By Yaldaz Sadakova
The life-changing email lands in my inbox on a miserable snowy day in January 2019.
The subject line is cryptic. “Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada Event Notification / Immigration, Réfugiés et Citoyenneté Canada Notification d’événement C000817096.”
But I know what it’s about. I’ve been waiting for this email for months.
“Sir/Madam,” it begins, “The purpose of this notice is to invite you to a Canadian Citizenship Test.”
I’m super grateful and relieved at the prospect of finally becoming a Canadian citizen.
I won’t have to apply for a permanent resident status every few years anymore.
I won’t have to complete long immigration forms and pay hefty immigration fees every few years anymore.
And I’ll be able to vote, to have a say in decisions that affect me.
Even though I’m grateful, I think the promise of this citizenship is coming 10 years too late. By “this citizenship,” I mean citizenship from a wealthy country with an abundance of professional opportunities.
I needed that much more a decade earlier, at the beginning of my career, when the opportunities I wanted didn’t exist in my native Bulgaria. And when my Bulgarian passport was worthless in terms of allowing me to easily work abroad.
Back then, I lost jobs both in New York and Brussels—jobs that would have given my fledgling career a much needed boost—because companies refused to sponsor me for a work permit.
I spent my 20s seeing every single one of my career dreams crushed due to immigration restrictions and the worthlessness of my passport.
However, my Bulgarian passport is no longer worthless. Bulgarian citizens received the right to live and work across the EU without a permit in 2014, soon after I moved to Canada.
Although I’ve never taken advantage of that privilege myself, I know its enormous value.
Still, Canadian citizenship is better late than never.
A few days after I get the notification, I start reading Discover Canada: The Rights and Responsibilities of Citizenship, the government-issued study guide for the citizenship test.
But the more I study for the test, the more resentful I feel: I can’t escape the fact that I’m being subjected to a double standard.
Much of the information I’m encountering in the study guide and in practice tests—information you absolutely don’t need in your daily life in Canada—is stuff many Canadian-born people don’t know.
Data actually shows that most Canadian-born folks would fail the citizenship test if they had to take it.
Apparently, a number of people born here don’t know even basics, such as the fact that Canada is a constitutional monarchy, and its head of state is the Queen of the United Kingdom, Elizabeth II. (The head of government is the prime minister.)
If many people born here don’t know the basics, why are we required to demonstrate in-depth knowledge of Canada?
Why do we need a largely irrelevant knowledge test to prove we’re worthy of Canadian citizenship?
The number of years we’ve spent in Canada—not to mention the tax and consumer dollars we’ve been contributing—should be enough to qualify us for citizenship.
To get to this stage, we’ve had to prove language proficiency, submit lengthy applications, supply tons of documents, pass invasive security and background checks. Why is that not enough?
The study guide I’m reading was revised last in 2012 by Canada’s then Conservative government. The Conservatives felt the citizenship requirements for immigrants weren’t onerous enough.
So they made the citizenship test harder, one of several changes they introduced to make obtaining citizenship more difficult. This knowledge infuriates me.
I swallow my anger and resentment, and I move to the history section of the guide. Right away, alarm bells start going off in my head.
I don’t have detailed knowledge of Canadian history at this point.
But I know enough basics to understand that what I’m reading is a sanitized narrative, with shameful events given the most cursory treatment and followed by happily-ever-after sentences. We did something horrific, let’s mention it real quick, but it’s all good now, we’re proud to be Canadian!!!
The journalist in me is itching to fact-check so many sentences and paragraphs which sound suspiciously vague and euphemistic.
I also want to find out what key historical details are missing because this text screams “selective omission.”
But with just a few days left until my test, I don’t have the time to do that.
However, as I memorize dates of battles and names of war “heroes”—this citizenship test guide is mostly a right-wing tribute to Canadian military glory and patriarchy—I make myself a promise.
Once I get my citizenship, I’ll write about the fact that us immigrants are taught a whitewashed version of history. And that we’re required to know things which no Canadian-born person ever has to prove knowledge of to retain their citizenship.
