I did my proposal presentation for my Masters today, one of two actually. This first one is to some Honours students fascilitated by a History prof, which is sort of a practice run before the BIG proposal presentation this coming Wednesday, which will be to the History department and outside history departments and spectators if they want it. Besides my experience in drama productions and my more recent bout as president of Native Student Council, this will be the biggest presentation I’ve had to date.
My thesis, for those who don’t know yet, is the colonial destruction of the Pokemouche Reserve by the governments of New Brunswick and Canada. I had excellent feedback, but the most startling trend is the lack of knowledge these students had on Mi’kmaq history. This is not my judgement, this was theirs! They had no idea what was going on in the Maritimes and this is coming from a university that prides itself on Maritime history. As a result of that, my presentation just vanished from memory with only those comments fresh in my head. How can scholars consider themselves objective and leave out the Mi’kmaq people? Someone commented that whatever indigenous history they had, it ended by the 1700s.
I feel uneasy about this. I, as a Masters student, should not be the one educating these students, who obviously want to learn about this history. Last week, a student asked me for sources on residential schools, so I told him to read The Circle Game: Shadows and Substance in the Indian Residential School Experience in Canada by Roland Chrisjohn et al.. He not only ate it up, but he applied what he learned in his comment to me. He asked me, would you consider what the government powers did to Pokemouche an act of genocide? My answer is, “Yes. But I can’t say it because I would not be considered objective.”
The history as an academic discipline was developed in such a way, that you can’t say it like it is, as my previous entry, “Academic Objectivity” explained. Sadly, it is a Eurocentric discipline. Canada’s residential schools were an act of genocide. Besides the fact that the mortality rate at these so-called instititions was between 25-70% depending on the school, the academic who defined ‘genocide’, Rafael (or Raphael) Lempkin AND the United Nations Genocide Convention , which applied five definitions of genocide, state that, “Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group” is an act of genocide. Despite an actual academic and an actual piece of international law, you still cannot use the world “genocide” in history against Canada and the United States. You certainly can with Rwanda though! And Turkey for their genocide of Armenians! But never for the European nations, unless it was directed against fellow Europeans, such as the Jewish Holocaust and what happened in the former Yugoslav state. As so many indigenous scholars say, our holocaust never ended. It’s still here. Canada’s last residential school closed in 1993. But Canada will still use their warships to ram defenceless Mi’kmaq fisherman in 200o-1. To which the NDP political party (the so-called far left) asks the previous Liberal government (the so-called left), “Why didn’t you do it sooner?”
