Re.a post I mistakenly placed in the 2016 thread. The death toll continues in Thunder Bay. A kayaker recovered a body out of the McIntyre River today. It’s awful no matter who it was that died, but in particular I’m hoping it’s not another aboriginal youth.
The arguments for taking down statues of MacDonald sound exactly like the stupid ironic arguments Trumpists made like "“so, are we gonna tear down statues of Washington and Jefferson next?” when people wanted to tear down statues of Robert E. Lee.
We don’t have MacDonald statues because of the things he did wrong. We have them for the things he did right.
Yup, it was another aboriginal youth – 21 years old, born in TBay but had a foot both here and in a fly-in reserve. The reserve where my plane was shot down while we were landing. The reserve where the community centre was torched. The reserve with a constant stream of people being medivaced out to the tune of $6,000 a pop for urgent medical care arising out of drugs and violence. The reserve with enough criminality that a court must fly in once a month despite there only being about 1,200 residents.
"Fort Hopeless’ - Ontario’s shame
But the deceased youth didn’t fare better in TBay. His collar bone was already broken when he saved his family from a fire a few days before he was found dead in the river, where body after body after body of aboriginal persons are found.
RickJay, I very much appreciate your argument, and I realize that statues will not be falling. Having spent grades K-12/13 in Oakville and Burlington, I appreciate that there are almost no aboriginal people in those towns, that the non-aboriginal people who live there do not wish any ill against aboriginal persons, and in fact only wish them the best, and that Macdonald is rightly remembered there for being the key figure in Confederation. It is that for which Macdonald is not commonly remembered in Oakville but is commonly remembered by aboriginal people in the north that is highly problematic.
It is very different here in the north of the province. For many people up here, John Macdonald is remembered not just for being a Prime Minister. Duncan Campbell Scott is remembered not just for being a poet. They are known as key players in the genocide that devastated the lives of generation after generation of aboriginal people, and veneration of them is a poking an open wound. MacDonald’s railroad that connected the country? West of here, significant portions of the path for it were cleared of aboriginal people by deliberate starvation.
The final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is well worth reading. Sir John A. Macdonald:
RickJay, you’re a dad. You have a job. You live in an economically viable area of the country. You are free to trade and free to travel.
If you lived under the system that Macdonald put in place up this way, you would have to obtain a pass to travel off reserve, you would have been moved off viable agricultural land and relocated onto a reserve that could not sustain itself, and if you were fortunate enough to be able to produce a surplus of agricultural goods, you would not have been permitted to trade them to non-indians because competition against non-indians was prohibited. Even although your reserve might be close enough for your children to attend an off-reserve school, they would be taken from you and you would seldom see them.
If you lived north of here, where the recently deceased young man’s extended family lived, your children would have been taken from you and you would not see them for many years until they were no longer students, if you ever saw then again. You would be heart broken. Your wife would be heart broken. All the parents of all the other stolen children from your community would be heart broken. By taking the children, generation after generation of children, the souls of aboriginal communities were stolen, and the life of aboriginal communities was taken as surely as if it been stabbed in the heart.
Some children returned to their reserves as adults, only they had no parenting skills and any number of psychological problems due to having been raised in bad to awful conditions by government employees, so the generational problem worsened, such that today the parenting problems extant on reserves are truly devastating, not just for individuals, but for entire communities. To quote a well respected and deeply caring air paramedic who services remote reserves: “It’s Lord of the Flies.”
It is a gross insult to present aboriginal persons, and a gross insult to the memories of their ancestors, to commemorate the person who lead the charge that destroyed them, their culture, their communities, and worst of all, their children and future descendants.
If the ghost of MacDonald came to you today, and took your children away from you, took your ability to earn a living away from you, and caused you community to become grossly dysfunctional, how would you commemorate him?
Muffin, the treatment of the First Nations is the nation’s greatest sin. No serious student of history or reasonably well informed citizen doubts that. It’s taught in our schools rather extensively. This is no mystery.
