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INTRODUCTION: ABORIGINAL CANADA REVISITED
- University of Ottawa Press
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Kerstin Knopf INTRODUCTION: ABORIGINAL CANADA REVISITED day, at the beginning ofthe 2ist century,it has been more thanfive hundred yearssince the "discovery" and beginning ofthe European conquest of North America—the "new world." The term new world itself betrays the European ideological framework of the late 15th and i6th century that included the desire to explore another "new" non-European world, the divine and political right to the conquest and domination thereof, and the perceived European cultural and intellectual supremacy over the inhabitants ofthis 'new' continent. Colonial European discourse deemed them uncivilized primitives—noble, and mystical wo/men of the woods at best, and cruel, bloodthirsty, and cannibalistic savages at worst. The perspective of the original inhabitants of this new world is a different one. Wherever first contact took place, the Europeans must have appeared as strange and 'other' to Aboriginal people, not fathomable as equal human beings. To Native people, their world was not new and they, in allprobability, did not feel discovered. TheEuropean first-comers must haveseemed visitors, even pitiful at times, who had to be fed and helped through the first years, as 2 t in the case of the Jamestown settlement. In the situation of contact between two worlds unknown to each other, who has the right to define his/her own culture as the norm and the encountered world as the 'other' and inferior culture? The Europeans' self-proclaimed natural, divine, and political right to invade these new territories quickly solved that question. The pervasive usage ofterms like "discovery" and "new world" betrays contemporary power relations in North America and the ongoing ideological and discursive fortification of Eurocentric cultural and political hegemony as can be seen in the recently released feature film The New World (2005). Today the Native inhabitants of Canada and the USAare still internally colonized peoples. They belong to the Fourth World—nations subjected to imperial domination within the nations that colonized their traditional territories (Manuel/Posluns 1974). In Canada, politics, economics, judicial and social systems, museum culture, arts, print media, and electronic media have remained dominated by the Canadian mainstream throughout the ioth century. However, Aboriginal1 visual artists, intellectuals, politicians,lawyers, entrepreneurs, writers and other professionals have been claiming positions in these areasand in the past fewyearshavebegun to activelyparticipate in the Canadian mainstream and in the shaping of public discourses. This volume looks critically at the state ofAboriginal Canada at the beginning of the new millennium and asks: How much has the status ofAboriginal peoples within the nation and their relation to mainstream Canada changed? How much have Aboriginal people been able to decolonize Canadian institutions and public discourses? What has been achieved on the waytoward emancipation of AboriginalCanada? ABORIGINAL PROTEST AGAINST COLONIAL DOMINATION The "Oka crisis" in Quebec in 1990 certainly was the trigger for a new Aboriginal self-consciousness and a turn in Canadian-Aboriginal relations. It was the climax of a series of events that started with Trudeau's unsuccessful White Paper in 1969 and escalated to the bringing down of the Meech Lake 3 INTRODUCTION [54.226.25.246] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 13:29 GMT) KERSTIN KNOPF Accord in 1990 by Elijah Harper. On the one hand, the Mohawks' stand for their sacred burial ground fortified antagonisms between mainstream and Aboriginal Canada. This was largely due to the overreaction of the Quebec provincial, and later the federal government, as well as the criminalization of the initially peaceful blockaders, not to mention the biased Canadian media coverage of this conflict, and the media construction of the "gun-toting, militant, terrorist Mohawk warriors" (Guthrie Valaskakis 2005,39). However, the conflict did force the Canadian public and government to acknowledge Canadian colonial history and the subsequent political, economic, and social domination ofAboriginal people. The crisis over the Pines and a golf course evolved to a crisis inAboriginalCanadian relations and compelled Canada to address Aboriginal issues on a much broader and more serious basis. Again and again simmering conflicts over Aboriginal and treaty rights became politicized on the national level, with Aboriginal people protesting continuous violations of their rights and exploitation of their resources by mainstream industry. In the spirit of Oka, they have asserted and defended Aboriginal and treaty rights—from continual large-scaleroad blockades against logging and clear-cutting of forests in British Columbia2 and Grassy Narrows, Ontario,3 to the occupation of Ipperwash Provincial Park in Ontario in 1995, where they protested against the destruction of a sacred burial ground at the park and strove to...