"Against Guilty History" Sucks

=> The article

First, some context:

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This is adapted from a speech that was given to the Canadian Institute for Historical Education. This is less of context and more of foreshadowing.

Before the takedown, I'll summarize the article: Canada hasn't really done too many bad things, and many other countries are much worse, and we need to be really thankful for the country that the Founders(TM) built.

Canada's First Prime Minister

John A. MacDonald was Canada's first Prime Minister, serving until 1891. He organized the federal powers of Canada at the expense of everyone else in Canada, executing Louis Riel, who fought against the Canadian government after they cut supplies to a starving population of First Nations people.

Old MacDonald didn't stop there, though -- he instituted the repressive policies against the First Nations, a unilateral act that was pushed onto First Nations, ignoring their indigenous status and status as a separate sovereign nation. This policy, relevant to this article, also instituted the Canadian assimilation boarding schools for First Nations children, which then became death sentences for many children due to cramped living conditions and complete disregard for any tuberculosis precautions which swept through the schools and took everyone it could.

From Scientific American:

The reality is that the conditions in the schools themselves were the leading contributor to the often-shocking death rates among the students. In 1907, Indian Affairs chief medical officer Peter Bryce reported some truly disturbing findings to his superiors. After having visited 35 government funded schools in western Canada, Bryce reported that 25 percent of all children who had attended these schools had died; at one school, the number was 69 percent. While Bryce reported that “the almost invariable cause of death given is tuberculosis,” he by no means saw this as natural or inevitable. Bryce, instead, placed the blame for these appalling death rates on the schools themselves, which were poorly constructed, lacked proper ventilation and frequently housed sick students in the dormitories alongside their healthy classmates.

David Frum, however, doesn't seem to know this -- that's okay, we can't know everything. But when you're then going to state that he is unfairly blamed for the schools:

The residential-school system in Canada dates back to the mid-19th century. The system wound down in the 1970s; the last school shut in the ’90s. But it was Macdonald’s government that put federal resources into the system for the first time, and so its sins were laid at his door.

It would behoove you to be correct.

Let's just say what was happening outright:

Macdonald ... tried to save Native lives in the way he thought best: by guiding the Indigenous people of Western Canada toward a self-sustaining way of life in the modern world.

The plan was always forced assimilation. How does that work?

Macdonald’s hopes and plans failed. But no one can say that latter-day policies would have succeeded any better.

That's what I thought.

Canada was better than most

This is just a dumb argument given the context. If the question were "Which country is the least bad?", this would at least be relevant. With the right question, I think most people would've let this one slide. But instead Frum decides to start dismissing people being abandoned by their government:

Indigenous and Métis people in the Saskatchewan territory were goaded into rebellion by local abuses.

Indigenous and Métis people fought against a government that violated treaties, mismanaged land and citizens, allowed for settlers to steal land and resources, and refused resources to a starving population.

Unsubstantiated Allegations

Frum is then desperate to show that allegations of mass graves are false! This particular instance of wrong never happened! Vindicated! Canada reigns supreme!

This is so unfortunate on a national level because while no remains have been found in this particular instance, it misses the forest for the trees: Canada (and America) has a long history of abusing indigenous people through force and neglect. They just want for this to be acknowledged and for the wrong to be righted as best it can. At this point I'm just sad.

"Settler-Colonialism" shouldn't be a bad thing

Frum now tries to show that indigenous people have been welcomed into the fold! We've integrated so much of their cultures into modern Western society!

In the more densely populated regions of the Americas, Indigenous culture made a deep impression on successor societies. You encounter it in the language: potato, maize, and chocolate are all words of Indigenous origin.

I feel like if someone were to really feel like their culture was incorporated into the fold, it would be in a manner that people recognize and understand and it would be more than potatoes, maize, and chocolate.

Unrelated: the sweet potato has a fascinating history which can be seen through its etymology.

Frum is so pro-WASP Western civilization, that he doesn't recognize what assimilation does to people. On top of this being the entire reason of slaughter for many, many wars, Frum seems to think that it just simply doesn't happen:

Throughout history, however, the upheaval of conquest has only very slowly altered underlying social and demographic realities. The winners seize the heights of the social hierarchy and appropriate the land and wealth of the previous elites. But for the toiling subjects beneath those elites, life continues more or less as before. They pay taxes to new masters. Their patterns of work, their religious faith, their language, their family organization and funeral rituals—these change very gradually, if at all.

All of those patterns of life will change. They always do. No one escapes. The idea that they wouldn't implies that a victorious conquest simply changing the address you mail your taxes to.

After contact with Europeans, one social reality largely vanished and was replaced by another. If settler-colonial were simply an attempt to describe and explain that difference, then the term would be useful.

"Vanished". That's so crazy!!! Where did they go??? In what manner did they go??? Guess we'll never know -- like I said, you can't know everything.

What Frum misses is that settler-colonial DOES simply describe and explain that difference, and then people get upset at settler-colonial societies because of that whole vanishing act that no one knows anything about.

When socialists denounce capitalist societies, they do so because they believe they possess a superior code for creating and distributing wealth. When Islamists attack secular societies, they do so because they believe they better understand God’s commands for how men and women should live.

Gonna be honest, I missed this in my first reading of the article. He's just throwing this in to remind everyone who's right -- the capitalist Christian West -- and who's evil -- Muslims and socialists.

Frum is trying to say that in order to have a critique, you must offer an alternative.

But what is the moral alternative offered by the critique of settler colonialism?

The alternative is to right the wrongs of the past as best as you can and commit to not repeating them in the future. Feels simple enough to me.

Frum seems to not understand what settler-colonialism is. I think he thinks it's like going into the woods and build a little hut for you and your friends? I think he's really confused on what was happening in history. Poor guy's too caught up in culture wars and talking to a room full of supporters to understand the holes in his argument.

Colonization has taken many different forms and looked different depending upon the colonizer, but the common theme is the extraction of resources. Settlerism is the import of a culture with complete disregard for what is there originally. Taking someone's land is colonialism, and forcing them to assimilate is settlerism.

As Frum waxes poetic about the beauty of Western civilization, he insists that forcing indigenous assimilation is the right thing, that it is how they can succeed. Only WASPs have the notion of care for other people.

The idea that people separated by thousands of miles of distance could owe a duty of care to one another because they were citizens of the same nation was carried to North America in the same sailing ships that brought to this continent all of the other elements that make up our liberal democracy.

I just. I dunno. The idea that only Western civilization has the concept of caring for other people, and only Western civilization can save the savages... I'm just not sure. I'm just not feeling it. It just feels...

I'm tempted to dare Frum to just say exactly that, but he did. That's what he said. If I am waiting for something else, it's because I'm refusing to listen to him.

They owe honor to those who built and secured that good and just society for posterity: ... to the settlers and colonists who set everything in motion.

Flawless. No notes.

This was a talk that was delivered to the Canadian Institute for Historical Education, an organization whose mission statement is about bringing "context and candour" to those who are "unjustly maligned or [whose] contributions diminished". Their mission is not to identify anyone who has done wrong.

They are here to defend 3 specific people (I shit you not) from "defamation".