In an article of Jan. 15 in the National Post, Barbara Kay dealt with the status of discourse, or perhaps I should say lack of discourse, allowed in Canada today on the issue of its Residential Schools and our alleged “genocide” of Indigenous Culture if not the people themselves. She in no way implies our history is not problematic but does take issue with the grossly simplistic, hysterically defended partial truths that define what seems to be the only narrative acceptable to the sanctimonious defenders of Political Correctness. Her article is no doubt available online so I shall be brief in my comments.
Tomson Highway is a Cree playwright/novelist who states in his memoir, “Permanent Astonishment,” that he owes most of what he is to his 9 year stay in a residential school. His is a tale of gratitude rather than resentment. In 2015 when he was still editor of Canada’s The Walrus, a magazine that flatters itself as a champion of open debate, Jonathan Kay asked Highway to submit an article on the vast array of issues before The Truth and Reconciliation Commission. His article was rejected, the magazine’s editorial board deeming that it might upset some people, Indigenous and otherwise. Kay, who is no longer with The Walrus, says it was then that he realized “what I had entered was not a journalistic enterprise, but a sort of [religious] congregation.” It is one of the recurring themes of these blogs, the contemporary Left more often than not behaving like religious fanatics rather than the intellectual sophisticates they ludicrously claim to be.
Frances Widdowson was a tenured professor at Calgary’s Mount Royal U. until she was fired approximately a month ago for holding “toxic” views on various issues. The lengthy title of a paper cited by Ms. Kay suggests Widdowson found the oppressor/victim paradigm used to explain Canada’s relationship with the Indigenous, grossly simplistic. In 2020 she dared criticize the violence of B.L.M. which led her colleagues to amass the signatures of 6,000 people demanding her termination. But perhaps her greatest sin, Kay says, was her 2016 objection to a proposal to introduce Indigenous knowledge into the educational curriculum as the equal of Western Scientific knowledge. Google Widdowson and you will confront several articles opening with the assertion that she is unequivocally a racist. Suggesting that Western Science has more validity than Stone Age superstition now makes one a racist! It is the same sort of Postmodern B.S. that informs C.R.T., the absurd idea that no one way of approaching reality is superior to any other, that teaching 2+2=4, for example, is actually White Supremacism!
Given the pervasive irrationality of the contemporary Canadian Left, Kay says, it makes perfect sense that all sorts of speculation has come to be accepted as irrefutable fact by those who get their “information” from the mainstream media. No one has any idea what might ultimately be found in the unmarked graves of Kamloops, B.C. Other burial grounds used as further evidence of Canada’s genocide are quite likely, research has shown, filled with White people who died as a result of the various pandemics of the last two centuries. Yet on the basis of almost no empirical evidence, we are being asked to accept not just that Residential Schools were rife with abuse, but that Canada was consciously attempting to eradicate its Indians, any evidence to the contrary, even when offered by an Indigenous, simply not worth acknowledging. Such is the fascist arrogance of the political Left here in the Great White North! Dissident opinions not allowed. It’s their way or …..