The historical profession in Canada is lost

Christopher Dummitt on the self-loathing stage of Canadian culture

Canada is a genocidal state – was in the past and it’s still today. It’s an arbitrary patchwork of a bunch of unceded territories. Decolonization is an uncontested good to be embraced by every agency, organization and person. Artists can legitimately write about their own ethnic group only; everything else would be stealing. Reconciliation is a meaningful concept, an ongoing expiation of everyone in Canada in relations to the Indigenous groups. Immigrants are settlers too and they join in the process of expiation. Indigenous people have been here first and for that reason they hold a special and unique place to be honoured by all other ethnicities. Hereditary chiefs, as opposed to the elected ones, are more authentic to the Indigenous experience. The settler-Indigenous relation is akin to the renter-landlord relation. 

Until very recently – about five years ago – the above were minority opinions, some among them downright eccentric. Not a lot of people in the academe, law, politics, media or historiography considered them particularly serious. Today they have become dominant, nearing a consensus. They join many other ones that used to be a matter of debate, but not any more. Ongoing systemic racism. A person’s sex is a matter of declaration rather than any material reality. Free speech is not among the highest values of our society. In fact, words sometimes = violence. It is necessary in some circumstances to separate the races. The term BIPOC is meaningful and should guide policies. 

Things have changed especially fast in the academic setting, and not a lot of dissenting voices from the universities are being heard in the Canadian mainstream media. One of a handful of exceptions is Dr Christopher Dummitt, professor at Trent University in Peterborough. I had the pleasure of talking with him this week.

Prof. Christopher Dummitt

LP: Last year you came out in defence of Terry Glavin's vital work in the Post and one thing stuck with me. I’ll read it to you.

I was surprised to discover the presence of double-think in Canada, what Czeslav Milosz called Ketmanism, in the last few years in particular. What's your impression, is it getting better, is it getting worse, where is this going?

CD: I think it's drastically worse than it was five years ago, or three years ago. I keep having these interactions with people, people who agree with me – on whether you should take for example John A. Macdonald statues down, or whether you should rename Ryerson University... I know these people agree with me and say to me You're brave, but then they move on. The implication is that they would never do that. And in some way they're not irrational to think that there would be serious consequences to their lives. I spoke with someone yesterday on the phone who's retired, and he isn't going to lose his job, but he can lose his friends' network, he doesn't know what other people think. Maybe they agree with him, maybe they don't. You kind of slip into this anodyne conversation that isn't really meaningful but also that isn't dangerous. I know you wrote about this too, having grown up in eastern Europe... I am aware of it now all the time.

LP: And it's the institutions that are supposed to defend freedom of expression and freedom of inquiry that have fallen. I find myself frequently thinking, Here's another thing you can't say in a university setting or publish without great difficulty... What has been going on in Canadian universities? 

CD: Let me start with the good news; I'm a tenured professor and I'm becoming more outspoken on these issues than before. I've made it my bailiwick; I increasingly teach classes where I take these issues on. And that's partly a strategic decision because I know I have very good protections when it comes to academic freedom; of anyone in the society, I should be the safest to speak out. As long as I say it in a careful, thoughtful, balanced way. I do teach these things and I sometimes get pushback, but I adopt the stance of a curious observer. A student challenges me on something and I'll ask them to explain what they mean and what they think they disagree with in the readings I give them or something I've said. I find that approach goes down pretty well. And describing precisely what you disagree with is a skill; it's what distinguishes us from a smart person in a bar. It teaches you to be rigorous; fine, you disagree with something, now explain it to me in a way that the author or the speaker would agree with, and then criticize it. And I always put that first; it's a bar to be passed.

But you asked what can and cannot be said in universities these days. I think it's a matter of social mores, in terms of what people are thinking is right. I don't think people are being disingenuous when they say they have certain views on certain identity politics, or the case I know best, when they think Canada was made by committing genocide. They genuinely think it was a genocide and they seem oblivious that until about five years ago no one took that claim seriously. The claim was there for a long time, but not entertained. You forget how rapidly it changed, and it’s better not to mention how rapidly it's changed. And then once it's changed, you can't go back. People like me who say, Remember when we didn't find that credible?, are seen as being difficult. There was another piece I wrote a while ago in the Post, asking Why are we calling what happened in residential schools – genocide? What exactly is going on? That kind of curiosity I think is increasingly seen as… maybe dangerous is not the right word, maybe I'm being seen as a bit of a dick. It's not a done thing if you want to get along with people. Being curious about the new common sense. 

LP: There's also a nefarious agenda presumed. If you're defending free speech, for example, you're doing the far-right dog whistle thing. Or something.

CD: I don't presume to think that someone isn't doing that. I don't have any love for the far right – if they were in charge of the institutions in my life, I would be criticizing them. But they're not. They're not in charge of anything that matters in Canada as far as I can see.

