ASSIGNMENT 3:2

1.For this blog assignment, I would like you to outline the reasons why colonial authorities could not conceive of accepting the Metis as a third founding nation.

One of the major reasons that Indigenous groups were not accepted by an English Canada as a legitimate nation-founding force is due to the exclusive nature of the European settler-colonists’ ideology of Whiteness civility that framed the negotiations for the confederation. The concept of civility is characterised by “the temporal notion of civilization as progress that was central to the idea of modernity and the colonial mission with the moral-ethical concept of a (relatively) peaceful order” (Coleman 10). It is suggested that Colonial-era Europeans tended to believe that there was one path to civilization and social development (Coleman 12).  In the sense of such social evolution theories, the European culture was deemed “ahead” on the single timeline of civilization and thus “higher” than the Indigenous culture which were “delayed” or “backward” (Coleman 12). As Coleman pointed out, the colonial racial hierarchy “is clearly evident in the early legislation imposed upon Aboriginal people in Canada, such as the Act for the Gradual Civilization of the Indian Tribes (1857), the Civilization and Enfranchisement Act (1859), and the Indian Act (1876), which collectively viewed Aboriginal people as ‘uncivilized human beings whose cultures were decidedly inferior to British culture’” (13). While suggesting that the culture of “these others” at “the stages of primitiveness” could be civilized by the European civility which was “well advanced on the scale of modernity”, the European settler-colonists denied the Indigenous people’s access to something as civil as the “liberal democratic politics” as asserting that Indigenous people could not understand civility as an ideal form of government (Coleman 12). In this sense, the Matis’s claims for collective right were dismissed by the notion of the superiority of the bounded White civility which was legitimized as the foundational ideology of the emerging English Canada as a nation, as the Indigenous people were not considered as full members of the civil collective.  

In addition to “the history of White supremacy and colonial racism that are fundamental to the establishment of Canada as a nation” (Coleman 10), the other major reason that the Metis was excluded from English Canadian governmentality is the purpose of the settler-colonists to securing the privileges they occupied on the Native resources e.g. the land titles. What happened was the Indigenous claim included the inherent rights of prior-presence and they attempted to make it to the Constitution. This would have protected the Indigenous legitimacy of the Native land titles while clashing with the colonial interests. With the disregard of pre-contact history, the settlers underwent a process of “indigenization”, representing themselves as already the Native people of the Canadian soil and thus asserting their priority to latecomers or new immigrants. On the other hand, as mentioned above, the colonists claimed superiority to Aboriginals based on White civility (Coleman 16). With their “indigenous” as well as “civilized” status, the settler-invaders legitimized their dispossession of Aboriginals from their traditional land while the Indigenous presence in this land was denied and their claims for sovereignty were “legally” supressed.

The denial of the Indigenous representation in Canadian Federal Government in the late 19^th century is also due to the absence of Indigenous voice in the forging of the “imagined community” of Canada promoted mainly by writing schemes. Given the concepts of nationalism are established by a nation representing the collective narratives across times “as if they formed a natural community”, Coleman argues that “what has come to known as English Canada is and has been…a project of literacy (5). Given the European written traditions, Canadian nationalism, characterised by the English Canada’s fictive ethnicity of White civility, was constructed and reconstructed through settler writing. As a result,  White civility were naturalized as the norm for English Canadian cultural identity and  the normative concept of English Canadianness came to be established (Coleman 5). The collective awareness of White English Canadianness was reinforced by the canonization of settler literature. From the lens of settler-colonists, the “official symbolic history of Canada is a history of settlement” and according to this Loyalist version of history, “Canada was once a wilderness-wild, uncultivated, largely empty-until Europeans arrived and carved out a society.” (Coleman 29) This way of telling Canada’s story not only differed from the Indigenous historical oral accounts but misled people to “forget” the Indigenous prior-presence as well as the pre-contact history. However, such settler-colonial subjectivity as well as the privileged status of Whiteness was reaffirmed anyway through the narrative project of forming National consciousness enabled by the colonial literary productivity and print capitalism (Coleman 16). In contrast, the Indigenous cultural groups were marginalized in Canadian society due to their insistence on the story-telling traditions over the textual narrations and as a result a lack of literary representation in the National narratives. In fact, the emergence of the imagined collectivity called Canada involved not only a literary project but a racial project. There were numerous writings at the time when the Metis negotiated to be one of the founding nations of Canada that suggested the “Indians” were “incompatible with the national project of building a British-based civility”(Coleman 22). Moreover, the Natives were also considered in the then popular writings as a “vanishing race” that was doomed in the single timeline of civilizations (Coleman 29).  As a result of the colonial racism as well as the normative ideas of White superiority that was to secure settler-colonists’ privileges, which were legitimized by a literary project that was fundamental to cultivate the awareness of Nationalism, the Metis ended up failing to negotiate the sharing of political power of the emerging Federal Government of Canada.  

Works Cited:

Coleman, Daniel. White Civility: The Literary Project of English Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. Print.