There Are No Settlers, Only Citizens

There are people who built Canada.

There are people who work everyday to provide for themselves and their families.

Then there are those who see currency in collective brow-beating so as to guilt and minimise those who worked and continue to work to keep this country afloat.

I thought that disparaging other ethnic and racial groups was supposed to be a bad thing:

Although the term ostensibly divides between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians, most people use it as shorthand for “white.” It seems to be a way to talk about white people without explicitly referencing skin colour. It lets people attribute a whole slew of negative traits to one made-up cultural group — heaping all the worst aspects of Canada’s past onto currently existing people who happen to have the wrong skin colour.

Mostly this goes unsaid except when someone like the Anishinaabe writer Drew Hayden Taylor riffs on the term. He’s written about settlers a number of times and offers alternatives terms like “people of pallor,” or those who are “pigment denied.”

In one of his columns, he went through the words some of his Indigenous friends have for white people, such as a Lakota term that translates as “greedy person,” and the Mohawk phrase, “white foam people” — as in the foamy scum that forms on the top of lakes and rivers. ...

Most activists who are keen to talk about settlers and settler colonialism go out of their way to exclude non-whites. Don’t worry, they say, groups who are usually said to be “marginalized” — Black Canadians, recent immigrants, etc. — aren’t really settlers.

The pro-Palestinian lobby has adopted similar language — using a simple binary of oppressed and oppressor and mapping it onto the Middle East conflict. All you need to do is call the Israeli state an example of settler colonialism and you have all the answers. You know who the good guys are and who are the bad. Hint: the good guys aren’t the settlers.

That’s because the settler identity is also as much about a moralizing religious feeling as it is about race. To call yourself a settler is to awaken to a new faith. You embrace a new guilt-ridden sense of the country. It’s a modern hair shirt, a masochistic label by which you can do penance. By calling yourself a settler, you’re renouncing your privilege and announcing to everyone: “Don’t worry, I’m one of the good ones.”

The intellectuals who write books on the subject insist that you should feel “unsettled.” It’s right there in book titles, such as “Unsettling the Settler Within.” It’s hard to find a more Christian title than this — albeit in a seemingly secular fashion.

Canadians of previous generations used to spend a lot of time worrying about original sin — of how to overcome what the religious used to call the “taint,” and then turning to God for help. In the case of settlers, it’s the same thing under a new secular guise. Forgive me world, I am a Canadian of the wrong ancestry. Help me decolonize myself.

The effect is to divide Canadians into those who belong and those who don’t. It’s a citizenship test that so-called settlers need to write again and again — constantly professing their lack of belonging in order to appease the original sin of colonialism in the hope that someone, maybe even themselves, will allow them to belong.

So what are we talking about when we call ourselves settlers? It sure looks like we’re adopting a form of racism that wants to hide its worst aspects by steeping itself in moralizing self-flagellation. It’s a myopic way of picking out the worst aspects of the Euro-Canadian past and refusing to put them into a wider context. And don’t overlook the heavy dose of self-interest that’s often mixed into the moral righteousness.

This is an example of what Rob Henderson calls a “luxury belief.” That is, it’s a belief that gives status. It provides cultural and moral cachet. People have always tried to set themselves apart by their moral beliefs — by the way in which their heightened sense of right and wrong sets them apart. Self-confessing as a settler who wants to do better now does the same thing. By renouncing and denouncing their cultural past, self-professed settlers try to gain cultural prestige in the present.

Overt acts of racial discrimination are supposed to be illegal in Canada, yet the race-based settler moniker is spreading. Although I guess if you’re going to take it on yourself, there’s only so much anyone else can do.

 

Why don't people take their self-hatred and their grift elsewhere?

We don't need it here.