Taking the Test
My citizenship test is on an early January morning in Scarborough, an inner suburb of Toronto.
It’s minus 25°C, but the cold doesn’t bother me much. I’m properly dressed.
While I was woefully unprepared for my first winters in Canada, I now know the importance of wearing a toque, a thick scarf, thermal gloves, a down parka, waterproof heavy-duty boots, thermal socks (on top of regular socks) and a warm sweater.
Warmth is my first priority when I shop for clothes nowadays. Style has moved way down on my list.
When I walk into the drab waiting room of the Immigration building, I’m nervous. I’ve been cramming for this test like I haven’t crammed since high school, but I still confuse a couple of those military figures’ names.
We’re only allowed five wrong answers on the test, out of 20. When you’re not from here, there isn’t much room for making mistakes.
I’ve already had two cups of coffee, so I’m jittery. Also because I barely slept last night due to anxiety.
I take a seat and go over my notes, focusing specifically on my color-coded list of important dead white men. I’m glad I made this cheat sheet. Without it, I couldn’t have memorized the names of so many men I can’t relate to in any way.
I feel too anxious to concentrate, though. I take a deep breath and look around. Other people are also doing last-minute cramming, their noses buried in their study guides. The waiting room feels charged with collective anxiety.
But also with the collective hope that if we overcome this last hurdle, we’ll have all the rights and freedoms of people born here. We’ll finally be able to build lives on the “right” side of the border.
I’m reminded of what Rawi Hage calls in his novel Cockroach “the desperation of the displaced, the stateless, the miserable and stranded in corridors of bureaucracy and immigration.”
I’ve spent the past 15 years in the corridors of U.S., European and Canadian immigration bureaucracy. On this January morning, I’m once again in a corridor of immigration bureaucracy.
But this time I’m not stranded. In fact, it’s a huge privilege to be in this particular corridor.
The test turns out to be easier than the stuff in the study guide and the practice tests. Or maybe it’s the fact that I prepared so much.
I answer all the questions within a few minutes, confident that I got all of them right. The clock on the wall says there are 20 minutes left, so I double-check my answers. Then I check again.
After I submit my test, I’m taken to another room for an interview with an immigration officer, who is going to inform me about my test score.
While waiting for the interview, I take out from my worn-out blue folder the documents we were required to bring for this interview: current and expired passports, Canadian IDs, a landing paper and other documents. Always tons of documents.
The interviewer is a Black woman with a non-Canadian accent. Fellow immigrant, I note with satisfaction as I sit across from her. She opens my file and flashes me a friendly smile, which alleviates my nervousness.
“Congratulations, you got 20 out of 20 on your test!” she says.
“That’s great!”
She flips through my passport with her burgundy glue-on manicure. Then, looking at my file, she asks me when I moved to Canada and what my employment history is.
That information is already in my file, but I guess Immigration wants to ensure that the story we tell is consistent.
“You worked at the Benefits Canada magazine when you came here,” the officer says. “What did you do there?”
“I wrote and edited articles about investing.”
“Very good. Are you going to write an article about today?” she asks with the same friendly smile as she hands me back my documents.
“Oh yeah, I definitely will!”
Officially Canadian
My citizenship ceremony takes place seven months later. It’s on a warm September morning in the Toronto suburb of Mississauga.
As soon as I enter the Immigration building, I get in line to have my documents inspected. Once again! I guess Immigration has to ensure that the person who will get the citizenship certificate today is indeed me.
As I take out from my purse my worn-out blue folder with documents, the same folder I brought to my citizenship test, tears well up in my eyes. I’m not sure why.
I’m not feeling particularly emotional or festive. I just want to get this over with. More than anything, I’m annoyed with the whole bureaucracy surrounding the citizenship.
Perhaps I’m feeling the emotions of other people. Or maybe I’m crying out of relief?
The long line is moving slowly. Most people are wearing suits, party dresses and heels. Many have styled their hair. How did they manage to do all this, go through the Greater Toronto Area’s notorious traffic and still be here for 9 a.m.?
