Good Intentions Ended The Era Of Assimilation
The Postcolonial Transition Has Divided Canadians; Will Rent-Seeking Activist Demands - Like "Research" Into Unmarked Graves - Divide Them Further?
On Saturday, July 23rd, True North published Unmarked Graves: Money or Justice? , an opinion piece regarding the unmarked graves story I had the honor of co-writing with Tom Flanagan and Brian Giesbrecht.
These two guys have often been at the center of controversy around the unmarked graves story and other issues related to indigenous affairs in Canada. I think it has a lot to do with their stubborn adherence to scholarly traditions connected to such things as facts, empiricism, objectivity, sound argumentation, dispassionate analysis, etc.
On Monday, in my post on The Turn, I explained how both Brian and Tom are sometimes associated with the so-called Dorchester Group. This refers to Canadian academics and writers who have published, on The Dorchester Review, meticulously researched essays highly critical of the official narrative regarding residential schools and the sensational unmarked graves stories.
However, today’s offering includes a discussion of some of the transitional steps responsible for the shift away from the traditional scholarship and public policy practiced in the colonial era, when assimilation was the norm, to the situation today, in the postcolonial era, when assimilation is “racist.” Regarding indigenous issues, traditional scholars for the most part view the concept of assimilation as positive or at least inevitable. However, a postmodern scholar with a de-colonized mind would never admit to such a thing.
Below I discuss my co-authors (of the True North Op-Ed) and get their thoughts on some of this. To give the reader a broader perspective, I’ve added a few background details about them and their work. Let’s begin.
Tom Flanagan
Tom Flanagan, a former political science professor at the University of Calgary, is what I call a traditional-academic (distinct from the postmodern activist-academic). What is meant by this, is an academic who uses methods of knowledge production not based on postmodern epistemics, but thoroughly rooted in the intellectual traditions associated with enlightenment rationality. Whereas Tom would fall squarely within the broad knowledge community which practices what Jonathan Rauch has termed, liberal science, his critics most likely fall in the postmodern knowledge community that prioritizes subjectivity and relativism and other such anti-science, anti-objectivity ideology, in place of the rigor found in liberal science.
Tom has written a number of books. The one I’m most familiar with is First Nations?Second Thoughts. Here is a quote From Wikipedia:
Flanagan later published the controversial First Nations? Second Thoughts, which critiqued the report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. The book received the Donner Prize for the best book of the year on Canadian public policy in 2000, and the Donald Smiley Prize from the Canadian Political Science Association for the best book on Canadian government and politics.
At some point I’d like to come back around to this particular book, and do a full post dedicated to it. Or what might be more fun, is comparing Frances Widdowson’s Separate But Unequal, with Tom’s First Nations? Second Thoughts, as both offer compelling critiques of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. Tom’s work on Canadian indigenous issues is much broader than this. He has published books on Louis Riel, the North-West Rebellion, Metis and Inuit history, Canadian politics, and much more.
Another of Tom’s books (also a Donner Prize finalist) I would also like to come back to is, Beyond the Indian Act: Restoring Aboriginal Property Rights, which Tom co-wrote in 2010. This book introduced the First Nations Property Ownership Initiative (FNPOI), which was a “proposed piece of opt-in legislation that would have allowed First Nations to grant fee-simple interests to First Nations members.”1
I put FNPOI in the same category of a long list of ignored alternate approaches to indigenous issues. This tradition of ignored and rejected policy directions, mostly relates to a central question: will indigenous peoples in Canada have equal rights, and be treated the same as non-indigenous Canadians? Or will indigenous Canadians be citizens plus?
The Hawthorne Report, where the term citizens plus originates, was a rejection of the equal treatment of indigenous peoples, in place of a special class of First Nations with separate status including benefits only indigenous access. This line of thinking became entrenched, somewhere between good intentions and peace & love, in the 1960s era of hippie consciousness.
A Brief History Of Citizens Plus and the Postcolonial Transition
It is not likely a random coincidence that the timing of the Hawthorne Report (1966-7) followed Lydon B. Johnson’s great society (1964-5). Among many programs included in LBJ’s social vision (much of it left over from JFK’s New Frontier) was the war on poverty.
