Our nation’s history is not only fascinating — it’s key to reconciliation
The surest way to make me treasure something is to take it away. So it was with Canada Day, whose annual appearance I’d once greeted with scarcely more excitement than the Ontario Civic Holiday and Aromantic Spectrum Awareness Week. Then came 2021, when the high priests of social justice demanded that we cancel Canada’s birthday celebrations, so that we might spend July 1 in morbid contemplation of our original sin. Not being one for rituals of confession and penitence, I instead began to think harder about why I love this country, despite its flaws — even if expressing such sentiments in public was now viewed as hate speech.
But before we dismiss this three-year interregnum as a dystopian fever dream, it’s worth asking how our collective Canadian identity could be hijacked — even temporarily — in such a radicalized manner. And the truth is that it isn’t just progressive ideologues who bear responsibility; but also their counterparts on all parts of the political spectrum, few of whom exhibited any inclination to offer pushback while these falsehoods took root in the media. Even many writers at this newspaper, generally held to be a right-leaning outlet, greeted the unmarked-graves claims by heaping shame on their country.
In every other comparably advanced society, there exists a natural tension between conservative nationalists who reverentially sentimentalize their history, and the progressive critics who reflexively denounce it. And it is from out of that tension that something approaching the historical truth emerges. Or, at least something close enough to the historical truth that it provides a stable and coherent basis upon which a society can confidently pin its collectively embraced national identity.
What we learned in 2021 is that this necessary tension doesn’t exist in Canada, because traditionalists can no longer describe their nation’s history in a way that gives voice to their emotionally felt patriotism without attracting claims of racism and neocolonialism. As a result, our marketplace of ideas lacks the checks and balances required to inure us against — oh, gee, I don’t know, let’s take a crazy example — apocalyptic medieval fables in which legions of Indigenous children are thrown into furnaces and shallow graves by cackling nuns and diabolical priests.
So yes, shame on Trudeau for lowering the Canadian flag on federal buildings for half a year to honour victims entombed in non-existent mass graves. But shame on the rest of us for staring at our shoes while this blood libel was being signal-boosted. And now that Trudeau seems on his way out — and, with him, the maudlin, tear-soaked, bent-knee political shtick that accompanied this descent into hysteria — we might turn our attention toward developing a national self-identity sufficiently robust that it doesn’t fall to pieces the next time someone claims to have found genocide’s residue under an old tetherball court.
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The main challenge here is that identity springs from history, and getting Canadians excited about their past is difficult. I know this because I spent much of the COVID pandemic dragging my family around historical sites in Charlottetown, Quebec City and Ontario’s Loyalist heartland — not to mention the site of the 18th-century Palace of Parliament here in Toronto (where, somewhat underwhelmingly, we found a Porsche dealership, a parking lot, and the now-defunct “Big Wax” car wash). I wish I could say that any of these trips captivated my family’s imagination. But they didn’t, and I can understand why.
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Before going further, I’ll admit that I’m a late convert to the marvels of early Canadian history. The illustrations in my 1980s-era middle-school textbooks treated Indigenous peoples more or less as North America’s casino greeters — noble-seeming figures with stony faces who (literally) extended European explorers a friendly hand of welcome as their caravels first dropped anchor, before then fading unobtrusively into the hinterlands of terra nullius once the new European arrivals got on with the dull business of clearing land, plowing fields and surviving scurvy. (Needless to say, the fact that not a single one of these ink-drawn European pioneers would’ve been able to survive a winter without abundant assistance from Indigenous locals was generally ignored.)
There was little in these stories to arouse a schoolboy’s interest, let alone a vision of proto-Canadian identity. My main takeaway was that if I wanted to learn “real” history, I should look to the United States, Europe, and the realms beyond.
Like others of my generation, I eventually became more aware of Canada’s Indigenous peoples during my adulthood, thanks to the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and the increased media coverage of Indigenous issues that followed in its wake. Unfortunately, none of the new information I was learning caused me to become more interested in our history, Indigenous or otherwise.
Yes, Indigenous peoples were now being included as protagonists in the historical narrative. But they were depicted in two-dimensional terms: as saintly innocents, unblemished by sin, inhabiting a timeless state of tranquillity until the naqba unleashed by European arrivals. What’s worse, this more “progressive” conception of history seemed, in its way, every bit as Eurocentric as the old racist textbooks I’d been schooled with back in the 1980s — since the depiction of Indigenous societies as pacifistic, environmentally responsible, gender-diverse, proto-Marxist utopias obviously owed far more to the projected political fantasies of (extremely white) progressive academics and activists than to historical reality.
