Links - 7th October 2024 (1 - Indigenous Peoples [including Pre-Columbian Violence, Palestine Protest, 'Settlers'])

'Leaving things as they are': Iroquois Ridge High School to keep its name - Oakville News
Leaving things as they are': Iroquois Ridge High School to keep its name : r/oakville - "Good, they should teach the kids how the Iroquois got their name.  The Iroquois were a group of tribes that committed genocide against other tribes. The name is derived from Black Snake, which is what tribes told the French they were called.  This isn't some racist colonial BS, the Iroquois (allied to us) were a mighty and vicious group of tribes. Without them, Canada wouldn't exist as it does today. They likely took pride in the name as they adopted it themselves, as did the British. If they didn't want to be called Iroquois, perhaps they could have been nicer to surrounding tribes ... ...  The renaming to Haudenosaunee is an attempt to erase their genocidal history, which is a shame really because without it, we wouldn't be here."
"I mean, we have two colleges, Mohawk and Seneca, whom both took part in genociding the Huron. It is kinda tradition to name schools after tribes that were really into genocide 🤷🏼"

Meme - Emmy Scott @EmmyNawjoopinga: "Elon Musk is justifying genocide against Native people. The arguments in that video he posted is what every online troll says to Native people, “You were warring with each other before we got here.” Except war was often ceremonial. The purpose wasn’t to wipe other group out."
"The NOT SO Peaceful
What Your Teacher Didn't Tell You About Native Americans
Americans are taught that native people were stewards of the environment. Movies like Pocahontas sell that"
Joel Berry @JoelWBerry: "The native american tribes were some of the most evil humans to ever exist"
"The truth Johnny Depp wants to hide about the real-life Tontos: How Comanche Indians butchered babies, roasted enemies alive and would ride 1,000 miles to wipe out one family      Comanche Indians were responsible for one of the most brutal slaughters in the history of the Wild West     However, Johnny Depp wants to play Tonto in a more sympathetic light"

Wilfred Reilly on X - "Dozens of Native tribes were wiped out by larger nations like the Comanche, Iroquois, Sioux, Aztecs and Incas further south, etc - both before and after the whites arrived. The Beaver Wars alone destroyed dozens of small tribes, as well as some large ones like the Neutral.   No major conflicts were "ceremonial" - the Sioux took the 'sacred and eternal Black Hills' from other tribes a few hundred years ago, after thousands of deaths, and the Aztecs killed and ate between tens and hundreds of thousands of captives annually. Looking at expansion patterns, it's worth noting that large Native groups like this would eventually have swamped most smaller ones whether or not whites arrived to stay - especially if they still brought guns to trade.   The plain reality is that all humans until perhaps 70 years ago operated under very different rules from those in place today. Women got the right to vote in 1920. The final Geneva Conventions hit print in 1949 (?). US Southern desegregation took place in 1954. The Right of Conquest was repudiated in 1946, after Hitler. When it stood, and Europeans and Natives fought, the Euros won.   It's worth noting, as re claims of organized "genocide," that perhaps 90-95% of this was due to Old World disease - the Natives were often better individual fighters. But, that's^ basically it."