Me, I’m wearing casual black pants and flats. My hair is in a pony.
I’m waiting alone, even though my boyfriend is with me. Guests have to wait in another line and sit in a different section. He himself became a Canadian citizen in his late teens.
I look around the large room, trying to remember everything. The diverse crowd. The upholstered green chairs. The Canadian flag and the big desk at the front of the room. The quote inscribed on the beige wall which says, “The True North strong and free.”
The citizenship ceremony starts with a nature video. White bears, lakes, lighthouses, snow dunes and forests flash across the large screen to upbeat music. I get teary again. Why is this stupid video of bears and snow making me emotional?
After the video, an immigration officer announces the rules.
“The oath of citizenship is very important. My colleagues and I will be walking around the room, and if there’s even the smallest doubt that you’re not reciting the oath, you will not get your citizenship certificate,” she says.
“So keep those lips moving,” she adds. “We need to see your lips moving.”
What the fuck, is this kindergarten?
Next, we all rise, and the judge, a balding middle-aged man, enters. He introduces himself, explaining that he’s from China. I like his immigrantness.
Soon, we stand up again and start reciting the oath of citizenship, repeating after him.
“I swear that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, Queen of Canada, Her Heirs and Successors, and that I will faithfully observe the laws of Canada and fulfil my duties as a Canadian citizen.”
I’m reciting loudly, moving my lips as vigorously as possible, even though I think the whole idea of pledging allegiance, especially to a monarch, is ridiculous, outdated and way too nationalistic for my taste.
After the oath, the judge says with a triumphant air, “Congratulations! To the rest of the world you will now be known as Canadians!”
The room erupts in applause and cheers. Hands shoot up, waving Canadian paper flags.
How Canadian do I feel, six years after moving here at the age of 30?
While I’ve learned to tolerate the cold and to navigate Canadian culture, I don’t feel completely Canadian. But that doesn’t bother me much anymore.
When I was growing up in Bulgaria, I didn’t feel completely Bulgarian either. I’m ethnically Turkish and grew up Muslim. Not a desirable combination in Bulgaria, where anti-Turkish, anti-Muslim sentiments have always run deep because the country was under Ottoman rule for five centuries.
Even in my home country, I’ve always felt like an outsider.
On top of that, because I’ve lived in different cities and countries, I don’t feel rooted anywhere.
So this feeling of being part of a society but not belonging to it fully isn’t new to me.
I’ve learned how to carve out spaces for myself in the cracks and on the margins. How to survive in environments designed to exclude people like me.
I’ve come to accept that I’ll never know what it’s like to be part of the dominant demographic. To be the default. To see yourself and your experiences represented and accepted every step of the way, at school and at work, in media and in popular culture.
As I think about my Canadianness, I also realize that I’ve forgotten most of the things I memorized for the citizenship test seven months ago. This confirms my suspicion about the futility of the whole exercise.
After the judge announces that we’re officially Canadian, we get in line to collect our citizenship certificates from him.
When my turn comes, he asks me what I do for a living, the same question he asks everyone else.
“I write,” I say.
“Are you going to write about today?”
“Oh yeah!”
“Great, congratulations!” he says, handing me my citizenship certificate.
I’m now officially Canadian.
Land Theft and Genocide
Almost a year after that day, I start writing the piece I promised myself about my Canadian citizenship journey.
I start fact-checking the study guide for the citizenship test, particularly the history section, because it struck me as the most problematic one.
The first thing I notice once again is that the entire history section, and the entire guide, devotes no more than a few euphemistic paragraphs to the injustices Indigenous people have endured—while dedicating considerable space to military victories, white military “heroes” and white settlers.
“When Europeans explored Canada they found all regions occupied by native peoples they called Indians, because the first explorers thought they had reached the East Indies,” the guide notes.
