Multiculturalism and Reconciliation

Métis writer and activist DANIELLE PARADIS examines Canada’s multicultural policy through a modern Indigenous lens.

“It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness,” Tolstoy wrote in The Kreutzer Sonata. He was talking about the human assumption that attractiveness equals kindness and integrity. For a moment, apply this to the relationship between settlers and the beautiful land that is called Canada. In this gorgeous, expansive country, most Canadians who live here are happy to do so. They feel lucky. Surely such a beautiful place could not exist on the foundation of an ugly oppression. But fortune has not fallen equally among the people who live here. Five decades after Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s Liberal government adopted a formal multiculturalism policy, many Indigenous people are still searching for their identity within this land. This is a country that thinks of itself as a model of multiculturalism for the world. One that defines itself to its school-aged citizens in opposition to the United States. We learn in early grades that in the US you have to assimilate into American culture. Here, instead, we are a cultural mosaic where all the bright tiles of diversity form a picture of tolerance. Canada was the first country in the world to adopt a multicultural policy, but it took until June 2021 for it to adopt the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. In general, the notion of multiculturalism has proved to be a fairytale. Something that obscures slavery, Japanese internment camps, and other dark chapters of Canadian history. In 1996, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples wrote in its report, “a country cannot be built on a living lie.” The lie today is that Canada has always been a place that promotes tolerance and diversity. The multiculturalism policy that was promoted in 1971 was not designed to recognize Indigenous people. This promise of tolerance and formal equality was not extended to our inherent rights. For fifty years, our multiculturalism narrative has told a positive story of integration into a tolerant, liberal, and equal society. Yet even today, we live in a culture that prioritizes joining English and French settler societies. Our policies may be multicultural, but our institutions are not. We have Queen Elizabeth II as the head of state, Westminster-style legislatures, and towns, cities, rivers, and roads named after European colonizers or the Europe they left behind. That is not so surprising, when you consider that the 1971 creation of our multiculturalism policy was at a time of rising Francophone nationalism. Although the policy was not greeted warmly in Quebec either—claude Ryan of Le Devoir claimed that in trying to separate language and culture, the prime minister minimized both. While the two Canadas—french and English—fought over their own languages and cultures, the state continued to crush Indigenous languages. Young children were taken from their families and sent to a school that beat their mother tongue out of them. That sent them home, if they survived, with a language that forever separated them from their community. Within this context, multiculturalism has been a tool to legitimize and strengthen Canada, but minimize and erase the First People. These are the sorts of memories, that, as a country, we prefer not to dwell on. Chief Dan George, an acclaimed poet and First Nation leader, silenced a crowd of over 30,000 with his scathing “Lament for Confederation.” There, he mourned the loss of his land and home, and said he witnessed his “freedom disappear like the salmon going mysteriously out to sea. The white man’s strange customs, which I could not understand, pressed down upon me until I could no longer breathe.” The next fifty years must focus on a renewal of Indigenous culture. We must work to find a balance between Canada’s European style of parliamentary democracy and the Indigenous ways of knowing. We must work to preserve the land of this beautiful country, as the Anishinaabe teach, so that in seven generations our ancestors may live as we do, or better. We must teach the true history of Canada, and work to restore to Indigenous people the traditional knowledge that was taken away.