Thread by @Will_Tanner_1 on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "One of the most pervasive and insane lies of the past few decades is that the American Indians were living in peace and harmony until those nasty Europeans showed up and killed them while “stealing” their land  It’s nearly totally false, and is rooted in Cultural Marxism 🧵👇
First, as to the peace loving part, it’s probably the most idiotic myth. While an occasional tribe here or there might have been less violent than others, on the whole they were quite violent. And that’s not just in conquering and subjugating other tribes, though they did that too. Its also in the bloody, sickening tortures they carried out as a matter of course. Burning people alive, raping and torturing to death peaceful European women and children, hacking apart prisoners with sea shells, bit by bit, flaying them alive, etc. And that was widespread. As @njhochman pointed out in a recent tweet, while death by homicides was the cause of 2% of deaths across Europe at the time (17th century), in some native tribes it was 50%. And that often meant being tortured to death, not just stabbed
So it wasn’t for nothing that the American Declaration of Independence called them “merciless Indian savages”. In both their dealings with Europeans and dealings with each other, stomach churning violence was a matter of course and something they developed independently, not as a result of Europeans. The Last of the Mohicans does a great job of showing just how merciless and brutal they were
It was even worse in the Aztec South, where Cortes and his intrepid men essentially walked into a Satanic horror movie. Priests would top the beating hearts of sacrifice victims, flay little girls alive and wear their skin, and sacrifice their offerings to demonic gods by the tens of thousands. Meanwhile they ruled over a vast empire with an obsidian fist, butchering locals tribes that attempted to become independent or retain their independence. The Europeans were violent too, of course, but not to the same extent as the Aztecs
So, in the North there were control wars between two sides that butchered each other, particularly after Jamestown turned into a bloodbath, and in the South the Catholic conquistadors did their best to stamp out the demonic evil they came across. All that’s to say, and this is something that @0xAlaric and @njhochman have documented quite well, the Europeans were t showing up and slaughtering proto-hippies who just wanted to smoke weed and get along, as is now portrayed. Rather, they fought bravely, at often incredible odds, against hordes of barbarians who had spent generations butchering and torturing each other and wanted to do the same to the Europeans
So, why the lie about the Indians?  For one, modern leftists can’t accept that the natives, by whom they mean whoever was there last before the Europeans, were evil and violent, more akin to demons than hippies. To them, the Europeans must always be the evil ones. But it’s deeper than that. The “why” is important too
So, why? Why must they lie about the Europeans?  Because of the whole Critical Marxism mindset. After decades of naval gazing, self-hate, and churning anti-European sentiment, they’re convinced that any form of hierarchy is evil and must be dismantled, at least if it’s European at root. That means that have to hate what Europeans did in the New World (along with everywhere else). To them, Cortes isn’t a hero for stopping mass human sacrifice. He’s evil because his couple hundred men rallied native allies and defeated a vast native empire, as clear a sign as any of natural hierarchy and civilizational superiority. And so you get the lies. They can’t admit that European culture really was better in that it was more prosperous, murder was rarer, and, in any case it won the civilizational war and dominated the New World. That would mean admitting that there is a natural hierarchy amongst civilizations and that Europe was at the top, which their Cultural Marxist beliefs mean they can’t do. So they lie and claim the Indians were peaceful and awesome and the settlers who showed up only killed peaceable women, not that they fought against bloodthirsty tribes that had long murdered each other
Much the same is true of Africa and colonialism generally, which is why the Communist and “liberal democracy” worlds united to destroy Rhodesia:"

Selley: Nothing is less educational than a political protest - "Ask anti-Israel protesters why their movement seems so dedicated to wearing masks when they take to the streets, and usually you’ll hear some version of what the New York Times heard during the university encampments earlier this year: to offset “the risk of being doxxed by pro-Israel groups accusing them of antisemitism, featured by news media or captured in viral videos.” “If I give my name, I lose my future,” a Northwestern University student told the Times. Protest is so much more credible when participants have the courage of their convictions — when protesters are actually willing to risk something for the cause, as opposed, say, to demanding meal service and bathroom access from the universities they despise while they occupy and vandalize their campuses... Does this sound like a