“The arrival of European traders, missionaries, soldiers and colonists changed the native way of life forever. Large numbers of Aboriginals died of European diseases to which they lacked immunity. However, Aboriginals and Europeans formed strong economic, religious and military bonds in the first 200 years of coexistence which laid the foundations of Canada.”
The guide doesn’t explicitly state that European colonizers stole the land of Indigenous people; tried to erase their languages and cultures; outlawed their government, judicial, social and economic systems; confined them to inhospitable reserves; and limited their rights and freedoms in numerous ways.
It obfuscates the fact that Canada was built through the dispossession and genocide of Indigenous people.
One of the main ways Canada sought to erase Indigenous people is by forcibly placing Indigenous kids in residential schools far from home.
Physical, sexual and emotional abuse as well as starvation were rampant in these schools.
They existed from 1883 to as recently as 1996.
However, the Discover Canada guide dedicates only the following four sentences to residential schools:
“From the 1800s until the 1980s, the federal government placed many Aboriginal children in residential schools to educate and assimilate them into mainstream Canadian culture. The schools were poorly funded and inflicted hardship on the students; some were physically abused. Aboriginal languages and cultural practices were mostly prohibited. In 2008, Ottawa formally apologized to the former students.”
The truth about these church-run schools and their consequences is far darker.
In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, which was established to provide a detailed historical account of residential schools, released its final report.
“These residential schools were created for the purpose of separating Aboriginal children from their families, in order to minimize and weaken family ties and cultural linkages, and to indoctrinate children into a new culture—the culture of the legally dominant Euro-Christian Canadian society,” the report notes.
“The schools were in existence for well over 100 years, and many successive generations of children from the same communities and families endured the experience of them. That experience was hidden for most of Canada’s history, until Survivors of the system were finally able to find the strength, courage, and support to bring their experiences to light in several thousand court cases that ultimately led to the largest class-action lawsuit in Canada’s history.”
The report points out that residential schools were “an integral part of a conscious policy of cultural genocide.”
It says the realities of residential schools are “sometimes difficult to accept as something that could have happened in a country such as Canada, which has long prided itself on being a bastion of democracy, peace, and kindness throughout the world. Children were abused, physically and sexually, and they died in the schools in numbers that would not have been tolerated in any school system anywhere in the country, or in the world.”
I note that there’s also no mention in Discover Canada of the Sixties Scoop, the widespread removal of Indigenous kids from their families by Canada’s child welfare agencies.
“Child welfare authorities removed thousands of Aboriginal children from their families and communities and placed them in non-Aboriginal homes without taking steps to preserve their culture and identity. Children were placed in homes across Canada, in the United States, and even overseas,” explains the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
The Sixties Scoop actually extended well beyond the 1960s, until at least the late 1980s.
Another thing Discover Canada fails to mention are the current consequences of residential schools.
All the guide has to say about the present and Indigenous people, after referencing residential schools in four sentences, is that “in today’s Canada, Aboriginal peoples enjoy renewed pride and confidence and have made significant achievements in agriculture, the environment, business and the arts.”
But the legacy of these schools persists.
“It is reflected in the significant educational, income, health, and social disparities between Aboriginal people and other Canadians. It is reflected in the intense racism some people harbour against Aboriginal people and in the systemic and other forms of discrimination Aboriginal people regularly experience in this country. It is reflected too in the critically endangered status of most Aboriginal languages,” the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission explains.
“Current conditions such as the disproportionate apprehension of Aboriginal children by child-welfare agencies and the disproportionate imprisonment and victimization of Aboriginal people can be explained in part as a result or legacy of the way that Aboriginal children were treated in residential schools and were denied an environment of positive parenting, worthy community leaders, and a positive sense of identity and self-worth.”
Discover Canada fails to acknowledge yet another consequence of residential schools (and colonization in general): the disproportionately high rates of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls and Two-Spirit, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, questioning, intersex and asexual people.
“This violence amounts to a race-based genocide of Indigenous Peoples, including First Nations, Inuit, and Métis, which especially targets women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people.”
This is the conclusion of Reclaiming Power and Place: The Final Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.
