zhang.dianli

Another religious residential school is found to have a secret graveyard. Up to 169 unmarked graves adding to the already frightening death toll in these charnel houses of Christ.

And it's not only Canada. Canadians learned well from their neighbours to the South, after all.

When these body counts started getting revealed, along with the duplicitous concealment of them, Canadians got a shock to our collective system. Canadians were, after all, the “good guys”. We weren't like that. We were the tolerant, open, multi-cultural society. We wouldn't do this.

...must rise and save us from ourselves

It became an easy go-to to blame Catholics (despite a narrow majority of these schools being run by non-Catholic organizations), or, more broadly, Christians (despite several nominally secular organizations also running these horror shows, and despite all of them in theory being overseen by a secular government). Churches were burned in the name of tolerance. Social media exploded with condemnation of Christianity and Christians, in another ironic display of tolerance.

But...

This is misdirected. Because these schools are not an expression of Christian intolerance. These schools are an expression of Canadian intolerance, and this is something that does not sit well with the bulk of Canadians: secure in their white majority where everything is defined in terms of themselves.

Self-image shattered

See, we Canadians never were the good guys, not even for that small period of our history where we paraded ourselves around as such.

The shock is understandable. Most people don't read their own country's history outside of the sanitized versions presented in their primary schooling. If they had they might have noticed the little giveaways. Little giveaways like how slavery was banned in Canada in 1833: a blink of an eye ago in historical terms. Under French rule and British rule both, slaves were a thing in Canada: the French primarily enslaving native peoples and the British primarily enslaving African peoples in the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

(And before we get the WELL AKSHOOALLEE!! crowd piping up, yes, some native tribes, especially along the west coast, were slavers as well.)

Similarly every wave of immigrants that weren't French or English in background brought with them a matching wave of racial bigotry that frequently spilled over in violence:

• The Chinese head tax.
• The Anti-Oriental Riots of 1907.
• The Komagata Incident of 1914.
• The Anti-Greek riots of 1918.
• The Chinese Immigration Act (a.k.a. the Exclusion Act) of 1923.
• Japanese-Canadian internment of 1942.
• The antisemitism that has long simmered under Canada's placid surface, occasionally breaking out into a rollicking boil here and there.
• The moral panic over Romany refugees starting in 1997 and having never really stopped, only gone a bit quieter and underground (like the antisemitism).

And those are just the big incidents; incidents sufficiently large to make it into history books. In my own lifetime I've seen smaller, less overt (and less violent) such things. Like the anti-German sentiment that I got double-whammied with alongside the anti-Chinese sentiment. Our (Jewish) Ukrainian neighbours who got double-whammied with antisemitism and anti-Ukrainian sentiment. The huge kerfuffle over Iranian and Iraqi refugees in the '80s. Somali refugees in the '90s. It all paints a picture of a nation far less tolerant than it believes itself to be.

Colour me completely unsurprised

Of course what I'm saying comes as absolutely no surprise to anybody who is a “visible minority” (and I'm not even going to begin to unpack just how revealing that phrase is, nor how revealing it is that Canada's natives are not classified as such) in Canada. Let's go with some personal experience.

How many white Canadians of my generation had people making slant-eyes (or some equivalent thing that is more appropriate for caucasians) at them: both overtly and covertly? (By way of comparison, I've never seen a Chinese person making “straight-eyes” at the non-Chinese.) How many white Canadians ever had the phrase “they don't value life like we do” carelessly (or deliberately!) spoken in their presence about their ethnicity? (Protip: A lot more white racists are going to be hearing that phrase tossed their way after the COVID-19 debacle exposed the west for the clown pants wearing culture it is!) How many white Canadians were then the subject of feigned “Oops!” body language while slyly being glanced at after doing any of these? Or, possibly even worse, a condescending reassurance that, “no, you're one of the good ones!”

I think that if white Canadians sat down with any “visible minority” (or natives, since perversely in Canada natives aren't considered this)—or even just those whose culture is different in “multicultural” Canada—and actually listened (a skill most of them lack when it comes to criticisms of their behaviour, sadly), they would find out rather rapidly that Canada is not as “open” and “tolerant” and “multicultural” as they like to profess it to be.

And maybe, just maybe, if they sat down with a history book that wasn't bowdlerized pabulum made for children and read it with open eyes they might find that none of this “rising tide” of racism and bigotry that is spilling forth again in Canada is new.

Witch Hunt

And maybe, just maybe, these people, upon reading about Yet Another Pile of Native Children's Bodies being discovered, can, instead of pointing fingers of blame, look into the mirror and reflect[1] upon their own lives, their own behaviours, and their own culpability not in these specific deaths (which almost nobody alive is culpable for), but for the system in which these deaths were enabled and concealed.

Maybe.

[1] Pun fully intended, yes!