Opinion: Nothanksgiving by Jody Cloutier

Thanksgiving in Canada, Columbus Day in the US. They both fall within the same week. Although Canada recorded the first Protestant ‘Day of Thanks’ in the 1500s, decades ahead of the Mayflower landing, Thanksgiving in Canada attained its earlier date due to being further North, hence an earlier Autumn harvest; the primary reason for Canada’s similarity to American Thanksgiving is due to the surge of Loyalists pouring into Canada after the American Revolutionary War. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the spirit of the popular holiday continues across North America wearing the type of colonial settler fantasy depicted in this painting by American artist Jean Leon Gerome Ferris depicting the first US Thanksgiving. (Credit: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images)

One of the unseemly threads of similarity is, of course, the Indigenous connection. Industrial Schools in the US, Residential Schools in Canada. Both countries have a long history of slow genocide, but for some reason Canada’s is more upsetting. I would say that the reason for this extra upset is that there can be no claim of ignorance on the part of the Canadian Government. In fact, the Canadian government has been reminding us that they knew, quite well, about the horror stories of residential schools for a long, long time. As well they should, they were designed to be exactly the horror stories they became. 

It is difficult to have a long memory in this circumstance, the ugly truth of the matter is that the 94 Calls to Action resulting from Canada's Truth & Reconciliation Commission Report ("TRC") is not the magic bullet, (magic t-shirt, rather) that throngs of ‘literally-the-least-we-can-do-ists’ want it to be, regarding the deaths, displacement, kidnapping, and culturicide of hundreds of thousands of Indigenous Peoples in Canada.

The entire process of the Government of Canada holding itself responsible for Residential Schools began in earnest in the early 1980s when survivors began collecting evidence and testimony in order to develop a class action lawsuit. It wasn’t until the Oka Crisis of 1990 that major media outlets in Canada were forced to pay attention to the “...Indian problem…”(sic).

All of this happened, mind you, a full 6 years before the last Residential School in Canada, located in Saskatchewan, closed in 1996.

Image: In May 2021 the bodies of 215 children - the first of thousands to be uncovered across North America - were found in unmarked graves at the Kamloops Residential School using ground-penetrating radar.

We have tried; except while Canadians are seeking orange shirts to assuage guilt, the Canadian Government has been seeking White Papers to assuage responsibility. The TRC, and documents of its ilk, have been being produced by colonial/settler witnesses and representatives since Bartolome de las Casas compiled his Devastation of the Indies in 1542, for Prince Philip II of Spain. The 1844 Bagot Report, the 1847 Ryerson Report, the Bryce Report in 1906, the McKenna-McBride Commission (the Royal Commission on Indian Affairs) of 1916, The Story of a National Crime published 1922, the White Paper in 1969, the 1996 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, and of course the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of 2015. These reports have become tropes of their own stories in Canada.

The US has seen a movement to rename Columbus Day Indigenous Peoples' Day. This makes some sense. Meanwhile, in Canada, the federal government chose to piggyback a grassroots community-led movement in response to Call to Action 80, and in June of 2021 officially appropriated Orange Shirt Day, rebranded it National TRC Day, and made it a "recommended" (read: optional) day of observance.

I watched a nation embrace this new national holiday meant to honour, in the very least, the Indigenous lives lost and families forever altered in 166 years of residential school programs for Indigenous, Inuit, and Metis Peoples in Canada. Yet there was more focus on orange shirts and other jingoistic nonsense. 

The Bryce Report (which Department of Indian Affairs Superintendent Duncan Campbell Scott is referencing in the April 12, 1910 quote above regarding children losing their natural ability to fight illness in Residential Schools) made about 10 suggestions. That was in 1906. The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples made 440 recommendations in 1996. In 2015, there were 94 Calls to Action made in the TRC's conclusive report. Since then, only 13 have been completed. Not one of them was to buy an orange shirt at Canadian Tire, nor should the irony of purchasing them from the Hudson's Bay Company be lost on anyone, even if the funds are being directed back to survivors.

Yes, it would be amazing if we could simply buy our way out of pain, responsibility, culpability, restitution, reparations, or duty. But we can’t. So although I can see the appeal in back-patting, orange shirts, and self-congratulations for stopping the death and destruction of more Indigenous lives, maybe it’s premature to celebrate, or even give thanks, when we still have yet to do very much of anything except issue reports, declare holidays, and substitute action with fashion.

~Jody Cloutier is an artist, freelance writer and journalist, and LLM (Masters at Law) Candidate. A Bois-Brûlé Métis, he was born in Ontario, currently calls Alberta home, and shares his knowledge, perspective, and passion as one of Rare Earth's Board Members.

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