Canadian exceptionalism and other ikons

I finally got around to reading James Daschuk’s book, Clearing the Plains: Disease, politics of starvation and the loss of aboriginal life, which caused quite a stir when it was published back in 2013. It is a truly informative and original history of the health of indigenous peoples over the past several centuries, in the Canadian plains that eventually became the Prairie provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta. Daschuk’s main purpose in writing this book seems to have been to eliminate several important myths about the extremely high death rates suffered by those peoples not only during the colonial period of North American history, but also most emphatically during the early years of the “Dominion”, or “Kingdom” of Canada, from Confederation (1867) to the end of the nineteenth century.

Among the many myths destroyed by Daschuk’s research was the curious idea that there were no infectious diseases among native peoples prior to initial contact with imported European microbes during the colonial period. In fact, as Daschuk and several other researchers have shown, many of the common diseases from the “Old World” (Asia, Africa and Europe) did indeed exist in the “New World” (now known as the Americas), while others did not. However, those diseases that did exist do not seem to have ruined the health of those indigenous peoples nearly as much as the newly-introduced diseases, and the quite different, imported, strains of the older ones. Not only in “Latin” America (south of the current US-Mexican border), but also north of that line, the mortality rates of all the native Americans increased enormously during the colonial period.

Daschuk also demonstrated that in the case of the (future) “Canadian Indian” populations, those rates of mortality began their ascent long before initial, face to face, contact between the native peoples and the European fur traders who came to bargain with them. This was because microbes introduced into the Americas from the previously established Iberian colonies to the south made their way into the “Great Plains” of the future USA, and the future Canadian Prairies, much faster than the French or British fur traders. Those diseases often began pushing up mortality rates as soon as many of the indigenous peoples started using horses of Iberian origin to hunt bison.

Another one of the myths attacked by Daschuk’s research was the common pretension, often enunciated by uninformed people in our time, that the “First Nations” peoples currently living in the Canadian reserves, or US reservations, have always lived for the past several millennia in exactly the same regions where those reserves are to be found nowadays. To start with, there is the still not disproved possibility (ignored by Daschuk) that not all the indigenous peoples in the Americas were of exclusively Siberian origins, an idea which became the subject of heated controversy during the recent “Kennewick skeleton” controversy in the USA’s state of Washington.

More importantly, however, Daschuk showed that many of the native peoples (such as the Cree) living in the plains just prior to the founding of the Dominion of Canada were in fact native “refugees” from the boreal forest regions east of the Prairies, who had survived destruction much earlier from European microbes after having gradually developed their own antibodies. They replaced the much more unfortunate Assiniboine peoples, who had dominated the plains for centuries before the European traders arrived, but then succumbed very quickly, and almost completely, to those same microbes shortly after initial contact.

The idea that the indigenous peoples, before and during the colonial period, were forced by circumstance to move far away, mostly westward, from their regions of origin, has also been demonstrated by dozens of other historians, not only for the so-called “Indians” of the regions that became the USA and Canada, but also for the Inuit in the far north. One of those historians was Roland Viau, whose 1997 book on the Iroquois in the region that became central Canada and the north-central region of the USA, Enfants du néant et mangers d’âmes: Guerre, culture et société en Iroquoisie ancienne, I read shortly after it was published. In that book, Viau also pointed out that today’s “Indians” could not have been exactly the same ones as those established in any particular region several thousand years ago, not only because they were moving around all the time, but also because captured enemies in wartime, those that were not killed and eaten whenever they were brave enough to have induced “emulation”, were adopted instead as new band members to replace warriors killed in battle. With the inevitable result was that there was a great deal of biological “overlap” between competing bands, or tribes, even before they came into contact with any Europeans. Since reading that book, I also found out that women from enemy bands were often captured, and traded as slaves, among competing groups, which reinforces the overlap thesis.

Daschuk’s research also corroborated Viau’s point according to which the indigenous peoples in North America were by no means living on the land in the ecology-conscious way that they are often being described in utopian myths concocted nowadays. It seems that quite a few of the larger mammals were over-hunted and wiped out of existence in several different regions, long before the nineteenth century, when white hunters, especially in the USA, killed most of the plains bison for their hides, on a much more massive scale. Even though the Iroquois peoples, among others, also relied on extensive agriculture for their food needs, they apparently made their own contribution to the overall decline in game animals.

