THE CONTEMPRARY COLONIAL PROJECT IN CANADA

THE CONTEMPRARY COLONIAL PROJECT IN CANADA 

Bill Lee

June 12, 2018

In 1992 I published an article, on how colonization had been particularly focused and injurious to Indigenous communities2. At that time I believed that it was very important that we come to grips with the absolutely purposeful genocide and the effects of what Euro-Canadian policies and practice had done to the First People of this land. At this point in our history there is a sense, or more accurately it is better to call it a narrative, that in Canada today we are a nation of two peoples who are on the verge of, or at least are working seriously on, developing a path of reconciliation between the decedents of European settlers and Indigenous people. It is believed that our government and our two peoples we are working toward righting the wrongs and healing the wounds of the historical (first) colonialism. This view is founded on the belief that colonialism is a thing of the past. The evidence however tells a different story. Indeed this narrative is not simply incorrect but worse, a distraction from what is really going on, the barriers to real reconciliation. My strong belief is that we are not finished with colonialism at all but have merely changed its form and developed a new project, one based on refusing to pay up for that which our ancestors were involved in, what is often called "settler colonialism". It also involves the privileged place of non-Indigenous people. The colonial project in which we find ourselves as both Indigenous people and those of us who occupy what I call the "colonial class", I term the contemporary corporate colonial project.

There are Five Elements or Aspects to this contemporary colonial project that profoundly affect Indigenous people and the rest of the Canadian population.

(1) There is a continuing lack of redress/reparations for the theft of land and resources perpetrated during the first or initial colonial project.

For example, there is only minimal and gradual redress which is required to make up for the continuous breaking of treaties during the initial colonial project. As well, successive Canadian governments have held to a practice of dragging out negotiations or court cases related to land claims and treaty disputes. The hope is clearly to hope that the Indigenous communities run out of the energy and/the money to pursue the endless negotiations or litigations.

(1b) There is a Continuing Lack of Redress/Reparations for the Genocide, cultural and physical, perpetrated during the initial colonial project. This includes the government as well as Christian Churches, particularly the RC Church.

For example, the RC Church is continues to obfuscate its role in the residential school fiasco, refuses to pay its share of reparations and; Bishops refuses to allow the Pope to formally apologize for the part played by the Church in the residential school horror.

The government until recently has fought 60's Scoop "survivors“ in their attempt to obtain recognition and redress for their treatment.

(2) There is a Continuing Refusal of the Federal Government to Live up to Its fiduciary responsibilities under the Indian Act.

This includes (but is not exclusive to:

* Underfunding of on Reserve Education;

* Underfunding of on Reserve Housing;

* Underfunding of on reserve sanitation;

* Underfunding of on and off reserve Health Care;

* Underfunding of on and off reserve Child Welfare Services

(3) There is a Continuing Colonial Privilege Enjoyed and Perpetrated by the Colonial (Whitestream3) Class. This includes:

* Lack of recognition of Indigenous languages;

* Racism experience by Indigenous people is clearly not experienced by members of the colonial class. Indeed the people and institutions which dispense the racism never are on the receiving end;

* Lack of Recognition of Rights before the law (victims and those charged).

* Examples include:

+ The %age of Indigenous men and women incarcerated is out of all proportion to those experienced by whitestream Canadians ;

+ MMIW&Gs. Other than the Willie Picton case very few men have been brought to justice for the deaths of Indigenous women.

+ An unhappy example of the inequity experienced by Indigenous people in terms of the legal system is the failure to properly investigate and prosecute the killing of the young Cree man, Colton Boushie by an Alberta farmer.

(4) There is a Continuing Theft and Genocide Due to government facilitated corporate resource exploitation of resources. This has lead and leads to:

* Loss of traditional land;

&

* Destruction of land from the Pollution of land and water by the resource extraction companies.

Examples are many but a few will illustrate:

+ The Federal and Alberta governments Determination to push through the Kinder-Morgan tar sands pipeline over the objections of numerous Indigenous communities. The notion of free prior and informed consent stipulated by the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People is thus disregarded.

+ The people of Grassy Narrows in Ontario have been suffering the effects of mercury poisoning caused by logging practices literally for generations. Only in the last year has the Government of Ontario had to admit the damage to the land and people and its responsibility to clean it up.

(5) The result of the interplay of the four elements of the contemporary colonial project together has resulted in the final aspect. The colonial class of Whitestream Canadians continues to live off the avails, not only of the thefts and genocide of the initial project but the contemporary one. We of the colonial class enjoy a high standard of living and pay less taxes thanks to the financial gain from the use of Indigenous lands and resources and money saved by short changing Indigenous people on the debts owed to them.

Each of these aspects or elements take a huge toll on Indigenous communities, different but not less serious than the first colonial project. In other words, as this contemporary colonialism continues, we of the colonial class are generally well off at the expense of our Indigenous brothers and sisters and this makes a vile joke of the claim of Canada as a just nation in search of reconciliation.

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1 This article was initially created as notes for a panel discussion in which I took part as part of the 6TH Annual Tommy Douglas Institute, George Brown College, Toronto. "Indigenous Ways of Knowing KIHKINOOHAMAAKEWIN" May 28, 2018. The Discussion was to focus on the topic of how the Academy could further they efforts of Reconciliation. I took the position that to talk about reconciliation while we are living in a colonial country is not useful and that we need to confront and free ourselves from this curse prior to discussing how to reconcile our two peoples.

2 Lee, B. (1992) Colonization and Community: Implications for First Nations Development. Community Development Journal Vol. 27, No. 3 July. pp. 211-219.

3 Whitestream is a term I saw first in an article by Sandy Grande (2003) "WHITESTREAM FEMINISM AND THE COLONIALIST PROJECT EDUCATIONAL THEORY / Summer 2003 / Volume 53 / Number 3 0 2003 Board of Trustees / University of Illinois and is essentially a substitute for the term 'Mainstream" and which identifies that racism is a significant aspect of colonialism. It is also used in a more recent article by, Rebeca Burciaga and Rita Kohli, "Disrupting Whitestream Measures of Quality Teaching: The Community Cultural Wealth of Teachers of Color", Multicultural Perspectives, 20, 1, (5), (2018).