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The Sacred Covenant of Kamloops: Replacing Truth and Reconciliation with Secrecy and Self-Abasement

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From the C2C Journal

The Roman Catholic Church is steeped in centuries of mystery and ineffable truths. Its time-honoured rituals and beliefs offer an important sense of comfort and continuity to its 1.4 billion worldwide adherents. Yet a mysterious “Sacred Covenant” signed recently between two Canadian Catholic organizations and the Kamloops First Nation concerning unproven allegations of human remains on the grounds of a former Indian Residential School will bring neither comfort nor continuity. Instead, it points to an existential crisis deep within the Church itself. Hymie Rubenstein takes a close look at what is known about this strange agreement, and what it means for the future of truth and reconciliation in Canada.
Earlier this spring the Tk̓emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation, legally known as the Kamloops Indian Band, announced jointly with the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Vancouver and Diocese of Kamloops that they had agreed on a unique “Sacred Covenant”. Signed on Easter Sunday – a day sacred to all Christians – the document states that the agreement “[reflects] our mutual acknowledgment of past wrongs, particularly the Catholic Church’s role in the Residential School System, and a shared commitment to truth, reconciliation, and the future.”

The event was noted briefly in the legacy and Indigenous media, then disappeared. And in some ways, it was minor news. Yet another apology from a mainstream church over its role in the now-reviled Indian Residential School system. We’ve seen all that before. It would be a mistake, however, to dismiss this latest event as mere ecclesiastical virtue-signalling.

On Easter Sunday, a “Sacred Covenant” was signed between the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation of Kamloops, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Vancouver and the Diocese of Kamloops to mark their “mutual acknowledgment of past wrongs” and “a shared commitment to truth, reconciliation, and the future”. (Source of bottom photos: Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc, retrieved from (left) Victoria Now and (right) Castanet)

Belying its limited media coverage, the Sacred Covenant should be seen as a significant and worrisome indicator of the continuing damage done by the explosive May 27, 2021 media release from the Kamloops Band that claimed “confirmation of the remains of 215 children” on the grounds of the former Indian Residential School located on the reserve. In fact, a closer look at the context of this unusual agreement reveals the many ways Canadian public discourse has been degraded by unsupported allegations of what many have called a genocide, and how this now threatens the very survival of the Church.

Three common features now appear in almost any discussion of Canada’s residential school legacy. First are incendiary accusations made by Indigenous groups about grotesque or murderous acts perpetrated on students who attended the schools. Second, secrecy and vagueness that frustrate critical review of the details or corroboration of the accusations. And finally, abject acceptance and ritual self-abasement by the accused – often the Government of Canada or a church organization – who appear unable or unwilling to defend themselves. The Sacred Covenant is one more example of the moral confusion and self-hatred now embedded in Canadian history. And within this mysterious document lie important lessons for all Canadians concerned about what reconciliation really means and where it is heading.

What We Know About the “Sacred Covenant”

The Kamloops Sacred Covenant was signed by Tk̓emlúps te Secwépemc Chief Rosanne Casimir, Vancouver Roman Catholic Archbishop J. Michael Miller and Kamloops Bishop Joseph Phuong Nguyen. It was followed by a native spiritual sunrise ceremony and Easter Sunday Mass with hymns sung in the Secwepemctsin language at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church on the Kamloops reserve attended by Indigenous leaders from around B.C. and the North.

According to a press release from Casimir, the agreement affirms “the dignity and rights of First Nations peoples [while also] repudiating past injustices.” The Covenant document itself reportedly “outlines practical commitments, including honouring and memorializing residential school students, facilitating access to historical records, and retaining scientific expertise to support the Nation’s efforts in uncovering the truth and promoting healing.”

In his formal statement, Miller clarified the difference between a covenant and lesser agreements. “A covenant…entails a profound and significant undertaking, not a trivial matter. In our case, the Sacred Covenant involves the honouring of your ancestors and the children who died or endured great suffering during their time in a Residential School.” He also accepted without question an obscure native interpretation of the 15th century papal “Doctrine of Discovery” that seems designed to undermine the entire concept of Canadian national sovereignty. Clearly it is meant as much more than a run-of-the-mill apology for past sins.

“No trivial matter”: In addressing Tk̓emlúps te Secwépemc Chief Rosanne Casimir (left), Vancouver Archbishop J. Michael Miller (right) stressed the uniqueness of the Sacred Covenant as “a profound and significant undertaking…honouring your ancestors and the children who died or endured great suffering during their time in a Residential School.” (Sources of photos: (left) Ben Nelms/CBC; (right) The Catholic Register)

The Kamloops Sacred Covenant, according to media reports, is the work of longtime Indigenous activists Phil Fontaine and Manny Jules. Fontaine played a central role in the creation of the broader narrative that residential schools were explicitly malign institutions with his explosive 1990 CBC interview in which he claimed that “every single one” of the approximately 20 boys in his grade 3 class had “experienced some aspect of sexual abuse.” Lost to time is that Fontaine’s recollection was about abuse perpetrated by his fellow students. Today, it is universally accepted that it occurred at the hands of school staff – especially priests and nuns.

Jules is a former Kamloops chief (now termed “Kukpi7”) and was chief of staff of the Assembly of First Nations when Fontaine was the AFN’s Grand Chief. Jules attended the reserve’s residential school as a grade 1-7 day student in 1959 to 1967 – the period when schoolchildren are now alleged to have died (or been murdered) and secretly buried beside the institution. In an interview on CBC’s The Current a week after the Kamloops Band announced “finding” the graves of 215 children, Jules claimed secret burials of students were common knowledge within his own family and “other residential school survivors.” Curiously enough, he never said anything about such outrages for nearly 50 years – not even when he was band chief nor when he testified before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in 2013.