And so, seen in retrospect, it makes sense that the historian who finally did manage to get me hooked on my country’s history — and its Indigenous component, in particular — came to the subject as an outsider to the field.
There isn’t a hint of moralizing or political propaganda in Koabel’s account. While he is forthright about the enormous cultural differences that existed between these two societies, he is careful to trace them to the very different technological and geographic realities from which they emerged. The Europeans, hailing from sedentary capitalist societies characterized by high wealth inequality and a rigidly authoritarian ruling class, were completely bewildered by the flatter political and economic structures that were more suited to Indigenous life. They were also blinded by their Christian religious bigotries, which often led them to be contemptuous of Indigenous cultural practices. Still, the two groups stumbled along (largely) amicably for decades, overcoming the inevitable misunderstandings, and building the mutually profitable coalition along the St. Lawrence and Ottawa rivers that would, in time, form the sinew of what we now call Canada.
I’m obviously compressing Koabel’s material by several orders of magnitude, as well as leaving out enormous swathes of history involving many other regions and Indigenous groups — not to mention the ups and downs of the fur trade and the coming battle between the French and English. And so any errors of omission (not to mention the political views I’ve expressed) should be attributed entirely to me, and not Koabel. But origin stories are always vastly simplified affairs. And in my opinion, if we’re looking for a Canadian take on the genre, and one that people from many backgrounds can recite with a measure of pride and admiration, this is a good place to start.
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Let’s not delude ourselves. We know how this story ends — with French and English technology, population influx, and, yes, perfidy, combining to crush the cultures and political autonomy of the Indigenous societies whose assistance had been crucial to the survival of early European settlements. Yes, we should talk about the best means to improve life for Indigenous peoples, and to ensure that they share the fruits of our 21st-century knowledge economy. But none of our fine talk of “decolonization” can reverse the arrow of time. Canada isn’t going anywhere, so we all need to get along somehow — a goal that becomes easier if we read our history with an eye for inspiration, and not just outrage.
I recite all this because about 300 of those “brave fathers” at Queenston Heights were Indigenous — Mohawk warriors who scaled the heights and descended upon the invading Americans. While the engagement wasn’t decisive, the presence of the feared Mohawk troops helped break the Americans’ spirit, and thereby secure victory for the British.
This was hardly an isolated occurrence during the war, as Indigenous contingents often served as mobile light infantry working in concert with slow-moving British regulars. Without their (often heroic) feats of arms, the War of 1812 might have turned out very differently. Indeed, I suspect that America would have far more than 50 states, and we’d all have to wait three more days to celebrate our national birthday.
Canada will never be animated by the same fierce, sometimes militaristic, brand of patriotism exhibited by Americans. But insofar as we’re looking for national symbols suitable to modern adaptation in a multicultural Canada, the Battle of Queenston Heights would serve better than most, as it featured not only a notable Indigenous contribution, but also a (admittedly segregated) Coloured Corps, comprising Upper Canadians of African descent. As noted by a plaque erected by the Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada, “when considered in proportion to the population, Black men volunteered in large numbers, a testament to their belief in Canada as a haven for those formerly enslaved.” (The battle’s Laura Secord subplot might even permit us to describe aspects of the battle in feminist terms, though I’ll admit this would be something of a stretch.)
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Canada has been seeking “reconciliation” with its Indigenous peoples for many years now. And before we keep banging on with this (ill-defined) project, it’s worth asking a basic question: What would it even mean for Indigenous people to “reconcile” with a country whose officially expressed understanding of its historical actions has become wildly unstable — shifting from Eurocentric ignorance, to collective introspection and contrition, to unhinged self-laceration, all in the space of my own adult lifetime?
Which Canada are we asking Indigenous people to “reconcile” with — the one from 2021 that mass-murdered their children, or the one from 2024 that’s realized, oops, hey, turns out we didn’t?
To the extent reconciliation really can be achieved, the best way to build its foundations is for the country’s citizens — Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike — to learn Canada’s true history for themselves, and perhaps take inspiration from the many episodes in which our ancestors came together in common purpose, from the formation of the Laurentian Coalition that bound Champlain’s Frenchmen to the Wendat, Algonquins, and Innu, to the victory at Queenston Heights 200 years later.
At the very least, this process of national self-education might serve to strip the power of politicians and journalists to tell us who we are on the basis of misinformation and faddish ideologies. The Trudeau years showed us where that arrangement can lead a nation, and it’s not a place to which any Canadian should ever seek to return.
National Post
Jonathan Kay is an editor at Quillette and a former National Post managing editor.