Blowing the Whistle

The problems that beset the majority of Canada’s aboriginal communities are so large, diffuse and apparently intractable that few citizens—aboriginal or non-aboriginal— and fewer government agencies have the energy and fortitude to pursue solutions. Arguably the last federal government that had a clear plan of action was that of Pierre Trudeau in 1968–72. Minister of Indian Affairs Jean Chrétien’s 1969 white paper was the final push in an effort at assimilation that had animated Canadian aboriginal policy for a century, and that was most clearly expressed in 1920 by Duncan Campbell Scott, then superintendent general of Indian affairs: “I want to get rid of the Indian problem … Our object is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department.” This goal was supported by the church missions that developed the residential school systems, and by the majority of academics and politicians who gave any thought to the place of aboriginal people in Canada. Chrétien’s proposal to abolish special status for aboriginals and to establish programs designed to integrate Natives into mainstream Canadian society was universally detested by aboriginal leaders and was quickly withdrawn.

A generation after tabling his white paper, Prime Minister Chrétien received the massive 1996 report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, which concluded that “assimilation policies have done great damage, leaving a legacy of brokenness affecting Aboriginal individuals, families and communities.” Since that report was received, federal policies have been vaguely directed to implement the recommendations of the royal commission. Native communities are increasingly redefined as distinct nations with inherent rights of self-government, each with its own land and resource base defined through nation-to-nation negotiations with the Government of Canada.

The aboriginal industry in the title of Frances Widdowson and Albert Howard’s Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry: The Deception Behind Indigenous Cultural Preservation refers to the network of lawyers, anthropologists, consultants and aboriginal politicians who have assembled to negotiate and implement the land claims, self-government agreements and funding programs relating to this government policy. Widdowson is a political science professor, Howard a researcher in the same field, and both have had considerable first-hand experience working with aboriginal issues, primarily in Northern Canada. Rather than building the secure and long-term careers that are open to academics who accept the tenets of the aboriginal industry, they have chosen the daring course of blowing the whistle on the entire unmanageable project.

Before any consideration of the book’s position on aboriginal self-government and the merits of cultural isolation versus assimilation, it should be made clear that the entire discussion of these topics relates to the minority of First Peoples who live on reserves and in isolated northern and rural areas. The aboriginal industry makes a point of ignoring the 50 percent or more of Canadian aboriginals who currently live in cities, the majority of them building lives for themselves and their families that are virtually indistinguishable from those of other urban Canadians. Although most of these families have kinship ties to rural or northern communities and proudly identify themselves as possessing an aboriginal heritage, they are of little concern to the lawyers, bureaucrats and policy consultants whose careers are based on arguments relating to an idealized and mythical aboriginal way of life.

The authors approach the subject through classic Marxist analysis, providing the middle-aged reader with a sense of encountering an old and almost forgotten acquaintance, long lost in the discourse of modern and postmodern debaters. The Marxist approach has problems—primarily in its doctrinaire acceptance of cultural evolution, of which more later—but its materialistic “follow the money” focus is ideal for clarifying the tangle of relationships linking government, aboriginal leaders and the army of non-aboriginal mercenaries who are (counterintuitively) funded by government to fight for the aboriginal cause. The social perspective of the authors leads them to condemn the aboriginals’ choice to define their relationship with Canadian society through ancestry rather than through economic circumstances. This choice to choose ethnic over class interests is interpreted as a major obstacle to aboriginals obtaining just treatment from the larger society.

Widdowson and Howard’s Marxist assumption that individual rights relate uniformly to all of humanity and cannot be defined differently for distinct ethnic groups corresponds to the view held by the majority of Canadians. However, this assumption is very much at odds with the perspective of most aboriginal leaders, the mercenaries who write their speeches and supervise their negotiations and the government agencies that deal directly with aboriginal issues. The “aboriginal orthodoxy” described by the authors must appear bizarre or exaggerated to readers unfamiliar with aboriginal issues, but it accords well with this reviewer’s knowledge and experience of the subject. It can be encapsulated as a belief that the Creator placed the ancestors of First Peoples in North America, giving them a mandate to live in harmony with one another and with their environment, and to protect that environment from the incursions of rapacious Europeans. Europeans are a separate class of being, who are probably correct in their scientifically based belief that they are descended from African apes. Europeans lack most of the noble attributes—bravery, generosity, spirituality and the ability to think and deal with problems in a holistic rather than a simple linear fashion—that characterize aboriginal peoples. It is this assumption of a unique heritage and responsibility, more than their singular legal status, that sets aboriginals apart from other minority groups in the country, and that dissuades them from choosing the path of assimilation that has worked so well for immigrant minorities.

