INDIGENOUS CULTURES EMBRACED

INSTALLATION OF GOVERNOR GENERAL OF CANADA MARY SIMON, LIVE STREAMED ON THE CANADIAN BROADCAST CORPORATION (CBC), MONDAY, JULY 26, 2021 AT 8 AM PST.

GOVERNOR GENERAL BEGINS SLOWLY WITH A QULLIQ FLICKER

BY PETER THOMAS BUSCH

Canada has appointed an indigenous female as the Queen’s representative to government.

The appointment of Mary Simon as the Governor General of Canada may mark a turning point in the nation’s treatment of indigenous peoples, particularly indigenous women.

Even the present day attitudes and awareness exist in stark contrast to just a few years ago when the federal laws discriminated against indigenous women for marrying non-Indians. Such a divergence from the tribe resulted in the total loss of protection as an indigenous person.

Indigenous women often did not do well with the tribe on reserve, and if they ran away to the cities in the Southern lands to marry, indigenous women did not do well there either, finding themselves without indigenous rights and also discriminated against for being indigenous and female within the general population.

Indigenous people have not done so well around the globe under the former colonial structure that divided up the world among the conquerors. Indigenous cultures lost great struggles to civilizations often centuries further along in development.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s appointment of Simon as Governor General suggests a moving forward as a nation in a manner that embraces the rich history of indigenous peoples, not just in word, buying indigenous art and lauding their diversity, but in meaningful acts of inclusion.

Mary Simon was born in the Nunavik Village of Kangiqsualujjuaq, part of the Canadian Arctic north of Quebec.

The Inuit people struggle with a number of social problems related to the safety of their villages, living and dying in the Canadian North, as the frozen frontier bubble rubs edges with the modern world, often living under a summer sun with no night and a winter sky with no day. 

The livability issues in remote communities in the North is a product of neglect. But for two centuries now that neglect has often been fueled with malice.

For decades, the Canadian Government pursued the assimilation of indigenous cultures through various state initiatives that forced tribes to abandon their past. Indigenous peoples were also often simply left to survive with deteriorating minority rights against the more aggressive exercise of majority rule.

The Residential School policy mandated indigenous children to be taken from their homes and placed in boarding schools run by the Catholic church. The school program was designed to transplant the western culture and European teachings of God and man in place of indigenous culture and the unique concept of Creator, including the erasure of indigenous languages.

Mary Simon described language as the gateway to the future, likely for the very reason that many indigenous peoples are still struggling to regain their distinct language after decades of persecution.

For indigenous peoples, being Canadian must be a bitter pill to swallow, having been killed, beaten, discarded and replaced as an original people by other people continually arriving from everywhere else in the world.

The Governor General installation ceremony touched on the richness of the arts, music and culture the indigenous peoples have been able to maintain in the face of the most determined opposition.

The last few weeks, unmarked mass graves of children have been discovered near former residential schools in Kamloops and Cranbrook, British Columbia as well as in Saskatchewan. The nation’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission found that as many as 6,000 indigenous children died while attending the 130 residential schools operated across Canada from the late 19^th century until just about 40 years ago. America also had a school system to assimilate indigenous children.

The children that survived the Residential Schools often reported sexual abuse by the Catholic priests.

The process of reversing the damage caused by that violence has only just begun, and by many accounts, may take generations of truth telling, healing and forgiveness, since the trauma is passed down from generation to generation in what has become described as intergenerational trauma.

Trudeau likely chose Simon as a powerful symbol of this reconciliation process. 

The Governor General is largely a symbolic post so why not optimize that powerful symbol of what Canada wants to become. 

Trudeau is more than his father before him, but he also continues on as Prime Minister as a powerful symbol of his father’s initiatives to restore dignity to the indigenous culture by enshrining indigenous rights in the Constitution.

Former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau faced a fragmented nation with the French Canadian separatist wanting to divide the country, while many other distinct cultural entities loosely bound together in a nation weighted their futures on the results.

Canada had long been governed by centrifugal forces in Ontario and Quebec, pulling inward the people far off in the West and far off in the East, including the political power and everything else like taxes.

Trudeau, eh, Former Trudeau, hoped to govern more equitably by severing political power from the British Monarchy and amending the Constitution while at the same time protecting individual rights in a Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

In the very least, the repatriation of the Constitution from the old European colonialists served as a powerful symbol for French Canadians and Indigenous cultures across the new nation.

The new legal framework facilitated diversity and inclusiveness by first dismantling the centrifugal system of governance, and then redistributing power first to the individual provinces and then to the individuals within those provinces.

The new Constitution was a great undertaking of nation building at a time when the separatists and the disenfranchised dissenters had the momentum.

Canada still continued as a nation of relative exclusion even when the new laws and policies created by Trudeau wound their way through the courts in search of further definition and deeper meaning.

The social engineers could change the laws overnight, but the people, including the judges, the police and the fisheries officials still needed convincing that a new way forward existed that was better for the nation.

Elder Sally Webster lit a traditional Inuit lantern made of soapstone and seal blubber at the onset of the Governor General installation ceremony. The modest qulliq lit like a powerful beacon indicating that yet more was required of the young nation, and that this way was the best path forward into the future.

Simon spoke gently but firm, with confidence, as the qulliq flickered, and Elder Sally Webster tended to that lit candle as the Inuk women tend to do for light and warmth inside the tent on a long, cold Arctic night with little hope of daylight anytime soon.

The great struggle to tame the grand nation, that did not need to be tamed, had resulted in, what now appears by many accounts, to have been a great madness that brought out the worst of the colonialists. The Europeans had been here for the longest time, perhaps far too long.

Simon noted the selflessness of the people. And the Governor General of Canada may yet be here to selflessly deliver the powerful message of inclusion of which all the world may one day take note and follow suit.

Everyone must come together, not in sameness, but to contribute to the narrative of sharing by telling their diverse stories in a manner that fosters inclusion, but not madness.

Simon told her story with childhood memories of hunting with her family in the Arctic for daily sustenance, and the difficulty she had in reconciling Inuit life in the Far North with life in the Southern lands. This life struggle made Simon stronger and shaped her individual spirit.

Around the world nation building is never complete enough, but for Canada, the nation must still save the bright parts of a dark past in the hope of building a more inclusive society composed of strong compassionate individuals and uniquely rich cultures living together and sharing all that life brings under the golden light that passes above these lands.