[JaredMilne]

CDN_PATRIOT CDN_PATRIOT:

Using the term 'settler Canadians' instantly discredits you. I'm no settler, I was born in this country. Using that term does nothing but divide people, and is really uncalled for. I have as much right to this land as anyone else, and I refuse to feel any shame whatsoever for being Canadian, or in the way I appreciate the founding fathers (like MacDonald) for having the guts to put together this country.

-J.

Dude, I'm as much a patriot as you are. Call me 'Captain Canada' and I'll take it as a compliment. These lands are the only ones I can call home, as the UK, Ireland and Germany mean as much to me as China, Ecuador or the Central African Republic. I don't want the nuances of Macdonald's legacy (e.g. his ability to find common ground between disparate groups and get them to work together ot his openness to Francophone culture and languages) to be belittled or forgotten, nor that of other people like Vital Grandin, who again built my community. But I also know that my presence here came through the Treaties that made European settlement possible.

But this is the other side to our history that's been ignored or swept under the rug for far too damn long. It's at the root of so much of the shit that's happened to Indigenous people in this country, and at the same racism expressed by the likes of Lynn Beyak and the asshat who murdered Barbara Kentner. It's one of the main reasons I support so many of the things I mentioned earlier in this thread. And the fact that so many of the people who founded and developed our societies, and made our lives here possible, were involved in such shitty things needs to be recognized along with the positives of our legacies.

True patriot love means recognizing those shitty aspects of your country and wanting to make things right.

[DrCaleb]

JaredMilne JaredMilne:

True patriot love means recognizing those shitty aspects of your country and wanting to make things right.

[DrCaleb]

TRC requested $1.5M to find mass graves at residential schools. The feds denied the money in 2009

[Scape]

Who was in power then?

[Zipperfish]

Told my mother-in-law about this one (we're just north of Kamloops). She's like "215? I thought it was 300." It was well-known around here that there were kids buried there. She still remembers in Grade 4 when the school shut down and all of a sudden there were all these traumatized First NAtions kids in her class.

Fucking horrific.

[bootlegga]

JaredMilne JaredMilne:

Here's the thing, though-Macdonald and other people like him were in large part responsible for our being able to live here. Are everything we've done and all the heritage we've built since then morally tainted because of how they were made possible?
Not to mention residential schools in one form or another have existed almost since Europeans first came here. These attitudes existed long before him, and they existed long after his death.

No, everything isn't tainted, but we have to accept the good with the bad, and while I'm glad McDonald helped found Canada, the genocide he (AND his peers) helped create needs to be brought to light for everyone to see so we can remember and acknowledge it.

We don't accept when China throws the Uighurs in concentration camps or harvests organs from Falun Gong members, and neither should we accept McDonald's (and those who helped) sordid past.

Canadians like to think we are morally superior to most people on this planet, but we have our fair share of warts too, we've just done a much better job of hiding it in the past than some other countries.

JaredMilne JaredMilne:

And do we remember that Macdonald established voting rights for many First Nations without requiring them to lose their status, saying that "they carry out the obligations of civilized men...in every way they have every right to be considered as equal with the whites," which were repealed by a Liberal government that said it was "an insult to free white people in this country to place them on a level with pagan and barbarian Indians." And it wasn't a so-con historian that showed me that-it was Metis historian Olive Dickason, even today one of the most pre-eminent Native historians in Canada.

I sometimes wonder how different history had been if Native people had been able to wield that kind of electoral power much sooner. Native people have been experts at turning tools of assimilation into tools of resistance (e.g. settler Canadian law, European languages) so who knows what they might have done with both the vote and retaining status?

And we can't overlook the bigger issue at hand. Historian Christopher Moore wrote this in Canada's History a couple of years ago:

$1:

What would be shameful would be to remove Macdonald statues around the country — without addressing Canada’s responsibility for the poverty, dispossession, and alienation of Indigenous peoples that he helped to create and that we maintain.

...

When he helped to make starvation into a tool of coercion on the prairies, he was pursuing policies that were accepted by the Canadian electorate of the times — by us, in effect.

The way to redress that situation is to address the underlying wrong. It would be the height of hypocrisy to hide the Macdonald statues while we still accept the Indigenous poverty and dispossession he allowed to develop.

