Reflections on racism and its tentacled tumor on our body politic

 On this second year of a Day to Commemorate Truth and Reconciliation in Canada, it is long past time for “white” men and women to open both their hearts and minds to begin to welcome a respect for indigenous ways, indigenous thought, indigenous spirituality, not as an act of cognitive reprogramming, or as an act of political treaty-making, nor as a patronizing and condescending gesture of masked colonial arrogance, but rather as a humble prayer of gratitude and hope and surrender.

Indigenous traditions of respect for the earth and for all life offer a depth and breadth of wisdom that the world needs, and seems so resistant to embrace.

Marie Battiste, in a paper entitled, Maintaining Aboriginal Identity, Language and Culture in a Modern Society: Reclaiming Indigenous Voice and Vision, Marie Battists, ed. Vancouver BCL UBC Press, p. 201-202, as quoted in John W.  Friesen and Virginia Lyons Friesen, Aboriginal Education in Canada, p18:…

Immigrant society is sorely in need of what Aboriginal knowledge has to offer. We are witnessing throughout the world the weaknesses in knowledge, based on science and technology. It is costing us our air, our water, our earth; our very lives are at stake. No longer are we able to turn to science to rid us of the mistakes of the past or to clean up our planet for the future of our children.

The contemporary political culture, deeply embedded in a kind of patronizing and condescending model of patting the head of a child, as if, eventually that child will learn the appropriate ways of modern commerce, modern political vernacular and debate, of adapting to the demands of an economy that provides jobs to millions through technological innovation and heavily funded marketing will eventually have to bow on bended knee, stop talking and start listening, reading, reflecting and even engaging in a conversation whose agenda including both content and method will be offered by those indigenous men and women as a freely-given gift. And in order for that process to begin in earnest authenticity, surrendering and abandoning preconceived perceptions, attitudes, beliefs and practices that once dominated North American life among the powerful will need to be seeded as a precondition for further growth.

The German people surrendered to a process of denazification, as a way to turn the page in their collective history. The philosophy and the actions of the Third Reich are so horrendous, contemptible and disgusting, that the colonizing history of indigenous peoples in Canada, in the light of the Third Reich, might seem pallid, tepid and therefore tolerable. It is not tolerable; however, the process of reconciliation to which the Canadian government has expressed a full commitment, may well be sabotaged if a process of embracing, comprehending, acknowledging and formally discarding, and even burying all of the perceptions, needs, aspirations and fatal errors of that colonial mentality is not an intimate and integral feature of the process.

Colonialism has application to a stereotypical European, white, ambition to explore, conquer and subdue the ‘whole world’ primarily for the self-interested purpose of “using” the bounty and the treasure of the “new world” to enhance the wealth of the powerful back is Europe. Empire building, royal acclaim, profit-engineering, as well as the inherent drama and excitement including considerable risk, supported and nurtured by a variety of forms of patronage from wealthy/royal sponsors may have been the ‘light’ side of the initiative. The dark side, however, was the rape, pillage, murder, and religious conversion and complete emasculation of indigenous people, both individuals and the supporting and sustaining culture, beliefs, perceptions, languages and identity. This pursuit of dominance, competitively enacted, carried with it the strings, ambitions, expectations and hubris of both the sponsors and their people, as well as the adventurers themselves. Empires, like kingdoms, royal families, corporate and institutions, have behaved in a manner that, in many cases, was then free from the kind of critical examination, exposure and public disdain that needed investigation and a vehicle for communicating the impact of these expeditions, in real time. And, this pattern of competitive domination, control and the pursuit of power by those whose wealth and influence enables the ventures, is embedded in the political and economic and normative culture in the West today.

Targets of the neo-colonial ambition, as well as the strategies and tactics available, have changed, from indigenous to all those who have come to “need” the meagre wages the behemoths grudgingly concede. Capitalism, including the perpetuation of the wealthy and powerful class, (defined as the source and the stability of the normal order), continues to colonize industrial workers, farmers, transportation workers, in order to maintain the perceived need for control and dominance, that lies at the core of the colonial mentality.

And it is not only the business community that holds these views as normal, ethical and ultimately essential. The academic world, the ecclesial world, the health care field….they are all operating on a system of pyramidal top-down power, albeit with the more recent injections of modest ‘crumbs’ like the number of hours per week for work, and the injection of modest benefits for workers, in some instances.

Power at the top of the social, political economic gradient has always been able to, and also willing to “do whatever it can get away with” in order to serve its own primary interests. Benevolent dictatorships too have proferred meagre and modest ‘crumbs’ to their people, and then sung their own praises lustily.

Add to the campaign to grow and burnish the range of empire, the inherent racial superiority of white Europeans when confronted with people of a different skin colour, and significantly different ways of valuing each other, their environment and their spirit(s). Prejudice, bias, superiority, and power have throughout history maintained a degree of enmeshment and co-dependence for which those in power have never had to account. Of course, there are occasional exceptions of individuals and corporations who/which ‘valued’ their employees by building company towns, and by injecting medical supports, within clearly described and enforced limits. And by comparison, viewed through a lens of comparison with nearby corporations not engaged in similar initiatives, these ‘benevolent’ companies accrued an aura of humanity and compassion and worker appreciation.

