Truth and Reconciliation
Like most people, regardless of where you stand on politics, I sympathize with the plight of indigenous American peoples. I know of course there are arguments against them, but I am not interested in talking about this as it is a divisive discussion which skips over the relevant issues.
Firstly, the entire indigenous grievance industry is just that, a corporatized, subverted, and “colonized” entity. The essential grievance is that native lands were stolen from indigenous people by mainly European settlers and colonizers. Let’s take this at face value for now. So what has the grievance industry been doing about this?
Politicians of all stripes in Canada claim that what has been done to the First Nations peoples was a genocide, then their land was stolen. Taken at face value, what we have is murder and theft. What is the punishment for such grievances? Murderers go to prison. But these murderers are all dead. Stolen property is returned to their respective owners or estates. This is something which could be done, yet has not been done. Why?
Instead, the government has colonized the grievance itself, as part of “Truth and Reconciliation.” What do I mean by this? They have instituted a holiday which recognizes the grievance. They have instituted hiring policies which favour First Nations applicants in government work. They do a bunch of different things, nearly all symbolic in comparison to actual justice, the return of stolen land.
If I steal from you, and instead of returning the property to you, I apologize and retain the stolen property, I have merely given you empty words in exchange for said property. Are you satisfied? No, who would be?
Non-indigenous, native-born Canadians also have a problem here. They did not participate in the systematic genocide of indigenous peoples, nor did they choose to travel or come to Canada and reside on stolen land. In many senses they too are victims of this crime, and doubly too given that by mere circumstance of their birth, they are charged with righting the wrongs of men and women long dead.
If so what can be done? Stolen property, mainly land, should be returned to the victims of the theft. As well, non-indigenous Canadian born peoples should be given the opportunity to return to their own indigenous lands. Any deal in which the government returns the lands to the First Nations peoples must include the ability for non-indigenous peoples to return to their ancestral lands. This cannot be done piece-meal, and must be done through negotiations between the Canadian government and the various countries of origin, no matter how distant in time. Otherwise you will leave tens of millions of people stateless.
How can it be done when some don’t know their origins? They should just be able to choose which country to return to. I’d choose Sweden myself as I have family there. Where would you choose?
This is the problem with “Truth and Reconciliation”. It’s fake, captured and corporate. In a sense the issue has been colonized and put into the control of the Canadian government. Some people make hundreds of thousands of dollars off of selling the orange shirts year-round. Land acknowledgements are mockery and virtue signalling. If you want justice, you have to enact justice. But this will never happen, because doing so would literally end Canada as a country, and for the low low cost of saying some empty rhetoric about sympathy and feeling bad about the past, the Canadian State can maintain its supremacy over the indigenous peoples of Canada, while never truly doing anything at all whatsoever. If they were ever forced to, things would get pretty real.