To go back to the genocide question,  I know this scholar, a good colleague, I was actually friends with his son, his name is John Milloy. He worked in the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples in the 1990s. He wrote the first big book on the experience of the residential school system. I've heard John take on the more radical people in Indigenous studies. For ex he had taught a class called The History of Indians in Canada. This was just 6 or 7 years ago, he was still doing it the year he retired. Students would ask him about the use of the word “Indian” and he would look at them and say – this is the guy who's friends with the Chief of the Assembly of First Nations – he'd say, Well when the Saskatchewan Indian chiefs change their name, I'll change the name of the course. He just thought it was nonsense. And I looked in his book for the use of the word 'genocide', it doesn't show up; it got republished and it showed up in a foreword someone wrote. I sent him an email two years ago when we did that letter protesting the Canadian Historical Association's claim that genocide is a proper term and he just never got back to me. 

It's not like Milloy called what happened in residential schools genocide. He didn’t do it when he republished the book in the wake of the TRC report. But he's not willing to say anything, as far as I can tell. He's just one of the many people who won't say anything. I also know a host of scholars, even some younger scholars, who have written more complicated histories of residential school systems, while also talking about the terrible abuse that happened in schools. This scholar my age wrote an article about this particular school which had this principal who was seemingly nicer than others, a nuanced essay twenty years ago now about that dynamic; the purpose of the schools being one thing and then how they work slightly differently in certain circumstances. It was what you would hope an intellectual would do. Back before this was ever a culture war issue. I often wonder what she’s doing these days. I guess she is not talking about the subject any more. 

LP: That's just it. A very vocal minority and a very silent majority is how conversations and institutions get captured. 

CD: And how long is it before it's not a silent majority, do you think? Most people don't know or don't care much about these subjects. We rely on others to give us our knowledge. How long before they just forget – before they're just reeducated? That's the other question. 

LP: That's true. What are Canadian historians doing these days? Not a lot of them are coming out on any of these contentious issues. It's basically you and four other people who've come into the public sphere. 

CD: There are probably some older professors who may disagree with what's going on... But the historical profession in Canada, with the current generation, is just lost. They've given up on the idea that Canada has a history that is anything but shameful. When I sent that email to people my age, middle-aged, mid-career historians who I know to be balanced, thoughtful people, a few of them were not sure about taking a public stance, and a few others have completely gone over and lost the sense of perspective. Lost the sense that our goal as historians is to actually tell the truth. About the complex stories of the day. They saw what we were doing with the letter as harmful, that’s the catchphrase, but also as really in bad taste. How could you do this in this particular moment? Just let it go. And these are people who took on the Marxist radicals [in the past]. And the president of the Canadian Historical Association then, I liked him, he had a good sense of real people's lives and he was tempered and more even-keeled. He lost it, in that context. It seems to have been a kind of moral panic where people lost the ability to self-criticize, to criticize certain ideas.

LP: Let's stay with that word, genocide. It seems to me that people have forgotten what it means... a systemic effort to annihilate an entire ethnic group. Is that really what happened in the march of the British empire from one coast to the other and in the making of Canadian state? Was there ever even open warfare against Indigenous tribes, of the kind that the Wounded Knee Massacre in the US was?

CD: No, though there are the two Riel resistance-rebellions; by any stretch, they are not very violent. The second one, where there is conflict, most of the people actually aren't interested in rebellion at all.

There are people, and sadly children now too, who are being educated, who are looking at the Kent Monkman pictures of people being rounded up for residential schools and Monkman would tell you Oh it's just a metaphor, that the RCMP are coming in and police are physically manhandling and people are being taken from their families, but I’ve seen, even among my own children, I have four children, they don't think it's a metaphor. The actual historians know that it's not quite the case, but they would make the argument that the systemic structures of coercion were such that that should now be seen as genocide. They're the ones redefining what counts as that. If you look at the five-point UN definition of genocide, and if you want to be kinda fudgy about this, one of the items is you're removing children from their families – and the residential school system did that. Did they do it with the goal of preventing future birth? Not in that way, though they did kind of plan to change the culture. It's a complicated story. You can pick out a few of those details. Another example of this is forced sterilization. We know for certain that it happened to several thousand Canadian women especially in the west over the course of the twentieth century. 

LP: Of specific ethnicity?

CD: The policy was for quote-unquote “feeble-minded women”. It's pretty horrible, it's eugenics. The early research on this shows that actually the groups who were most affected were Ukrainians. Ukrainians largely emigrated in the early twentieth century, and by the twenties and thirties we began to see this. These would be women who probably suffered from mental illness, or lived in abusive relationships, or had alcohol problems. They are being targeted disproportionately. Was it every Ukrainian woman, no. But compared to population percentage, there was a high number. 