A few decades ago such claims would not have been given consideration by Canadian government officials schooled in the western intellectual tradition. However, the late 20th-century era of academic postmodernism provided an atmosphere in which assertions of impenetrable cultural difference were encouraged. Dale Turner’s 2006 book This Is Not a Peace Pipe: Towards a Critical Indigenous Philosophy urges aboriginal intellectuals to defend the legitimacy of indigenous ways of knowing the world. However, they must recognize that indigenous philosophies cannot be articulated in English (and presumably in other non-indigenous languages), and Turner argues that empirical evidence in the sense familiar to the narrowly rationalist scientific tradition is irrelevant to an understanding of indigenous thought. This mode of argument is fairly standard in the writings of current aboriginal scholars.

The cultural relativism arising from postmodern thinking—the assumption that all cultures are equally developed, just different from one another—is an affront to the Marxist view of cultural evolution, which sees history as a process in which societies progress at different rates through a set of fixed stages, from primitive hunting to ancient farming societies to feudalism, capitalism and ultimately communism. Widdowson and Howard claim that this evolutionary process explains the vast cultural chasm that existed between aboriginal hunting societies and European capitalistic societies at the time of contact. Critics have condemned this view as racist, although the authors clearly explain that they hold no such beliefs. They assume that all human groups have equal capabilities and they attribute differing levels of economic and technological attainment to purely historical, environmental and material factors.

So far so good. However, the authors are less convincing when they argue that differences in levels of social and technological achievement at the time of first contact continue to be relevant today and are the major obstacle to successful accommodation of aboriginal and Euro-Canadian societies. A strong argument can be made against this position, simply by citing the many aboriginal individuals who have adapted successfully to main-stream society.

The evidence of history and archaeology is also at odds with the authors’ assumption of a 16th-century Canada occupied by small primitive bands of aboriginal hunters. When Samuel de Champlain travelled through what is now southern Ontario in 1615, the region had a population estimated at between 50,000 and 75,000. Most were farmers living in small towns, many of which were home to more than 1,000 people. These societies, like the aboriginal civilizations stretching from the Mississippi Valley to Peru, were decimated during the 16th and 17th centuries by European diseases, and it was well into the 1800s before southern Ontario regained a population as large as that which had existed in the early 1600s. Elsewhere in Canada, aboriginal populations with similar densities and levels of social complexity existed along the coast and salmon rivers of British Columbia and in a few productive pockets of the Maritimes and the Prairies. Only in the northern forests and tundra were small hunting-based bands the dominant social unit, as they were at the same time in similar regions of northern Eurasia.

Four hundred years ago there certainly were significant differences in social complexity and technological attainment between Europeans and aboriginal North Americans. However, this should not obscure the fact that both were far less sophisticated, socially and technologically, than their descendants of the present day. At the time that Champlain was describing the Native peoples of southern Canada, my own Irish and Scottish forebears were illiterate farmers scratching a bare living from rocky soils and the shellfish they collected from the local beach. I have visited the remains of their dwellings and found them to be hovels meaner and more uncomfortable than those occupied by Inuit during the same century. Their way of life was much closer to that of 17th-century Native Canadians than it is to that of their present-day descendants.

Problems of social adjustment are not so much the result of inherent differences between aboriginal and European societies as they are of our perceptions of these differences. According to the aboriginal orthodoxy, intercontinental differences in social and technological complexity are of no relevance, because the history and culture of First Peoples are singular and not to be critiqued or even understood by those outside the magic circle. On the other side stands the assumption that the “western way of life” is a European and Euro-American development that we now bestow on the rest of humanity. Actually, many nations contributed to today’s global culture and economy. Not the least of these were the Native New World farmers who developed many of the food plants— most importantly corn and potatoes, but including everything from avocados to tomatoes—that support billions of people in today’s world and that arguably allowed 18th-century European populations to reach the densities needed to undertake the first industrial revolution. Europeans alone cannot take credit for modern medicine, jet aircraft and industrially induced global warming. All of our ancestors had a hand in it.

False historical assumptions are basic to the intellectual atmosphere that allows rural First Peoples to continue existing as aliens in Canadian society. For centuries the assumption of enormously different levels of culture was promoted by colonialist officers, bureaucrats and missionaries who decreed the natural superiority of European civilization and the utter worthlessness of Native ways. Many, including this reviewer, suspect that exposure to this assumption and all of its consequences over many generations is the primary cause of the troubles that afflict so many aboriginal communities today. Widdowson and Howard’s outright rejection of this interpretation, in favour of one that sees immense cultural difference at the base of these problems, is not convincingly argued.

The historical assumptions that the authors do challenge are those of the current aboriginal orthodoxy that began to replace the colonialist paradigm about 50 years ago, in the context of global decolonization. The myth of aboriginal exceptionality is now so widespread in Canadian society that a writer as astute as John Ralston Saul, in his recent A Fair Country: Telling Truths About Canada, accepts it as the basis for his essay on Canada as “a Métis civilization.” Its power is augmented by the adoption of this fashionably romantic Euro-Canadian stereotype by aboriginal leaders, apparently including the indigenous politicians and artists of Saul’s acquaintance.

