Canada is stereotypically characterized as a country filled exclusively with cold weather, maple syrup, and unwaveringly nice people. However, in reality, the land we now call Canada was founded on the violent colonization and genocide of Indigenous people. To understand the complication of Canada, we need to examine the country’s past and present to see why stereotypes don’t always line up with the truth.

When we look at Canada’s dark past, we need to start at the beginning. The first people to inhabit what we now know as North America migrated from Asia at least 20,000 years ago. Europeans, obsessed with the idea of the supposed “New World,” made the journey across the Atlantic Ocean to establish settlements there. European colonial powers in Canada fought bitterly with each other, ending lives and waging wars over land that was never theirs. Indigenous peoples in Canada were killed in the largest numbers by diseases brought over from Europe. European colonizers also murdered Indigenous people during land thefts and forced removals. When colonizers landed in the “New World,” over 100 million Indigenous peoples may have lived in the Americas. By the end of the 19th century, the population of Indigenous peoples had depleted by 90 to 99 percent.

As the Canadian government grew larger and more powerful, government officials began signing treaties with Indigenous leaders. Yet while most Indigenous leaders viewed these treaties as nation-to-nation agreements of peace, Europeans saw them as real estate deals that entirely erased any Indigenous ownership of their land. According to Alan McMillan and Eldon Yellowhorn, “treaties shifted from ‘peace and friendship’ to land surrender.” Often, the Canadian government resorted to blatant deception when writing these treaties. Government agents would write treaties with very technical language with which Indigenous leaders weren’t familiar, and there were often huge differences between the verbal agreements made between Indigenous peoples and government officials and the actual written treaties. 

As more and more Indigenous land was stolen, the Canadian government created reserves. Reserves are, in short, pieces of land that are recognized as belonging exclusively to Indigenous people. However, the Canadian government found many ways to steal land from these reserves and even lease Indigenous land to companies that exploited it for profit. These reserves were created by the Canadian government (run exclusively by white Europeans), which meant Indigenous people had no choice and little to no input. 

The Canadian government didn’t stop at pushing Indigenous people off of their land, though, and it soon began to pass legislation focused on depriving Indigenous people of their culture. These laws restricted Indigenous people’s ability to practice their own culture and traditions. Additionally, they banned wearing Indigenous regalia and clothing in public and outlawed Indigenous sacred objects. Many of these laws imposed new systems onto Indigenous people, making them function under the Canadian government and stripping them of their right to operate in a self-governing way. 

The Canadian government intended to completely assimilate Indigenous people into white Canadian society, which many refer to as “cultural genocide.” Since Canada’s initial colonization, European colonizers and settlers viewed Indigenous peoples as though they needed to become European and “civilized,” even though the very concept of “civilization” is rooted in white supremacy and racist thought. 

With this aim of cultural genocide in mind, the Canadian government created the residential school system. The residential school system aimed to indoctrinate Indigenous children into conformity with European religion, culture, and lifestyle. Residential schools kidnapped Indigenous children from their families, took them far away from their communities, and punished them if they tried to acknowledge their cultures in any way. Think for a minute about just how deeply evil that is - taking children away from everything they’ve ever known and putting them through unimaginable abuse for years, just to further a government’s racist agenda. 

Indigenous children forced into residential schools had their hair cut short and were made to wear uniforms and follow a very restrictive schedule. If children broke the rules, they would be severely punished. Emotional, sexual, and psychological abuse was widespread in residential schools, and physical abuse was weaponized as a form of punishment. Survivors of residential schools recall being beaten brutally, seeing their fellow “students” shackled to their beds, and some Indigenous children had needles pushed into their tongues for speaking their own languages. 

These abuses, along with overcrowding, lack of proper sanitation, and terrible food and health care, resulted in a shockingly high death toll at residential schools. Additionally, residential schools provided Indigenous children with insufficient education, as most “students” had only reached grade 5 by the time they were 18 as they were forced to do so much manual labour that they didn’t spend as much time in classes. In 1907, P.H. Bryce, a public health physician for the Canadian government, reported that 24 percent of previously healthy Indigenous children across Canada were dying in residential schools. This statistic does not include children who died at home, where they were frequently sent when they were seriously ill. The scope of residential schools’ crimes are still being discovered, as over one thousand bodies of Indigenous children were found in unmarked graves at residential schools in the span of a few months in 2020-2021.

As Pamela Palmater, a Mi’kmaq lawyer, professor, activist, and politician, said: “... why is it important to understand the history of genocide in Canada? Because it’s not history.” While some would say the residential school system ended when the last residential school closed in 1996, that doesn’t account for the impact the system has had on the Indigenous people who endured its horrors. Indigenous communities across Canada have gone through severe intergenerational trauma and loss of language and traditional teachings due to the effort the Canadian government put into erasing these aspects of Indigenous culture. Additionally, the oppression of Indigenous peoples in Canada is visible today in the forms of land disputes, disproportionate levels of incarceration, lack of housing and systemic poverty, marginalization, and the crisis of violence against Indigenous women, girls, and two-spirit people.

If we ever want to be proud to be Canadian, we need to acknowledge Canada’s past and present, including the parts that are terrible and shameful. However, we also need to take action to ensure that Canada can be a place where everyone has access to the human rights they deserve. We can’t erase the past, but we can create a better future. Whether or not that future views Canada well depends on us.