My English Degree Helped Me Learn About Canada’s Not-So-Rosy Racial History

If I were to make you guess the identity of a charming, fairly youthful, liberal, handsome world leader, who comes to mind? If you guessed Justin Treudeau of Canada then you are definitely along the right lines. His image blends with Canada’s international reputation as the ‘nice’ capital of the world, which seems to be on the surface rightly earned. The country boasts vast, snow-capped landscapes and a relaxed, liberal aura from the world’s perception. They rarely enter any kind of discursive political conflict, and many Americans fled there when Trump became president.

If you are anything like me up until the last few years, this is the perception you will probably have of Canada. In fact, before I did my year abroad, I had never really been confronted with the idea that Canada has an Indigenous population. What does it mean when a country silences its Indigenous population so much that it kind of forgets it has one?

But the country has as violent and tense a history with race as any other settler-colonial country. I first glimpsed this during my year in Australia, where my searches for my Aboriginal history and culture modules sometimes dredged up references to the culture and trauma of Canadian Aboriginal peoples. I wondered why I had never heard anything about Canadian Aboriginal and Indigenous peoples before. And I began to come to the conclusion that the British Empire and its continuing legacy is in one way or another responsible for most of the Indigenous and non-white suffering in the world, as well as the silencing of their stories and cultures.

My next insight into this injustice was through a module called ‘Resource Fictions: Oil and Water in the World System’. Through this module, I learned how Indigenous populations — forced into rural areas by years of colonisation, land dispossesion and genocide — have destructive tar sands running through their ancestral, sacred lands, and homeplaces.

Something I learned during my time in Australia was that Indigenous groups have very specific and very important relationships with the land. Reciprocity and respect is emphasised and essential to everyday life.

This is similar for Indigenous peoples in Canada, which, like Australia, has a diverse range of groups and cultures within their Indigenous population. I don’t wish to equate any of these as each group has its own unique customs and culture; but, a respect for the environment is something that has always stood out to me as a common thread between many Indigenous communities across the world.

And in this final-year module, I learned how a connection with water, and an emphasis on living in a fluid harmony with it, is pivotal. What is even more heartbreaking, then, is that Canada (in addition to the usual displacement, dispossession and trauma inflicted on Indigenous populations in settler-colonial countries) is home to the Alberta tar sands, the world’s biggest industrial project of unimaginable environmental destruction.

These toxic tar sands, and the pipelines that carry the oil throughout North America, rip right through Indigenous lands and communities, and plans to expand them continue even now.

Canada is home to 60% of the world’s lakes and ⅕ of the world’s water. This water is being poisoned. Indigenous populations, who have drunk water from the lakes for millennia, have been cut off from a clean water supply by the toxic byproducts of the oil sands; they are forced to buy bottled water (the plastic for which is derived from oil).

This exploitative project is not only destroying the land but annihilating quality of life and sacred connections to the environment for local Indigenous groups. If there’s one thing worse than exploiting land unsustainably, it’s using stolen, sacred, Indigenous-owned lands to do so.

Indigenous peoples in Canada are some of its most ardent environmental campaigners. But they are being ignored. Their position as those affected by unsustainable, destructive projects intertwines with their position as a disenfranchised and oppressed group in a white supremacist system. They are silenced; their needs and human rights are inconvenient to the economic ambitions of the dominant class.

Sadly, Canada is just a small cog in a world system that values economic capital over environmental sustainability or human wellbeing.

Drawing attention to its shortcomings despite its tolerant world image is important if we want to address the sources of international racism and environmental destruction. Both of these go hand in hand in the long and ongoing history of colonial and imperial domination, which views both environments and non-white bodies as things to be exploited and ignored.

Canada, like many other predominantly white countries, is still caught up in a system that disenfranchises both the environment and non-white communities. Canada needs to listen to its Indigenous population if it wants to move on from its role as an oppressive, colonising country to one that is a genuine part of the push for climate justice.

Originally published at https://ncdickinson4.wixsite.com on February 14, 2021.