Phil Fontaine, former Grand Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, is reported to be one of the authors of the Sacred Covenant. He played a central role in initiating the broader narrative that residential schools were places of widespread abuse and horror. Shown at right, students and staff at St. Paul’s Indian Industrial School, Middlechurch, Manitoba, ca. 1901. (Sources of photos: (left) Ontario Chamber of Commerce, licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0; (right) Library and Archives Canada/PA-182251)

While we may know who is behind the Sacred Covenant and roughly how it came about, it remains unclear why it was done. Beyond a vague and somewhat ominous discussion of the Doctrine of Discovery, Casimir’s press release talks at length of the need to access church records and to make use of “scientific evidence” to ascertain the truth about the alleged graves. James Borkowski, Miller’s delegate for reconciliation efforts, similarly told The B.C. Catholic that, “What kept us progressing was a commitment to truth, wherever it takes us, and a desire to avoid divisiveness in this work.” Truth appears to be a major preoccupation of the Sacred Covenant. But if that’s the case, then why all the secrecy?

Sacred, or Merely Secret?

The Easter Sunday mass celebrating the covenant was restricted to selected invitees and was closed to the media. The text of the Sacred Covenant has also not been made public. Multiple requests to obtain a copy by this writer and other researchers have been rejected, as were requests from other legacy and Indigenous media outlets. The secrecy appears to be at the request of the Indigenous parties to the agreement, although church representatives say they hope to release it eventually. Beyond frustrating journalists, this reticence flies in the face of Christianity’s 2,000-year-long belief that God’s truth must be universally accessible. What would have been the point, for example, if Moses had come back from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments – but decided to keep them to himself?

Why keep it a secret? The refusal to release the text of the Sacred Covenant runs contrary to Christian belief that God’s truth is universally accessible. Shown, Charlton Heston as Moses returning from Mount Sinai with the stone tablets listing the sacred Mosaic Covenant from the 1956 movie The Ten Commandments.

Secrecy and misdirection, however, are entirely consistent with current practice by Indigenous groups involved in the “missing children” and “unmarked graves” controversies. Regarding the May 27, 2021 media release, for example, each of the declarative words “confirmation”, “remains” and “children” were later revealed to be either false or unverified. That is because such claims were based on preliminary findings of a survey performed with ground-penetrating radar, which can only detect subsurface anomalies, and not what those anomalies might be. The Kamloops Band continues to withhold the actual survey report, as does the UBC academic who performed the work. More recently, the Kamloops Band has acknowledged the weakness of its original claims.

A short-lived police investigation: While Kamloops RCMP under the direction of Chief Superintendent Sydney Lecky (top) began an investigation into the buried children allegations soon after the May 2021 press release, it came to an abrupt halt after Senator Murray Sinclair (bottom) complained the Mounties were “intimidating people, rather than helping them.” (Sources of photos: (top) Doug Herbert/CBC News; (bottom) Fred Chartrand/The Canadian Press)

We are still waiting for a coherent police investigation into what are alleged to have been horrific crimes. The RCMP began to investigate immediately after Casimir’s May 2021 press release – but equally quickly faced strident objections. Senator Murray Sinclair – former chair of the TRC – publicly accused the RCMP of “intimidating people, rather than helping them” and suggested the Mounties should restrict themselves to combing through documents.

The investigation was dropped within days of Sinclair’s complaints and turned over to the Kamloops band’s small Indigenous police service, who clearly lack the capacity for such a large-scale undertaking. Of note, the RCMP commander in Kamloops at the time, Chief Superintendent Sydney Lecky, is a member of the Peskotomuhkati First Nation of New Brunswick. He later transferred out of Kamloops and subsequently left the RCMP altogether; Lecky is now the Chief of Police in Timmins, Ontario.

And despite $7.9 million in federal funding to support investigative site work at Kamloops (plus another $12.5 million for a healing centre), there has never been any physical excavation of the alleged grave sites. Neither has there been any core-sampling, which is less intrusive but could still yield important information. In the few places elsewhere in Canada, where residential school site excavations have been attempted, no human remains have been found.

Keeping Records, Hidden

The signatories to the Sacred Covenant all claim the agreement is necessary to improve what is known about children who attended residential schools run by orders of the Catholic Church (over 40 percent of the residential schools were run by Protestant denominations and about 15 percent were run by the federal or territorial governments). There is, however, no apparent shortage of this information already available. Starting with the earliest transatlantic voyages, Catholic missionary orders generated many detailed records of their historical interaction with Indigenous peoples throughout the Americas.

Missionaries in what would eventually become Canada carefully recorded their firsthand knowledge of and interaction with Aboriginals over a period of five centuries in documents such as the Jesuit Relations. Beyond these readily accessible historical documents, the Catholic missionary orders that operated residential schools turned over all their unpublished school-related records to the TRC as part of the 2006 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, as did all other churches involved with the residential school system.

Evidence aplenty: Since the time of first contact, Catholic missionary orders created ample records of their experiences with the Indigenous peoples of Canada; this later included detailed residential school attendance records. Depicted at left, Pere Marquette and the Indiansby Wilhelm Lamprecht, 1869; at right, a section of the original Samuel de Champlain monument in Orillia, Ontario. (Source of right photo: mahfrot, licensed under CC BY 2.0)

Even more important and detailed are the voluminous federal and provincial government archives, especially those of the former Department of Indian Affairs. These contain a vast wealth of data including student applications for admission to residential schools, attendance records, letters, memoranda, investigations, medical information, birth and death certificates and numerous other details about the operation of the schools and their students. A small proportion of these records have been investigated by academics and journalists, including by C2C Journal, but the vast bulk remain largely unexplored. There are also a few private efforts dedicated to factual research in this area, including the Indian Residential School Records website, and the Indian Residential Schools Research Group, of which this author is a member.

