The Antisocial Socialist

I know everyone is all upset or amused, depending on your political persuasion, by some other big news right now, but I kinda had to share this before I forgot.

There is a thing called the Gord Downie & Chanie Wenjack Fund. The name alone needs some unpacking, especially if you live somewhere other than so-called Canada. Who are these names, you might ask? Not two people who ever met, that's for sure. Gord Downie was the lead singer of the Tragically Hip, who died rather tragically from cancer. Chanie Wenjack was a young Anishinaabe boy who, like many Indigenous children of his generation, was kidnapped and sent to residential school, where he was the victim of genocidal abuse. At 12 years old, he ran away and died of starvation and exposure.

Downie, in the last years of his life, was moved and horrified by Chanie's story. He set out to do something, and that something was a concept album and graphic novel about Chanie's life and death called The Secret Path. After his death the fund was established to educate and build awareness about residential schools. I'm reasonably sure that the proceeds didn't go to benefit Downie personally.

I've listened to a number of Indigenous people talk about this, and as you can imagine there are many different opinions. Most voices I've heard think that Downie absolutely had good intentions, but many are a little suspicious of this fund and also of the idea that this boy's story should have to be told by a wealthy white man in order for anyone to feel a certain way about it. I will not weigh in on it as I'm not Indigenous but I was sort of ambivalent. I don't use these sorts of materials in my classroom because I would prefer to highlight the work of Indigenous creators, many of whom have lived experience with residential schools and generational trauma.

All of this is to say that the fund sent around educational packages to schools this week. There was some good stuff in them, actually, including David A. Robertson's On the Trapline. And then I found these:



Is it me or is it in poor taste that your branded swag for your fund that is literally named after a child who froze to death is...gloves? Kind of thin gloves???

Because I think it's gross, actually.

They say "do something" on them.

I don't blame Gord Downie for this, btw. By all accounts he was a decent guy. I want to believe he wouldn't have approved of this.

This is why the kids say reconciliation is dead.

If you're a settler on the land currently called Canada and you have never done so, I urge you to read the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's 94 calls to action:

Here they are.

Reconciliation Is a Verb. Further reading, including the voices of survivors, courtesy of the Raven Trust.

 The final report of the Inquiry into Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls came out last week. It's 1200 pages and you can read it here (note: I have not). Among its conclusions and recommendations, it refers to the ongoing disinterest-to-outright-complicity of Canadians and the Canadian state in the deaths and disappearances of at least 1200 women and girls since 1980 constitutes an ongoing genocide.

This, to me, is a no-brainer. The relationship between the settler state and Indigenous peoples in general can really only be described as genocidal, to the point where Canada pushed quite heavily to redefine genocide at the UN in 1948 so that it couldn't be held accountable for trying to wipe out the vibrant cultures of Turtle Island.

For some reason, though, both Trudeau and the ambulatory bag of raw sewage threatening to ooze into Parliament after the next election have a really difficult time saying the G-word. So much for nation-to-nation and Haida tattoos in the former case; in the latter it's not exactly surprising that Yellow Vest ally Andrew Scheer is a goddamned racist. I'm nowhere near as active and involved in decolonization and Indigenous solidarity as I should be—as we all should be—but. Just. Gross. 

History will judge us for this. History is already judging us for this. There was a very low bar and we as a country couldn't even stumble over it.

Lost amongst the much bigger (but also, of course, disturbing) Panama Papers story is this article, about the decision of the Ontario Court of Appeals that records from the testimony of residential school survivors can be destroyed in 15 years.

Wait, what?

This fills me with so much rage I'm shaking almost too much to type.

I grew up knowing about residential schools. It wasn't exactly a secret, and it ended within my lifetime. I knew they were rape, torture, and death camps from a very early age. I've known about the FUCKING MASS GRAVES FULL OF CHILDREN'S CORPSES for at least a decade. I only recently found out that most settler Canadians claim to have only found out about it with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission findings, which I don't really believe because I tend to attribute to malice what I can't believe is stupidity.

So, of course, we're going to destroy the records. Thousands of people were brave enough to testify to the rape, torture, destruction of their language and culture, and horrific abuse they suffered at the hands of the state and church, and the state has decide this isn't worth keeping. Probably in another ten years, it can be entirely forgotten. If there's one thing settler Canadians are great at, it's forgetting.

Oh yes, they're claiming that they're going to contact the survivors and ask if they want their records archived rather than shredded (obviously they do, though, or they wouldn't have fucking testified in the first place, would they?) but since a lot of them are dead and they're aging in general and we're not exactly talking about a stable population, I'm guessing they'll say, "oh, we tried to call them but the phone was out of service, into the shredder with the testimony."