And then there was a period in the sixties and seventies where it switches a bit and that's where you start to see a disproportionate picking out of Indigenous women. But people would take those facts, and suggest that that was part of a deliberate plan to limit the birth rates of Indigenous women, and that that's genocidal. The definition of genocide is you're trying to eradicate the whole group, you're trying take women and prevent them from giving birth, like you would see in China right now with the Uyghurs. That is clearly not what was happening in these policies. But if you make the accusations, and someone asks for details and fact-checks, they will seem a bit of an asshole. “How could you ask this?” I've re-read two years ago this U of Alberta historian who's written a very good, very meticulously detailed history about this policy. And she's very clear on the numbers – and she is not speaking out on this now. She's not trying to correct anyone when they say This policy was directly targeting Indigenous women, which is in some ways what the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women commission found. And case after case, people make claims. 

The other case that the Commission made that goes back in history is this case of the smallpox blanket. Obviously, people died of various diseases during the early contact between the old world and the new, smallpox is the worst but there were measles, tuberculosis etc. To my knowledge, and I've spoken to several historians about this, there seems to be one case, in the eighteenth century, during the Seven Years’ War, Jeffrey Amherst may have sent a smallpox blanket to groups he was fighting with. It's a bit unclear, but it's possible. When you look at the MMIW inquiry, they make this claim that disease was spread intentionally and you look at the footnotes, which I've done, and you trace it back -- it traces back to one potential incident. But if you read the inquiry, there was no doubt that the disease was spread intentionally. What are the sources for that? It leads you back to murky waters where there's no evidence of intentional attempt to eradicate an entire people. As one historian I know who works in this area says, up until the mid-nineteenth century this was not in their interest, the opposite in fact. Those who were expanding westward were fur traders. They relied on Indigenous people, they were dependent on them. It's when settlers come, the settlers want to displace the Indigenous population. For much of the period when the Indigenous people were dying of disease, it's the fur traders who were interacting with them and the exact opposite was in their interest. The Hudson Bay Company tried to do very early vaccination campaigns in the nineteenth century. They're trying to prevent the diseases from spreading. 

LP: I wanted to ask you about the modern land treaties. I suppose Canada started entertaining land treaties again in the 20th century in the 1970s? I am trying to understand why, seemingly overnight, some time in the last five years, we've become a country of unceded territories. Everyone in the academe and the NGO sector and even the government was talking about it suddenly, putting their treaties info in their social media bios. We've suddenly become a tenuous country. 

CD: There's a long history here. Canada by and large followed the British precedent of signing treaties to take possession. And famously in 1763 there's the Royal Proclamation where, after the defeat of France in North America, they're really trying to limit the American colonists from spreading westward. They devise the 'Indian territory' just west of the thirteen colonies, and they insist that any land deal has to be done by an agent of the crown, advertised as such – so they put these limits on Americans – this is one of the many things that Americans resented. The American revolution succeeds and in what becomes Canada the British crown continues to follow that policy of having treaties. 

LP: Which is a pretty non-genocidal way to proceed, I’d say.

CD: That’s right. The strongest claims that many Indigenous people have when it comes to this country is that agreements were made and then were broken. Those are pretty clear in some instances, and those are the strongest cases. The unceded territory thing is fascinating. You take the areas where the treaties were not signed, but settlers still came in; there's a chunk of those across the country, including what's now the national capital. It's an interesting question whether you would say that that is not Canadian land. The more radical groups would say it's not Canada, the treaty was never signed. The reality was the treaties were signed when the government was forced to sign, where there was a significant number of Indigenous people there and the treaty needed to be signed in order to facilitate settlement. Each case should be looked at individually, I think. But the idea that two hundred, three hundred years later Canada doesn't exist in the places that lack land treaty – that's a political choice that the last few generations of Canadians in elite institutions, law, universities, politics, are making. Now they're saying, we're going to take this “nation-to-nation” relationship seriously. Even though the nation may be the big Blackfoot nation of Alberta or it might be 800 people somewhere else. It's a fascinating fiction, that people are trying to make real. I know people who think it's important, and.. I don't have a firm opinion on this issue. My gut instinct tells me that it's a disaster in the making. 

When you have a nation and you divide up into these different kinds of citizenship groups you give certain people rights and have other people who don't have rights... My gut instinct is that that will not create peace, it will create tension. There was a few years ago the conflict over lobster fishing in Nova Scotia. Some said, it's the big corporations that are upset that a few of the Mi'kmaq fishers were fishing out of the normal harvesting season. That one framing seems to make sense. On the other hand, you have NS fishermen who aren't super wealthy who are trying to make a living and look across the bay and so-and-so because of their ancestry is fishing. And academics then say, But they're careful, they're not overfishing, all these ideas which are also wrapped up in a quasi-mystical sense that some people have a special connection with natural resources. I am skeptical about it. These tensions are going to grow the more we have these kinds of interactions. It's going to get worse when we're trying to get to a greener economy, and when you need to mine the kind of materials you need to put into batteries that go in electric cars, and there will be mining areas in those quote unquote traditional or unceded territories – you create layers and layers of conflict. I'm not saying that there's no legal case to be made for these rights, I'm not saying that this isn't a positive vision of Canada which celebrates Indigenous culture, but my general feeling is it's a disaster in the making. 

