CANADIAN COLONIALISM

A history book examines the deeply disturbing aspects of Canadian colonialism.

Canada may not have an equivalent of America’s Trail of Tears, the massacre at Wounded Knee, or the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, but its history is stained by its shameful treatment of its Indigenous people and non-European immigrants. “If you leave them in the family, they may know how to read and write, but they remain savages,” one government official said in 1883 in justifying the costs of residential schools for First Nations people. Kishchuk frames this grim history as “internal colonialism” in a book that deftly weaves together primary and secondary sources. Internal colonialism in Canada was “achieved through forced uprooting and displacement, direct attack and subjugation, disdain, disrespect, and denial of rights, and embedded racism,” he argues. The volume goes as far back as the Chilcotin War in British Columbia, which broke out in 1864 after tribal members attacked a road construction camp on their land to show how “internal colonialism has been practised pervasively” in Canada. Some of the “most grievous acts” have been brought into the open in recent years, including the establishment of residential schools to forcibly assimilate Indigenous children. “Indian boys and girls are dying like flies” one magazine reported in 1907. To his credit, the author also highlights such lesser-known horrors as the relocation of the Quebec Inuit to the high Arctic, the forced sterilization of Indigenous women, and the hanging of a Metis, or mixed race, leader in 1885 after John A. MacDonald, Canada’s first prime minister, said: “He shall die, though every dog in Quebec bark in his favour.” But much of the prose reads like a textbook, with Kishchuk failing to put one character center stage and offering little historical interpretation. There are some odd omissions, too—a section on the homicides of Indigenous women does not mention the notorious “Highway of Tears” killings in British Columbia. Still, the work is a salutary corrective to Canadian pride, noting that “many of those affected by colonialism are alive today and are scarred for life.”

An engrossing but dry account of Canada’s internal colonialism depredations.