At the end of the day, the decision of how to move forward ultimately lands on the shoulders of the victims - the First Nations. If theys want his statues taken down, then fine, and if they don't care or would prefer something else, then I'm fine with that too.

Canada in some ways is like Israel - it expects to stand on the moral high ground after it does really shitty things. If we want to stand up there, then we have to answer for the shitty things we've done (unlike Israel is willing to do).

[Thanos]

Israel at least has the potential of someday experiencing total destruction at the hands of the Arabs as an explanation for their hyper-vigilance crossing the line into brutality. They live in a shit neighbourhood where anything and everything horrible eventually happens. Nearly being exterminated altogether as a distinct group also leaves some nasty mental & emotional pathologies behind in a people, even four generations after the event.

Canada has no such excuse. The Natives in 1867 were no threat to our existence. What was done to them came from an entrenched arrogance only.

[JaredMilne]

bootlegga bootlegga:

No, everything isn't tainted, but we have to accept the good with the bad, and while I'm glad McDonald helped found Canada, the genocide he (AND his peers) helped create needs to be brought to light for everyone to see so we can remember and acknowledge it.

We don't accept when China throws the Uighurs in concentration camps or harvests organs from Falun Gong members, and neither should we accept McDonald's (and those who helped) sordid past.

Canadians like to think we are morally superior to most people on this planet, but we have our fair share of warts too, we've just done a much better job of hiding it in the past than some other countries.

At the end of the day, the decision of how to move forward ultimately lands on the shoulders of the victims - the First Nations. If theys want his statues taken down, then fine, and if they don't care or would prefer something else, then I'm fine with that too.

Canada in some ways is like Israel - it expects to stand on the moral high ground after it does really shitty things. If we want to stand up there, then we have to answer for the shitty things we've done (unlike Israel is willing to do).

I fully agree about our needing to take the good with the bad-a concern I have though is that we risk overlooking the former too-that we go from a simple depiction of 'Canada The Good' to a simple depiction of 'Canada The Bad'.

More than that, as I've talked about a few times I think we need to take a broader look at the problems of the Anglo-American political tradition, which came up with all these great ideas on freedom and justice and also a bunch of pseudo-religious and pseudo-scientific BS to justify restricting them to white men. This is a much larger, systemic thing that lasted for centuries and that I think hasn't been examined as much as it should have.

I already mentioned my ideal solution to the statue issue, and several of the citations in the article I linked to show that Native opinion on the subject isn't exactly unanimous. Every community is going to have to decide on the issue. So you and I are in agreement on this one.

I didn't include it in the quote, but Christopher Moore's article is one reason I support implementing almost all the TRC recommendations, as well as the broad scope of the changes advocated by the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, the Penner Report, the more recent MMIWG inquiry. He mentions how, if these bigger issues are addressed, we can more positively recognize the achievements of Canada and the people who helped build it.

[CDN_PATRIOT]

JaredMilne JaredMilne:

Dude, I'm as much a patriot as you are.

No offence, but I doubt that. Unfortunately, my patriotism has waned in the last couple of years because I see the country that I love so much being torn apart by people like Trudeau, revisionists, and all the snowflakes that need to soap box and try to tear everything down just because their feelings are hurt in some way or another.

JaredMilne JaredMilne:

But I also know that my presence here came through the Treaties that made European settlement possible.

My presence came here through my parents. I was born at St. Joseph's Hospital in Toronto. Anything regarding treaties or issues with the First Nations happened at least 100 years before I came into this world. None of that had anything to do with me being born in Canada, and has no bearing on my life in any way.

You want to call that cold? Fine. I don't owe anyone anything except for my parents who brought me into this world. I owe it to myself to stand up for a country that may be flawed, but is still the true north strong and free. I'm not going to let someone tell me that I have to feel things like 'shame' an 'remorse' just because I'm not 'indigenous'.

JaredMilne JaredMilne:

But this is the other side to our history that's been ignored or swept under the rug for far too damn long. It's at the root of so much of the shit that's happened to Indigenous people in this country

I can agree with that, but at the end of the day, many governments of the past of ALL political stripes dropped the ball over and over again. We as a country need to abolish the reservations and welcome First Nations into the fold permanently. First Nations also need to stop blaming 'whitey' for every goddamn thing.