Truth-seekers keep out: According to Raymond Frogner, head archivist at the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, access to the millions of federal government documents held by his organization (and funded by Canadian taxpayers) pertaining to Indian Residential Schools and other Indigenous matters is restricted by the concept of “Indigenous Data Sovereignty”.

As part of the 2006 residential school settlement agreement, millions of federal government documents were turned over to the University of Manitoba under a trust deed signed in 2013 and are now held in the school’s National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR). The goal was to create a single point of contact for all this important information. Unfortunately for anyone interested in searching for the truth, however, the NCTR does not offer unfettered access to non-Indigenous researchers.

As head archivist Raymond Frogner explained at an NCTR meeting in Yellowknife in 2023, access to these archives is limited by the concept of “Indigenous Data Sovereignty”. This refers to the alleged “right of Indigenous people to govern the collection, ownership and use of data about Indigenous communities.” In this way, anyone suspected of holding heterodox or opposing views about residential schools or native politics can be denied access to what were originally church or Government of Canada records (collected and archived at the Canadian taxpayers’ expense). This is contrary to the official mandate of the TRC.

In short, there is no scarcity of raw data concerning the operation of residential schools, who attended, and who might have passed away while attending such schools. What is lacking is transparent, convenient and guaranteed access to this information by anyone interested in seeing what it has to say. And the Sacred Covenant will do nothing to improve that. 

How “Fraternal Love” Became the “Evils of Colonialism”

In September 1984, Pope John Paul II touched down at the airport in Yellowknife, kissed the ground and spoke to a small crowd before addressing the people of the North by radio. It was the first papal visit to Canada and the Polish-born pontiff readily admitted to the “faults and imperfection” of his Church’s treatment of Aboriginal people. And yet his address brimmed with optimism and joy firmly supported by evidence going back to first contact between the Church and Canada’s Indigenous people in the early 1600s. His words are worth recalling at length:

“I know of the gratitude that you yourselves, the Indian and Inuit peoples, have towards the missionaries who have lived and died among you…What they have done for you is spoken of by the whole Church; it is known by the entire world. These missionaries endeavoured to live your life, to be like you in order to serve you and to bring you the saving Gospel of Jesus Christ.”

“Whatever faults and imperfections they had, whatever mistakes were made, together with whatever harm involuntarily resulted, they are now at pains to repair. But next to this entry, filed in the memory of your history, is the record, with endless proofs, of their fraternal love.”

“That marvellous rebirth of your culture and traditions which you are experiencing today owes much to the pioneering and continuing efforts of missionaries in linguistics, ethnography and anthropology…Yes, dear Indians and Inuit, the missionaries have always shared in your cultural and social life.”

Pope John Paul II’s 1984 address triggered no political backlash. At the time, there was still general agreement among Indigenous people and the Canadian public that while the residential schools were both inadequately funded and poorly attended, they did more good than harm for those who persevered in their studies. Since then, however, the narrative has shifted dramatically – in large part because of Fontaine’s 1990 allegations. This change in opinion has infected not only the Indigenous political movement, academia and news media, but the Catholic Church as well.

Compare Pope John Paul II’s words to those of Pope Francis’s “penitential pilgrimage” to Canada in July 2022:

“…the suffering endured by Indigenous children, particularly those who, unfortunately, never came back from the residential schools…It is necessary to remember how the policies of assimilation and enfranchisement, which also included the residential school system, were devastating for the people of these lands. When the European colonists first arrived here, there was a great opportunity to bring about a fruitful encounter between cultures, traditions and forms of spirituality. Yet for the most part that did not happen…In the face of this deplorable evil, the Church kneels before God and implores his forgiveness for the sins of her children.”

Inventing a new narrative: In his joyful and optimistic 1984 speech in Yellowknife, NWT, Pope John Paul II (top) paid homage to the “fraternal love” between Catholic missionaries and their native congregations. Four decades later, Pope Francis (bottom) denounced this relationship as “spiritual abuse”. (Sources of photos: (top) CP Photo/Fred Chartrand; (bottom) AP Photo/Gregorio Borgia)

It is a papal statement full of self-recrimination and remorse. An accompanying Vatican News article added to this grim sense of self-flagellation, speaking of the “evils of colonialism” and the “attempt to erase the cultures of the indigenous peoples.” The change in tone and content is obvious. From the earlier pope’s unapologetic proclamation of Indigenous people embracing the Gospel of Jesus Christ to what should have been a “fruitful encounter” between (presumably equally valid and worthy) belief systems. From missionaries living as natives in “fraternal love” and providing the tools for their cultural rebirth to the “spiritual abuse” of children in the boarding schools and the “evil” of cultural (or worse) genocide. Pope Francis’s moral relativism – implying that the gospel of Jesus Christ has no higher standing than traditional Indigenous spirituality – effectively pulls the rug out from under the Roman Catholic Church’s 2,000-year-old mission of salvation.

An Argentinian who was formerly Archbishop of Buenos Aires, Pope Francis is a longtime self-professed sympathizer of Latin American “liberation theology”. Like Marxism (and now wokism), liberation theology regards the world as divided between oppressors and oppressed. In this instance, we have a simplistic binary between evil, exploitative Europeans and sacred, noble Indigenous people. It is a doctrine that eventually found its way to Canada and morphed into the current narrative of murderous white priests and nuns preying upon innocent Indigenous children.

