Canada's subverted racism against Aboriginals

Ingrained racism needs to be addressed.

Forgiveness for residential schools, disrespect of traditional lands and racism: These are a handful of the many issues facing aboriginal people in Canada today.

While we hear a lot about the racism issues in America, we don’t hear as much about the problems faced by aboriginal people in Canada.

“The problem with Canadian racism is that, because of the Canadian system’s covertness, all the attention is drawn to the American system, and Canada gets a pass as it were,” says Dr. Charles Quist-Adade, a sociology professor at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.

“Canadians tend to think that their racism is much better than the racism in the USA, but I think that is wrong,” he says. “Racism, no matter where, no matter how, no matter what its shape, is still racism, and at the end of the day, people are hurt.”

The covertness that Quist-Adade refers to is the fact that almost half of the aboriginal population live on reserves, according to Statistics Canada in 2011. It’s easy for us to believe that Canada is one of the best countries in the world in regards to social progress. In fact, the Social Progress Imperative has ranked Canada second in the world, just behind Iceland, for tolerance and inclusion.

According to the 2011 Census, there are about 1,400,685 aboriginal people in Canada, or 4.3 per cent of the population. In B.C., there are about 232,290, or 5.4 per cent of the population.

When considering statistics, aboriginal people are in a different situation, compared to the rest of Canadians. Fewer are educated, healthy or safe. Fourteen per cent are unemployed, their incarceration rate is 10 times higher than the national average, and their school dropout rate is 2.7 times greater than average.

Much of this is due to their isolation, away from services that many Canadians take for granted. According to StatsCan, only two per cent living in the Greater Vancouver area (not including Abbotsford) are self-identified aboriginal.

In 2011, only 17.2 per cent of aboriginal people were able to communicate in an aboriginal language.

While there have been many changes in the United States regarding black civil rights, Brandon Gabriel, an artist and educator with the Kwantlen First Nation, says that little has changed for aboriginal people in Canada.

“I think progress is really slow moving, and I think that anything that’s deemed progressive in this society has to come from the people,” he says. “I don’t think the government is going to be an agent of change. The government is more interested in keeping things the way they’ve always been, because they benefit from it. And that benefit really comes down to the land and its usage.”

Gabriel refers to the way aboriginal land is approached by the government. Generally, the idea of land belonging to First Nations people is meaningless, according to Gabriel, simply due to the way Canada was originally founded and colonized.

He says many of the attitudes and policies developed in Canada, regarding the separation of First Nations people from the rest of society, began in the early formation of the country.

He cites the Indian Act of Canada as one of the most important pieces of legislation still in power.

“Basically, the Indian Act of Canada has served as the Apartheid model which other countries have adopted as their own. It outlines what’s in it, [including] land proprietorship, which First Nations people don’t have, to this day, who are living on reserve. Taxation issues, as well as healthcare and education with fall in line with it.

Many of the problems experienced by Aboriginal people today stem from our early colonial history. Phil Fontaine, a former national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, argued in a letter to the United Nations in 2013 that what early European colonialists did to indigenous Canadians would be considered genocide. The UN drafted regulations regarding this in 1948 in response to the Holocaust. Canada signed these regulations in 1949, and it passed through the House of Commons in 1952.

In the 1800s, colonialists encouraged Aboriginals to integrate into their own culture, using residential schools. Aboriginal children were taken from their families, and brought to Christian boarding schools where they would be forbidden from speaking their native languages, and taught a different religion. Roughly 150,000 people passed through these schools, and about 3,000 people died in them, namely from physical  abuse and lack of proper medical care.

Aboriginal people experience many stereotypes. There are misconceptions that they have special rights due to their heritage. Many Canadians mistakenly believe that they get many things for free.

“One of the big misconceptions is that the Indian Act of Canada has provided a citizen-plus policy towards aboriginal people, which it hasn’t,” says Gabriel. “We do not own the land that we live on, it’s held in trust by the Queen of England. We cannot buy or sell it. So therefore, the rest of the country is abiding by this fee-simple land ownership system, which has benefited greatly from it, whereas the First Nations people have not been able to tax their own lands or put money into taxation which helps raise infrastructure development.”

“The racism towards Aboriginals is horrendous,” says Quist-Adade. “Lack of proper housing, lack of proper health care, many of them are on the streets, many of them are deprived of their basic amenities. They have the highest incarceration rates as a percentage of the Canadian population . . . Canada has a form of racism and indeed we should not be gloating that our racism is better than the one in the USA. It should be tackled head-on.”