good place for a public school to take students on a field trip?... Parents were promised children would only be attending a protest to “observe and learn from the presentations and discussions” — specifically about Grassy Narrows, the northwestern Ontario First Nation where people have suffered mercury poisoning from an upstream pulp-and-paper plant. Some students soon found themselves chanting such world-changing half-rhymes as, “from Turtle Island for Palestine, occupation is a crime.” And no grownup in charge pulled the plug. If you can believe it, that’s more or less the TDSB’s exculpatory version of events: It came as a total surprise, it says, that the Grassy Narrows protest morphed into a Gaza protest … at which point, apparently, the adults were utterly powerless to effect order. The board promises that children participating in protests is against official policy, and will get to the bottom of what happened. But school officials were clearly aware of the risk, or the risk parents might perceive, to children’s privacy, beforehand... Setting aside the whole miserable history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for a moment, does this sound like a good place for a public school to take students on a field trip? A place where it might be wise for children as young as eight to conceal their faces? Others have their own particular objections to how this objectively wasted school day went down: the fact that the aforementioned letter asked what it called “settler” parents to dress their “settler” children in blue (in honour of the clean water Grassy Narrows has been denied), while Indigenous children were “invited to wear their regalia”; the report of a Jewish child, upset at anti-Israel chants at what was billed as a clean-water protest, being told she would quickly “get over it.” But to me that acknowledgment of the potential risks for children attending a protest is the most damning evidence of severe, termination-worthy rot within the TDSB... It’s not that kids shouldn’t be taken to observe protests on principle — at least in theory. I think that would be a reasonable part of a middle- or high-school civics education. But students need to be observing protests with a critical eye. Protests have led to major, positive social changes. But they are also, usually, very very stupid. They are the opposite of an educational activity. You’ll learn nothing from what anyone says except supposed facts you should already have accepted as true to be a proper member of the tribe. They are festivals by and for the already convinced. Many of the participants — look for grey hair and foreign art gallery tote bags — are really just there to relive the 1960s for 25 minutes before drinks and dinner. The fact it’s so easy to pick up a placard and join an ideological team, and be instantly accepted, is precisely why a proper school shouldn’t be encouraging students to do that. Good teachers, good schools, good school boards, could easily manage all these problems and make such a field trip educational. But it seems we don’t have nearly enough of those."
"Accountability" is only for those who oppose the left wing agenda

Vivian Bercovici: Children are being taught that Israel represents all that is evil. It can't continue - "Children attending Alpha Alternative School (in Grades 3-6), as well as students from other schools, were asked in advance to wear blue shirts. There are different explanations for this request. Some have said that the blue was meant to signify clean water. The Grassy Narrows First Nation has been dealing for decades with health and other impacts of industrial pollution of its water supply. Others have indicated that the blue shirts were intended to mark the students as “settlers.” A badge of shame. The TDSB has been silent on this point, refusing to clarify. Anne-Marie Longpre, a TDSB teacher who took students to the event, posted on her now-closed X account that: “This was a march for Indigenous land rights. Do you really believe it’s harmful to kids to hear the chant, ‘From Turtle Island to Palestine, Occupation is a crime?’” Well, yes, Ms. Longpre. I do. Harmful and wildly inappropriate. It is also a profound breach of duty of care. These words reflect Hamas’s ideology (a recognized terrorist entity in Canada) that Israel is an illegal and criminal occupier of what they consider to be the land of Palestine. On the streets of Toronto and university campuses, this simplistic distortion of historical fact is deployed to demonize Israel, Jews and any individual who believes that the Jewish state is “legitimate” and has a “right to exist.”