When social and political forces like labour unions are considered sinister and anathema to the pursuit of corporate profit, however, as they are today, and have been for decades in North America, the stench of the abuse of power, similar to the stench of racial colonial empire-building abuse continues to hang over the contemporary and modest shifts in acknowledging, and accounting for the deep and ineradicable stains of colonialism.

 
It is not considered colonialism if and when a sole shooter attacks a synagogue or a mosque; however, it is a lingering and growing sign of the same ‘lethal social/psychological poison’ that inhabits the colonial mind. It is not considered  colonialism when a Prime Minister refuses to support his Attorney General, who just happens to be the first indigenous woman in Canada to hold that office, when she attempts to uphold the boundaries of her office(s) when faced with an applications fora deferred prosecution of SNC Lavalin. And yet, who can effectively and honourably argue that vestiges of colonialism do not infect that whole chapter in Canadian history?

It is not considered colonialism when a premier exempts long-term care institutions from inspection only then to witness excessive numbers of sickness and deaths in those homes resulting from conditions conducive to the spread of COVID.

It is not considered colonialism if and when hospitality workers have to scrape and beg for reasonable wages, and even for the tips they have been paid by patrons, (when withheld by employers)…and yet it is a similar kind of abuse of power.

Is it not considered colonialism when tax breaks for the rich are built into legislation, thereby funnelling public funds toward padding the portfolios of the wealthy, while eviscerating public programs to feed, to school, to house, and to provide health care for the disadvantaged…and yet it is.

While failing to provide safe, secure and abundant water for indigenous communities is obviously another vestige of colonialism, the length and duration of the failure has now become systemic, and so embedded into the culture that, for more than a century, governments have failed to act and have never been fully held to account….and so the initial impact of colonialism has been revisited on indigenous peoples for more than one hundred and fifty years impacting generations of young men and women, many of whom now dwell in Canadian prisons.

Law enforcement’s penchant for seeking and arresting people of colour at a rate far in excess of the proportion of such demographics in the national population, while obviously a blatant and open wound based in racism in the national body-politic, is nevertheless, another of the cancers for which we have not discovered, and applied even a repressive intervention. Just how serious can this country be about acknowledging, and then addressing the multiple complexities of racial attitudes, first to indigenous and also to minority groups, including new immigrants and refugees, if we continue to walk past these social and cultural “boils” as if they were normal, expected, tolerable and resistant to all curative measures.

Perhaps, rather than a ‘cure’ in the medical sense, the Canadian culture needs to consider the questions around “Truth and Reconciliation” to be matters needing a permanent and revolutionary perspective…Can we as Canadians begin to see our betrayal of indigenous families, and their children, not only as our worst and most heinous night-mare, but also as a path of light to re-imagine how our people with the least ‘political voice and influence’ are our most important and most valued and most resilient and most creative and most prophetic and poetic among us.

IT is not enough to build water lines, with reservoirs, in order to provide clean water for people living on reservations; it is not enough to hold public artistic ceremonies of song and dance in the nation’s capital, while wearing orange shirts; it is not enough to continue to hold wealthy and highly esteemed individuals as most important in our culture, while watching men and women sleeping on grates with temperatures near or below zero F.

The colonial mind-set, attitude, practice and its many implications continue like a barely recognized and acknowledged tumor pushing against both the brain and the heart and the lungs of the body politic. It is emasculating our sense of self-discipline, our sense of self-worth, our sense of our potential and our belief in our shared identity as a self-respecting nation. And its cells are continuing to replicate each time we turn a blind eye and a deaf ear to the obvious abuses of power over those whose voices we ignore or dismiss.

And there is no medical faculty or hospital, no ethics professor or consultant, and no court or  legal measures that can or will ameliorate our dependence and reliance on the abuse of power, for which we are all responsible, both for its incarnation and for its erasure…

We have to see, to feel, to think and to act our way out of this protracted night of darkness whose tentacles reach far beyond the imaginary ghosts and goblins and vampires of hallowe’en.

We actually are those vampires and sinister and ‘real’ human apparitions in the lives of millions of our own people….We can do better!

 Every conscious recognition, by each of us, that we are abusing power, is a step forward in neutralizing our hardwiring for power over. And while that recognition need not and must not erase our past, including words and phrases that were integral to the colonial mind-set. We have to sail between the Scylla of the contemporary “sanitizing” of our past, and the Charybdis of those clashing rocks of our innate insecurity that seems insatiable, in its appetite for ‘victims’ to assure us of us our unique and uncontestable (ironically and satirically) value. Our personal, familial, institutional and community reality and identity all depend, to a degree that we have thus far failed to acknowledge, on our disciplined commitment to take each step. And we must do it, not to patronize our indigenous peoples, nor our racial minorities, but to rescue ourselves from our own sabotage of our authentic better angels.