But no, you cannot equate a builder, however flawed, with a traitor who fought to enslave a people. The legacy of MacDonald (and others of the time) should be honestly and frankly discussed and should be a part of his legacy as taught and understood. More importantly, and the tragedies we still live with should be fixed, but MacDonald’s not Robert E. Lee. He constructed a country, and is the primary reason this isn’t now the United States.
Lincoln was a racist; Churchill an imperialist and an elitist and a racist and an author of a number of military catastrophes. Gandhi was a Nazi sympathizer, Mandela a militant terrorist wannabe, and Dr. King a plagiarist. For all I know, Norman Borlaug beat his kids, Terry Fox was an asshole, and Raoul Wallenberg didn’t tip. People are honored if they achieve greatness; if they left something great behind. MacDonald did that. His sins against Aboriginals should be in every history class all the same and the resolution of those sin our government’s first priority.
What did Robert E. Lee leave behind that was great? Nothing.
Is Macdonald really that venerated in Canadian society? I only remember him presented somewhere between “trivia question” and “interesting fossil”.
The ones who were truly lionized were the super-wholesome teachers’ pets of the nation - Roberta Bondar, David Suzuki, Terry Fox, Craig Kielburger, Silken Laumann, Rita MacNeil, etc, etc.
Not the way Washington or Lincoln are in the USA, no.
MacDonald was a workmanlike statesman. He did practical things, and to be honest he was not the most quotable guy.
Except for Terry Fox, whose name has become essentially synonymous with fighting cancer in Canada, none of those people will be much remembered long after they’re dead, either.
The “Great Person” theory of history has struggled to take hold in Canada, and to be honest, I’m good with that, because it’s usually wrong.
Fire/rescue pulled another floater out of the river this evening – cpr – off to hospital. No report yet on whether the floater lived or died.
There is no end in sight.
Good news – his heart had stopped but CPR and fast treatment at the Health Sciences Centre has him back in the land of the living. A 20 year old aboriginal person.
I was never taught anything about MacDonald in school, apart from the fact that he was the first Prime Minister of Canada. Nothing. Nada.
Also nothing about residential schools or really any Canadian history at all, come to think of it. And since we, as a family, came to Canada when I was a wee lad, my parents couldn’t even impart any knowledge.
The internet era has taught me a bit about all this, but only recently as it’s gaining traction.
I still don’t know what to make of it all. It’s a very complex issue for my brain. Way too many moving parts.
I never learned much about MacDonald, either, and I grew up in his hometown. His house is a historical site. WE could have walked to it from the school I attended. We never did. A full examination of Canadian history didn’t happen until high school, and even then I don’t think we made it past the Depression.
My kids have the same experience in history every year; from September to February they learn about the First Nations. Then they start getting into settlers, there’s a panicked mention of Confederation being a thing, and by June they’re out of time. They’ve never made it to the First World War - literally could not tell you anything about it. They’re in Grade 8 and 7, and are both bright enough to remember that sort of thing.
Canadian history courses? Zippola for me.
Interestimg what RickJay said in that quoted post. History (of any kind) wasn’t a mandatory course when I was in high school in the late 70s. I took things like French and Geography instead.
Typically, at what age is a person usually developed enough to dig into history on a substantive level, getting into the whys rather than just memorizing the names and dates of battles?
For example, in grade four, our class was shown a video on racism, and although I had never seen a black person in real life, I had seen black people on Buffalo TV stations, so I was able to get it at a substantive level that it is wrong to treat people differently due to our skin colour differences. Yet at that time I did not understand the concepts of Canada and the United States. I had no clue what the jurisdictional boundaries meant, to the degree that I was scared of being drafted. I had been across borders many times (Ontario, New York, Quebec, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia by that age), and I had been to Expo 67, and had been fascinated by the moon landing, but I had no clue at all as to what differentiated jurisdictions other than their names and locations – distinctions with differences. In grades 7 and 8 I learned a lot of English history, but it was mostly about the names and dates of kings and battles, rather than the whys of what had been had been.