... The well-documented murder, torture, rape and incomprehensible savagery was celebrated on the streets of Gaza — and Toronto. The chilling pledge of Hamas leadership is to repeat this slaughter until Israel is destroyed and every last Jew is dead. This is a standard chant. These protests normalize extreme Jew-hatred, violence and a very distorted rendering of history. “From Turtle Island to Palestine, Occupation is a Crime” is not the benign nursery rhyme that Longpre, and others defending the protest, seems to think it is. It is a call for the annihilation of Israel. Whether her views stem from ignorance or malevolence, they are neither new nor anomalous in the TDSB. The rot is deeply entrenched. Among the more spectacular consequences of the October 7 massacre is the degree to which the very robust pro-Islamist population in Canada has been emboldened. As the slaughter and torture of civilians by Hamas continued on that day one year ago, the savagery was celebrated openly on the streets of many cities in Canada. There was an immediate and bizarre alliance between supporters of Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, ISIS, the Taliban and of course, the murderous regime in Iran that trains and manages them all — and so-called “progressives.” To Islamists, Israel is a blight on the Middle East that must be destroyed. This has been the predominant and abiding ideology in the region since 1948. Ironically, former U.S. president Barack Obama’s appeasement of Iran and its state-sponsored terror operations supporting Islamist proxies in the region alienated long-standing American allies: Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Israel. They despised Iran’s destructive, fundamentalist regime and this became the foundation of what has emerged as a strong alliance binding these countries. Including Israel. Excluded from this group — which includes several other Muslim countries under the Abraham Accords umbrella — are the nations that support or have been overtaken by terror groups: Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Iraq. Qatar plays both sides, financing and supporting Islamist terrorists in innumerable ways, while holding itself out as being allied with American and western interests. It is an absurdity that has a life of its own. What is puzzling is the convergence of interests between Islamists and leftish “progressives,” many of whom are gay. They seem to be oblivious to the fact that they are loathed by Islamists; unaware that gay individuals in these societies are burned alive, stoned to death, thrown from buildings (blindfolded and bound, headfirst) and hung from cranes in the public square. What binds these antithetical demographics — Islamists and progressives — is their shared hatred of Jews and Israel. To Islamists, homosexuality is unnatural and forbidden by Allah. Women are also objectified and subject to restrictions and abuse that do not align with liberal western norms. Their progressive bedfellows have come to their epiphany about the evil of Israel and Jews through various forms of indoctrination and learning. A recently published, slim volume by author Adam Kirsch, On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice, offers the most succinct distillation of the key “thinkers” in this socio-political movement. Israel and the United States, Kirsch explains, are “settler-colonial” societies, meaning that they are “permanently illegitimate, because they were created against the will of the people previously living there.” This theory explains and defines every aspect of the despised society. And this convoluted reasoning is how and why they proudly celebrate October 7. “By killing old people and children inside the borders of Israel, (Hamas) acted on the principle that every citizen of a settler colonial state is a fair target, because none of them has a right to be there,” Kirsch writes. “Young people today who celebrate the massacre of Israelis and harass their Jewish peers on college campuses are not ashamed of themselves for the same reason that earlier generations were not ashamed to persecute and kill Jews — because they have been taught that it is an expression of virtue.” They have been taught, since they were small children, that Israel represents all that is evil. This is reinforced in high school. And deeply entrenched by the time they get to university. And then they become educators, public officeholders and public servants. Not to mention the masked thugs controlling our streets and university campuses."

Teachers who organized 'field trip' to anti-Israel protest double down - "the teachers’ union at the centre of the controversy is saying it did nothing wrong and would do it again... Leaked emails showed that parents had even been encouraged to dress their children in blue based on whether or not they were “settlers.” “For any Indigenous participants, they are invited to wear their regalia. Settlers are asked to wear blue, if possible,” reads a Sept. 17 mass email with details of the “field trip.” Parents were also warned that media would be present at the event and that “masking is encouraged.” In a Tuesday statement, the Elementary Teachers of Toronto — one of the organizers of the protest — made no apology for the field trip or even its anti-Israel elements, saying it fit within their mandate of “social, environmental and racial justice.”... parental outrage over the field trip even spurred a protest of its own. More than a hundred people rallied outside Toronto District School Board headquarters to call for the immediate firing of TDSB employees responsible for the field trip. “Our city needs the growing talent that comes out of our school system and not brainwashed and indoctrinated children who have been taught conspiracy theories and hateful tropes,” Toronto City Councillor James Pasternak said in a speech to the crowd."