In celebrating this progressive lurch to the woke left, Pope Francis also defamed the memory of the thousands of priests, nuns, lay brothers and lowly workers – many of them Indigenous – who gave a lifetime of work teaching and caring for tens of thousands of Indigenous children with the goal of preparing them to adapt to life in a rapidly changing Canadian society. Many of the nuns kept detailed records of daily events which were periodically forwarded to the mother houses of their religious orders, and paint a very different picture than the current narrative. It is true that Catholic missionaries were, by their calling, engaged in proselytizing. Their methods, however, were neither forcible nor absolutist; there were no forced conversions or baptisms.

Claims of horrific abuse at residential schools defame the memory of the many Catholic priests and nuns who dedicated their lives to helping native children. Shown at left, Father Allan Noonan with students at the Kamloops Indian Residential School, B.C.; at right, a priest-coached baseball team at the Ermineskin Indian Residential School, Alberta.

The Slow-Rolling Suicide of the Catholic Church

Despite its long history of selfless and often dangerous missionary work driven by an unswerving faith in the sanctity of its own beliefs, the Catholic Church today is mired in self-loathing and despair. In the wake of the Kamloops Band’s May 2021 press release, Miller was likely the first religious leader in Canada to apologize. “In light of the heartbreaking disclosure of the remains of 215 children,” he stated in a press release less than one week later, “I am writing to express my deep apology and profound condolences to the families and communities that have been devastated by this horrific news. Each time new evidence of a tragedy is revealed, or another victim comes forward, countless wounds are reopened.”

No need to confirm, just grovel: The Catholic Church has repeatedly apologized for its participation in the residential school system, regardless of what the evidence says. Just days after the May 2021 announcement in Kamloops, Miller wrote to express his “profound condolences to the families and communities that have been devastated by this horrific news.” Shown, a memorial at the Centennial Flame on Parliament Hill, June 2021. (Source of photo: Bing Wen/Shutterstock)

Rather than withholding judgment until he saw actual evidence, Miller uncritically accepted the band’s entire array of incendiary assertions, damning not only the church but Canada as a whole. To repeat: to this day, no previously unknown human remains of any sort have been found in Kamloops or anywhere else.

Still, Miller and Borkowski are intent on going even further. Not only do they align themselves with the Indigenous narrative that residential schools were a “colonialist” policy amounting to a genocide, but they also agree with attempts to shut down any further debate on the matter. “Of course, we do not back up or support those who deny the tragic events in Kamloops and at residential schools,” Miller stated in March during another formal apology. (His third in total; he also apologized to the TRC in 2013.) “There’s no question that this was a tragedy in the past and those who claim that it wasn’t I think are certainly misplaced in their judgment.”

The Sacred Covenant thus continues the Catholic Church’s decades-long repudiation of itself and what was once its essential mission of spreading the word of Jesus. But how long can an inherently self-hating institution survive after adopting such a stance? If one accepts the narrative that residential schools were engaged in a scheme of murder perpetrated by nuns and priests acting on behalf of the organization’s broader leadership, then it stands to reason the Church itself must be considered a murderous and therefore irredeemable entity.

While most of Canada’s senior Catholic clerics appear willing to march along with this slow-rolling suicide, not all are onboard. In an interview last year with The Catholic Register following reports that the federal government was considering making it a crime to say that residential schools were not genocidal, Bishop Emeritus Fred Henry, formerly the Bishop of Calgary Diocese, explained that before apologizing it should be necessary to ascertain what exactly occurred. “Why,” Henry proposed, “is the Catholic Church not asking the federal government for proof that even one residential child is actually missing in the sense that his [or] her parents didn’t know what happened to their child at the time of the child’s death?” As Henry observed, it makes no sense to apologize for something that might never have occurred.

A slow-rolling suicide. Among the few dissenting voices inside the Catholic Church is Bishop Emeritus Fred Henry, who warns of the long-term consequences of blindly accepting unverified claims that thousands of residential students “were murdered by Catholic priests and nuns and clandestinely buried in unmarked graves”. (Source of photo: Canadian Catholic News)

‘Why,’ Henry proposed, ‘is the Catholic Church not asking the federal government for proof that even one residential child is actually missing…?’ As Henry observed, it makes no sense to apologize for something that might never have occurred.

The wholesale and unquestioning acceptance of the damning Indigenous narrative about residential schools will ultimately prove catastrophic for the Church, Henry predicted. “It seems abundantly clear to me [to ask what follows] if the Catholic Church…allows the lie that there are thousands of missing residential school children to become embedded in stone?” he wrote in the email interview. “Obviously, [it means] these thousands of missing children were murdered by Catholic priests and nuns and clandestinely buried in unmarked graves.”

Through its meek acceptance of Indigenous accusations and repeated apologies, the Church has thus manoeuvred itself into the position of being unable to mount a fact-based defence, even as the narrative becomes ever-more outrageous. The Sacred Covenant is yet another step in this process of self-abasement, another suicide note. As Henry worried, there is no apparent conclusion other than the complete destruction of the Church itself.

It is a process that is mirrored in the similarly self-flagellating behaviour of Canada’s governments and other secular institutions. The country is destroying its international reputation and eroding its feelings of self-worth because no one has the nerve to tell Indigenous leaders and activists that their residential school revisionist revolution has gone too far.

Reconciliation or obliteration? Beyond the reputational damage suffered by the Catholic Church, widespread acceptance of the residential school genocide narrative undermines Canada’s international stature, distorts this country’s proud history and denigrates the many historical figures who worked for the benefit of future generations. (Sources of photos: (top) Colin Temple/Shutterstock; (bottom) Blake Elliott/Shutterstock)

According to a Maru Public Opinion online survey following the 2021 Kamloops claims, 55 percent of Canadians polled agreed that “given the context of the residential school era, what occurred was an act of genocide as opposed to an act of good intentions that had bad outcomes.” An astounding 81 percent said they agreed the International Criminal Court should investigate their own country for the worst of all imaginable crimes. To underline this point in bold, in 2022 the House of Commons unanimously voted to recognize “what happened in Canada’s Indian Residential Schools as genocide,” citing Pope Francis’s statements as evidence for such a conclusion.

