Against Guilty History

John A. Macdonald, the first prime minister of Canada, was born in 1815. Some years ago, as the bicentennial of Macdonald’s birth neared, some civic-minded residents of the Ontario county in which I spend summers decided to mark the occasion by raising a statue in his honor.

Macdonald arrived at the county seat of Picton in 1833 to train as a lawyer. The law would ultimately enrich him and enable him to enter politics. Yet he had not reached his 20th birthday when he nearly wrecked his career before it started.

Macdonald got into an altercation with a prominent local doctor. Politics may have been a factor: The doctor was a Reformer; Macdonald already a Tory. Alcohol may have been a factor too—it so often was with Macdonald. Both men were charged with assault. The doctor was convicted. Had Macdonald been convicted as well, he would likely have lost his right to practice law.

On October 8, 1834, Macdonald made his first appearance in a court of law. The case he argued before the jury was his own. He won.

The Prince Edward County statue commemorated that early turning point in Macdonald’s career. The sculptor, Ruth Abernethy, depicted the youthful, wavy-haired Macdonald as if he was addressing a jury, resting one arm on a witness box, inside of which stands an empty chair. The chair invited passersby to sit in the middle of this significant scene in Canadian history, maybe pose for a photograph, and thereby join the country’s continuing story.

For five years, the statue stood as an ornament on Main Street, in front of the town library. Then came the events of summer 2020. Two months of pandemic lockdowns had left millions of people bored and restless. The killing in late May of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer triggered a worldwide surge of protest that frequently escalated into vandalism and riot.

Statues interpreted as symbols of white domination or European colonialism were disfigured or toppled across the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe. In Canada, statues of Macdonald were destroyed or vandalized. Ours in Picton was twice daubed with red paint.

At first, local authorities tried to protect the Picton statue. Then, in May 2021, an anthropologist working near a former Indigenous residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia, discovered disturbances in the ground that she said probably indicated unmarked graves. A local Indigenous band council quickly enlarged this claim, announcing that the remains of 215 children had been found at the former school.

The history of these residential schools, where students and teachers suffered grim rates of mortality from disease, had long been known and acknowledged. Large-scale programs to vaccinate the Indigenous people of British North America against smallpox began in the 1830s and were highly successful. But tuberculosis was not so well understood. Students brought in from isolated bands proved tragically susceptible. The residential schools were ravaged by tuberculosis until the advent of modern antibiotics.

Physical and sexual abuse also disgraced the school system. Students lost continuity with their ancestral cultures and languages. These awful events were minutely described in accounts published in the 1990s, and they were reexamined by a federal commission in the 2010s. In the 2000s, the government of Canada issued a formal public apology for the schools and paid billions of dollars of restitution to some 80,000 people who had attended them.

The United States operated a residential school system of its own, in both the mainland U.S. and in Hawaii and Alaska. The American system was even more decentralized than the Canadian; record-keeping was poor. In December, The Washington Post published an investigation reporting that the true death toll over the 150 years from the 1820s to the 1970s was three times higher than the previously accepted figures. In the U.S., as in Canada, tuberculosis, pneumonia, and influenza were the leading causes of death for much of that period, followed by other infectious diseases for which causes and cures would not be discovered until years later.

But here at Kamloops, seemingly, was proof of something even more terrible: mass death on a previously unknown scale, covered up by school authorities and the government of Canada, over a period of almost a century. Or so Canadians and the world were invited to believe. Prestigious international media such as the Associated Press, CBS News, and The New York Times shocked the world with news reports of the lost schoolchildren.

In response to the news, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tweeted that he’d ordered the flags above the Canadian Parliament and all federal buildings to be lowered in mourning. The flags would remain lowered until November 7, 2021, the longest official mourning in Canadian history. A year after the original headlines, he joined a daylong memorial service at the site, where Governor-General Mary Simon, effectively Canada’s head of state, denounced the “atrocities” that had taken place at the school.

The residential-school system in Canada dates back to the mid-19th century. The system wound down in the 1970s; the last school shut in the ’90s. But it was Macdonald’s government that put federal resources into the system for the first time, and so its sins were laid at his door. In June 2021, following the “mass grave” claims, the Prince Edward County Council voted 13 to one to remove the Macdonald statue from Picton Main Street.

[Mary Annette Pember: A history not yet laid to rest]

No country has a perfectly clean past. Canada’s, however, is cleaner than most. The most notorious episode of violence erupted in 1885. Indigenous and Métis people in the Saskatchewan territory were goaded into rebellion by local abuses. The uprising was suppressed at the cost of fewer than 100 battlefield deaths on all sides. Eight Indigenous men were hanged on one day in November 1885 for their deadly attacks on white settlers and missionaries. Three others had their death sentences commuted. (The rebellion’s ringleader had been tried and hanged a few days earlier.) Compared to the recurring atrocities in the trans-Mississippi American West, this is a mild record of armed force. Yet, over the past decade, Canada has been wracked by a spasm of self-accusation of the severest crimes a nation can commit.