In Visions of the Anointed, Thomas Sowell explains how many of LBJ’s social programs under the auspices of the war on poverty, indeed lifted many out of poverty, but not out of dependence. A situation echoed today on many of Canada’s indigenous reserves.
Decades after LBJ’s vision for a great society, which aimed among other things, to end poverty, it is easy to see now, that the inspiration behind investment in any given social vision can often be very much at odds with unforeseen and unintended consequences.
In 1969, Pierre Elliot Trudeau argued that it was “inconceivable that in a given society one section of the society (could) have a treaty with the other section of the society. We must all be equal under the laws.” But nevertheless, Trudeau’s whitepaper, which advocated for assimilation and the enfranchisement of indigenous Canadians, was rejected by activists who preferred the citizens plus approach. This effectively ended the era of assimilation.
The term Citizens Plus was used by Alan Cairns (a researcher for the Hawthorn team) decades later as the title of his book. In an email exchange with Tom Flanagan, he wrote - “I think both Hawthorn and Cairns were mainly thinking of enhanced social services for Indians, similar to what the Great Society attempted for the poor in the United States.” That the postmodern ideology of parallelism would subsequently become fashionable, according to Tom, was not likely intended by Hawthorn and Cairn’s conception of Citizens Plus.
!n an essay written by Alan Cairns2, he explains the course scholarship has taken from the colonial era, where “imperial scholarship” took the practice of cultural assimilation as a given, to the current era where postcolonial scholarship rejects assimilation and the internal colonial model in favor of citizens plus and the separate nations approach under parallelism.
Brian Giesbrecht
Brian Giesbrecht is a retired judge of the Manitoba provincial court. He has over four decades of experience dealing with Indigenous child-welfare issues. I interviewed Brian earlier this year, and continue to exchange emails with him regularly. Brian is, a walking encyclopedia when it comes to the history of residential schools, and indigenous issues in general. He has been publishing op-ed pieces for years in national publications like The National Post and the Toronto Sun, and often on think tanks like the Frontier Center For Public Policy.
To give you a sample of the IRS knowledge that flows freely from Brian, seemingly off the top of his head, here is a snippet from an email exchange where Brian explains some of the realities of the era of assimilation:
The real genocide would have been if the brand new Canadian government had ignored the educational needs of Indians. The treaties attempted to accommodate the obvious need to teach Indians English and other rudimentaries. Those day schools were not working, for many reasons. The residential school project was actually a bold attempt to do something quite ambitious. Nicholas Flood Davin’s industrial school plan largely failed (as did Davin, who blew his brains out in a Winnipeg hotel room). It proved to be too expensive. The truth is that it was not the racists who built the residential schools- the racists would have been happy to see the Indians die out. The progressives built the schools. If the obvious educational needs of the plains Indians had been ignored, there would have been no educated Indian class today.
Unmarked Graves: Money or Justice?
In the True North Op-Ed, mentioned at the top of this post, my co-authors and I turn our attention to the millions of taxpayer dollars being transferred to indigenous communities intended to fund “research” into unmarked graves. These are investigations that should be conducted by the RCMP. And they would be if it were not for the condition of parallelism, where indigenous peoples belong to separate nations, and apparently exercise quasi-sovereign jurisdiction over potential crime investigations, but yet are still somehow parallel with the rest of Canada.
In the last few weeks I have seen video emerge of Indigenous community members operating what looks like lawnmowers in empty fields; they are ground penetrating radar devices. Like something out of a Kurt Vonnegut novel, it appears that unqualified volunteers are operating them as they search for unmarked graves.
Here is a quote from our True North Op-Ed discussing the enormous amounts of money the government has set aside for unmarked grave “research” :
“These grants are only drops in the river of money that governments are offering for research on unmarked graves. The federal government alone promised $320 million in August 2021 and $275 million in Budget 2022. Provincial governments are providing additional funds.
Canada is an enormous landmass, there are many former residential schools, and searches around all of them can potentially be extended indefinitely. When a search comes up empty it seems only to increase demand for a broader search.”
Read the full piece on True North.
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Boutilier, Sasha (18 August 2016). "An unsung success: The First Nations Land Management Act". Policy Options. Retrieved 12 March 2019.
Aboriginal Research In Troubled Times by Alan C. Cairns. Published in Indigenizing the University (2021) edited by Frances Widdowson