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Any discussion of Indigenous matters is fraught with the explosive danger of being construed as racist, reactionary or misanthropic

The Indigenous people were extremely skilled in various handicrafts, and as woodsmen, hunters, and warriors; they were physically remarkably strong and nimble and had a life expectancy approximately equal to Western Europeans at the time of contact. But the claim that the civilization the Europeans found in what is now Canada was in any other sense competitive with that of Western Europe is nonsense. For all its failings, this was the Europe of Shakespeare, Descartes, Galileo, Michelangelo and Leonardo. Many of the things we think of as touchstones of an advanced technological society — agriculture, written languages, metallurgy and knitted fabrics and materials — were largely or entirely absent. Even the wheel was not to be found.

It is also bunk that the Europeans invaded and usurped an Indigenous “nation” or group of nations, in the manner that is now often implied, similar to how Nazi Germany invaded Poland or the Netherlands. The country was very sparsely populated and no native group or authority purported to govern anything larger than mainly itinerant bands or tribes, or to have borders or any concept of national space and jurisdiction. Europeans and those from other continents who immigrated legally to Canada and their descendants, have a right to live here equal to that of any Indigenous person.

Immigrants and their descendants have a right to live here equal to that of any Indigenous person

Frequently made allegations of attempted genocide against Indigenous people by Canadian governments rest on one written command by the agitated British general Jeffery Amherst during the Seven Years’ War that perhaps a communicable disease could be put in some blankets distributed to rebellious Indians, but nothing came of it, and the incident did not occur in and has nothing to do with Canada. The claim of cultural genocide, an attempted transposition of the concept of physical extermination, as in Nazi death camps, to education, is also fraudulent. As I have written here and elsewhere before, it is scandalous that the present federal chief justice would fasten the prestige of her position to such a monstrous defamation.