I submitted this comment to the Globe and Mail yesterday. I dont know if theyll run it, I hope they do. --------- Scottish Independence: a Métis response Much ink, digital and otherwise, has been shed in the last few weeks in the Canadian media on Scotland’s independence referendum. Less attention, however, has been paid to the concrete relationship between Canada’s Indigenous peoples and Scottish self-determination. As a Métis woman--with fur-trade roots that stretch back to 19th and 20th century Scotland, England and Ireland--working and studying in Scotland today, I am intensely, viscerally interested in what Scottish independence may mean for decolonization of Indigenous peoples’ lives in both Canada and abroad. It is no secret that Canada is, in many ways, one of the first iterations of Scottish independence. A recent museum exhibit at Aberdeen University explored the Scottish Diaspora to Canada, and the organizers went so far as to mount a Pioneer Day to celebrate the exciting lives that Scots migrants lived once they crossed the Atlantic and settled the Empty West. An upcoming conference to be held at the City Chambers in Glasgow in January 2015 plans to explore John A. MacDonald’s role as “Son of Glasgow, Father of Canada”. There is a palpable, proud relationship that many Scots share over the links between Canada and Caledonia in the past and present. Some could even argue the Scots have more than proven their ability to run a country by the very founding of Canada in 1867 by Glasgow’s lost son. However, the impact of Scottish migration and politics on Indigenous people in Canada is quietly left out of these enthusiastic discourses. Nowhere is the genocidal role of MacDonald’s Indian residential schools, designed to kill the Indian in the child, brought up in the heroic tales of Scottish creation of the Canadian State. Nor is MacDonald’s racist Indian Act discussed broadly in contemporary Scottish discourses of Scots-Canada kinship. At a Trudeau Foundation Summer Institute in May 2013, Métis author Maria Campbell reminded us that everything that was practiced on Indigenous peoples in Canada by the English was first practiced on the Scots and the Irish. Hierarchies of dispossession rarely end well. Margaret Atwood explores the unending re-cycling of colonial violence that spans the North Atlantic in her evocative 1978 poem ‘Four Small Elegies: Beauharnois 1838, 1977’. The English sacking of Quebecois homes by Scots volunteers (themselves victims of displacement through the Highland Clearances) in Beauharnois in 1838 prompts Atwood to ask: “Those whose houses were burned/burned houses/Whatever else happens once you start?”. Yes, Scots suffered, but they migrated that suffering to Canada and re-enacted it upon other peoples. The omissions of the re-circulations of Scottish dispossession upon populations in Canada are all the more glaring as some pundits in Scotland discuss the Independence Referendum as a) a means to ‘decolonize’ an Indigenous Scotland or b) compare Scottish independence to Quebec sovereignty. I’m all for independence. I plan to vote ‘yes’ with great enthusiasm this week, to stymy the impacts of the failing politics of London Rule and Etonian-led austerity on other parts of the United Kingdom. But I also hope to use this fervent local discourse of Scottish decolonization and anti-oppression as a means to insert a conversation about Scottish complicity in the colonization of Canada’s Indigenous people into the Scottish zeitgeist. What is often forgotten in diasporic narratives is that Indigenous knowledge, stories, goods and resources flowed back to the UK and other colonial metropoles. Scottish museums are chock-a-block with pelts, furs, sacred items and other material culture brought back to the Isles by Hudson’s Bay men and their families. Scotland, though suffering from the Highland Clearances and other policies which disadvantaged some Scottish peoples, still benefitted materially, economically and intellectually from its engagement with Indigenous peoples and Nations in Canada. When I mark that ‘yes’ on my ballot this week, it won’t be for some benevolent or fuzzy feeling of Scottish-Canadian kinship. It will be for my ancestors who bore the brunt of Scottish and English colonialism and survived all these generations to provide me with the means to return to the heart of the colonial Empire to heal the pain of what was wrought upon the nations Britain enthusiastically oppressed. For me, it will be a loving and audacious act of decolonization within and across nations.
Posted on: Mon, 15 Sep 2014 14:47:08 +0000
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