The Birthday of A Giant Colony: The Indigenous Peoples of Canada

The Birthday of A Giant Colony: The Indigenous Peoples of Canada
The amount of money spent is huge. It is accompanied by unending faux comment by the Mainstream Press and Media [“half truth, no truth, and sleight-of-hand”]. The Fourth Estate bathes itself in the flood of “expertise” by Social Scientists: Sociologists, Anthropologists, Psychologists, Psychiatrists, Suicidologists … and more … who operate and/or provide the structure of the passionately concerned, humane, sensitive, deeply caring “reconciliation” “truth” and other keenly motivated “Commissions of Inquiry” … into the deeply destructive, on-going, un-health and deracination of Canada’s Indigenous Peoples from sea to sea … to sea.

How has the legislation since John A. Macdonald continued to be destructive of Indigenous life and community? Why are top Social Scientists unable (?) to fathom the reasons for the unending degradation of Canada’s First Peoples?

The hard, hurting short answer to the last question may be because the Social Scientists are, in fact, (even when unaware) unable to find any meaningful solution … living as they do in the side-pocket of Power (quite close to its wallet).

What is to celebrate about a sickness in Canadian Society that is more than 150 years old?

The vastness of the subject, its intricacies, its on-going (apparent) insolubility, and the endless publication attempting to deal with it must surely cause many, many concerned non-indigenous Canadians to “turn off”, to turn away from the subject from sheer confusion. Are they racists? Perhaps. One cannot say categorically: “No, not racists”. But let us say “Not Racists … merely confused people unable to find a thread they can take hold of to lead them (a) to the core of the problem, and (b) able to see Real Solutions that may be given life.”
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    The Birthday of A Giant Colony: What’s To Celebrate?
    The Birthday of A Giant Colony: What's To Celebrate?

With the enormous literature on the subject one is lucky to find the core, the key, the heart and soul of the matter in terms that any Canadian may understand. It is there. And when it is presented any Canadian (except those who are on “the distraction” payroll) will say: “Yes, of course. Now let’s begin real change.”

Reading the book by Roland D. Chrisjohn and Shaunessy McKay (with Andrea O. Smith): Dying To Please You: Indigenous Suicide in Contemporary Canada makes everything plain. [Read also The Circle Game by Roland Chrisjohn and Sherri L. Young , with Michael Maraun].

[Notice the two books are not published either by major University Presses or by major “Mainstream” publishers in Canada – those last being, in fact, U.S. Branch Plant operations in Canada: Gigantic Imperial Publishers for a Gigantic Colony.] The publisher is Theytus Books, Penticton, B.C.

The condition we face arises, they reasonably say, out of the nature of our society. Dying to Please You …. refers to global developments since Columbus “discovered” the geography of the Western Hemisphere in 1492 … and the rape of South and Central and North America was launched, and (in relation to the lives of the Indigenous Peoples) has never ended.

That is the basis of the argument. It is that Pizarro, the famous looter/murderer of Indigenous people in the first half of the sixteenth century was simply father and uncle to all that has followed and which continues to this day: the rape and looting of all “The New Worlds” by Pizarro’s Capitalist descendants. The primary cause of the disease attacking the Indigenous in the world and in Canada is called … Capitalism. Genocide follows ….

“Genocide”, write the authors of The Circle Game, “is key to the whole story. Genocide … to cover up the wholesale theft of North America from the Aboriginal Peoples, to avoid having to compensate those whose property was stolen … and to obliterate the chain linking specific genocidal actions taken against Aboriginal Peoples… to the legal, political, economic, and social elite that conceived and implemented genocide.” (p. 74)

(On that central matter read all the volumes by Anthony Hall and Bruce Clark … as very useful further instruction.)




The authors of Dying To Please You…. assert that the program has been a shared activity of all The Western Imperial Malevolent Powers. (p. 104) That is true … from at least Pizarro onwards. The authors of the two books before us deal “head on” with the subject … and so we may be usefully brief. The “nature of our society” is (as the authors record) that it is a Capitalist Society … one in which (a) Capitalists, in fact, rule, and (b) in which the goal is to gain possession of and exploit anything and everything that will increase Capitalist wealth. The problem for Canadian government, now, the authors aver, is “how to appropriate indigenous land and property without paying for it…” Moreover … the “possibility that indigenous nations maintain their ownership while being compensated for previous outright robberies is not allowed to be raised as an issue.” (p. 106, Dying to Please You….)

And so, for the Indigenous Peoples, Dying to Please You….recommends they “come to grips with the domination of our lives by capitalism” (p. 138). But, surely, a real solution will only come about when all Canadians come to grips with Capitalism and reconstruct “the present system”… excluding the power and the tools of Capitalism….

Education … in our time … as The Circle Game points out, is, in fact, training to accept the Capitalist Status Quo. We have probably gone backwards. In the 1950s and 1960s debates about Capitalism were fairly common on university campuses. And the Communist Party of Canada was visible … and was dumping on (and educating about) Capitalism. Marxist Study Groups were fairly common. Now Canadian university campuses are firmly and ‘richly’ in the hands of the Capitalist State … as is every legislative body and almost every visible Political Party in the country.

One of the very best ways to protect Capitalism is to establish as absolute Truth that any examination of, and/or any reference to Marxist Thought can only come from filthy, vile, near-mad, immoral, humanity-hating, gross, vile, anti-community, self-seekers … (when, in fact, the description may, rather, describe perfectly… almost any … serious Capitalist….)

None of that bodes well for the real condition of Canada’s indigenous peoples OR for the indoctrinated population standing, apparently helpless, in the face of on-going extermination … on-going genocide.

What a strange and sorry tale to tell about Canada on the occasion of its 152nd Birthday Party. The greed of its Capitalist Class, the existence of barely disguised Capitalist government, added to the ignorance of non-Indigenous Canadians (and even many of the Indigenous) … delivers a continuing condition of oppression, gross misunderstanding, and … genocide.

“Come the Revolution” … as people used to say … “things will change”! But the Revolution seems farther and farther away. Except one of the characteristics of Revolution, we are told, is that often, unexpectedly, the chain of consent snaps and the community is in revolutionary change almost as a result of what seemed to be the unnoticed ‘nature of the society’. “Hope”, as Alexander Pope wrote, “springs eternal in the human breast”.

*(Top image: The Scream, on the cover, The Subjugation of Truth, by Kent Monkman. Credit: Now Tronto)