Sweeping assertions about forced assimilation and physical genocide have grotesquely distorted the history of Canada’s relations with its Indigenous people, and defamed the many honourable historical figures who participated in the process. And there is no apparent corrective to this radical and destructive path. Indeed, as mentioned, the Liberal government has lately considered demands that it criminalize any contrary discussion of the entire issue, in essence outlawing any continuing search for truth.

All of which suggests that the end-point of the Sacred Covenant – and all other attempts by Canadian society to find common ground with an increasingly aggressive cadre of residential school activists – is not reconciliation. It is obliteration.

Hymie Rubenstein is a retired professor of anthropology who taught for many years at St. Paul’s College at the University of Manitoba, the only Catholic higher education institution in Manitoba. He is currently editor of the REAL Indigenous Report.

Source of main image: Steveleeart, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

After 15 years as a TV reporter with Global and CBC and as news director of RDTV in Red Deer, Duane set out on his own 2008 as a visual storyteller. During this period, he became fascinated with a burgeoning online world and how it could better serve local communities. This fascination led to Todayville, launched in 2016.

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Indigenous Catholic Priest questions “The murder of 215 Indigenous Children” at Kamloops Indian Residential School

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From the podcast Catholic Minute With Ken & Janelle

Indigenous Catholic priest, Fr. Cristino Bouvette, speaks to the report of the 215 missing children first released in 2021 and what we know today.

On May 27, 2021, the Kamloops Indian Band announced that ground-penetrating radar had detected the remains of 215 “missing children” at the site of a former residential school. The media quickly picked up the story, with headlines proclaiming the discovery of “mass graves.” Social media exploded. Churches were vandalized, and some were set on fire. Catholic Bishops issued apologies. But was it true?

Fr. Cristino Bouvette, a Catholic priest with Indigenous heritage, brings clarity to the controversy.

Full statement of first statement by Kamloops Indian Band, on May 2021 https://tkemlups.ca/wp-content/upload…

Updated Statement: May, 2024 on 215 anomalies were detected https://tkemlups.ca/offices-closed-on…

Canada mourns as remains of 215 children found at indigenous school https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-can…

Kamloops Indian Residential School Mass Graves: No Bodies Found Despite $8 Million Probe https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/India/…

Terry Glavin: Canada slowly acknowledging there never was a ‘mass grave’ https://nationalpost.com/opinion/terr…

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C2C Journal

The Indigenous “Land Back” Movement: A Land Mine for Canadians

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From the C2C Journal

By Michael Melanson
Amidst the litany of grievances levelled by Indigenous organizations it is easy to overlook the genuine progress made by some First Nations. Democratically elected native governments have negotiated additional rights, expanded their lands and gained control over natural resources and major projects, creating a sustainable economic base. But that apparently isn’t the course desired by a vocal subset of politically charged Indigenous North Americans. They’re unsatisfied with incremental progress or compromise. They are all grievance, all the time. And they want it all. Michael Melanson examines the emergence of the Indigenous “Land Back” concept, its evolution into militancy and potential violence, and its recent metastasis into some of the darkest crevices of the human psyche.

At a recent in-service for Manitoba teachers on the subject of Indigenous education, attendees were told by guest speaker Christopher Emdin that “resistance to colonialism is not terrorism” – the words splashed across a giant display screen. The American author and educational theorist was alluding to the October 7, 2023 Hamas terror attack against Israel, but he was also making a general statement about lands “occupied by settler colonialists” – i.e., ordinary non-Indigenous Canadians. Emdin had been hired because “settler colonialism” has become a source of pedagogical angst in the Winnipeg School Division. In trying to do its bit to effect Indigenous Reconciliation, the division – like others across Canada – has come to regard settler colonialism as the historic yet current oppressor. Emdin’s message conveyed an essential subtext: Indigenous people have a right to resist colonial occupation by any means necessary in order to get their land back.

Land Back is a political sentiment originating among Indigenous thinkers and activists in the United States that is now flourishing in Canada. Land Back is fundamentally revanchist: it seeks a return of lands considered to have been possessed by North American Indigenous peoples before contact with Europeans. As such, virtually all of North America can be regarded as former native territory if “possession” is defined loosely enough. It is difficult to characterize Land Back as a political movement because it lacks the associated cohesion and formal organization. Its core impulses are a combination of mysticism, grievance, aspiration and ideology. But its goals are unquestionably political – often fiercely so.

“Resistance to colonialism is not terrorism,” Christopher Emdin recently told a gathering of Winnipeg teachers; the American educational theorist was speaking in reference to Hamas’ terror attack on Israel on October 7, 2023 (right) but also as a general condemnation of “settler colonialism”. (Sources of photos: (left) The Brainwaves Video Anthology/YouTube; (right) AP Photo/Ohad Zwigenberg)

Definitions of Land Back (also sometimes spelled Landback, LandBack or #LandBack) vary among professional and grassroots activists, opinion-leaders and other adherents. Jesse Wente, the journalist and current Chair of the Canada Council for the Arts, says Land Back is “about the decision-making power. It’s about self-determination for our Peoples here that should include some access to the territories and resources in a more equitable fashion, and for us to have control over how that actually looks.”

Ronald Gamblin, an Anishinaabe from Manitoba who is National Learning Community Coordinator of the 4Rs Youth Movement, states that the term “encompasses a complicated and intergenerational web of ideas/movements. When I hear Indigenous youth and land protectors chant ‘Land Back!’ at a rally, I know it can mean the literal restoration of land ownership. When grandmothers and knowledge keepers say it, I tend to think it means more the stewardship and protection of mother earth. When Indigenous political leaders say it, it often means comprehensive land claims and self-governing agreements.”

