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Photo by BLAIR GABLE/AFP/Getty Images

They didn’t. They came in waves and spread out in waves, frequently displacing earlier settlers violently. Where is the “Dorset culture” today? Or the Laurentian-speakers Cartier found at Hochelaga but Champlain did not? An excruciating piece in Canada’s History magazine just claimed that before European contact “Life here in Turtle Island was self-determining – the rivers ran as rivers, the elk roamed as elk, and the many nations of Indigenous peoples charted their own paths to the future…. Everything had the right to life. The deer had an inherent right to life… to live in a healthy home and to raise its children in a kind and loving way. The peoples of this land, too, had the right to life…”

The author admits people killed deer, albeit respectfully. But nowhere does his piece mention war, torture, sex slavery or any of the other all-too-human things ordinary Canadians know happened in this non-Eden despite the exquisite PC grovelling that is instinctive among our political and cultural elites.

In his ill-fated announcement of the new aboriginal cultural centre in the old U.S. embassy, Prime Minister Trudeau said “No relationship is more important to this government than that with the indigenous peoples.” Bosh. The most important relationship for any government is with all the citizens in whose name, for whose benefit and with whose permission it governs.

Photo by Sean Kilpatrick / Canadian Press

By the same token, aboriginal activists should try to remember that the Canadian public to whom their appeals for reconciliation and justice are ultimately addressed, often in peremptory language, is not a faceless line of Jeffrey Amherst clones and abusive residential school staff. A great many of us, or our ancestors, came here fleeing oppression and sometimes encountered it on arrival too, and have long tales of historical woe of our own about which nothing can ever be done.