Comment: Culture, Canada and the Aboriginal Peoples
- Paul Chartrand | April 18, 2015
Is there a Canadian culture? If so what is it? Where do the Indigenous people fit into this? What are our common ideals as Canadians, our values and collective aspirations? Do we have a vision of our future? It would be fatuous to suggest there will be wide agreement on the answers to these questions. So I asked My Good Friend (MGF) what he thought about the subject of culture and these questions.
We must start with an understanding of what is ‘culture’. To do that we look at the views of anthropologists. A classic study published in 1952 contained more than 164 definitions of culture. More have been developed since. No one definition has garnered universal agreement. Some social scientists argue that the concept is too ambiguous, broad and contentious to be of any use.
Nevertheless, the politicians were happy to include ‘the multicultural heritage’ of Canadians to guide the interpretation of the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In politically-correct circles ‘multicultural’ seems to have morphed into ‘diversity’, an empty shell that drives MGF to apoplexy, he not being impressed by word-magic to hide meaning.
Not to be outdone by the elected politicians, the judicial politicians on the Supreme Court of Canada have happily adopted the term thrown away by its anthropological inventors. This, despite the demands of precision that the law requires. And in the process the Court has not treated fairly the ‘culture’ of Aboriginal peoples compared to the ‘culture’ of others. An example is the Mahe case where the Court said the purpose of French-language minority rights was to preserve and promote the two official languages of Canada ‘and their respective cultures.’ The Court did not inquire into that culture, instead presuming its existence as a fact. On the other hand, when developing the concept of ‘aboriginal rights’ the Court demanded proof by Aboriginal claimants that they have a culture, and that a ‘right’ must be ‘an element of a practice, custom or tradition integral to the distinctive culture of the aboriginal group claiming the right’. In other words, Aboriginal people must prove as a matter of law that they have a culture: others are presumed to have a culture as a fact.
The federal Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (1996) recommended the recognition of the rights of self-determination and self-government of the Aboriginal peoples, and the implementation of historic Treaties and the negotiation of new ones. This view butted heads with the popular but grossly misunderstood notion of ‘equality’ and tackled with the concept articulated by some scholars that ‘citizenship’, and not ice hockey, was the glue that held Canadians together.
Does this mean that Canada has little in the way of preferred values, ideals, and collective aspirations to the extent that an abstract notion of ‘citizenship’ is what makes Canadian society distinct in the world? Is there a Canadian insistence on ‘this is the way we do things around here’, which seems to be the heart of the concept of self-determination. MGF believes that the political elites of Canada have imagined a country which wants to be all things to all people and in the result ends up being nothing to anyone. It follows he says that immigrants are not expected to integrate into a Canadian culture, whatever that means, but are invited to live their lives according to their own lights.
I am not sure I agree entirely with MGF. But let me conclude. If we view a country as a living dynamic matter of the soul and heart, it would be better if Canada were to recognize its Aboriginal foundations in creating a self-image and a vision of its future. If we turn inwards and reflect upon the philosophies, the histories, the languages and the cultures of the historic North American nations of this Northern place, there is hope to build a vision of a country that will stand as a model for the world.
Today the growing young Aboriginal population does not see itself reflected in the national institutions and aspirations of Canada. This disaffection stands in the way of a claim to universal legitimacy of the Canadian state itself. Canada should be seen as legitimate in the eyes of all its citizens. That legitimacy can be reached not by a universal concept of citizenship alone but by the due recognition of the distinct Aboriginal foundations which give rise to the First Nations’ Treaty Relationship and Riel’s Manitoba Treaty for the Metis nation.
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