Is Canada a "Settler-Colonial" State?

By Henry Srebrnik, [Fredericton, NB] Daily Gleaner

 

The past few weeks have underscored the troubled nature of the Canadian state’s relationship to the more than 600 pre-contact ethnic groups in the country.

Our academic, media, and political elites are moving towards defining Canada as a “settler-colonial” enterprise, one that illegitimately quashed the sovereign rights of the nationalities that inhabited its space and largely replaced and marginalized its indigenous populations with an invasive settler society. 

To many indigenous people, we are in fact genocidaires and they consider Canadian law “Eurocentric.”

Many public events across the country now begin with a statement that we are gathered on “unceded” land belonging to one or another native people. 

Are we going to conceive of Canada as a “Rhodesia?” That was the African country governed by the minority white settlers until being returned to native inhabitants through multi-racial democracy in 1980 as Zimbabwe.

According to its website, the mandate of the Crown-Indigenous Relations department is to “renew the nation-to-nation, Inuit-Crown, government-to-government relationship between Canada and First Nations, Inuit and Métis; [and] modernize Government of Canada structures to enable Indigenous peoples to build capacity and support their vision of self-determination.”

In their July 5, 2018 document, the department stated that the concept of an aboriginal nation in Canada refers to “a sizeable body of Aboriginal people with a shared sense of national identity that constitutes the predominant population in a certain territory or collection of territories.” 

There is much irony here. Although for the “settler” state, any form of ethnic nationalism is now considered anathema, aboriginal entities constitute ethnically-based homeland nations. As well, although non-indigenous Canadians are long past rule by unelected officials, we accede to indigenous groups traditional forms of governance, including a hereditary chiefly caste.

Indigenous peoples are now engaged in a form of irredentism – the desire to regain territory historically or ethnically related to it but under the political control of another jurisdiction.

Like irredentists everywhere, they seek to reclaim and occupy land that they consider to be a “lost” (or “unredeemed”) territory unjustly appropriated from them by force.

Examples around the world are numerous. Armenians wishing to expand into areas of Azerbaijan and Turkey formerly theirs; Ireland’s desire to reunify the island; Hungary trying to gain Hungarian-populated areas in Romania, Serbia, and Slovakia; Pakistan’s claim to Muslim-majority Kashmir, and so forth.

These are all ethnically or religiously-based homeland nations and they base their irredentist claims on that fact.

In few instances do irredentists wish to absorb the entirely of another state. The only one that comes to mind is the “maximalist” Palestinian claim to all of Israel.

But ours is a similar case. Since every indigenous nation on the Canadian land mass can claim some part of the country’s territory, what we have is a “super-irredentism.” 

You can easily find through Google numerous maps outlining the regions belonging to the various indigenous nations. And since every last square kilometre of this country is the homeland of one or another indigenous people, all of Canada becomes open to reclamation.

After all, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) logically flows from the recognition that indigenous governmental, legal, and political orders have existed from time immemorial, long predating the arrival of European settlers.

The federal government is moving forward with proposed legislation on UNDRIP, with the goal of passing it by the end of 2020.

Justice Minister David Lametti and Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Carolyn Bennett announced the government’s plan to chiefs gathered in Ottawa last December at the annual meeting of the Assembly of First Nations. “You are setting the path for decolonization and reconciliation,” remarked Bennett.

The only pushback has come from Quebec – itself, of course, an ethnic nation. The rest of Canada has no such national cohesion. 

Ottawa is already dealing with aboriginal peoples “nation to nation,” as though these were summits between equally sovereign jurisdictions.  

Perhaps in retrospect they will be regarded as such, the way liberation movements in Africa and Asia negotiated for independence with European imperialists.

“Non-indigenous” Canada, as it continues down this road, is becoming a self-dissolving state. As genuine indigenous self-determination comes to pass, “settler” Canadians will in effect become squatters on the sovereign territories of the many nations that constitute pre-contact Canada.

This may not be as far-fetched as it sounds today. After all, world history is full of such change.