like the confidence, pride and joy that was prevalent during the centennial, 54 years ago.

One of those urgent priorities was eloquently and movingly summarized by Senator Murray Sinclair shortly after the news broke about the discovery of unmarked graves of 215 children on the grounds of Kamloops residential school.  

My last column ended with a resolve to “keep a hopeful, prayerful silence” in the wake of the news from Kamloops.1 

The hopeful aspect was the clinging to the possibility that the discovery may prove to be the turning point for facing the truth and moving toward reconciliation. I explained that prayerful side of the resolve was to make my comments about Canada’s relationship with Indigenous peoples a kind petition, not to any political leader, but “to my fellow citizens here on this ground”:

Let’s, once and for all, come together, regardless of our various ethnic backgrounds, faith traditions, political leanings and economic situations, to support one another in finding the courage to face the truth, accept our complicity, shoulder the responsibility, and get to work, each in our small corner, according to our own lights, doing everything in our personal power to make this right.   

I’m writing with the question “what can a poor boy do?” still top of mind. What can this old, poor white male (he, him) settler Canadian of Atlantic European extraction do to help make this right?

Not much. But I’m confident that we can do what needs to be done together, as a people. We can lead, and when we do, the governments will follow. 

In the wake of recent developments, following a precedent set in Vancouver, Canada Day celebrations have been cancelled in Wilmot Township. It was Canada Day in Wilmot, a committee that, according to a recent communication, “supports reconciliation and is working toward the direction of the two row wampum,” that made the decision to hold back on the celebrations this year. 

As Wilmot Councillor Angie Hallman, who chairs the group, has explained, “It’s a one-year pause to respect grieving Indigenous people in our community. … One year without fireworks is compassionate and appropriate.”  

A public statement from the committee proposes, much like I did two weeks ago, quiet reflection, taking reconciliation to heart, and making it personal:  Together, Canadians must do more than just talk about reconciliation; we must learn how to practice reconciliation in our everyday lives – within ourselves and our families, and in our communities, events, governments, places of worship, schools and workplaces. And most importantly for all of our children and future generations.

Meanwhile, there are reports that the Township has also decided to leave the statue of Canada’s first Prime Minister in storage indefinitely, which may mean a merciful end to the Prime Ministers Path project in Baden. In Toronto, the new beeldenstorm, which I’ve been observing with ancestral terror and dismay, has extended its fury to a statue of Egerton Ryerson at the university named after him. 

“You can feel change coming like a train rumbling toward you,” Luisa D’Amato comments in the Waterloo Region Record. “In this time of grief and rage and reckoning, neutrality cannot exist.” D’Amato goes on to ask: “How long before the other statues representing the rotten foundations on which this beautiful country is built must come down too, so we can understand ourselves better?” 

I’m not neutral, but I’m not fully in line with any prominent current position either, especially any stance determined to separate the sheep from the goats. If you say “neutrality cannot exist,” you’re suggesting this is the direction we’re headed. I hope not. The greatest danger we face is the prospect of, again following the U.S. example, forming two hostile, irreconcilable camps and fostering a culture of fear, blame, hate and violence. 

I haven’t changed my view that targeting long gone personages like Ryerson and Macdonald to carry the blame is a distraction from the main concern, and a hindrance to facing the truth. In terms of what it implies for Canada, we’ve reached what looks like an impasse. This isn’t just a stain on an otherwise glorious national record. It is Canada itself that is at stake here. 

That’s why, in my “petition” last week, I wrote “let’s do this for Canada … and let’s do it as Canada.”  

I recommend the long view of the history of Canada in part because the achievement of home rule here 154 years ago no longer looks like such a great accomplishment. From an Indigenous perspective, settlers in power spelled disaster here in the True North strong and free, just as it did after settlers in the 13 rebellious colonies declared their independence 90 years earlier. The settler republic set patterns of continental nation-building that Canada has been following almost to the letter, and this remains the dominant pattern to the present day. 

And yet, I wouldn’t describe such foundations as “rotten.” To begin with, a “country” is more than just whatever the current arrangements are for managing the day-to-day affairs of a modern nation state. Our “beautiful country” is the land, the waters, the peoples and our cultural inheritance, not a constitutional order. We have been making progress here in Canada, real progress, not just the old-fashioned “man and his world” dominion over the lands, waters, plants and animals kind of progress. The fact that we’re finally getting around to facing this problem is in itself evidence of this. 

