I visited Brock‘s Monument, near Niagara-on-the-Lake, on a perfect Sunday afternoon. There were only a handful of people around, and some of them were just out for a stroll in the surrounding park. Only a couple people bothered to read the informational plaques. Many of you are probably asking "Who is Brock and why does he deserve a monument?" Isaac Brock was a British general who was instrumental in repelling the initial American invasion in the War of 1812. He was killed in the pivotal Battle of Queenston Heights, which was won by the British/Canadian side and occurred right where the monument is situated. He was greatly aided in this battle by Tecumseh, the Shawnee chief who chose to fight with Brock against the Americans. Without Tecumseh and Brock, it's likely Canada would not exist today.
The importance of the Battle of Queenston Heights can't be exaggerated. Most of the British army was fighting Napoleon in Europe. Brock was given a bare bones force supplemented only by a few poorly trained Canadian militiamen. Tecumseh allying himself with Brock intimidated the Americans and gave Brock access to an extremely effective fighting force. The defeat demoralized the Americans and prevented them from launching a full scale invasion. Since there were no reinforcements available, the British would likely have not been able to defend against such an invasion and would've sought some sort of settlement, which likely would've ceded significant territory to the US, if not abandoned the entire colony to the Americans. In short, we are damn lucky there is a Canada at all.
I've heard Canadian history described as dull, but it isn't at all true. This perception is mainly due to Canadians having been inundated their entire lives with a steady diet of mythology from our southern neighbour, which makes their history seem much more exciting than ours. Our history is a rich panoply of courage, determination, and virtue. It is also sometimes ugly and disturbing. Canadians should know their history, as any citizen of any country should know its history, but also because there is so much to be learned from it that applies to the here and now.
Instead of celebrating the Battle of Queenston Heights, it's been ignored if not forgotten. Yes, Brock has the monument at the battle site but I bet the overwhelming majority of Canadians have no knowledge of him. (I asked several friends about Brock and Tecumseh; none of them knew anything about them.) Tecumseh was just as, if not more, important in the battle and while he certainly has not been erased - there are several things named after him, including a mountain near my hometown in Alberta - most Canadians appear to be wholly ignorant of his role - and the role of the Indigenous in general - in the founding of this great nation. (Ironically there are more things named after Tecumseh in the US, including at least ten schools and four US Navy Ships. The Americans greatly admired him as an adversary.)
Tecumseh was a highly intelligent man and a very persuasive and passionate leader. He didn't join a "white man's war" out of altruism; he had his own strategy and was convinced that the British/Canadian side would treat him and his people much better than the Americans would. He persuaded many of the northern tribes to join him in a confederacy, with the goal being to create a homeland for the Indigenous separate from both the British and the Americans. He believed the British were more trustworthy and less greedy than the Americans, and Brock made promises to him that would've helped achieve his goal. But Tecumseh was killed in the Battle of the Thames in 1813, when his British allies retreated and left him and his men outnumbered. His dream of an Indian Confederacy never materialized because the promises Brock made were never honoured.
In hindsight, Tecumseh's faith in the British looks reasonable only as the lessor of two bad options. While there were no Wounded Knee massacres and no forced marches along a Trail of Tears (today we would call this ethnic cleansing, and the perpetrators would be tried for crimes against humanity) in Canada, our country's record with the Indigenous is certainly nothing to be proud of; just look at the residential schools.
The residential schools were created to force Indigenous children to assimilate fully into Canadian society. They were funded by the government and run by churches. Either the money given by the government was insufficient or the churches pocketed a lot of it, or some combination of the two. Either way, the schools were run on a meagre budget, leaving the children undernourished and often without heat and proper medical care. Discipline was severe and violent, and physical and sexual abuse were rampant. When tuberculosis hit, the weakened children died in large numbers, a fact which the schools then covered up. Many families never heard from their children again and never knew what happened to them.
The residential schools were an attempt at cultural genocide. There is no way to justify this, and no excuses or minimizations are even remotely appropriate. Saying another country behaved worse than you means little. Being 'less racist' and 'less cruel' is not anything to be proud of, because it still means you are racist and cruel. It seems to make some Canadians feel better if they can say "we weren't as bad as other countries." But it really shouldn't.
It would serve our country well if people really knew our history, the good and the bad. All of our founding peoples- English, French, Indigenous - played large roles in creating this country and making it what it is today. Maybe the divide between Francophone Quebec and the rest of Canada would be a little less corrosive if we had a greater awareness of the history of Quebec and what it had to endure. Maybe people would look at our Indigenous citizens differently if they understood their history and how it impacts their lives to this day. Why are many Indigenous people distrustful and resentful of our society and government? Because 250 years of racism, lies, and betrayals will do that.
William Faulkner wrote that "The past is never dead, it's not even past," and a truer sentence has never been written. Every society or nation or country is a work in progress, in that everything has to be built upon what was built before. Old mistakes are corrected but new ones are made. The traumas and injustices of history are always lurking. (There is even some evidence that trauma may be passed from one generation to the next through our DNA.) Pretending history is irrelevant is pure folly. You can't truly understand the present if you ignore the past.
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