And then Canada can go back to pretending its a shining example of human rights when it instituted genocide on a mass scale and there are dead children buried in unmarked graves.

Here is a thing that happened:

The government of Canada, in collusion with various churches, kidnapped, tortured, starved, neglected, raped, and in many cases murdered aboriginal children. They robbed them of their families and culture. They beat them for speaking their own languages. When they died—and per capita, more of them died than Canadian soldiers in WWII—they were not returned to their families but buried in mass graves that were abandoned once the "schools" were closed. This fucking abomination, our own Holocaust, committed on Canadian soil with the full blessing of the law and with willful, savage brutality, took place from 1869 to 1996, involved 150,000 innocent children, and dealt a blow to indigenous communities that still echoes today. How can it not? 1996. Do you understand how recent this is, how raw this wound remains?

And it's not a secret. It hasn't been a secret as long as I can remember. The Truth and Reconciliation Committee's report on it was released today, but the information contained therein has been in the news for years. I looked back in my "first nations" tag and found a post I made about Kevin Annett, who did extensive research that revealed estimated death tolls and some of the mass grave locations, in 2008. I remember watching "Where the Spirit Lives," which depicts rape, torture, and murder in a residential school, in 1989. We had like five channels back then, but it was on CBC, which you could get even if you just had a coat hanger wired to the back of your TV. My whitebread honky school showed the movie to us in class (different times; these days it would be too graphic to show to children). Even my shitty Canadian history textbooks, which existed to spread a false image of Canada as a multicultural, democratic, benevolent paradise, had a little paragraph noting that this was a thing that happened. (Minus the mass graves and the death toll, which may not have been that well known back in the 80s and regardless is not a thing that instills national pride.)

I don't pretend to be particularly knowledgable about indigenous issues. I'm white as the driven snow. I know some First Nations people, though not many. I've been vaguely involved in some solidarity activism. But I didn't have to go out of my way to learn that my government kidnapped and murdered children.

Like any decent human being, the fact that this was done enrages me. (Decent human beings, judging by some of the comments to today's Star articles, are at a premium in Canada. But if you are not outraged by genocide there's something wrong with you and you are #gulagbait.) But what also enrages me is the number of people who are acting like they had no idea this happened.

"We didn't study it in school."

"I had no idea it was that bad, though."

JESUS FUCK, people, what did you think happened? Why Oka? Why Caledonia? Why Attawapiskat? Why Bill C-51? Don't you live here?

Like, I get how someone brand new to the country might not have heard about it, as the fact that we fucking slaughtered large swaths of the indigenous population is not something that Canada advertises to new immigrants. But do people just never read the news? Is everyone just relying on Grade 10 Canadian history to be an honest and truthful representation of the European conquest of Canada? I'm actually raging here at how willfully oblivious so many whites must be to have made it to adulthood without having any inkling of the blood that permeates the land they've stolen. It's a testament to the brilliance of our national propaganda machine that it can convince so large a percentage of the population that this is not information worth investigating. And it's a testament to the sheer ignorance and racism of settler culture that, proportionally, more children died in residential schools than in Auschwitz or of the Black Plague, and until today few were willing to call it genocide.

Fuck off. If you were born here and didn't know, it's because you didn't care to find out.

P.S. We also enslaved black people. That's not in the history textbooks, but now you can't not know that either.

The first Thanksgiving, as reenacted by children:

I went to see Art Spiegelman speak. I wish I had more time to tell you about it, but in the meantime, because of his talk I am now aware of this:



Did everyone else know and just not tell me?

P.S. Art Spiegelman is awesome.

P.P.S. So are my new thigh-high green-on-green striped kneesocks. They match my "Ceci n'est pas un pipe" t-shirt perfectly and I basically looked like a cartoon character today. (Appropriate, since I just drew four cartoons of myself because I'm an egomaniac.) I should have taken a picture.

It's another one of those long days at school and I won't be around, so here are two discussion questions for you. Fight talk amongst yourselves.

1. What do we think of this news story? There's a lot in there, so let's pick it to pieces.

2. Speaking of genocide, the Toronto District School Board has a new history course dealing with the subject. It officially recognizes three genocides: Armenia, the Holocaust, and Rwanda. What's missing, and why do you think they chose to exclude the genocide that happened in the country where the course will be taught.

Have a happy Friday!

You've all got the William S. Burroughs Thanksgiving thing memorized by now, right?