No single definition: Canadian arts journalist Jesse Wente (bottom left) describes Land Back as being “about the decision-making power”, while for Ronald Gamblin (bottom right) from 4Rs Youth Movement, the meaning depends on the person using it. Still others say it includes having the Sioux tribe gain control over the iconic U.S. Presidential Memorial at Mount Rushmore, South Dakota (top). (Sources of photos: (top) Dean Franklin, licensed under CC BY 2.0; (bottom left) Royal Ontario Museum/YouTube; (bottom right) 4Rs Youth Movement)

From its general beginnings around 2010 or even earlier, Land Back’s first explicit expression came in 2018, according to Wikipedia, when Arnell Tailfeathers, a member of the Blood Tribe in Alberta, used it in the protests demanding the reversion to Sioux tribal control of the world-famous U.S. Presidential Memorial at Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Versions of Land Back now are also found in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and Mexico.

Though it is hard to pin down precisely – as the varying descriptions above make clear – generally speaking Land Back is a militant iteration of aboriginal nationalism. Proponents often disavow the legitimacy of Canada and the United States and frequently express hostility to their citizenry, whom they label “settler colonialists”. As in virtually all expressions of ethnic and racial nationalism, an autonomous sovereign territory is sought by some Land Back proponents.

This article on the website of High Country News in Paonia, Colorado (not to be confused with the High River, Alberta newspaper of the same name) attempts to instruct “white” readers in the Land Back movement’s virtues – and is therefore instructive in another way. It defines “land ownership” as merely a tactic “that keeps wealth and power in white families” (Hispanic and blacks apparently being uninterested in owning land), equates police with “violence”, lays essentially all of North America’s current ills at the feet of Europeans, suggests “Western colonizers” are “evil”, and talks about “so-called” civilization.

While the sentiments of Land Back are most commonly expressed at the populist levels of social media and public events, the initial success and popularity of early Land Back activists prompted composition of a formal manifesto in 2019: Land Back: A Yellowhead Institute Red Paper. It is written in the spirit of the 1970 Citizens Plus “Red Paper” by Harold Cardinal of the Indian Association of Alberta, which had been issued to angrily counter the Pierre Trudeau government’s preceding White Paper (formally, the Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy, 1969).

The new Red Paper makes it clear that Land Back aims to rationalize aboriginal sovereignty and, as it states on page 48, assert “fulsome Indigenous jurisdiction”. The 65-page document proposes a radical departure from liberal-democratic norms. It seeks to override the non-Indigenous nation-state and privilege a minority on the basis of ethnic/racial origin. The authors appear well-aware of what they are doing. They seek to justify a cultural exception to our ostensibly universalist liberal-democratic creed by using the assimilationist caricature of the 1969 White Paper as their theoretical foil.

Despite being widely if not universally portrayed as such – including by the authors of both Red Papers – the 1969 White Paper was not in my opinion concerned about cultural assimilation, but actually sought a third alternative to Canada’s historically fluctuating and often contradictory Indian policies of segregation and assimilation. Unfortunately, the White Paper only vaguely outlined this third alternative, as in the following passage from page 13: “For many years Canadians believed the Indian people had but two choices: they could live [in effective segregation] in a reserve community, or they could be assimilated and lose their Indian identity. Today Canada has more to offer. There is a third choice – a full role in Canadian society and in the economy while retaining, strengthening and developing an Indian identity which preserves the good things of the past and helps Indian people to prosper and thrive.”

A 2019 official manifesto of Land Back activists (top left) advocates for “fulsome Indigenous jurisdiction” and a radical departure from Western liberal-democratic norms; their argument is based on a common critique of the Pierre Trudeau government’s 1969 Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy, aka the White Paper (top right).

Although the White Paper recognized the clear problems arising from “the policy of treating Indian people as a race apart,” it nonetheless did not call for the complete disassembly of the reserve system or the erasure of Indians’ separate status, but recommended something closer to what Quebec nationalists would later famously term “sovereignty-association”. As the paper states: “Frustration is as great a handicap as a sense of grievance. True co-operation and participation can only come when the Indian people are controlling the land which makes up the reserves.”

The failure of the White Paper as a new policy direction resulted in a continuation of the frustration and grievance of the failed reserve system and, half a century later, Land Back activists like the Red Paper authors are trying to redeem the added years of misery. “Our times, too, are revolutionary,” the document states on page 6. “While tragically little has changed since 1968-1970, there are also emerging debates to reflect on and work through together. We continue to grapple with federal and provincial bureaucrats and/or industry on rights, title, and jurisdiction, but we are increasingly turning inward and are having productive conversations about what reclaiming land and water might look like, for all of us.”

“Citizens plus”: The 1970 “Red Paper” challenged the principles of universalism and racial equality, demanding special rights and thereby giving rise to the notion of “Indigenous exceptionalism”. Shown, Harold Cardinal (standing), 25-year-old leader of the Indian Association of Alberta, addresses Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and his cabinet during a Parliament Hill meeting, June 4, 1970. (Source of photo: CP PHOTO)

This is a disingenuous remark on the post-White Paper stasis, because that state of affairs was itself largely promulgated by the aboriginal nationalists of the day (and their white academic supporters), who fiercely denounced and resisted any civil reforms that might have resulted in Indians becoming like other citizens of Canada. This stance would have profound consequences.

The 1970s and 80s gave rise to the idea of Canada’s Indians becoming “citizens plus” – as the original Red Paper’s formal title suggested – meaning they would have the same rights as other citizens but also held additional rights by virtue of being aboriginal people. This is also when a notion of “Indigenous exceptionalism” arose and began to challenge the principle of universalism – the liberal-democratic ideal that every citizen should be equal and none should be discriminated against on the basis of race or ethnicity, and which had otherwise come to inform social and government policy in Canada. The great Mackenzie Valley Pipeline debate crystallized and amplified these elements, as well as birthing the Canadian version of the “decolonization” movement, as chronicled in this C2C article.

