SOUND OFF: On racism in Canada
I REMEMBER WHEN I WAS ABOUT 5 or 6 years old, we used to only go to Chinese restaurants in Kamloops with my great Grandparents who raised me because they knew they would not be allowed into white-run restaurants in the city. In the late 1950s when I was older and was allowed to be on my own while in Kamloops, I once entered a restaurant run by white people: I was refused service. Humiliated, embarrassed and ashamed, I had to go back to the Chinese-run Silver Grill in order to get served. My elders, relatives, Secwepemc and other Indigenous people in Canada and elsewhere, share these memories, often involving being subject to verbal and physical acts of aggression, or at best refusals of service and jobs, being stereotyped, and addressed as “you Indians.”
In the last few years, finally, Canada is moving in the right direction in addressing a deep history and endemic structure of racism as it has affected Indigenous people in this country: the Truth and Reconciliation Commission clearly recognized and addressed this issue in many of its Calls to Action. BC has recognized UNDRIP, which lays out principles that address the racial discrimination against Indigenous peoples worldwide, and Canada is planning to incorporate it into its laws. As we, as Indigenous peoples, are well aware, racism also deeply affects black people and people of colour in Canada. Recently, in the wake of the demonstrations in the US following the killing of George Floyd at the knee of a police officer, Prime Minister Trudeau stated that racism is not only an American issue, but is also a systemic issue in Canada. Let us remind ourselves of the 1912 Komagata Maru issue involving a ship loaded with East Indians who wished to immigrate to Canada, where Canadian authorities refused to disembark them on clearly racist grounds, and sent them back to India. Let’s not forget the Chinese Head Tax and the Japanese internment camps during the Second World War.
In relation to us as Indigenous Peoples, beginning with the preemption of the 1860s, our ancestors were from preempting the lands we had stewarded and lived on for thousands of years, and instead privileging white settlers to become fee simple owners of these our lands for mere pennies to “encourage” settlement at our cost. In the same memorial to Sir Wilfrid Laurier our chiefs concluded, “Governments have taken every advantage of our friendliness, weakness… to impose on us in every way. They treat us as subjects without any agreement to that effect and force their laws on us without our consent, and irrespective of whether they are good for us or not…. They claim ‘authority’ over us. They have broken down our old laws and customs… by which we regulated ourselves. They brushed our laws and leaders aside. As well as imposing the Indian Act with which they impost their will on Indigenous peoples against our will.”
Some two decades later, Canadian Poet Laureate Stephan Leacock succinctly reflected Canada’s view of Indigenous Peoples when he wrote: “We think of prehistoric North America as inhabited by the Indians, and have based on this a sort of recognition of ownership on their part. But this attitude is hardly warranted. The Indians were too few to count. Their use of the resources of the continent was scarcely more that that of crows and wolves, their development of it nothing.” Racist attitudes denied our rightful existence, valid way of life, even our very presence on the land where we had lived for 10,000 years.