John Robson: The Hypocrisy and Dishonesty of ‘Land Acknowledgements’

View of Moraine Lake in the Valley of Ten Peaks, Banff National Park, Alberta, in a file photo. Shutterstock

Commentary

Let me begin by acknowledging that this column was plagiarized on a stolen computer by a notorious brute. Now let’s all build a better, brighter world by following my example. Eh? You wouldn’t take advice from a lying thug and think I should return the laptop to its rightful owner? Then you’d best avoid Canada.

You see, here, every high-tone or public-sector event begins by piously confessing we’re on stolen land. Sometimes just “traditional,” or perhaps “unceded.” But often “unsurrendered.” Which is false, hypocritical, and destructive.

The hypocrisy sticks in my craw. The people smugly asserting they’re on someone’s pilfered territory have no plan for returning it because they have no intention of doing so. So they either don’t believe it’s stolen, or don’t think stealing is bad.

Like Prime Minister Justin Trudeau sanctimoniously agreeing with the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women report about an ongoing genocide without resigning, let alone surrendering for trial. So he doesn’t really think there’s a genocide, doesn’t really think genocide is bad, or doesn’t really think he’s in power.

Instead, in some progressive version of “deep state” paranoia, a second-generation prime minister born to money and privilege is an outsider and a rebel, and DEI activists must root out pervasive public sector and corporate racism. Not a few bigoted truckers in Swift Current. Everybody but them. But it’s not just hypocritical.

It’s false. Canada is not a racist nation and is not on stolen land.

All decent people deplore the tragically one-sided collision between Europeans and inhabitants of the Americas. But if aboriginal leaders were promised things they did not get, Canada being a free and fair country, their successors can get remedies from the courts. And the falsehood goes far deeper.

It involves a pretence that aboriginals were without original sin before the white man showed up, living in harmony with one another and with nature. But their limited environmental impact was due to stone-age technology, not some “green gene” the rest of us lack, or white people do. And they were not pacifists until European serpents invaded Eden.

They engaged in chronic low-level warfare, again limited by technology, not intent. Moreover it featured rape, torture, and ethnic cleansing. A recent “reconciliation” story about renaming “Squaw Island” near Ontario’s Sioux Lookout mentioned “its history as a place where women and children hid when rival Sioux warriors were spotted on the river” but not why they had to hide, go missing, or get murdered.

Some senator just ripped Canada for complicity in the “transatlantic slave trade” that ended decades before Confederation because the British stamped it out, while Upper Canada was the first place in the Empire to prohibit slavery. But there was a lot here from time immemorial because aboriginals routinely enslaved one another until the British stamped it out in an act of arrogant colonial humanity. And it gets worse.

All this talk of the “traditional” aboriginal territories in “so-called Canada” is Orwellian. As Terry Glavin just wrote, “We are constantly hectored to understand that Israel is an illegitimate colonial settler state. We are similarly obliged to understand Canada as an illegitimate colonial settler state.” Yet Canada has a much more solid claim to its territory, via treaty, purchase, continuous occupation, and good government with popular consent, than various aboriginal groups, as does Israel.

Even aboriginals who were not nomadic were constantly seizing land or fleeing. Those Jacques Cartier encountered at Stadacona had vanished when Champlain arrived mere decades later. But non-literate societies erasing any lingering evidence, including silencing rival oral traditions, doesn’t legitimize conquest. It just hides the bodies.

When I was very young, events, including the public school day, typically began with the Lord’s Prayer until it was decided that not everyone believed in it, and many who claimed to didn’t mean it, and we stopped. But while we need social cohesion, and appropriate rituals, I don’t even think most of those who mumble these acknowledgements believe them.

As for the audience, I recently sat grimly through yet another virtue-signalling land acknowledgement, then discovered unexpectedly that most at the table were also silently offended. As on many woke causes, the great and good have us intimidated. But you cannot build a decent country or just society on hypocrisy, lies, and fear.

Pervasive official untruths about “Our home on native land” are socially dangerous. They erode trust in official institutions, including among aboriginals hearing self-flagellating false promises. And among regular citizens who watch these same elites, paradoxically, fill Canada with immigrants who feel no connection to this history and should not be encouraged to keep distorted historical grievances blazing. But let us not cast too covetous an eye on the outcome.

The big objection is that these land acknowledgements are hypocritical and false. And living a lie is not the Canadian way.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.