CANADA is seen across the world as a tolerant country that has welcomed hundreds of thousands of migrants over the years. Broadly speaking, this perception is an accurate reflection of the country’s ethos. However, as a recent incident in the province of Saskatchewan showed, attitudes towards Canada’s indigenous people — or First Nations as they are officially known as — reveal a troubling degree of racism.

The facts of the case in question are bitterly disputed, but according to the victim’s friends, here’s what happened. On Aug 9, Colten Boushie, 22, and four friends drove nearly an hour from their Cree reservation at Red Pheasant to swim in the river. Driving back, they had a flat tire and drove into a farm for help. There they were confronted by an armed farmer who smashed the car’s windscreen. Panicked, the young men reversed into a parked car, scrambled out and ran. There were gunshots and Colten Boushie dropped dead.

The farmer, Gerald Stanley, 54, was arrested and charged with second-degree murder. He has been released on bail, pending an investigation by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). The case has ignited the underlying tensions between white farmers and indigenous people living on reservations in their midst. The famers accuse their native neighbours of stealing from them and living on handouts. It is a fact that they have lower incomes and educational levels, and far higher unemployment rates than the regional and national averages.

But none of this should have unleashed the torrent of racial abuse directed towards the indigenous people that this case has done. In one Facebook post — since deleted — Ben Kauz, a local councillor, wrote: “The only mistake Stanley made was to leave three witnesses alive.” To raise money for his legal defence, local farmers organised a “steak dinner”.

The RCMP made matters worse when they put out a press release saying that three of the five friends were wanted in a separate robbery case. The clear implication was that the murder was somehow justified. The Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations has strongly attacked the racial slurs their members have been subjected to, and the provincial prime minister has appealed for tolerance.

There are 643 First Nations recognised as such in Canadian law, and most of them live on designated reservations across the country, with half of them in British Colombia and Ontario. Officially, they are not a ‘visible minority’, unlike the different migrant groups that have made Canada their home. And precisely because they are scattered, and mostly live in rural areas, they have become invisible, and have no voice and no lobby. And as they are generally politically inactive, they have little clout in provincial and national affairs.

In this, they are not alone: indigenous people in Australia, the United States and South America share a similar fate. Everywhere they exist, they do so on the fringes of society, subjected to racism and neglect. Marginalised and patronised, many have sunk into apathy and despair. And while racism directed at other ethnic groups is challenged and resisted, there are few to champion the cause of aboriginal groups.

In Canada, attendance at residential schools was made compulsory for Indian children, as they were known in 1876 when this was made part of official policy. Thus, children were forcibly placed in these church-run schools where they were often subjected to physical abuse and sexual exploitation. It wasn’t until 1996 that the system was dismantled, and in 2008, Prime Minister Stephen Harper made a formal apology to the indigenous people.

Australia, too, imposed a similar, even harsher, system on its aborigines. A searing film, Rabbit Proof Fence, depicted a young boy and his sister as they fled their boarding school to return to their parents hundreds of miles away.

The logic underlying this cruel social experiment was that in order to ‘civilise savages’, children had to be removed from the influence of their families. To further cut off their links to their own culture, they were forbidden to speak in their own languages in the residential schools. This long process of deracination robbed entire generations of self-confidence and pride, turning them into the demoralised, unmotivated people so many of them have become.

But despite their suffering, Canada’s First Nations have fared better than their cousins in the United States. Here, the Red Indians as they were long known as, were mercilessly decimated by diseases introduced by white settlers, made to sign unequal treaties that confined them to remote reservations and forcibly moved from their ancestral homes. And when it was decided that reservation lands were valuable, the Indians would be forced to move again to other locations.

And yet, none of these past atrocities and present injustices are usually discussed. In New Brunswick, where I am writing this, the local First Nations never feature in conversations with my Canadian friends. It’s almost as if they are a national embarrassment not fit to talk about in polite company.

Globally, it is a fact that in regions where Europeans have settled for good, native populations have never really recovered from the trauma. With missionary zeal, white settlers and administrators have sought to erase every vestige of indigenous civilisations. Thus, continents like Australia, North and South America today have dominant white societies that have accepted and largely integrated non-white migrants, but continue to ignore the plight of those they displaced.

But these attitudes are not confined to whites alone. In Sri Lanka, the Veddas — the original inhabitants of the island — can now be numbered in the hundreds. Squeezed by roads, farms and towns, their jungle habitat has shrunk, and most have been absorbed into the majority. India’s Adivasi tribes have been marginalised, and their land and forests expropriated. Pakistan’s Bheels in lower Sindh have been pushed to the very margins of existence.

Removed from their lands, their culture and their past, native people are in terminal decline everywhere.

irfan.husain@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, August 29th, 2016

Opinion

Editorial

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