Left wing indoctrination in schools is a far right conspiracy theory and misinformation, because if you disagree with the left wing agenda, you are not a decent human being

The 'settler' label has taken on uniquely religious characteristics - "There seem to be a lot of settlers in Canada these days — or at least more people who call themselves settlers. The phrase shows up in email signatures and Twitter bios, right next to pronouns and job titles. At the start of meetings in the world of universities, NGOs and the public sector, people introduce themselves as a settler who lives on some Indigenous people’s traditional lands... The first time I really took notice of this was a few years ago. Someone I knew was proud of her Ojibway heritage and spoke a lot about her Ojibway grandfather. Curious, I asked about her other grandparents. This, I swiftly realized, was a mistake. Her face crumpled. My question forced her to admit that, as she put it, “they’re just the usual settler mix.” She said the word “settler” — talking about three of her four grandparents — with a brutal mixture of disdain and discomfort. Here she was, trying to pass as Indigenous, and I’d forced her to admit that most of her background was white. Although the term ostensibly divides between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians, most people use it as shorthand for “white.” It seems to be a way to talk about white people without explicitly referencing skin colour. It lets people attribute a whole slew of negative traits to one made-up cultural group — heaping all the worst aspects of Canada’s past onto currently existing people who happen to have the wrong skin colour. Mostly this goes unsaid except when someone like the Anishinaabe writer Drew Hayden Taylor riffs on the term. He’s written about settlers a number of times and offers alternatives terms like “people of pallor,” or those who are “pigment denied.” In one of his columns, he went through the words some of his Indigenous friends have for white people, such as a Lakota term that translates as “greedy person,” and the Mohawk phrase, “white foam people” — as in the foamy scum that forms on the top of lakes and rivers. It’s all rather amusing except when you think that the publications where he writes these things — outfits like the Globe and Mail and TVO — would never allow similar jokes about people of other backgrounds. Most activists who are keen to talk about settlers and settler colonialism go out of their way to exclude non-whites. Don’t worry, they say, groups who are usually said to be “marginalized” — Black Canadians, recent immigrants, etc. — aren’t really settlers. The pro-Palestinian lobby has adopted similar language — using a simple binary of oppressed and oppressor and mapping it onto the Middle East conflict. All you need to do is call the Israeli state an example of settler colonialism and you have all the answers. You know who the good guys are and who are the bad. Hint: the good guys aren’t the settlers. That’s because the settler identity is also as much about a moralizing religious feeling as it is about race. To call yourself a settler is to awaken to a new faith. You embrace a new guilt-ridden sense of the country. It’s a modern hair shirt, a masochistic label by which you can do penance. By calling yourself a settler, you’re renouncing your privilege and announcing to everyone: “Don’t worry, I’m one of the good ones.” The intellectuals who write books on the subject insist that you should feel “unsettled.” It’s right there in book titles, such as “Unsettling the Settler Within.” It’s hard to find a more Christian title than this — albeit in a seemingly secular fashion. Canadians of previous generations used to spend a lot of time worrying about original sin — of how to overcome what the religious used to call the “taint,” and then turning to God for help. In the case of settlers, it’s the same thing under a new secular guise. Forgive me world, I am a Canadian of the wrong ancestry. Help me decolonize myself. The effect is to divide Canadians into those who belong and those who don’t. It’s a citizenship test that so-called settlers need to write again and again — constantly professing their lack of belonging in order to appease the original sin of colonialism in the hope that someone, maybe even themselves, will allow them to belong. So what are we talking about when we call ourselves settlers? It sure looks like we’re adopting a form of racism that wants to hide its worst aspects by steeping itself in moralizing self-flagellation. It’s a myopic way of picking out the worst aspects of the Euro-Canadian past and refusing to put them into a wider context. And don’t overlook the heavy dose of self-interest that’s often mixed into the moral righteousness. This is an example of what Rob Henderson calls a “luxury belief.”... By renouncing and denouncing their cultural past, self-professed settlers try to gain cultural prestige in the present. Overt acts of racial discrimination are supposed to be illegal in Canada, yet the race-based settler moniker is spreading. Although I guess if you’re going to take it on yourself, there’s only so much anyone else can do. We can, however, at least deal with the religious and moralizing aspect of the settler label. Maybe we should act like a good Quebecer does at the sight of a hijab or a crucifix. We can say that your religious beliefs are all fine and good, but our public institutions are meant to be secular. They are for everyone. So keep your religious luxury beliefs to yourself."