But the most important recent myth completely demolished in Daschuk’s book was the popular pretension that Canada has never been involved in anything like the USA’s extremely racist and violent repression, not only of Southern black slaves and sharecroppers, but also of their own indigenous peoples. Even though it is true that the great republic to the south undoubtedly killed off a lot more “Siberian-Americans” during its territorial expansion than did the constitutional monarchy of Canada, this was only because they encountered a much larger indigenous population than the considerably smaller groups then living in Canada.

Daschuk demonstrates very convincingly that the much higher rates of mortality on the Canadian plains, right after Canada’s 1870 takeover of the huge western region known as “Rupert’s Land”, were caused by direct Canadian government intervention. That region, officially run for two centuries before that on a charter granted to the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) by the King of England, was given by the British government to the newly constituted Canadian “Dominion”, as part of Britain’s imminent military and political withdrawal from North America. Canada’s first prime minister, John A. MacDonald, who ran the country for most of the 24 years between Confederation (1867) and his death (1891), was also his own minister of Indian affairs, and sought to “clear the plains” of indigenous peoples in order to open them up to large-scale agricultural development by much greater numbers of European immigrants.

After the total disappearance of all the plains bison, MacDonald personally ordered his Indian agents to limit native access to vaccination against disease, that had already been introduced to the region by the HBC and some missionaries prior to the Dominion takeover. At the same time, he also instructed them to use the food weapon so as to force all the surviving Indians onto reserves and, once installed on those reserves, to withhold subsequent food handouts so as to not only reduce government expenditure, but also induce his indigenous “wards” to become self-sufficient in subsistence agriculture, deliberately isolated from any commercial contact with non-natives. The result was a colossal increase in native death rates, especially after MacDonald decided to intensify his repression in order to punish those tribes that had joined the abortive,1885 Métis armed rebellion against the Canadian government.

Daschuk’s decision not to write anything about that rebellion, nor about the previous 1870-1871 rebellion, both of them under the leadership of the French-speaking, Québec-educated, Métis leader, Louis Riel, is the only major weakness I have been able to find in his book. Though it is true, as he points out, that the military and political aspects of those rebellions have already been much discussed in Canadian historiography, it would have been very useful to his readers for him to have at least commented on how the politics of those rebellions fit into the overall picture of the deliberate destruction of non-European, or incompletely European, populations that he describes. By not doing so, he risked letting his readers assume that he may have been influenced by the kind of central-Canada (Ontario and Québec) bashing that is often encountered in western Canada. His account of the commercial war between the upstart, Montreal-based, North-West Company and the London-based HBC, for several decades prior to the latter’s absorption of the former in 1821, also seems to emphasize how relatively “pro-Indian” the British traders were compared to the Canadian ones.

Nevertheless, for historians of that period of Canadian history, Daschuk has made an extremely important contribution, not only to the history of the indigenous peoples involved, but also to the theme of nation-building. As was pointed out in his book, in MacDonald’s view the clearing of the plains was a necessary prerequisite to the implementation of his government’s 1879 “National Policy” of economic development, centred on three major prongs: the protective tariff favouring Canadian industry, huge government subsidies toward the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway (1881-1885), and large government expenditures on propaganda in Europe designed to convince hundreds of thousands of destitute Europeans to become farmers in western Canada. Among many other such writings, my own doctoral thesis (UQAM, 1991) on economic nationalism in central Canada between 1846 and 1885, has to be seen in a new light now, after Daschuk’s addition of a fourth “prong” to the National Policy, namely the deliberate destruction of what was left of the indigenous population in the Prairies.

Much more than Daschuk’s revelations about indigenous mortality prior to Confederation, it was his account of Canada’s own repression of plains Indians after Confederation that scandalized the many thousands of Canadians who read his book. None of those people could believe that liberal-minded Canada could possibly have done such a horrible thing. It was also very difficult for politically-correct Canadians to realize that their country had largely succeeded in hiding that story from public view for over a century after that, even though MacDonald himself had used explicitly racist language in public debate at the time, notably in the Canadian House of Commons. The myth of Canadian exceptionalism has always held that the European colonial empires were certainly guilty of racism and genocide, from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries, as was the USA, but that Canada had somehow avoided having done the same. Up until the publication of Daschuk’s book, most Canadians even managed to feel superior to the “much more racist” Australians and New Zealanders.

