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Gabriela Lopes

As a settler, I am proud to celebrate the National Day of Truth and Reconciliation because I believe we are witnessing a historic social transformation. The conversations happening in politics have been taking Indigenous claims to justice and sovereignty increasingly seriously, as truths are accepted and Indigenous culture is promoted in public events. For example, the city of Montreal organized four activities during the eclipse that happened this spring. One of them, centred on Aboriginal stories about the lunar phenomenon, was led by an Indigenous scientist. A few months later was the tenth anniversary of the first declaration of Aboriginal Title in the history of the Supreme Court of Canada. It has been almost as long since Montreal added the white pine to the city flag. I think people are realizing what the Royal Commission on Indigenous Peoples identified over 25 years ago: we have been taught a version of history that is in many ways untrue, and we must “set the record straight”. There has been a deliberate erasure of North American Indigenous peoples from Canadian culture, and this has been to the detriment of all.

Canada’s next step on the path to Truth and (re)Conciliation is to have a genuine conversation challenging our legal assumptions and our government structure.

To be genuine means recognizing that the single government of Canada today is not in accordance with the Treaties signed to share the territory between two sovereign entities. We would not have this type of Parliamentary regime based on Catholic monarchical values, with a paternalistic authority over Indigenous peoples, if the agreements made with the original Canadians had not been broken

Indeed, the problems we call “systemic” are all interconnected – racism, sexism, and all the other exclusionary practices that do their best to funnel wealth into concentrated pockets. The colonial strategies that attempted to physically and spiritually destroy Indigenous peoples are another reflection of a deep ideological current. 

Today, some of the most pressing systemic issues recognized in Canada are food insecurity and climate catastrophe. The food system, the network of labourers and distribution channels that connects the whole process from the seeds to the table scraps, is shaped by this ideological current to prioritize making profits over feeding people nourishingly. Crops are designed to maximize yield, and there is so much food going around that almost 50% of it is wasted along the way. At the same time, Canadians are going hungry: one in three black and Indigenous children live in food insecure households, as do one in five white children. Those who are eating are getting increasingly sick from ultra-processed foods, which we consume more than anyone in the world second only to our Southern neighbours. Exacerbating the whole situation are the damaging environmental effects of the agricultural sector. This championing of profitable practices is a huge entangled problem. 

Solutions

We must democratically revisit our foundations in order to find the right scope for solving it.

Who better to help us figure out what that even means than those who have resisted the laying of that foundation on this continent for centuries? Indigenous peoples have a profound knowledge of how to build nourishing and regenerative food systems, and have been protecting global biodiversity from extractive industries. If we absorb that wisdom at the ideological level, it can have ripple impacts in a much wider pond of systemic issues. 

Don’t be afraid of deep conversations

We can allow ourselves to be influenced by our fellow citizens’ understanding of what good governance could look like based on different spiritual and values systems. Three key pillars of our political ideology can be a good place to start discussions:

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economic growth

The idea that endless economic growth is the basis of health for a community

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private property

The belief that private property is the most civilized method to ensure safety

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centralized authority

The dependance on centralization and standardization of authority to ensure freedom

economic growth

Endless economic growth is how we measure Canada’s health.

This is how everyone operates, from countries to corporations to capitalists. The less we have grown since last year, the worse off we are, and stagnation is assuredly negative — the horror should we shrink instead. 

This logic is sound because it is how the world currently operates, but it is based in absurdity because it is environmentally unsustainable and socially destructive. The competitive pursuit of “more” erodes our social fabric. Additionally, we simply don’t have the resources to grow forever, the Earth is finite. I personally hope we figure ourselves out here before we start our space exploration era in earnest; it would be tragic if we turned the galaxy into a corporate battleground.

Instead, we must develop a governing system for this territory known as Canada influenced by Indigenous values. We would not take more than we need and would redistribute the rest. The accumulation of wealth, such as by West-Coast chiefs for potlatches, would be more for collective endeavours than personal enrichment. We would be a lot more respectful of the environment and the animals, counting them more like fellow citizens than dollar signs.