Geoff Russ: Only clowns label Canadians 'settlers' - "Most people can guess why most Canadians do not embrace the “settler” label, much the same way that most Canadians do not wear clown costumes to work. Nonetheless, the poll results show that one in four people walking amongst us are into self-flagellation. There is no scenario in their worldview where “settlers” are a positive presence — they will always be the invasive species who can only exist as antagonists or allies to Indigenous people. In no way does this racial labelling resemble those used in the census or other statistical gathering; it is purely political in the most repulsive way. The children of parents who arrived from Poland in 1991 have no culpability for any violence or displacement that happened during the colonization of North America. Yet public school teachers in Toronto would treat them as if they burned the longhouses and are genetically responsible for residential schools. It would be unfair to believe that every single person working in public education is an idiot who finds comfort in the Hutus-and-Tutsis-ification of Canada. However, those saner voices are drowned out by demagogic figures within those unions, like Fred Hahn, president of the Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) Ontario. That is the trade-off with public sector unions. You get benefits and the power to strike to try and strong-arm the government, but you are effectively muzzled from speaking up, lest you become ostracized. Radical voices are always the loudest, regardless of how ridiculous and unpopular their views are. Do not expect change to come from within the public sector anytime soon, or from the universities, as both have been captured by this loud, corrosive minority of thinkers, if they can even be graced with that label. In a July report, British Columbia’s public health officer Bonnie Henry endorsed making nearly all drugs legal and freely available to the public. Among the report’s contributors were a number of other gems: one referred to herself as a “third-generation Canadian settler” while another called himself an “English settler,” as if they were extras in the Last of the Mohicans... Give it a few more years of pliant, progressive governments and soon “settler” will be a label on passports. It will not change the fact that chopping up and dividing Canadians like this is wrong. The right thing to do is eliminate the practice, ideally with all the efficiency of shoving a vampire into the morning sunlight. Unfortunately, despite Leger’s poll showing that almost 80 per cent of Canadians either reject the “settler” label or do not care, the other 23 per cent have sunk their claws into our institutions. The result will be more field trips where “settler” students are told to dress in a way that marks them apart from others present. For those who loathe and despise this course that Canadian society is being led towards, it does not mean abandoning universities and public education. Whether it be conservatives, moderate liberals or simply concerned citizens, it means actively contesting school board elections with the same vigour and energy that provincial or federal elections are. It also means pushing governments to open up independent schools, such as the Calgary Classical Academy , a tuition-free charter school focused on inculcating “virtues, knowledge and habits befitting free citizens” within their pupils. It also means remaining in higher academia and incrementally pushing back, as the radicals have succeeded in doing so persistently. Most people still need a university degree to succeed, and abandoning the path to management positions cedes the ground entirely to the radicals."
Left wingers hate charter schools because it's harder for them to push left wing propaganda there Truths from a 'settler colony' that needs to embrace a united future - "This ideology holds that everyone, except the First Nations, are essentially illegitimate colonialists from whom penance is required but forgiveness is forbidden. Canada’s past record of settlement — once the source of pride — has been turned into a tale of unrequited evil... settler paradigms tend to miss the role of collaboration between peoples. In fact, Quebec, for example, grew largely in what historian Fred Koabel describes as “hybrid European/Indigenous communities“ that were critical to the functioning of early Canada. Many of this now growing population, notably the Métis, are of mixed race. The settler paradigm is often confused by history. Take the history of Israel and Palestine. Rather than simply being a region where peaceful “natives” were displaced by brutal Zionists, the area constantly shifted from one dominant group to another. Canaanites, Hebrews, Assyrians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs and Turks all came and conquered peoples who themselves were descended from past settlers. Close to half of Israel’s own population consists of non-European descendants expelled from Arab countries. As we should honour the First Nations, we should also understand that they have had different experiences with settlement and colonialism. Some groups now considered victims of racism once conquered others, sometimes with cruelty. The notion that ethnic persecution is something just applicable to people of European descent ignores the universality of slavery and oppression among virtually every ethnic group, including in North America and Africa, where well before the conquest of the Europeans, there were constant wars and mass enslavement. In terms of finding solutions to legacies of colonial activity, either in Palestine, Australasia, the U.S. or Canada, the weakness of settler ideology lies in its obsession with the past. Most current settlers, many of them there for generations, notes New Zealand legal scholar Jeremy Waldron, “have no place else to go.” There have after all been “huge changes” in these