All this came at a time when Canada was also involved in a massive “truth and reconciliation” charade with all the country’s native peoples, from every Canadian region, who had also suffered since Confederation through the adoption of the residential schools program. Beginning with parliamentary approval of the highly paternalist “Indian Act” of 1876 and continuing right up to the 1990s, tens of thousands of indigenous children were taken away from their families and sent to various Christian schools in order to be “civilized” through deliberate attempts to deprive them of their “Indian-ness”. This, combined with several other ongoing scandals about the “Third-World” living conditions that have long prevailed on most of the Canadian reserves, and a long-awaited inquiry into the violent deaths of hundreds of indigenous women in recent years, does not make Canada look good, to say the least.

In this debate, it is not enough to argue, as some commentators used to do, that after all the “professional Indian” representatives of native bands rejected the Trudeau government’s attempt to do away with the “apartheid” of the reserve system in the late 1960s and the early 1970s. Most indigenous leaders back then apparently felt that they had a much better chance influencing Canadian aboriginal policy from inside the reserves than if all of those still living on the reserves were simply merged into the general population.

In other words, Daschuk’s historical revelations could not have come at a worse time for Canada’s internal and external image as an “exceptional” Western country, governed by political correctness rather than by racism and repression. Daschuk’s research is even more damning than that of such other historians as Marcel Trudel, who was one of the first historians to demonstrate that many of the settlers during the French regime in Canada (1608-1763) also possessed slaves, which is another important “exception” to Canadian exceptionalism. One of Trudel’s books on that subject was translated and published in English, in the same year (2013) as Daschuk’s book was published.

Much more than Daschuk’s historical revelations, however, it is the agonized and astonished reaction to those revelations that is by far the larger story. For some peculiar reason, today’s Canadians seem to have forgotten that their country was simply a small part of the six-century long European conquest of the rest of the world (most of Asia, Africa, the Americas, Australia and most of the islands in the world’s oceans). Given the extremely violent, explicitly racist and imperialist nature of sustained Western expansionism, it is hard to believe that any particular group of European settlers could have completely avoided all those characteristics.

Even many of the British officials who governed, or misgoverned, Canada prior to Confederation, such as Lord Elgin, also participated in the British domination of many other colonies, such as Jamaica and India (in Elgin’s case), as well as in economic satrapies like China (Elgin again). Several modern historians, such as Mike Davis, have also written extensively about the British use of the food weapon in India, where the number of victims was measured in the millions, rather than the thousands of victims among the eternally misnamed Canadian “Indians”.

In all the Western empires, the method of “divide and conquer” was also used over and over again, the various imperial leaders over the centuries temporarily allying themselves with one particular group of indigenous peoples against some other group, the better to further imperial ambitions. It made no difference to them if their allies changed periodically, one ethnic group being exchanged for another, one region, one religion or one competing empire, set for a time against another one, so long as their particular empire triumphed in the end. In western Canada, as in India, the Middle East, or wherever else, the idea always has been to never let any of the local populations unite in opposition to imperial domination. Not during the colonial period, and not during the more recent neocolonial period, either. Nowadays, the Western method of divide and conquer has also been passed on to several emergent, “Eastern” empires.

To be sure, downplaying Western imperialist ideological attitudes, as the Canadians have often done, is not any less biased than the attempts of some modern Third-World apologists to say just the opposite, often claiming that their own ancient civilizations or neolithic communities, prior to being conquered or dominated by the Western empires, were almost perfect, and indeed morally superior to any of the European civilizations. In reality, it is hard to find any human community, whether those referred to as urban-based “civilizations” or those known only as neolithic “societies”, that can truly claim any type of moral superiority. Not only nowadays, but also since forever.

In his book, Daschuk also attacked presentism, the often erroneous idea according to which today’s historians should not criticize societies or individuals in the past for doing things that were acceptable then, but not at all nowadays. Apparently, well-known Globe and Mail columnist Jeffrey Simpson tried to lambaste Daschuk’s book for just that reason, in a piece written on the bicentenary (2015) of MacDonald’s birth. But Daschuk had already anticipated that kind of assault on his work, when he showed how MacDonald’s anti-indigenous actions and opinions were already being regularly denounced during his own lifetime, as not equal to the standards of the day.