Looking back needn’t involve longing for a return to some lost ideal. And self-loathing will not help us accomplish anything. There are some saving graces in the story of Canada, especially continuity over time, peaceful transition and an emerging good will. We know better, and can do better than our forebears did during the years when Macdonald, Laurier, King, Diefenbaker or Trudeau Sr. presided over our parliament.To build on what has been accomplished so far, what we need is hope, confidence and a firm resolve.  

The overarching truth that needs to be addressed is not connected to the sins of any particular individual, or malevolent government policy, or the ancient ways of kings, empresses and popes, but the frontier spirit of manifest destiny, dominion from sea to sea, and “go west young man”: i.e. the distinctly North American conception of progress as expansion, mastery, exploitation and extraction.

The widely popular painting by John Gast at the top of this post shows how “American Progress” played itself out as the republic fulfilled its destiny. The image is equally applicable as an allegory of how this Dominion has been expanding from sea to sea to sea. The driving force was not old-fashioned colonial aggrandizement, but high modern nation-building in two independent settler democracies.    

To reconcile, we’d be wise to go back to the beginning. This means, as the Canada Day in Wilmot group has sensed, starting to work “toward the direction of the two row wampum.” 

This would take us to 1613, 254 years before the achievement we celebrate on Canada Day, and 163 years before the events our cousins to the south celebrate on July 4. It takes us to the development of an understanding between people of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and a few adventurers from the United Provinces of the Netherlands who had come to set up a factorij — a trading post — on a great river that would give them access the interior of Turtle Island. 

According to an Oneida source, Two Row Wampum Belt “symbolizes the agreement and conditions under which the Haudenosaunee welcomed the newcomers to this land.” It was, and remains, an understanding, starting with an insistence that this is a relationship between equals standing on the same ground:

You say that you are our father and I am your son.” We say, ‘We will not be like Father and Son, but like Brothers’.” This wampum belt confirms our words. These two rows will symbolize two paths or two vessels, traveling down the same river together. One, a birch bark canoe, will be for the Indian People, their laws, their customs and their ways. We shall each travel the river together, side by side, but in our own boat. Neither of us will make compulsory laws or interfere in the internal affairs of the other. Neither of us will try to steer the other’s vessel.

This is not a deal or a contract; it is a framework for a relationship. The British continued to endorse this framework after they seized New Amsterdam, just as they carried on with the various understandings that defined the French presence on Turtle Island before the fall of Quebec. The silver Covenant Chain is one of the foundations of Canada as it has evolved over the centuries, so called because when silver starts to tarnish, all you have to do is polish it. It is the antithesis of “rotten”.

via University of Windsor
The long view from here also encompasses the Dish With One Spoon principle about how land can be shared to the mutual benefit of all who live on it. The concept, which goes back at least to 1142, was an important part of the Great Peace of Montreal in 1701.

I claim no special knowledge of these concepts, but a naive view may have some advantages. To me, these understandings seem profound, wise, more relevant than ever before, and full of promise. 

In the case of the Two Row Wampum, it means mutual respect, peaceful coexistence, and a brotherly, sisterly kind of friendship. 

One Dish, One Spoon addresses “our collective responsibility to each other and the Earth: we should take only what we need, leave enough for others, and keep the dish clean.” 

None of the parties involved with these original understandings over time —  Haudenosaunee, Anishnaabe, British, French, Netherlanders, Yorkers, Bostonais, Québécois 2  — were able to consistently live in accordance to their true meaning. But the agreements still stand, especially here in Canada, where we’ve never overthrown a government or broken completely with the past. While all those atrocities were happening, we still polished that silver now and then, scarcely knowing what this actually meant. Two Row and One Dish, One Spoon are part of what we are, and may hold the key to get beyond the impasse we’ve reached as Canada Day 2021 approaches.  

I’m talking about the view from here, in Laurentian Ontario; things look different in Pacific Canada, Newfoundland, Nunavut, or in the territories around Hudson’s Bay that were owned by the great fur corporations and then ceded to the settler dominion, or in Jamaica, Trinidad, Louisiana, Texas.

This is not the whole story. But as a Canadian who lives, works, ponders and associates in the Great Lakes region of the interior of Turtle Island, I’d happy to cling to Two Row and One Dish as our equivalent of the Magna Carta, our Declaration of Independence: time-honoured wisdom that explains to the world who we are, why we exist as a distinct landed sovereignty, and what our purpose, mission and, hopefully, destiny is for the 21st century.