The fable of aboriginal nobility stretches back at least 2,000 years, when the Roman historian Tacitus described the savage Germans as shaming the Romans with their honour, generosity, hospitality, bravery, sexual morality and democratic mode of governing. It was revived during the 1500s when Europe coincidentally discovered both America and the classical past, and perceived newly encountered peoples as the admirable survivors of an ancient golden age when all men were brave, all women chaste and everyone honourable, generous and pious. The concept was well studied by European social theorists of the past few centuries and, in more recent times, by aboriginal politicians and by the consultants whose careers became bound up with the communities that purchased their research. The predictable result is the situation described by Widdowson and Howard, in which aboriginal leaders and Canadian governments are held hostage by the shared stereotype of Noble Native and Savage Whiteman.

The authors trace the toxic influence of this myth as it distorts negotiations over aboriginal claims to land and self-government, phrased as the inherent right of independent nations whose sovereignty was never ceded to Canada or was stolen in unfair treaties signed over the past two centuries. They describe how the myth is used to justify special legal status for Natives and, effectively, to bury the pervasive problems of family violence and child abuse—the acts that so dishearten teachers and, especially, nurses posted to many remote northern communities. They demonstrate that the myth is basic to the development of abysmal educational systems that focus on Native languages and cultures rather than on the literacy and numeracy that would provide a foundation for children to become economically productive members of contemporary society. They describe how an exaggerated value placed on traditional environmental knowledge devalues the findings of scientific research in fields such as wildlife management and is exploited by industrial developers who use it to bypass government environmental regulations in order to negotiate secret “benefit agreements” with Native leaders.

Historian Alan Cairns, whose 2001 essay entitled Citizens Plus: Aboriginal Peoples and the Canadian State argued that aboriginal Canadians should be granted special rights that are not available to other citizens, is sympathetic to the myth of aboriginal nobility. He writes that “when they emerge from the sidelines of history, people who have been demeaned, humiliated and stigmatized inevitably construct arguments and reinterpret the past in ways that enhance their dignity … the psychic gratification they produce is immensely valuable to their believers.” An ennobling mythic past may benefit people whom history has treated badly, and the myth may provide some temporary relief from the pain of deprivation and addiction that is so great in so many aboriginal communities, but even this is questionable. In my experience, most aboriginal people living on reserves or in isolated communities have little concern about a mythic past, but consider themselves to be ordinary people trying to make a life for their families in the contemporary world. It is the politicians, the artists, the intellectuals of the aboriginal world who have adopted and incorporated the myth of the noble aboriginal into their view of themselves, and who use it as an effective tool in advancing their position in dealing with non-aboriginal society.

This book clearly demonstrates that the myth is basic to the industry that provides an excellent living to the cadre of lawyers, government officials and academic consultants who negotiate the policies designed to maintain the isolation of aboriginals from mainstream society. The clear sympathies of Widdowson and Howard are with the people living on reserves and in remote aboriginal communities, the people whose addictions, abuse and suicides are used by the Native elite as tokens to be traded for increased government funding and transfers of power to their own pet projects. It is this elite whose cries of cultural genocide prevent so many aboriginal children from obtaining the education, the perspective and the confidence that would give them a choice between cultural isolation and adaptation to life in the mainstream of Canadian society.

Widdowson and Howard have undertaken a flawed but courageous attempt to expose the illusion on which current Canadian aboriginal policies are founded. They decry the vast amounts of money and energy that Canadian governments continue to squander in pursuit of this mirage and the condescension of those who sham belief in such an implausible pretense. It is regrettable that they chose to replace current stereotypes with those of aboriginal simplicity that prevailed during the colonialist past. This deficiency is bound to attract unmerited accusations of racism, even comparisons—which particularly annoy the authors—to right-wing academics such as Tom Flanagan, whose 2000 First Nations? Second Thoughts made similar assumptions regarding the primitive nature of aboriginal society.

The resemblance between this book and Flanagan’s is limited to two areas: to the assumption of Native backwardness and to the view that a brighter aboriginal future lies in assimilation and accommodation rather than in continued separation from mainstream society. But Widdowson and Howard’s hopes for the future contrast sharply with the simple solution proposed by Flanagan, who believes that the problems of First Peoples’ communities could be easily solved by market forces enabled by a few legislative changes—such as turning over government funding and the ownership of reserve property to individuals, thus allowing them to raise capital by mortgaging their homes and the resources of what used to be their reserves. Widdowson and Howard are more hopeful of solutions arising from the aboriginal population, trusting that leaders will emerge from the communities of Métis, urban aboriginals and Native women who have little to gain from the delusions of the current paradigm and the stereotype on which it is based. They also recognize the need for large-scale and long-term government programs of education, health and community support in order to sustain the move toward assimilation. This is certainly a humane alternative to Flanagan’s neoliberal approach, which we may fear is too much in the mind of a federal government that is currently led by one of the professor’s most apt pupils.

Widdowson and Howard have written an important book, one that should be read by all who are disturbed by the current status of Canadian First Peoples. Whether or not one believes that their best hope lies in assimilation into Canadian society, it is clear that progress in any direction is effectively hindered by the idea of aboriginal uniqueness and by the industry that has developed in pursuit of this fantasy.