Introduction

After listening to the other presenters here yesterday, and this morning I seriously considered dumping this perpared stuff and taking off on a whole different tangent with you today. One of the reasons is what I heard from a few other speakers yesterday that changed the way I'm now thinking about some of the things that are in here. But I've decided not to do that, not entirely anyway. There are some things that have not been touched on as yet in terms of the differenvce between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal perspectives of history and there is a Metis history out there that most of you may never know if you don't hear it here today. So most of my remarks will come from this prepared text. but I'm certainly prepared to follow up on any direction your questions afterwards might take.

I intend to spend much of my time with you today trashing conventional concepts of Canadian history. For starters I want to challenge several basic assumptions upon which the "common sense" history of most Canadians is based. But I also want you to be aware of my own personal assumptions and point of view because they are naturally going to colour everything I say.

I was raised, in Toronto, as lower middle class catholic Canadian white boy. I was told, at about the age of six by my father that I had Indian blood and that my great-great-grandfather was a halfbreed explorer of some kind. I went through the educational system, without attaching any more significance or meaning to my Indian background than I did to my Irish, or German, or French background.

In short I was brought up like many, if not most Canadians of  the 1950's and I assumed the same assumptions that my average Canadian education provided me with. I'm telling you all this so you can better understand the absolute outrage I felt as a Canadian, and as a person when I discovered that my real heritage had been betrayed by those who were supposed to be preparing me to learn what it meant to be a person, and what it meant to be a Canadian. I should point out that my background puts me in a very different perspective than most of the speakers before me at this conferfence, in the sense that I was cut off from my heritage, by ignornance, until I was in my midtwenties. So I'm coming to you now as one who has had to fight his way back to an awareness of his people from a non-Aboriginal world.

As an assistant director of research in 1978, with the Ontario Metis and Non-Status Indian Association, I spent two years going through the literally thousands of documents that our researchers were bringing back to the office. My specific job, at the time, was to sort through all that stuff, pick out those things that would help the Association present the potential claims of Metis and Non-Status
Indian people in Ontario. In the process of doing that I began to recognize a definite pattern that had first become evident in earlier research work I had done on the Riel uprisings, and the Tecumseth
confederacy.

After a time this pattern of distortion, suppression, and outright lying, or "disinformation" as it called today, in the documentation that historians were using to construct the story of Canada became
so so obvious, that I began to expect it. To cut a long story short I spent two years in a state of anger and rage, both at myself for being so naive as to believe what I had been taught, and at an acamedmic and governmental system that perpetuated the "big lie" to serve its own interests.

There were a few exchanges here yesterday over the value of literacy and books in the learning about Native history. Although I did, in fact, find it necessary in my own life to put books aside for some years so I could learn to experience reality directly, I also discovered I had a a talent for what I am going to call "unreading" books. I don't think it would work to throw the history books away, but I do think it is necessary to read between the lines, to uncover the big and small lies in effect, to "unread" the book to expose the bias from which it was written and then to replace it with an Native or Aboriginal perspective.

At the end of the reasearch project I drafted a final report which I dug out of some cartons in preparing my presentation. It stands up very well, I think, in terms of what we're talking about here today, so I'm going to read parts of it to you as a summary of my personal perspective in this situation.

"Had Canada been discovered in 1976, when the Canadian government signed the International Covenant on Human Rights, there would have been no question that Canada's Native people would have both the right to self determination and the right to freely dispose of their natural wealth and resources. These two basic human rights are exactly what Canada's Native people are claiming today.

How the dispossession of an entire people from the birthright of their identity and their homeland could be buried in the footnotes of Canada's history is a chronicle of evasion and expediency that makes the apartheid policies of neo colonial South Africa at least honest by comparison. Canadians have much to learn from a Native perspective of their country's history.

Canadians must themselves recognize that recorded history has betrayed the Native people of this country. Those people who proclaim Canada as a just society for all, must themselves learn from the litany of injustice that dispossessed an entire people from their homeland. Those who would profess an ignornace of the events that created the present conditions of Native people, can no longer hide from the truth or shrug off the responsibility that history places on the shoulders of a truly just people."

I think maybe I'll leave the end of that piece to the end of this presentation.
 
 

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