LP: Land acknowledgements are now recited everywhere... and they kinda hide the fact that Indigenous groups fought themselves over land and resources, no?

CD: I almost never do them myself. I don't do them not because I don't want to offer respect to Indigenous people; it's more a worry about what you're saying there, what kind of impression you're giving about the land, and whose land it is. It kind of suggests that some people belong more than others, and that rubs me the wrong way. I teach at Trent University – I actually grew up in Peterborough. It's bizarre that I ever ended up teaching back here. My family is from here, several generations... My grandmother born in the 1850s was buried down the road at the cemetery. I spent a chunk of time this summer going to Gaspé which is where my mother was from, going back to the eighteenth century. My family's been here for hundreds of years. I belong to this country. I deeply resent the idea that some people really belong here. If we treated you worse than me because you've only been in the country for x number of years, people would lose their minds at that kind of discrimination. I just find the idea unthought through and rife with all kinds of problems. And they load some people up with mystical properties that are also unnecessary. I'm also a pretty devout atheist, so there's that element as well. 

LP: No, I've noticed this tension between the official Canadian project (being agnostic about ethnic background, religion etc.) and designating some people as the most special of all.

CD: I mean, I get the reasons behind it. There are groups of Indigenous people who, statistics don’t lie, have worse lives than a lot of other Canadians. They suffer in a whole host of ways, from more poverty, more incarceration, and these problems are not unconnected to the colonial experience. I don't think that they're connected in a way that the phrase 'systemic racism' implies but I do think there is a connection. The well-meaningness comes from OK, we need to do something about this, we need to acknowledge the people in the ways that we didn't; in fact there are ways the Canadian culture would often denigrate the Indigenous people. I totally get that. 

But I think the good will will only last about a generation and it may run out. I think it works because in our contemporary culture, some would say Christian culture, we give special status to the victim. And those who are less fortunate. I get where it's coming from. But I think it can be dangerous. 

LP: Last couple of questions as I know you need to go soon... The recent wave of self-debasement in cultural institutions in Canada, particularly the museums. And arts councils adopting political goals. Where is this going to end? Canadians already have very little interest in their own culture and history. And then this comes around. No one's gonna consume that art. Are we gonna have a culture in ten years' time?

CD: It's such a tricky question because we're already so disinterested in Canadian things as such. The  institutions were created to give ourselves back to ourselves. I think they were created with the best intentions: the idea was that there's something distinct about Canada next to the United States. That's why we need the CBC. I used to really believe that and I still to an extent find that an appealing argument because we have the exact same language of the Americans and we are going to consume American stuff just by virtue of economies of scale. There is some reason to supplement the Canadian art and culture sector to make up for the problems of free market. Free markets are great but.. they don't care about Canadian culture. So I get that idea. But the fact is when you have a series of state-run institutions, they can be captured by whatever the current fad is. And the sad thing is that the current fad is, ironically, a kind of self-debasing, resentful, self-loathing Canadian culture. 

And this is probably made worse by the fact that people who staff these institutions are either elite people who have come from families with a lot of money, or aspire to be in that world. And they have lots of reasons to feel guilty about how they got where they are – so they imbibe this. 

It actually reminds me of another anecdote... I was at the Heterodox Academy annual meeting in Denver last year, chatting with a bunch of other Canadian academics who got interested in HA. A number of us know each other. What we realized is that one of the things we have in common is that we grew up in working class families. I mean, my father dropped out of high school and worked in GM and had a great labour job, so I grew up in a comfortable family but he worked in a factory. Sort of middle class in the accoutrements that we could afford, home ownership, car, but no access to culture, no access to higher forms of the art. A number of people who are alarmed at what's going on in the cultural world, intellectual world, are the kind of people with a background like I had who looked to the university world with admiration – oh wouldn't it be great to be in this place of higher learning – a real sense of that. And then we get here and we're told that we are privileged white men. And I think we're all a little bit a) skeptical but b) we don't have the sense of lèse majesté about it. We don’t go, what a fascinating thing, let's listen to this little person down here, and let's patronize them with these ideas. I don't have that. I just didn't grow up in that kind of background. And a lot of people who I was with didn’t either. That probably says something. The kind of people who are most attracted to these ideas had privileged upbringing and it seems easy for them to take these ideas in, to throw the legacy of cultural institutions and higher education away because they didn't have to work for them.