In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission accused Canada of “cultural genocide” against Native peoples. In 2019, another commission—this one investigating the murders and disappearances of thousands of Indigenous women and girls (commonly at the hands of the men in their lives)—dropped the modifier cultural to upgrade the accusation to “race-based genocide.”

Trudeau at first conceded the charge. Speaking in Vancouver after the second commission’s conclusion, he said, “We accept their findings, including that what happened amounts to genocide.” A few days later, he took a step back. Speaking in French to Radio-Canada, he said: “I accept the commissioner’s report, including the fact that they used the word genocide, but for me, it is a bit more appropriate, I believe, to talk of a ‘cultural genocide.’”

Pope Francis, visiting Canada in the summer of 2022, lent his authority to the accusation: “It is true. It was genocide.”

In October 2022, a member of Parliament for the left-wing New Democratic Party introduced a motion to acknowledge “what happened in Canada’s Indian residential schools as genocide.” The motion was adopted by unanimous consent. Not a single lawmaker dissented.

The allegation that hundreds, if not thousands, of children had died in cruel neglect (or worse) in Canadian educational institutions, and that their bodies had then been covertly buried, was thus accepted as fact. Doubters, including some of the country’s leading historians, faced accusations of being “genocide deniers.”

Despite this overwhelming social pressure, awareness did begin to seep through Canadian society that something was amiss. No new human remains have emerged; excavations, which could provide definitive proof of unmarked burials, have not taken place.

As the mass-graves story has been challenged, those who told it have become more militant in its defense. The federal Department of Justice said it is studying proposals to criminalize so-called residential-school denialism.

Rather than contesting specifics, however, advocates have shifted the battleground to more philosophical terrain: a new practice of condemning the very existence of Canada and countries like it as a crime, the crime of “settler colonialism.” A project of “decolonization” now dominates Canadian cultural institutions, universities, even provincial K–12 education systems.

One startling incident garnered much attention. In September of this year, several Toronto District public schools sent middle schoolers to a march on behalf of Native water claims. Once at the event, teachers led the students in anti-Israel chants. A Jewish student who took part was reportedly told by a teacher to wear a blue shirt to identify her as a “settler” and “colonizer.”

The comedian Louis C.K. has a bit about the word Jew being an unusual word—it can be both the perfectly correct term for a Jewish person and, depending on the tone, a nasty slur: “He’s a Jew,” as opposed to “He’s a Jew.”

So it is with settler colonialism. At one level, this can be simply a descriptive term for how Canada developed from a string of European colonies populated by European settlers. The laws of Canada, its political institutions, its technology, its high culture, and its folkways were largely imported from across the Atlantic Ocean. How could it have been otherwise? Canada was a thinly populated place before the Europeans arrived, perhaps 500,000 people in the half continent from Newfoundland to British Columbia, from the southerly tip of Ontario to Baffin Island.

In the more densely populated regions of the Americas, Indigenous culture made a deep impression on successor societies. You encounter it in the language: potato, maize, and chocolate are all words of Indigenous origin. When a Mexican eats a taco, he is likely not only eating a pre-Columbian food; he is also using a name derived from pre-Columbian sources.

Wars against and alongside Indigenous nations exerted enormous influence over the ultimate form and borders of Canada. Why is English rather than French spoken in northern New England, upstate New York, and the valley of the Ohio? Why was the border between the future Canada and the future United States drawn where it is? The answers to those questions were determined in great part by complex struggles, first among Indigenous nations, then between those nations and the French and English colonies, and finally among the independent United States and the British colonies and their respective Indigenous allies and enemies.

But the character of the society that formed within those borders was determined by the settlers themselves, for basic reasons of demography.

The encounter between Europe and the Americas triggered one of the greatest demographic calamities in human history. The Americas were first inhabited by wanderers from Siberia. When the most recent ice age ended, the land bridge to Asia disappeared. There would be little contact between the two portions of humanity for thousands of years. When the worlds met again, after 1492, they infected each other in ways that proved much more deadly to the Americans than the other way around. Indigenous people died in horrifying numbers. In densely populated Mexico, the population shrank by perhaps as much as 90 percent. The numbers for what is now Canada must have been fearful too, and from a much tinier starting point.

Such a catastrophe must have convulsed the afflicted societies. Former structures of authority and belief must have been shaken, old gods discredited. The ability of Indigenous people to defend themselves against the incursions of the Europeans was broken by microbes at least as much as, or more than, by the newcomers’ superior military capability.

History abounds with stories of conquest: The Arabs exploded out of the desert to impose Islam upon the Middle East and North Africa; King William and his Normans crossed the English Channel in 1066; the Manchus overthrew the Ming dynasty to rule China. For that matter, plenty of such stories exist in the pre-Columbian history of this hemisphere. When we read land acknowledgments about the different nations that hunted or farmed in what is now, say, Montreal or Toronto, we are reading lists of invaders and invaded, victors and vanquished, enslavers and enslaved.