Forty-six years after Pierre Trudeau’s White Paper, his son was articulating just how far the idea of Indigenous exceptionalism had progressed in Canadian political discourse. During the 2015 federal election campaign, Justin Trudeau said that his government would “renew the nation-to-nation relationship with aboriginal people.” Then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper neglected to press Trudeau on just what he meant by that promise, unfortunately so, because it is a highly dubious statement. What nation-to-nation relationship, never mind what happened to it that necessitated renewal?

Land Back can thus be seen as an accelerant to that fuzzy notion of renewing intra-national relationships (given there are at least 630 First Nations, there are potentially hundreds of nation-to-nation relationships in need of renewal), something that would guarantee years if not decades of grinding political negotiations, with all the frustration, disappointment and anger that would surely entail, leading to still more strife. The new Red Paper’s authors suggest what this might mean when they hint at the inherent militancy of Land Back on page 56: “[Another], and perhaps more direct, type of assertion revolves around physical reclamation or occupation of lands and waters.” If negotiations fail, in other words, we have other tactics at the ready.

Gamblin is explicit about this: “When you look at it, as Indigenous peoples and nations, we come from the land. The land is our home, our mother, our caregiver, it’s what makes us Indigenous,” he writes on the 4Rs Youth Movement website. “Considering this, non-Indigenous folks need to understand that land back is about much more than land. You need to understand that when you hear youth scream ‘LAND BACK’, when you see land protectors stand off against the RCMP, when elders make prayers for the land, and when political figures sit in land negotiations, Land back is about Indigenous peoples confronting colonialism at the root. It’s about fighting for the right to our relationship with the earth. It’s about coming back to ourselves, as sovereign Indigenous Nations.”

The implications of “Indigenous exceptionalism”: Shown at top, graphic art recently posted to social media (at left) and spraypainted on a walkway (location unknown, at right) carrying violence-inciting messages; at bottom left, protesters unload a truck full of tires as they fortify a rail blockade in Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory, Belleville, Ontario, February 2020; bottom right, Ontario Provincial Police arrest a protester at the same blockade. (Sources of photos: (top right) dav, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0; (bottom left) The Canadian Press/Lars Hagberg; (bottom right) The Canadian Press/Adrian Wyld)

The existential association of being with land has been common if not ubiquitous among Indigenous peoples worldwide throughout history. It has been widely romanticized and is typically regarded as essentially harmless, or at least understandable. But when viewed unsentimentally, it is clear that it is ethno-centric and exclusionary if not explicitly racist. In perhaps its worst expression, the Nazis harnessed this atavistic impulse in their racist doctrine of Blut und Boden (which means “blood and soil”): since they are from the land, they are of the land and, as such, have more right to the land than someone who came to this land from elsewhere.

The relatively recent concept of universalism fundamentally rejects distinctions in law and governance on the basis of ancestry. The large (and ever-growing) exception being made for aboriginal people is based mainly on historical grievance: as the Indigenous people of Canada, they suffered from the colonization of their homelands by foreign nations and therefore deserve special considerations of redress.

Turning again to Gamblin, who provides a routine example of this mindset. “The architects of Canadian colonial policy,” he writes, “knew that if they wanted access to the lands in order to generate wealth and power, that they would need to separate us from this relationship. So, they used tactics such as forced relocation away from our homes and onto reserves (Canada’s apartheid system), introduction of patriarchal governance (Indian Act Chiefs), starvation of traditional resources (such as buffalo massacres), breaking family units and knowledge transfer through Indian Residential Schools, targeting women and children with violent policies, limiting our access to on the land cultural practices, and even making it illegal for us to fight in the Canadian legal framework for stolen land. These were systematic tactics intended on destroying our relationship with our mother.”

Among the Canadian “colonial” government’s “systematic tactics intended on destroying our relationship with our mother”, Gamblin names “targeting women and children with violent policies” and “buffalo massacres”, yet verifiable historical facts contradict his accusations. Shown at top, Indigenous children receiving medical examination; at bottom, a pile of bison skulls in the United States, 1892. (Source of bottom photo: Burton Historical Collection/Detroit Public Library)

Space does not permit a thorough parsing of Gamblin’s litany of grievances, but none of what he writes should be taken at face value. Although superficially factual at first glance, each phrase is loaded with emotionally charged adjectives and adverbs, exaggerations or falsehoods. The intent appears to be to convince by sleight-of-hand and emotion rather than historical accuracy.

Two quick examples by way of illustration. First, to Gamblin’s accusation of “targeting women and children with violent policies”. Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister, saw to it that every native Canadian was vaccinated against smallpox – in some cases, receiving inoculation even before the local white population. Second, “buffalo massacres” as a “systematic tactic” of “Canadian colonial policy”. It is established that well over 90 percent of the eradication of North America’s up to 50 million bison occurred in the United States. Of the rest, much of this was done by Indian and Métis buffalo hunters and, of that portion, nearly all of it took place before the newly formed Dominion of Canada gained legal control over the Prairies in 1870. The Government of Canada inherited a tragedy; it did not bring it about.

The new Red Paper’s academic tone is an exception to standard aboriginal activist discourse, but it too resorts to emotional hooks. “The stakes of these struggles are immense,” the authors state on page 64. “Of course, while Indigenous land and life are the focus here, the life of our species and of the planet are at risk from the type of economic philosophy and practices of (sic) perpetuated by colonialism and settler colonialism…So the matter of land back is not merely a matter of justice, rights or ‘reconciliation’; Indigenous jurisdiction can indeed help mitigate the loss of biodiversity and climate crisis…Canada – and states generally must listen.”