This report was released in 2019, after Discover Canada’s latest revision in 2012.
However, the disproportionately high rates of missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA people has been going on for years.
This was not news in 2012, when the current citizenship test guide was published. There’s no excuse for the omission.
“This genocide has been empowered by colonial structures, evidenced notably by the Indian Act,the Sixties Scoop, residential schools, and breaches of human and Inuit, Métis and First Nations rights, leading directly to the current increased rates of violence, death, and suicide in Indigenous populations,” explains the report on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.
“While the Canadian genocide targets all Indigenous Peoples, Indigenous women, girls and 2SLGBTQQIA people are particularly targeted. Statistics consistently show that rates of violence against Métis, Inuit, and First Nations women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people are much higher than for non-Indigenous women in Canada, even when all over differentiating factors are accounted for,” reveals the report.
“Perpetrators of violence include Indigenous and non-Indigenous family members and partners, casual acquaintances, and serial killers.”
Slavery
Another grave omission of the citizenship test guide is the failure to acknowledge that slavery happened in Canada.
The following paragraph, along with a sidebar about two white Canadian abolitionists, is all Discover Canada has to say about slavery:
“Slavery has existed all over the world, from Asia, Africa and the Middle East to the Americas. The first movement to abolish the transatlantic slave trade emerged in the British Parliament in the late 1700s. In 1793, Upper Canada, led by Lieutenant Governor John Graves Simcoe, a Loyalist military officer, became the first province in the Empire to move toward abolition. In 1807, the British Parliament prohibited the buying and selling of slaves, and in 1833 abolished slavery throughout the Empire. Thousands of slaves escaped from the United States, followed ‘the North Star’ and settled in Canada via the Underground Railroad, a Christian anti-slavery network.”
While this paragraph portrays Canada as a refuge for enslaved people in the U.S., there’s far more to the story about the country’s relationship with slavery.
About 4,200 Indigenous and Black African people were enslaved in the European colonies that became Canada, from 1632 to 1834.
White people bought, sold, traded and inherited enslaved people like property in colonial Canada.
“Newspapers advertised slaves as commodities […], sometimes offering them for sale alongside livestock; slaves were listed in inventories of property along with animals, and were sometimes exchanged for horses,” the late historian Marcel Trudel writes in Canada’s Forgotten Slaves: Two Centuries of Bondage.
He notes that slave owners even used enslaved people as security for debts.
Owners subjected enslaved people to physical, psychological and sexual violence. They also forcibly renamed the people they enslaved.
“After having purchased slaves, an overseer often stripped them of their names, imposing whimsical, comical, or humiliating ones instead (like Hercules, Cesar, or Monkey),” historian Charmaine Nelson writes in The Walrus magazine.
Owners controlled enslaved people on a biological level, too.
“By imposing a matrilineal order, any child born to an enslaved female assumed the mother’s status, instantly becoming the property of her owner,” Nelson explains.
“While many white, male owners fathered mixed-race children through rape or coercive relationships, they also exploited black people as ‘breeders’ of new property through forced sexual pairings.”
Slavery was so normalized in Canada that slave ownership existed at every level of society, among both French and English Canadians. People who owned slaves included governors, seigneurs, military officers, bishops, priests, nuns, judges, merchants, newspaper publishers and more, Trudel notes.
At the time of my citizenship test, I knew none of these details about slavery in Canada. I had no idea that slavery had happened here, even though I’d lived in the country for six years.
The refrain I’d heard was that racism in Canada isn’t as bad as it is in the U.S. because Canada didn’t have the slavery baggage.
Although the evidence for slavery in early Canada does exist, and a new generation of Canadian scholars is bringing it to light, the issue still isn’t part of mainstream discourse.
A big reason is that Canadian schools have largely ignored the topic of slavery.
They’ve been focusing instead on the 19th century anti-slavery Underground Railroad network which helped African American slaves escape to Canada.