Equally fascinating is the recent attempt by Phil Fontaine, the former Grand Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, to get the United Nations to condemn Canada’s nineteenth-century attempt to wipe out all the Western native peoples as the “sixth official genocide”, after the Holocaust, Srebrenica, Armenia, Rwanda and Holodomor. Unfortunately for that official list, however, the real number of genocides in world history is much higher than five or six. It also includes the settlers attempt in the British colony of Newfoundland to get rid of the remaining Beothuks, that also took place in the nineteenth century. Not to mention the German attack on native peoples in Namibia in 1904-1905, an event that puts the lie to several journalistic attempts to classify the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire (1915-1916) as the “first genocide of the twentieth century”. Any serious attempt to list all the genocides in human history is a monumental task, as Frank Chalk and Kurt Jonassohn described it in their 1990 book, The History and Sociology of Genocide: Analyses and Case Studies.

Unfortunately, all world history has not just been characterized by racism, imperialism and genocide, it has also been equally full of innumerable attempts to deny any wrongdoing. After rotten treatment of millions of people considered “inferior”, whether they be “inferior” social classes, the “inferior” female gender or an endless list of “inferior” minorities, myth making has always been the most important characteristic of all human societies. Which makes iconoclasm, not in its original sense of deliberately smashing other people’s physical ikons, as in the Islamic State movement’s breaking of “un-Islamic” statues and buildings in Mali, but in its modern sense of a deliberate intellectual “demolition” of previously unassailable ideological myths, as Daschuk has done for the western Canadian plains.

So, by all means, let us all continue to demolish every myth of every country, every religion and every ideology, most emphatically including literal belief in whatever was written down several centuries ago in some sacred text or another. More or less in the way depicted in the Lawrence of Arabia movie, in which the hero’s answer to a local leader’s claim that something or other cannot be done because “it is written”, the reply always has to be “nothing is written”. Honest research is what we need the most, not more myth-making.

One of the most interesting examples of the kind of attitude that needs to be adopted towards the deliberate invention of unreality is from René Magritte’s 1928-9 work called “The Treachery of Images”, which consists of a perfectly realistic painting of a pipe, followed by the caption “This is not a pipe”. In other words, the painting is only an image, a mere representation of a pipe, not the real physical object. Similarly, none of the patriotic, religious or ideological representations of reality are in fact real, they are only mythical representations. None of them deserves to be worshipped as if it were the real thing.

To take another example, in Mao Zedong’s cultural revolution in China, a photo of Mao or a copy of his selected quotations (“the little red book”), were both considered to represent Mao’s personal liberation of hundreds of millions of Chinese people from the horrors of Western (including Russian) capitalism and imperialism. A message that was conveyed at the time not only to the Chinese, but was also used to create true believers in Maoism in every other country in the world. However, that message was only another enormous lie, the reality being that Mao himself was one of the greatest villains in world history, in fact a self-appointed prophet of his own personal brand of imperialism.

The Canadian exceptionalism denounced in Daschuk’s book is yet another example of the enormous difference between a concocted myth about what happened in one particular place at one particular time (the birth of the Dominion of Canada), and what was really discovered about that time and place by one particularly iconoclastic, professional historian. Dozens of other examples spring to mind concerning the enormous differences between myth and reality in all kinds of other cases: the Islamic State’s “caliphate” pretending to carry out the will of Allah rather than just copying Genghis Khan’s barbarian slaughter of innocents, the “ten days that shook the world” when the Russian Revolution was supposed to have inaugurated an inevitable march toward world communism, the billion people who are all still counted as “Catholics” even though half of them have not been faithful to most of the Church’s most important teachings for at least the past sixty years, the patriotism of all the neoliberal presidents of the USA since Ronald Reagan who gave away two-thirds of their country’s industrial strength to “communist” billionaires in the People’s Republic of China. How many other such examples could any reasonably well-informed person come up with after a few hours reflection? Past and present, us and them, every human institution in the world has been churning out thousands of such unbelievable myths ever since human beings started believing in their own deliberate misrepresentations.

It was probably Douglas Adams who got the closest humanly possible to an accurate definition of intellectual iconoclasm with his “total perspective vortex”. We need to imagine ourselves being capable of fully knowing and understanding the consequences of every imperialist strategy that has ever been concocted over the centuries, and subsequently covered up, by the world’s richest and most powerful myth-makers. We need to get a complete picture of just exactly what is and has been going wrong inside every dominant or dominated society, before we can hope to be able to do anything about that. Incomplete (partial) knowledge, and incomplete understanding, only result in being partial towards, or being biased in favour of, those who have concocted the less well known and the less well understood acts of domination and submission.