Having used decolonization ideology as a springboard to investing Indigenous-led solutions with the capacity to save the world, the Red Paper portrays the nation-state as posing a barrier to such an Indigenous-led global salvation. It portrays the UN as “an organization of states that first and foremost defends the territorial integrity of sovereign states,” which “means that states are the primary vehicle to address climate change and loss of biodiversity.” And so, the paper laments on page 65, “Even while the UN recognizes the harms states perpetuate against Indigenous people (including denying consent), they cannot imagine non-state Indigenous-led solutions that may threaten the state system.”

A global saviour in our midst: The Red Paper lays the blame for the world’s climate and biodiversity crises on settler-colonialism and calls for expanding the Land Back movement’s scope to one that offers “non-state Indigenous-led solutions” for the whole world. (Source of photo: Backbone Campaign, licensed under CC BY 2.0)

The Red Paper authors appear to be suggesting that Indigenous organizations (to be determined) be given supra-jurisdictional authority. As grandiose and unrealistic as it sounds, it seems that they think aboriginal people should rule the world because they know what is best for the world and they know that because they are of the world in a way that non-Indigenous people are not; Mother Earth has given them her blessings as a birthright.

The continuing and in some ways worsening Indigenous/non-Indigenous dichotomy is a bane of humanity; it is antithetical to humanism because it presumes to determine who belongs here the most and who the least. If humanity matters most, it cannot matter who was here first. Some of the more sophisticated Indigenous exceptionalists are now staking their global campaign for jurisdiction on an issue of convenience: the fears of an existential peril – climate apocalypse – underpinned by the belief that they are somehow imbued with knowledge, skills and a force of origin that ordinary mortals do not possess. It is of course preposterous, and surely tempting to laugh off such presumption. But it needs to be taken seriously, for it is ultimately a mythos of race that justifies dominance of a sort that, in my view, has genuine and deeply disturbing parallels to Nazi “blood and soil” mysticism.

A new iteration of “Blood and Soil”? Land Back’s fundamental ethno-centrism mushrooms into overt racism among some of its extremist adherents, reminding the author of Nazism’s Blut und Boden doctrine, which held that only the racially pure local Volk had rights to the land. Shown at left, logo of the Reich Ministry of Food and Agriculture; at right, farmers in Innsbruck, Austria wave swastika flags to salute German soldiers, March 1938. (Source of right photo: Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-2005-0923-505, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0 de)

Transposed to dullards and maladapts, the sentiments of Land Back become a surly revanchism that does not balk at the potential for barbarism. A disturbing number of Indigenous activists have, for example, come out in support of Hamas, grotesquely refashioning the October 7 atrocity as an act of decolonization. The Idle No More movement hosted a webinar barely a month after the massacre called “From Turtle Island To Palestine”, and a month after that Red Nation in the U.S. staged a teach-in on the same subject. “Palestine is actually doing a Land Back,” declared Sioux activist and academic Nick Estes, who spoke at both events. “They’re actually doing what we think we want to do but we haven’t gone there yet. Palestine is just doing it now…and for me, that was beautiful. I just want our resistance to be so strong, our fire as a people so strong that we just take back what is ours.”

Thankfully, there are courageous and notable Indigenous voices calling out such twisted opportunism. Noting that in Israel, it is Jews who are the Indigenous people, Chris Sankey, a businessman and former elected councillor of the Lax Kw Alaams Band near Prince Rupert, B.C., roundly condemned both the Hamas massacre and the attempt to distort its meaning to serve Canadian Indigenous activists’ decolonization agenda. “What has troubled me the most has been the frequency with which my peoples’ struggle for reconciliation has been invoked to justify the bloodshed, often by so-called ‘experts’ in the academy,” Sankey wrote in the National Post. “This is an absurd and, frankly, offensive comparison, as Indigenous-Canadians and Palestinians stand worlds apart.”

Like Land Back, “decolonization” is a term without fixed definition holding the potential to signify insurrection or violent, racially targeted civil strife. It can never be said often enough: “decolonization” is a foreign idea, developed in the context of wars of independence in Africa by trained Marxists who advocated organized violence from the start. It is itself hateful and racist.

Speaking in support of the Hamas atrocities, Sioux activist Nick Estes (top right) praised the Palestinian attackers for “doing a Land Back” and called for the same behaviour among his own people; Chris Sankey (bottom right), a member of the Tsimshian community of Lax Kw’ Alaams in northwest B.C., replies that “Indigenous-Canadians and Palestinians stand worlds apart.” Shown at bottom left, members of Samidoun (subsequently designated a terrorist organization) burn a Canadian flag on the steps of the Vancouver Art Gallery, October 7, 2024. (Sources of photos (clockwise starting top left): Appalachians Against Pipelines/Facebook; @nickwestes/X; Conservative Paty of British ColumbiaJarryd Jaeger)

At the very least, in their ambiguous current states of definition, both are programs for which anyone with a chip on their shoulder can “write code”. Some of those defining those terms are brooding nationalists informed by a colossal ledger of grievances against “settler colonialism” who are self-propelled with an existential sense of moral and mortal imperative and have come to regard themselves as a higher order of the human species. This is real: the Indigenous campaign to force the changing of the name of Powell River, B.C., has featured one aboriginal leader repeatedly referring to white Canadians as “subhuman”.

We should take caution. Between the pity, reverence and romanticization of Indigenous peoples and ways, there is a blind spot in which a ruthless racialist ideology can continue to grow.

Michael Melanson is a writer and tradesperson living in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

Source of main image: The Canadian Press/Nathan Denette.

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