To the End of the Hyphen-Nation: Decolonizing Multiculturalism

"Visible minority" is defined by Statistics Canada and by the Employment Equity Act as "persons, other than Aboriginal peoples, who are non-Caucasian in race or non-white in colour"

(emphasis added).

One of the realities is that when we talk of multiculturalism, we are currently talking about visible minorities only.

The Toronto Roundtable on Multiculturalism Mosaic to Harmony: Multicultural Canada in the 21st Century (2007)

now is an especially powerful moment to be researching and teaching in the field of Canadian literature. Across Turtle Island powerful and creative indigenous-led movements are mobilizing on a number of fronts: to protest violations of indigenous treaty rights; to call for restitution; to defend land, water, sky, plants, and animals against corporate encroachment; to seek justice for housing infrastructure crises; to call for public inquiries into murdered and missing indigenous women, and to reinvigorate Aboriginal cultures. What is extraordinary about these movements is not the scale or strength of Aboriginal resistance. As Kwakwaka'wakw activist Gord Hill points out in his recent critical history, indigenous peoples have continually resisted the brutalities of colonialism for five hundred years, from the Beothuk resistance in Newfoundland in the early seventeenth century (19), to the Red Power Movements of the 1960s and 1970s (58), to the Kahnawake Warrior uprising at Oka. The recent and ongoing protests in resistance to the Northern Gateway Pipeline; the Pictou Blockade against Northern Pulp Mill; the Elsipogtog First Nation resistance of hydro fracking in New Brunswick, and the Idle No More protests during the winter of 2012–13 sparked by the Canadian federal government's proposed changes to the Indian, Fisheries, and Navigable Water Acts (amongst others; 21 Kino-nda-niimi Collective): these and other watershed movements squarely build on the strong legacy of indigenous resistance in the Americas and reverberate into the future. What is different about these resurgent movements is the degree of continent-wide non-indigenous participation and support. As the writers of The Winter We Danced: Voices from the Past, the Future, and the Idle No More Movement observe, "it engaged the oft-slumbering Canadian public as never before. Within four months, the Idle No More movement moved beyond the turtle's continental back and became a global movement with manifold demands" (22). Aparna Sanyal sees such indigenous-led movements as "a gift from Canada's fastest-growing population [that] shows that the cultural centre of the country is shifting." In this context, it becomes an especially exciting endeavour to teach Canadian literature at the postsecondary level, when to teach students about the histories of colonial injustice means also to connect them with those of the present—as well as with the radical re-imaginings of Canada that these vigorous social movements invite. Or at least, that is how I wish it would feel. In reality, teaching indigenous literatures in the multicultural Canadian literature classroom remains as fraught an endeavour as ever. In some ways it may be more so. In this paper I weave together three scenes from my Canadian literature classroom into my analysis of Statistics Canada's "Ethnic Diversity Survey" (2002), an extraordinary document on multicultural belonging, in order to probe the unconscious ways in which multiculturalism shapes the reading and misreading of indigenous literatures, as well as the possibilities of future practices of solidarity and alliance building on Turtle Island.

While this paper seeks to probe the unconscious pedagogical work that multiculturalism as a social policy performs and why it makes teaching and learning indigenous literatures in multicultural contexts difficult, I want to differentiate the motivations of this paper from those of the pedagogical "complaint tradition." Teachers' complaints about the perceived decline in quality of student literacy and thought forms a robust tradition going back to the early modern era. The tradition of teachers' complaints is inevitably ideological and is invested in the maintenance of particular class and race hierarchies. As James and Leslie Milroy put it, "Language attitudes stand proxy for a much more comprehensive set of social and political attitudes, including stances strongly tinged with authoritarianism, but often presented as 'common sense'" (46...