There's more than enough blame to go around, but no one wants to be the bigger person and eat crow to get the ball rolling. If both sides would just admit they have ALL been asshats and start treating each other with respect and honour, we'd be on our way to finally making ground and putting all this crap behind us.

Instead, people just want to point fingers and label each other as the AntiChrist instead of actually doing something productive.

JaredMilne JaredMilne:

True patriot love means recognizing those shitty aspects of your country and wanting to make things right.

Goes both ways, and is more complicated than that. Truth.

-J.

[fifeboy]

JaredMilne JaredMilne:

CDN_PATRIOT CDN_PATRIOT:

Using the term 'settler Canadians' instantly discredits you. I'm no settler, I was born in this country. Using that term does nothing but divide people, and is really uncalled for. I have as much right to this land as anyone else, and I refuse to feel any shame whatsoever for being Canadian, or in the way I appreciate the founding fathers (like MacDonald) for having the guts to put together this country.

-J.

Dude, I'm as much a patriot as you are. Call me 'Captain Canada' and I'll take it as a compliment. These lands are the only ones I can call home, as the UK, Ireland and Germany mean as much to me as China, Ecuador or the Central African Republic. I don't want the nuances of Macdonald's legacy (e.g. his ability to find common ground between disparate groups and get them to work together ot his openness to Francophone culture and languages) to be belittled or forgotten, nor that of other people like Vital Grandin, who again built my community. But I also know that my presence here came through the Treaties that made European settlement possible.

But this is the other side to our history that's been ignored or swept under the rug for far too damn long. It's at the root of so much of the shit that's happened to Indigenous people in this country, and at the same racism expressed by the likes of Lynn Beyak and the asshat who murdered Barbara Kentner. It's one of the main reasons I support so many of the things I mentioned earlier in this thread. And the fact that so many of the people who founded and developed our societies, and made our lives here possible, were involved in such shitty things needs to be recognized along with the positives of our legacies.

True patriot love means recognizing those shitty aspects of your country and wanting to make things right.

Well said!

[herbie]

I somewhat agree, neither you nor I are "culture" that's just part of who you are. I'm no less Canadian than my native friend across the street. MOF when I encounter an American, whether they're white, black, Asian, whatever, they're an American. And as far as how far your family goes back I don't give a flying fuck if they got here by boat, plane or walked across the Bering land bridge. It's all as pompous as bragging like 'got here on the Mayflower' - fuck off that was them not you.
The only people I see ruining this country are the few separatist idiots who'd rather be part of something smaller.
Nonetheless we all should be ashamed at the utter indignity of burying children in unmarked graves with no record they even existed as people and accept that as history too.
Settle for common sense, these statues of men who did some rotten shit that offends important groups of people are no better than the Confederate statues in the USA. Simply rubbing it in. Move them to museums where their actions can be fully documented rather than just tongue-bathing their heroic, bronze glory rather.

[DrCaleb]

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/apr ... -1.2908356

[Tricks]

Seems like an easy response:
Investigate the grounds of every residential school for more evidence.
Rename/tear down any one associated with the running of these schools
New curriculum in history classes specifically about how fucked up these were. Treat it with the same reverence we treat the holocaust.

Pull the responses of every politician who objected to it being called a genocide 6 years ago and repeatedly beat them over the head with their own words.

[DrCaleb]

What are you, some sort of radical leftie? Holding people to account for their actions is 'cancel culture' now.

[bootlegga]

herbie herbie:

I somewhat agree, neither you nor I are "culture" that's just part of who you are. I'm no less Canadian than my native friend across the street. MOF when I encounter an American, whether they're white, black, Asian, whatever, they're an American. And as far as how far your family goes back I don't give a flying fuck if they got here by boat, plane or walked across the Bering land bridge. It's all as pompous as bragging like 'got here on the Mayflower' - fuck off that was them not you.
The only people I see ruining this country are the few separatist idiots who'd rather be part of something smaller.
Nonetheless we all should be ashamed at the utter indignity of burying children in unmarked graves with no record they even existed as people and accept that as history too.
Settle for common sense, these statues of men who did some rotten shit that offends important groups of people are no better than the Confederate statues in the USA. Simply rubbing it in. Move them to museums where their actions can be fully documented rather than just tongue-bathing their heroic, bronze glory rather.

Well said