On Wednesday, a group of people claiming to be something called the “Vancouver City Council” passed a motion conceding that their quote-unquote “city” is actually located on “the unceded traditional territory of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.” The self-styled “mayor” declared it a historic moment.

It has long been a marked affectation of the British Columbia elite — be they political, legal, academic, or cultural — to ostentatiously emphasize their awareness of grievances committed against First Nations in centuries past by systematically undermining the legitimacy of the “settler” society that’s been established since. The most pronounced tic is the habit of beginning virtually every public address — a politician’s stump speech, a university commencement, the call to order of the human resources subcommittee of the library board, etc. — with a sombre, yet self-righteous reminder that whatever glories are about to unfold are occurring on the “traditional, unceded territories” of this-or-that native band. Often the ritualism goes even further: the Liberal Party’s 2013 Vancouver leadership debate, for instance, was kicked off with the party president handing a bag of tobacco to a local aboriginal leader as an anachronistic offer of concession.

Many political gatherings have similarly eschewed the settler tradition of opening proceedings with a vaguely Christian prayer in favor of explicitly aboriginal hosannahs, usually with lots of drumming and chanting. In 2011, Mayor Robertson chose to take a pass when it came to swearing his oath of office on a bible, but had little problem being blessed by holy men of the tribes whose land he sought to unjustly rule. Indeed, amid all the “whither the housing market” talk of their Wednesday declaration, it’s worth noting that city council ostensibly declared their own illegitimacy not to address any outstanding property dispute, but simply to get the ball rolling on organizing even more culturally-acceptable welcoming ceremonies than the ones they already hold.

Female B.C. politicians — afforded, as they are, more opportunity to make political statements with fashion — now routinely attend public events wearing scarves, blouses, jackets, dresses, and jewelry decorated with the distinctive art of West Coast aboriginals. The old Lieutenant Governor of the province, Iona Campagnolo, claimed one of the proudest achievements of her otherwise meaningless term was commissioning herself a beautiful new official uniform embroidered with intricate silver cross-stitching of whales and eagles depicted in traditional Coast Salish style. When the mayor of Kitmat was flash-mobbed by a gaggle of aboriginal activists protesting the proposed Northern Gateway Pipeline a few months ago, one of the great optical ironies was that the mayor herself was decked out in a floor-length coat emblazoned with aboriginal art at the time.

Then there’s the war on settler names, a cause that’s been quite enthusiastically championed by British Columbia’s current Liberal government. Ex-premier Gordon Campbell in particular went on quite the kick during his final years in office as he sought to restore all manner of “traditional” aboriginal names to prominent pieces of provincial geography. In 2010 the former Queen Charlotte Islands became “Haida Gwaii” (though not overnight — Premier Campbell grinned himself through a whole ceremony for that, too), and the Strait of Georgia was rebranded the “Salish Sea.” He wanted Stanley Park to go back to being called “Xwayxway,” too, until the feds who own the park (or I suppose we should say, “claim to own”) put a kibosh on that one.

All this sort of stuff is obviously motivated by a certain kind of white liberal guilt; the idea that the imperialistic horrors of one’s racial ancestors can be atoned through a kind of showy self-loathing, combined with a “better-late-than-never” embrace of the culture of the conquered. This, to use the trendy term, is a way of bringing “social justice” to the aggrieved party, which in today’s touchy-feely times is considered every bit as important as the real thing.

The awkward fact, alas, is that the anti-colonialist affectations of British Columbia’s white ruling class are little more than products of their own limited colonial imaginations, particularly deep-seeded Christian notions of sin and guilt, which even in these post-Christian times, are proving remarkably entrenched in “settler” culture.

In the eyes of today’s anxious white overclass, after all, “traditional” aboriginal cultures and societies primarily function as a sort of secular Garden of Eden — an idyllic, if somewhat vague and ahistorical locale entirely free of want or worry. The unfashionable modern sins of racism, war, capitalism, old-world religion, and environmental degradation, meanwhile, are viewed as the poisons of Europe, and a burden of “original sin” carried by all the continent’s ethnic descendants. By extinguishing, undermining, or subordinating signifiers of European culture, one engages in an act of spiritual self-flagellation and takes a step towards restoration of the fallen utopia — and thus moral salvation.

The unfortunate thing about treating aboriginal policy as a path to spiritual betterment, of course, is that endless rituals of symbolic atonement do little to alleviate the unavoidably temporal sufferings of Canada’s aboriginal population. A new name for a park won’t provide clean water for a polluted reserve; a smudge ceremony at the school board won’t raise abysmal aboriginal graduation rates.

Worse still is the fact that the postmodern moral code of BC’s white overclass also insists on pushing the destigmatization and acceptance of dangerous social vices of which aboriginals are the disproportionate victims — chiefly drugs and prostitution — while simultaneously demonizing sectors of the economy which present the community’s surest path to greater prosperity and self-sufficiency —which is to say, natural resource development.

In other words, far from heralding the bold progressive break they imagine, there’s little reason for aboriginals to believe the latest animating ideology of Canada’s elite will offer much substantial improvement over previous self-serving ideologies of condescension and indifference that caused so much suffering in generations prior.