“A Fair Country” - part 1
Infovore that I am, I love reading over the holidays. More so than being acquainted with unfamiliar facts, I treasure being shown their context, and how they came to be. To paraphrase from my Facebook, I like knowing what; I love knowing why.
I finished John Ralston Saul’s A Fair Country: telling truths about Canada a few days ago — a thickly-enriching read, as he always is. Happily, it was an easier read than Reflections of a Siamese Twin, his previous tome on the Canadian identity. This may be because he spent less time on the decades leading up to Confederation this time around (a grey area in my schooling), or he drew that historical arc more tautly, or it may even be that I’m more familiar with that period now. :)
Saul’s goal (as evidenced by early references to the work as “three new myths about Canada”) is to re-envision Canada as:
- a fundamentally Metis civlization, not a European one.
- a nation built on peace, welfare, and good government (instead of the more familiar “peace, order and good government”)
- a country set to flourish once its elites internalize the first two points, and reject the learned helplessness that has characterized their behaviour, first with the British and now with the Americans.
He richly succeeds with the first two points; hopefully, he will be shown prescient on the third.
What most impressed me was his contrast of the historical tendency in European cultures towards monoculture, with the Aboriginal tendency towards diversity. One could call these conquer and coexistence paradigms, respectively. An Old-World comparison might use Japan and India. Japan is fairly monolithic; there are proportionally few minorities, and they nearly exterminated their own aboriginal groups. In contrast, India — despite millenia of internecine warfare, and all its entailed horrors — has a remarkably diverse culture. Indeed, Hinduism itself is more like a loosely-linked family of religions, than a monolithic faith.
Saul argues Canada’s success in peacefully integrating French and British colonies together would have been impossible under European nation-state thinking. Rather, it was a crowning triumph of the Aboriginal paradigm –a paradigm that one’s circle must expand to include “the other”, instead of destroying / assimilating them.
Taking the example of the Cree, he notes that their negotiations with European / European-Canadian officials were conducted on the basis of Witaskewin, “carefully negotiated and continually renegotiated peaceful coexistence… which includes the idea of sharing the space”. The end-product being Miyo-wicehtowin, or mutually-healthy relationships.
While we have consistently, catastrophically failed our First Nations siblings, it is that spirit of Witaskewin which allowed the people of two bitter-rival colonial powers to draw together co-operatively — despite differences of culture and language! Indeed, Protestants and Catholics only put weapons aside in Northern Ireland a decade ago.