Throughout history, however, the upheaval of conquest has only very slowly altered underlying social and demographic realities. The winners seize the heights of the social hierarchy and appropriate the land and wealth of the previous elites. But for the toiling subjects beneath those elites, life continues more or less as before. They pay taxes to new masters. Their patterns of work, their religious faith, their language, their family organization and funeral rituals—these change very gradually, if at all.

What happened in the Americas (and in Australia and New Zealand) was very different. After contact with Europeans, one social reality largely vanished and was replaced by another. If settler-colonial were simply an attempt to describe and explain that difference, then the term would be useful.

[Adam Kirsch: The false narrative of settler colonialism]

But now we come to the sneer in Louis C.K.’s joke.

Settler-colonial is not intended purely, or even primarily, as a description of a particular path of social development. It is intended as a condemnation of the new societies that have been created by that path of development. And there is something very peculiar about this critique of Canada and elsewhere in the New World.

Moral critique is always based on an implied moral alternative. When socialists denounce capitalist societies, they do so because they believe they possess a superior code for creating and distributing wealth. When Islamists attack secular societies, they do so because they believe they better understand God’s commands for how men and women should live.

But what is the moral alternative offered by the critique of settler colonialism?

Sooner or later, the Old World was going to discover the New. How might that encounter have gone differently in any remotely plausible way?

In the Canadian case, Macdonald is harshly criticized for not doing more to rescue western Indigenous nations from the catastrophic effects of the disappearance of buffalo herds in the late 1870s and early ’80s. At the time, the trans-Canada railway was not yet finished. Beyond its central core, the federal government was a puny organization whose civilian employees were recruited more for party loyalty than technical competence. The most important federal force in Western Canada was the Northwest Mounted Police, which numbered only about 300 troopers. Even so, the Macdonald government contrived to deliver rations to almost the entire population that had signed treaties with Canada, some 30,000 affected people. The Macdonald ministry spent more on support for Indigenous populations than it did on the Canadian military or almost any other function of government. Even a severe critic of the government’s record, the historian James Daschuk, acknowledges that “the Macdonald administration avoided the political backlash from a region-wide mortality of the indigenous population from famine,” even if “the quantity of rations was often the absolute minimum to sustain life.”

Macdonald’s critics blame him precisely because he tried to save Native lives in the way he thought best: by guiding the Indigenous people of Western Canada toward a self-sustaining way of life in the modern world. Macdonald’s hopes and plans failed. But no one can say that latter-day policies would have succeeded any better.

Over its near-decade in power since 2015, the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has nearly tripled spending intended to benefit Indigenous people. The scale of the spending is very large. Canada now commits more resources to what the government terms “Indigenous priorities” than national defense. Over that same period, Canadian Indigenous people have plunged into a demographic disaster more terrible than anything in the Macdonald years. From 2017 to 2021, average life expectancy for Indigenous people in British Columbia dropped by six years, to 67.2 years (the average for non-Indigenous Canadians in 2021 was 82.5 years). From 2015 to 2021, Indigenous people in Alberta suffered a collapse in life expectancy of seven years, to 60 for men and 66 for women. The principal culprit: opioid addiction and overdose. In Alberta, Indigenous people die from opioids at a rate seven times higher than non-Indigenous Albertans.

Canadian history is unscarred by equivalents of the Trail of Tears or the Wounded Knee Massacre. Yet Native Americans are more likely to complete high school than are Indigenous Canadians. The land acknowledgments and genocide accusations are not helping.

Almost all real-world ideas for improvement of the condition of Indigenous Canadians depend on the resources and institutions that were developed by the modern society of Canada—which was settler-colonial in the non-sneering sense of the term. The idea that people separated by thousands of miles of distance could owe a duty of care to one another because they were citizens of the same nation was carried to North America in the same sailing ships that brought to this continent all of the other elements that make up our liberal democracy.

In other words, the system of beliefs that so negatively judges settler colonialism is itself one of the most refined and exquisite products of settler colonialism. To the extent that a modern liberal democracy has failed to deliver on those promises to any category of its people, whether defined by race, sex, or any other characteristic, then it is both the responsibility and the pride of that democracy to attempt to correct that wrong.

There are passages of guilt to remember and expiate. History should always be told in full. But we don’t correct past wrongs committed in a liberal democracy by defaming the ideal itself.

Like Americans, Australians, and New Zealanders, modern-day Canadians live in a good and just society. They owe honor to those who built and secured that good and just society for posterity: to the soldiers and sailors and airmen who fought the wars that kept those societies free; to the navvies and laborers who built their roads, laid their rail, dug their seaways; to the authors of their laws and the framers of their constitutions; and, yes, to the settlers and colonists who set everything in motion.

This essay is adapted from a talk given in Toronto on December 4, 2024, to the Canadian Institute for Historical Education.