countries. Most immigrants, particularly outside Quebec, came long after the initial period of settlement, and the vast majority live in cities, far from the areas dominated by First Nations. The settler ideology is also undermined by the rapid ethnic changes taking place in all these countries... The arrival of Asian and other non-white immigrants raises difficult questions about settler ideology. Is the computer programmer from the Philippines a settler? Does someone who came from North Africa represent just a darker version of the murderous colonialist? Rather than accentuate conflict, Canada’s future lies in accommodating these populations while ensuring they integrate into the fundamentally liberal national culture. Such subtleties are missed in the mad rush, in media and academia, to blame all of Canada’s problems, indeed those of the planet, on European whites. The settler/colonial ideologues insinuate, notes Golnaz Fakhari, an Iranian-Canadian freelance journalist based in Vancouver, that the “white community” is the culprit for injustices, that their history is “smeared with blood.” He concludes: “This agenda rarely ever points to the history of the rest of the world — and believe me, that history is just as gruesome, if not more so.“ Rather than obsess with race and retribution for past crimes, Canadians, like Americans and Australians, need to focus more on how to get our increasingly diverse people to get along in a commonwealth. The idea of being a “white nation” is very outdated as our populations become ever more diverse. After all, most of the latest “settlers” in Canada, the U.S. and Australia are people of colour. Rather than fight over the difference between settlers and existing population, including First Nations, the country needs to look beyond ethnic differences and embrace what the leftist French-Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has called “the politics of recognition,” which is open to all the varied ethnic experiences. What is needed is not a renewal of nativism but an openness to defend the clear successes of our civilization. We should learn the evils of Western expansion but also appreciate its blessings. As pointed out in a new book from scholar John Ellis , it was the West that pioneered early notions of gender equality, human rights and racial justice. Denial of this fact, notes Ellis, is among the “dangerous delusions” that inhabit our pedagogy. Anti-slavery movements, historian Nigel Biggar has suggested, emerged not in Africa or the Middle East, where the practice continues even to today, but in the heart of the imperialist 19th century, Great Britain."

Most Canadians don't see themselves as 'settlers,' poll finds - "It may be common among Canadian academics and some policymakers to identify non-Indigenous citizens of Canada as “settlers” — European-descended people who colonized the country — but most Canadians don’t see themselves that way, according to a new Leger Marketing poll. The pollsters found that 47 per cent of Canadians disagree with the term “settler” as a descriptor. Thirty per cent didn’t know about the term, leading the researchers to note that it’s “reasonably safe to conclude that the 30 per cent … simply don’t understand the notion of settler colonialism.”... “They, therefore, define Canadians as either Indigenous or as settler-colonists. That most Canadians reject the ‘us and them’ labelling is indicative of a widening gap between the academy and the public at large. That gap risks undercutting efforts at reconciliation as … it fails to capture the diversity of the Indigenous and non-Indigenous persons.”  Perhaps surprisingly, 41 per cent of Canadians ages 18-34 were negative about being labelled colonists. That compares with 47 per cent of 35-54 year-olds and 53 per cent of respondents who were 55 years and older. Moreover, 39 per cent of the youngest cohort responded that they “didn’t know” about the “settler” label (or they said it doesn’t apply). That’s more than the 35-54 group, who came in at 29 per cent, or the 25 per cent of those ages 55 and over... Unsurprisingly, the respondents who identified with the settler label said there were from the left side of the political spectrum... Given that many French Canadians think of Quebec as a nation, it may not be surprising that most of those surveyed agreed they are settlers (48 per cent), as opposed to English Canadians (17 per cent). According to the researchers, Canada’s francophones “learned that they colonized parts of the province, a term, which in French, they equate with settling it.”  That number shifts among ethnic minorities. Fifty-five per cent of those respondents disagreed with the term settler as an identity. “Many newcomers to Canada were themselves victims of colonial regimes and are likely to refuse the label being applied to them,” explains Jedwab. Younger people were less inclined to proclaim pride in being Canadian, with senior Canadians being the most proud... There were distinct differences in the levels of pride across the country. Those with the most pride in being Canadian come from the oldest part of the country: Atlantic Canadians are the most proud, with 91 per cent showing the flag as it were. In Ontario that number dropped to 80 per cent. In Alberta it was 84 per cent, 77 per cent in Manitoba and Saskatchewan and 74 per cent in B.C.  Again, perhaps counterintuitively, 81 per cent of Quebec respondents said they were proud to be Canadian. That number was similar among both Francophones at 82 per cent, and English speakers at 80 per cent. Intriguingly, Jedwab says there was little correlation between how people viewed the settler label and whether they were proud to be Canadian, or not.  What’s next in terms of Canadian identity? “Ideally there needs to be some reflection from the academy and some policymakers as to why this framing of Canada doesn’t resonate with the majority,” says Jewab."