Geoff Russ: This is the land of the Canadian people

Canada can be a home to everyone except those who made it, as the official story so often now goes. At universities, in corporate boardrooms, and at municipal ceremonies from Victoria to Halifax, Canadians are reminded that they sleep, live, and breathe upon somebody else's "traditional territory," as "uninvited guests" on "stolen" land. This is the doctrine of delegitimization, designed to make Canadians politically and spiritually docile, for whatever reason.

In fact, Canada is the traditional land of the Canadian people because this is where they became a people in the first place. True, at some point, their ancestors may have set sail from Britain or France or wherever else in the world their forebears sailed from. But a country that your family has not lived or died in for four generations or more is no longer a homeland. Visiting London or Normandy may feel more familiar than Rio de Janeiro, but you are still a tourist in-spite of your surname.

The original colonists and those who followed became Acadians, Canadiens, Maritimers, and British Columbians a long time ago, while others made families with Indigenous people, creating the Métis. All were distinctly North American, with their own songs, fables, and even accents (though these are sadly fading).

That transformation happened in North America, and it makes no difference that the languages they speak today originally came from Europe. That transformation predated Confederation.

Colonists on the St. Lawrence in the late 1600s were already calling themselves Canadiens, and French military officers did not hesitate to recognize that they were different, nor did the colonials themselves.

During the Seven Years' War, the tensions between the native-born people of New France and their European officers were apparent.

"War in this country is very different from the wars in Europe. The Canadiens and Indians would not march with the same confidence under the order of a commander of the troops from France, as they would under the officers of this colony," remarked Pierre de Rigaud de Vaudreuil, the first Canadien-born governor of New France, on the eve of the British conquest.

Likewise, during the War of 1812, General Isaac Brock had great reservations about the North American-born members of the militia compared with his British regulars. All of these were signs that Canadians, both English- and French-speaking, had become something different from their counterparts in the metropole, though bound by loyalty.

People like to call Canada a "land of immigrants." Canada is a country with many immigrants, to be sure, but not everyone can claim the immigrant story, and many have no reason to try. By the 1930s, nearly everybody living in Newfoundland was locally born. Such people cannot be called Europeans maintaining a colony. A people's land becomes traditional when children are born in the same place where their grandparents are buried. Bonavista, Alberta's foothills and the Ottawa Valley are traditional Canadian lands within a national homeland.

Despite rumours to the contrary, there is a Canadian culture that has its own songs, written by men like Stan Rogers, Tom Connors, and Gordon Lightfoot. Much of their music will be forgotten as the generation that grew up with it ages out of life, apart from a few iconic songs like "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" and "Barrett's Privateers."

Ironically, much of that same postwar generation that listened to that music on the radio is the one that disregarded the culture and habits that made those songs possible, replacing them with a bland, generic modernity they mistook for sophistication. Nonetheless, "uninvited guests" rarely make such well-made, evocative music.

Making the term "traditional territory" exclusive to discussions about Indigenous peoples denies millions of Canadians a status as a people that others around the world can take for granted. It allows one small segment of the population an indefinite and ever-strengthening relationship to the land while treating another as incapable of belonging to the same place.

A family may have lived beside the same river for hundreds of years, yet its descendants are still considered guests by the institutions that educate and employ them. All of it is psychological dispossession, aimed at making the Canadian presence feel conditional. Even being called simply "guests" directly implies that Canadians are not in their own home, and yet this is the moderate label used at universities.

It is one thing to recognize the older Indigenous presence on the land and another thing entirely to turn non-Indigenous people into moral subordinates. Furthermore, this is gaslighting because it tries to make Canadians disbelieve the ironclad evidence of their own history. Their towns, cemeteries, and family photos are there for all to see, yet institutions refuse to treat them as evidence of legitimate attachment.

"Traditional territory" itself is a very broad historical description that has been conflated with "unceded," which is a legal term in constitutional discussions. Going further and calling it "stolen" is an outright accusation, but the difference has been blurred.

For example, Trent University in Peterborough states that the campus stands on treaty territory, specifically within the nearly two million acres ceded to the Crown in 1818. However, it also describes the people who live and work there as "uninvited guests."

Scotiabank declares that its Toronto executive offices sit on "ancestral and unceded territory," while the City of Toronto states that Toronto is covered by a treaty.

Repeating the same drivel is a way for these institutions to claim authority and embed new rituals that ensure compliance. Canadian applicants and workers have no option but to participate in these ritual humiliations or risk having their lives and careers sabotaged.

Those who administer these rituals get a kick out of it, as if castigating an audience or a candidate is an act of subversion. If Canada's biggest banks and professional credentialing factories are the ones hosting the rituals, is it really a rebellion anymore?

Like it or not, Canadians are a people whose sense of self is precarious amid great hostility from those who should know better or who have a vested interest in seeing them unmade.

Canada is centuries old and cannot be reduced to the status of permitted accommodation. This is our land.

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