“The stories of good white Canadians as the ‘saviours’ of fearful, hunted, and tormented African American fugitives fit neatly into our national identity as a racially tolerant, multicultural society,” Nelson writes.
“But the existence of [enslaved people] reminds us that this country was itself founded upon the strategic exploitation of certain populations. Canada, in other words, is a country that was built on large-scale racism. Thousands had their lives, health, hopes, cultures, families, and dreams stolen from them, while labouring tirelessly for the betterment and prosperity of a white elite.”
Long-Overdue Revision
After I finish fact-checking Discover Canada’s history section, I learn that the current Liberal government is planning to revise the guide.
The new version will reportedly address certain historical omissions. Although, of course, it remains to be seen just how accurate and inclusive the new guide will be.
A thorough revision is long overdue. Even the 2015 residential schools report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission called on the government to update the current educational materials for immigrants and to teach us an inclusive, accurate version of history.
However, revising the guide now still won’t undo the harm that has already been done: scores of new Canadians, myself included, have been fed a whitewashed version of history.
The Consequences of Sanitizing History
As I said earlier, I don’t think there should be a citizenship test for immigrants because it subjects us to a double standard.
However, if there is a test, the least the government can do is provide a truthful account of how Canada came to be.
Teaching us a misleading historical narrative which purposely keeps us ignorant is unconscionable. It has many harmful consequences.
One is that it deprives immigrants of the proper context to understand the legitimate grievances of Indigenous and Black people.
Many immigrants are quick to ascribe problems in Indigenous and Black communities to individual failings, instead of seeing them for what they are: the result of dispossession, slavery and genocide.
When we lack historical context, it’s hard to grasp that the system doesn’t work the same way for everyone in this country. Canada may have been good to many immigrants and to white people born here, but historically this hasn’t been the experience of Indigenous and Black people.
Another consequence of absorbing a sanitized version of history is that it causes immigrants to adopt patriotic attitudes without question in an effort to fit in.
Consider, for example, how every year on July 1 many immigrants are eager to share Canada Day greetings on social media, especially, it seems, with their professional networks. (I personally see more of these posts on LinkedIn than on other platforms.)
From an immigrant standpoint, dispensing Canada Day greetings, wearing Canadiana T-shirts and participating in Canada Day events are actions that seem harmless.
Actions that signal our willingness to “integrate” because Canadian society gives us the message that observing Canada Day is one of the things we must do to demonstrate our understanding of Canadian values and culture.
Fluency in Canadian culture—specifically white Euro-Christian Canadian culture—is the main thing we’re asked to prove when we try to build a life here. Especially when we look for jobs.
Canadian employers insist that we need work experience which comes specifically from Canada. This Canadian experience requirement isn’t about hard skills, though.
It’s simply an indirect and discriminatory way for hiring managers to say the following:
“We don’t think you understand white Euro-Christian Canadian culture.
“This is because you come from non-White non-Western places we consider inferior—and because we underestimate you by default, since our beliefs are rooted in white Western supremacy.
“Therefore, we don’t think you have the language and interpersonal skills to communicate with white Canadians of Euro-Christian heritage.
“But we can’t be so blunt about this, because we’re supposed to value diversity and multiculturalism.
“And we really do value diversity. It’s just that we only apply it to people that we don’t consider foreign and inferior.”
Lack of Canadian experience—i.e., not having a track record of conforming to white Euro-Christian Canadian culture—is the main reason so many immigrants end up driving cabs and washing dishes, despite the fact that they come to this country with advanced degrees and relevant work experience in their fields.
All of this is why immigrants feel pressured to prove our Canadian credentials and our support for white Canadian culture every step of the way. Our survival here depends on it.
But do we actually know what we’re celebrating when we observe Canada Day? Do we realize what we’re endorsing?
For our citizenship test, we’ve all learned that Canada Day is the anniversary of Confederation, which happened on July 1, 1867, when the British colonies of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and the Province of Canada united into a single country called the Dominion of Canada, under the rule of the British Empire.
