About a month ago a pair of white South Africans ignited an international discussion about race and responsibility when they printed 10 t-shirts with the words “I benefited from apartheid” written boldly across the chest.
Those 10 were distributed at an art installation and were spoken for so quickly that another 30 were quickly produced. The gesture, a response to reactionary criticism of a supermarket’s hiring policy, elicited all manner of responses. Some suggested the t-shirt designers were motivated by a misplaced guilt; others felt they were unnecessarily digging up old history better forgotten; still others felt they were appropriating a struggle that whites had little place in.
One thing was undeniable: those 40 t-shirts prompted a debate about race and apartheid, guilt and responsibility. Uncharacteristically, the debate centered on the place of whites within post-apartheid South Africa, asking uncomfortable questions that seldom get asked. To what extent do whites today remain beneficiaries of the apartheid system? To what extent are whites responsible for its ongoing effects?
More recently, a similar debate has emerged in Canada, ignited by the hunger strike of Chief Theresa Spence of Attawapiskat, and the concurrent, nationwide Idle No More movement. From shopping mall drum circles to highway disruptions and hashtags, aboriginal activists and their allies have forced a discussion of Canadian colonialism in countless homes across the country this holiday season.
Naturally, the tone of those conversations will help to determine whether Idle No More will change the discourse on colonialism in Canada, or simply fade into the history books of forgotten social media movements.
It will be tempting for some to write the movement off, to see this as a First Nations issue to which settlers have little to contribute and less to gain. But there is a lesson to be learned from South Africa here, and Canadians would do well to listen.
To admit that we settlers have benefited from colonialism in Canada will seem a platitude to some and a provocation to others, but it is something that we are unused to hearing in our day-to-day lives. In the era of pressure group politics, it is too tempting to write off aboriginal demands as just another “special interest” with a circumscribed area of relevance. And yet, if this were so, the system of colonialism that exists in Canada would actually be far easier to dismantle as ceding sovereignty would have little effect on the daily goings on of Canadians.
The reality is that many businesses, communities, and individuals would be impacted if our country took a fairer approach to our longstanding colonial history. Resources extracted from unceded land benefit Canadian economies in the south, often to the expense of local communities that rely on robust ecosystems for basic sustenance. When royalties on these resources go to a federal government democratically responsible to southern Canadian populations, it is the “hinterland” that suffers most.
Similarly, by systematically neglecting rural and urban aboriginal populations alike, and by choosing not to honour treaties from coast to coast to coast, our government has “saved” millions of dollars. Properly speaking, however, that money was never theirs to begin with. There is a moral argument to be made here, but also a legal one that stretches back as early as 1763, when the Britain issued a Royal Proclamation prohibiting western expansion without Crown approval.
What we have, then, are governments and businesses appropriating wealth from indigenous communities primarily to the benefit of settler communities in the south. Perhaps it doesn’t take the crossing of an ocean for resource extraction to constitute colonialism, though we are used to thinking of it in this way.
So, yes, I benefit from colonialism. And I don’t think it’s too great a stretch to say that colonialism has shaped my life as much as that of Canada’s First Nations, only in a vastly different, almost incomparable way. The very fact that I am writing this today on what was once Songhees territory might be proof enough of that uncomfortable fact. Colonization is a two-sided coin, with those benefit on one side and those who suffer on the other.
The question that “I benefited from apartheid” and Idle No More ask is whether decolonization might be a two-sided coin as well. We are too used to thinking of the effects of colonialism as an “aboriginal issue,” but its influences reach the lives of all Canadians.
If I benefit from colonialism, do I not have a moral responsibility to combat its oppressive effects? If there is one definitively Canadian issue, this may be it. The responsibility to challenge the mechanics of colonization and be “idle no more” lies with us all – settler and Songhees, colonized and colonizer.
Someone get me a t-shirt.