There was a Vancouver Sun article at the weekend, by Peter McMartin - where he asked how long it will be before he can call himself a ‘Native’ of Canada? He’s upset that terms like ‘Settler’ are used to identify people like him.

A couple people have asked me about it, and so OK here’s the issue.

The only reason we need a term for them, is because there’s a term for us (Natives). We’re put in a box and given an ID that has the word ‘Indian’ written on it. We didn’t choose that, but we have that because our countries were all bulldozed over by…??? Well by someone… and we’re still here, and still don’t have self-rule in our own lands and have separate and inferior legal status in those places. Which is a present day problem (not something consigned to the past like McMartin says). If you have a present problem connected to a specific group of people - you need to identify them. And like the ID says, we’re identified as Indians.

I think what people like McMartin don’t like is being labelled. Because it’s never happened to them before - they’re the default, and by being the default they never need to think about who they are as part of a collective. They can dwell on their own personal histories as a curiosity, but don’t need to think about where they fit. Us? We’re identified and labelled from the day we’re born.

But if we want to solve anything, we can’t do it by saying that we’re Indians and you’re just ‘people’ or ‘Canadians’ or whatever, because whatever label you take, by definition excludes us because we’re using it to define the difference between the people with these ID cards and the people without them. And so by claiming that title as your own, you’re excluding us from it - which is the height of divisiveness.

So whatever label it is, it shouldn’t be a group we want to be part of, or that we want to unify people around.

Of course their argument then would reverse and switch to saying - let’s get rid of the label ‘Indian’. But if you don’t want to be called a colonizer, you probably don’t want to suggest erasing that label, because that label contains all of our Indigenous rights and lands and status. You can’t get rid of that label until everything is torn down, the constitution changed, the land question sorted out, and every First Nation that wants it has home rule on their own territories. Then we can be Mohawk and Quebecker, and Albertan and Blackfeet, and all of them together are Canadians in a larger and finally complete federation of equals.

But that’s not what we are right now. That’s the dessert that comes after another century of broccoli. Until then, like it or not, if we have a label, you need one too. If you don’t like this one, pick another - lord knows we have. Native, Aboriginal, Indian, First Nations, Indigenous - none of these things are cast in stone. But whatever the label is, it doesn’t change what you are - only another century of work will do that.

Here’s McMartin’s article: vancouversun.com/opinio…