Was there an ancient Canada?

Laying claim to First Nations’ grievances may be just more Canadian appropriation of another people’s past

by Michael Nenonen <mnenonen@republic-news.org>

This article takes me into unfamiliar territory. I’ve never before challenged another Republic writer’s work, much less the work of my publisher, Kevin Potvin, a man I deeply respect and whose articles are typically well-reasoned and well-argued. Though I’ve occasionally disagreed with his positions, until today I’ve never felt the need to form a rebuttal to anything he’s written. Unfortunately, there are certain positions that he espoused in his article, “Beware Anti-Anti-Americanism” (issue 131), that I believe require a critical response.

In this article, Potvin argues that Canada has a secret history, a history that justifies anti-American sentiment among Canadians. He writes that a “peaceful, continent-wide, decentralized, and free-trading nation called Canada” existed for approximately two centuries before it was carved up by the imperial powers of the age. “Ancient Canada” was inhabited by an amalgamated population of French Canadians and First Nations people: “French Canadians and Indians were, by the 18th century, pretty much one and the same through centuries of intermarriage across most of North America.”

Ancient Canada was decimated by wars conducted by the imperial powers, and, in particular, by the “menacingly belligerent religious fundamentalists gathering in greater numbers in the American colonies.” The Indian Wars were, in this reading, a campaign of genocide against Ancient Canada. The victims of this campaign fled north, and eventually looked to the British Empire for protection from their American persecutors. The survivors thereby saved their lives but lost their freedom. The memory of Ancient Canada was then obliterated by the regimes that laid claim to the continent.

Potvin states that “Canada is therefore defined as that part of the original nation saved from savage murder by US terrorists and ethnic cleansing by the US Army.” Potvin seems to believe that Canadian identity is rooted in Ancient Canada, and that because of this, the genocide committed by Americans against Ancient Canadians defines our identity as Canadians today. Far from being a mindless prejudice, anti-Americanism really expresses the memory of this genocide, however buried that memory may be in our national consciousness. Abandoning anti-Americanism, as so many right-wing pundits advise, would simultaneously deny essential features of our national identity and increase our vulnerability to our southern neighbour’s expansionist zeal.

I haven’t read the historical sources Potvin relies upon in making this argument, nor do I know what those sources are. Despite this, a number of the points that Potvin raises seem self-evident. French Canadians and First Nations people certainly lived in comparative peace, they shared economic relationships, and many intermarried. America’s Indian Wars were genocidal and driven at least in part by religious fanaticism. Many First Nations people did flee north to escape these wars. British dominion suppressed or extinguished much of what existed before. Finally, anti-Americanism may well be Canada’s foremost defence against American ambitions to thoroughly subjugate our economic, military, and political institutions.

Having said this, two of Potvin’s positions appear indefensible.

First, the fact that there was some intermarriage and cooperation between French Canadians and First Nations peoples hardly demonstrates that the two peoples were thoroughly homogenized. In fact, there weren’t simply two peoples to homogenize. There are currently 53 distinct Aboriginal languages surviving in Canada; there were undoubtedly many more at the time of Confederation. There are six Native culture areas in Canada. Within these regions, Native cultures show broad similarities; among these regions there are profound cultural differences. There are also profound differences between the cultures and histories of Metis and non-Metis Native people. There’s no evidence that peoples as diverse as the Mik’maq on the Atlantic Coast and the Haida of the Northwest Coast have ever thought of themselves as belonging to the same “nation,” any more than the Japanese have ever thought of themselves as belonging to the same “nation” as the Vietnamese. Many of the First Nations even waged war on one another, with such conflicts occurring as late the 18th century. Despite early intermarriage and economic cooperation, a clear cultural division between Native and non-Native Canadians has always existed. As Daniel Francis points out in The Imaginary Indian: The Image of the Indian in Canadian Culture (Arsenal Pulp Press, 1992), non-Native Canadians have expressed racist attitudes towards First Nations people since the earliest days of colonization. All of this mitigates against Potvin’s claim that intermarriage between First Nations people and French Canadians created a single “nation” of any sort, no matter how “decentralized” we define that nation as having been.

Second, even if we assume that Ancient Canada existed in some sense, there’s no reason to assume that modern non-Native Canadians have any claim to its heritage or to the grievances such a heritage might entail. My own ancestry, for instance, can be traced past Canada to the United States, Germany, Sweden, Finland, and France; so far as I know, I don’t have a drop of First Nations’ blood in my body. None of my ancestors had to endure the monstrous suffering that Canada’s Aboriginal peoples have undergone. As a white man, I even profit from the exploitation of First Nations land and from the marginalization of First Nations people. How, then, can I incorporate the grievances arising from the genocide inflicted upon Native peoples into my own national identity? If anything, my identity as a descendent of European colonizers incorporates the historical responsibility for the genocide. My share in this collective responsibility is compounded by Canada’s historical attempts to eliminate Native identity through policies of forced assimilation, policies that were every bit as genocidal as the bloodletting committed by the Americans.

It’s Potvin’s apparent attempt to appropriate First Nations’ identity that bothers me the most about his article. This kind of appropriation isn’t unusual in Canada. Daniel Francis argues that non-Native Canadians have never really felt at home here. We know that we took this territory from its original owners, and that the several hundred years of our residency is as nothing compared to the thousands of years they’ve lived upon it. We also know that our psychological relationship to the land is infinitely shallower than theirs. For Native Canadians, the land is layered with mythological connotations, whereas for non-Native Canadians it’s simply a pile of natural resources awaiting economic exploitation. We’ve often responded to the psychological dissonance this knowledge creates by trying to incorporate features of First Nations cultures into our own. We erect totem poles in our public spaces and decorate our buildings with Native art. We use images depicting Natives of ages past to promote our tourism industry, and bastardize First Nations’ religious traditions in New Age spirituality. We mimic First Nations’ ceremonies in both the Boy Scouts and the mythopoetic men’s movement. People like Archie “Grey Owl” Belaney have even disguised themselves as First Nations people in order to become spokespersons for supposedly Aboriginal concerns. While such strategies help non-Natives feel more comfortable in this fundamentally alien setting, they further marginalize and silence actual First Nations people. Potvin’s article takes this to a new level: instead of simply appropriating First Nations culture, it seems he’s claiming the victimization of First Nations people for non-Native Canadians. I doubt that this was his intention when writing the article, but it’s nonetheless the article’s effect.

This is regrettable, given Potvin’s otherwise steadfast opposition to anti-Native racism in Canada. His newspaper has published numerous articles exposing the injustices suffered by Native Canadians—articles that have often been far harsher in their condemnation of Canada’s colonial heritage than those typically printed in more mainstream publications. Potvin’s article strikes me as a momentary lapse of reason, something that can apparently befall even the wisest men and the most progressive papers.

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