This is the kind of purpose and mission we can take home to Wilmot, to Kitchener, to Hespeler, to Maryhill, to St. George, to Paris, to all of Grand River Country, a land within a land within a land. The land immediately around us can be imagined as a bowl within the larger bowl or dish covered by the Great Peace of Montreal signed on August 4th, 320 years ago. 

One thing this poor boy can do is propose we add August 4th to the “Celebrate Canada” sequence.  

The image is copyright, so I’m not going to include it here, but check out this map of One Dish, One Spoon country from The Common Pot, by Lisa Brooks.    

1 This Time It’s Different – Thursday June 3 2021

Today marks the first anniversary of the Kitchener Solidarity March for Black Lives Matter, which gathered near the entrance of Victoria Park to form the procession that began to move at 5pm.   

By terrible coincidence, there will be a vigil tonight at 7pm in the Clocktower Common area behind that same Victoria Park entrance in memory of the 215 children found buried in an unmarked grave on the grounds of Kamloops Residential School in British Columbia, Canada. 

A year is not very long. There was a feeling among Black communities in the United States that this time it would be different. I still live in hope that the reaction to the murder of George Floyd will prove to be the turning point in facing truth and moving toward reconciliation. 

The discovery in Kamloops is graphic evidence of how, here in Canada, from coast to coast to coast, from the day we established home rule until very recently, Indigenous lives have not mattered, not even the lives of little children. 

This is too solemn an occasion for carrying on with playful musings or smart aleck pokes at familiar national storylines. Today, I’ll keep a hopeful, prayerful silence.

2 Here’s the list of signatories for the Peace of Montreal in 1701 (wikipedia):

  • Haudenosaunee
    • Onondaga, Seneca, Oneida and Cayuga, represented by Seneca orators (Tekanoet, Aouenan, and Tonatakout) and by Ohonsiowanne (Onondaga), Toarenguenion (Oneida), Garonhiaron (Cayuga), and Soueouon (Oneida), who were signatories.
    • Mohawk, Teganiassorens
    • Sault St. Louis (Kahnawake) Mohawk, represented by L’Aigle (The Eagle)
    • Iroquois of La Montagne, represented by Tsahouanhos[6]
  • Amikwa (Beaver People), represented by Mahingan, and spoken for by the Odawas in the debates
  • Cree, or at least one Cree band from the area northwest of Lake Superior
  • Meskwaki (the Foxes or Outagamis), represented by Noro & Miskouensa
  • Les Gens des terres (Inlanders), possibly a Cree-related group
  • Petun (Tionontati), represented by Kondiaronk, Houatsaranti and Quarante Sols (Huron of the St. Joseph)
  • Illinois Confederation, represented by Onanguice (Potawatomi) and possibly by Courtemanche
  • Kickapoo (attendance is disputed by Kondiaronk)[6]
  • Mascouten, represented by Kiskatapi
  • Menominee (Folles Avoines), represented by Paintage
  • Miami people, represented by Chichicatalo
  • Mississaugas, represented on August 4 by Onanguice (Potawatomi)
  • Nippissing, represented by Onaganioitak
  • Odawa
    • Sable Odawas (Akonapi), represented by Outouagan (Jean Le Blanc) and Kinonge (Le Brochet)
    • Kiskakons (Culs Coupez), represented by Hassaki (speaker) and Kileouiskingie (signatory)
    • Sinago Odawas, represented by Chingouessi (speaker) and Outaliboi (signatory)
    • Nassawaketons (Odawas of the Fork), represented by Elaouesse
  • Ojibwe (Saulteurs), represented by Ouabangue
  • Potawatomi, represented by Onanguice and Ouenemek
  • Sauk, represented by Coluby (and occasionally by Onanguice)
  • Timiskamings from Lake Timiskaming
  • Ho-Chunk (Otchagras, Winnebago, Puants)
  • Algonquians
  • Abenaki, represented by Haouatchouath and Meskouadoue, likely speaking for the entire Wabanaki Confederacy[6]

Great Peace of Montreal with the signatures. If we take this to be our Declaration of In[ter]dependence, this “Outilirine Chief”, who may have been signing for the Cree people, can be our John Hancock.

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