If we were to incorporate more Indigenous values into our economic system, the constructs of wages and salaries to earn one’s survival within a community, our manners of distributing limited resources and access to commons, and the creation of public works would be impacted. 

private property

All of this would inevitably bring us to conversations about private property and justice.

Currently, the institute of private property is the metric that governments and international organizations measure to determine collective safety: how well is private property protected? It is the bastion of civilization as we know it. 

Private property is a system that is based on a fundamental line between person and property, and that line is a political construction. On one side of the line is the person, endowed with dignity and rights; on the other is property, fit only to be possessed. If ownership is akin to control, what does it mean when eight men own as much as half the global population? We cannot have billionaires without sweatshops, and the line between person and property in that scenario becomes blurred. It is the real reason we are in a race of endless growth — if you stagnate or shrink, and others around you keep growing, you will eventually be consumed and become property yourself. 

If we had developed as a nation with a mindset inspired by Indigenous philosophies, we would probably have created a proprietary regime more similar to interpersonal relational rights than controlling, exclusionary rights. Such a conception would include responsibilities to care and share in the power dynamics between the “owner” and the “owned”. This is similar to when a parent says “this child is mine” — they have a privileged relationship with their child, but they do not necessarily exclude the child from fomenting relations with others.  Perhaps we would not have poverty or homelessness in our communities, having found a different way to ensure safety and justice that does not require us to distrust each other.

centralized authority

Speaking of which, who are those who decide on the laws of private property and define justice?

The authority to dictate the shape of our communities, to say what is fair and right, is limited to a few people. The effect of this is that even in the most democratic countries, wealth inequality is increasing. Most law-makers are elected in a process that is very detached, with each official representing thousands of constituents they’ve never met, leaving many citizens feeling “powerless and disconnected from the political system”. The rest that sit in courtrooms are not elected and are overworked.

Ours is an era of burgeoning democracies, still removing itself from the cocoon of the monarchical system from which it was born. It is based on the belief that only an authoritative and centralized governance system, with monopoly over violence and the definition of justice, will allow us to live together peacefully by “submitting to the yoke of the law of God”. (By the way, the copyright to the Constitution of Canada belongs to the monarch of England, by “Grace of God”). We do not see how it is possible for people to respect each other without the paternalism of the state. But that is the same as fearing that people will be immoral without Godly guidance and a Bible, or Torah, or Quran. It comes from thinking that humans cannot be trusted, and individual freedom must be curtailed to preserve peace and good governance.

If we opened ourselves to the countless legal traditions of Indigenous communities around the world, we might be convinced differently. Humans can be trusted to want to use their freedom to be good to each other in the right conditions. Those conditions begin with the belief system of a community. It is possible to trust one another to the extent where we do not feel the need to standardize justice and centralize authority. We might even come to believe that we don’t need hard borders to keep the peace, but that is a conversation that extends far beyond Canada.

All of these concepts may be very radical and a bit scary to think about. The important point is that in the process of Truth and (re)Conciliation, we are trying to build a future that works for everyone. No one will lose more than they are willing to give up if we can bring ourselves to have an honest conversation about what is working and what isn’t, and how we want change to look. 

The ethos to erase the “Indian problem” significantly shaped the Canadian governance system in direct contradiction with the spirit of the Treaties between nations. The efforts to extinguish Indigenous sovereignty were meant to preserve the economic progress of the land-toiling European system. This motivation reflects the assumption that alternative economic ideologies should be dismissed outright. But with more and more Canadians feeling inclined to “put stock in their own judgement on political matters,” perhaps the assumption is not as unquestionable as previously believed. 

We know that we have been taught a version of history which purposefully limited our understanding of what is possible. If we think together, we can easily come up with new and exciting possibilities. 

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