Obviously it is a chicken and egg problem, compounded by not all kids developing at the same rate, but I have to wonder if experiencing and learning about different cultures when younger might be better than memorization of facts and the dogma that often goes along with it, and leave history until teenage years when kids are better able to distinguish between greys.
Really? As one who grew up in southern Ontario at about the same time as you, I’m surprised. My history courses went through Canadian history in grades 7, 8, 10, and 13. It concentrated mostly on New France, on the War of 1812, on Confederation, on the building of the CPR, and then we jumped forward to the Quiet Revolution. We completely skipped WWs I and II, and the Depression.
We also skipped any mention of Canada’s native peoples. Pity, because there’s an issue that should be discussed.
There is clearly a generational difference here. At some point in the 1970s, Canadian educators must have realized the country was grown up now, and that they should be teaching Canadian history. I find it colonial and sad that kids in Canadian school *in the 1970s *would be taught British history before Canadian history. In the 1870s, maybe.
By the time I was being taught history - “social studies” as they called it in elementary school - it was Canadian in focus. We were never taught one minute of British history except as Britain pertained the the founding and creation of Canada. Not one king, not one battle.
Yeh, early 70s for me. Very colonial. Although it was in Oakville, Ontario (Appleby College), it would fit would fit right in alongside England’s boarding schools. Great if you enjoyed playing silly in cricket, or being taught to tackle in rugby by an Anglican priest, but more seriously, if you enjoyed being challenged in any number of ways, including academically, it really was wonderful. Since my family was tied up in a lot of English history, being schooled as a youngster in English history was handy, but in retrospect, I think that the school was were too much of an ethnic school (English ethnic) when it came to that lack of Canadian history. We need to make informed decisions as to where we go as a country, and that requires knowing how we got to where we are. 1066 and All That is only a small piece of the puzzle.
Scratch that previous post – I posted it without realizing it. Yeh, early 70s for me as a day boy. Very colonial. Although it was in Oakville, Ontario (Appleby College), it would fit right in alongside England’s boarding schools. Great if you enjoyed playing silly in cricket, or being taught to tackle in rugby by an Anglican priest, but more seriously, if you enjoyed being challenged in any number of ways, including academically, it really was wonderful. Since my family was tied up in a lot of English history, being schooled as a youngster in English history was handy, but in retrospect, I think that the school was too much of an English ethnic school when it came to that lack of Canadian history in the elementary yeas. We need to make informed decisions as to where we go as a country, and that requires knowing how we got to where we are. 1066 and All That is only a small piece of the puzzle.
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It may also vary provincially. I got:
• Grade 5: Canadian history (British and French colonial).
• Grade 6: US history.
• Grade 7: Social Studies - Modern Europe. More sociology than history.
• Grade 8: Canadian, British and French 18th and 19th centuries, including French Revolution.
• Grade 9: Cradles of civilisation: Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Indus and China.
• Grade 10: Social studies again; completely unmemorable.
• Grade 11: Canadian History - The Grand Coalition and Confederation.
• Grade 12: More unmemorable social studies.
I think I’m Muffin’s vintage.
Some things were a bit odd. For example in the Cradles of Civilisation bit in Grade 9, the text talked about the four or five different races (Indian/Eskimo; Mongoloid; African; Caucasian: and Australian Aborigine). All of them were illustrated wearing traditional “native” dress: War bonnets, loincloths, carrying spears, etc.
Except for the Caucasian. He was wearing a jacket and tie with neatly combed blonde hair. :smack:
Still, props to them for teaching that “civilisation” didn’t start in Europe, but in Africa, the Middle East, South Asia, and China. (Although the course did end with Greece and Rome, of course.)
How the hell do you remember this shit? Most of the time I spent in school is a hazy blob of ‘Wawawa’ from the teachers. Outside of school, I can remember things fine. But what year I took a specific class let alone what it was about? I bet you can even remember your teacher’s names!