But what most of us immigrants haven’t learned—because it’s omitted by Discover Canada—is that the Fathers of Confederation didn’t consult Indigenous people about Confederation. Indigenous people were excluded from discussions about Confederation.
Another thing we were not required to learn for the citizenship test is that Confederation introduced the Indian Act, a key piece of legislation which allowed Canada to continue and legitimize the dispossession and genocide of Indigenous people.
I learned about the Indian Act only when I started doing research for this piece.
The Canadian government created the Indian Act without any input whatsoever from Indigenous people.
“The government did not ask Aboriginal people what they thought of the new legislation that would govern their lives,” activist and historian Bev Sellars, of the Xat’sull First Nation, writes in Price Paid: The Fight for First Nations Survival.
“Through this racist legislation, newcomers gave themselves the power and the authority to make decisions over Aboriginal people from the time we are born until we die—even after death in the administration of the estate of an Aboriginal person. The Indian Act created an authoritative institution—the Department of Indian Affairs—that wielded political control over Aboriginal people. The act also imposed government structures in the form of band councils, established limited access to the land through the reserve system, and defined who qualifies as Indian,” Sellars explains.
“Each time the government realized its laws were not working, they amended the act. Repeated amendments have been made to deal with unanticipated problems that arose while trying to ‘civilize and assimilate’ the Indians, the overall purpose of the act.”
The act is still in effect today.
So it’s no surprise that while immigrants are eager to celebrate Canada Day in an effort to prove their Canadian credentials, Indigenous people aren’t celebrating. They’ve made it clear that Canada Day is a commemoration of land theft and genocide.
When we’ve only been exposed to the colonizers’ sanitized story about how Canada came to be, it’s easy to fall for the “proudly Canadian” narrative without questioning it. Proud of what? Of land theft? Genocide? Slavery?
Another harmful consequence of learning a false historical account is that we direct our gratitude for being here to the wrong people.
From the moment we land in Canada, we’re told that we have to be perpetually thankful to colonizers and their descendants for creating this country, for letting us in, for being so tolerant, for allowing us to access opportunities and services here.
This is misguided. It’s Indigenous people that we owe gratitude, and allyship, to.
Because it’s Indigenous land—stolen Indigenous land—that we live on.
Meanwhile, the reserves which European settlers pushed Indigenous people to make up only 0.2 percent of Canada’s landmass.
“Settler Canadians […] enjoy and benefit from 99.8 per cent of our Indigenous land base under the federal and provincial governments. That is what the first Canadian Constitution established under the British North America Act, 1867. Our lands were put under Crown title and we were left with 0.2 per cent of the land on our Indian Reserves,” the late activist and political leader Arthur Manuel, of the Secwepemc Nation, explains in an article.
These key historical details Manuel references are also missing from Discover Canada.
“Indigenous peoples basically subsidize the Canadian economy with free land and resources,” he points out.
Speaking of land, in Price Paid, Sellars uses a powerful metaphor to summarize how Indigenous people had their land stolen.
“What if you owned a house and a beautiful garden? Would you share it with others? Would you welcome them?
“What if your guests decided to stay? Would it still be your house?
“What if you woke up one morning and found your family had died? Would it be right for the newcomers to occupy the house left empty by those deaths?
“What if the newcomers began to fill the house and outnumber your family? Does that make the house theirs?
“What if eventually you are displaced to the garage and the newcomers take over the rest of the house? Is it theirs?
“What if the newcomers ignore your house rules and impose their own? Does ownership of the house transfer without your consent?
“What if the newcomers finally agree to sit down and talk? Should their opinions about ownership be more valid?
“What if the newcomers agree to negotiate terms of settlement? Should they be allowed to keep changing the rules without your consent?
“What if you are forced to appeal to newcomer institutions and laws to try to get your house back? Does that justify legal transfer of the house to them without your consent?
“What if the court says the house is yours? Can you take it back?
“What do you need to fix your house now that it’s yours again? What can newcomers do to help?”
The first thing we can do to help is learn the full, true story of how Canada came to be. ♦
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