There past has been a battle between European and Indigenous culture. They are seen as “half-breed” and shameful to both sides. Metis people in modern day Canada are developing as strong and proud people of their culture and heritage. For non-aboriginal people it is hard to understand how to address aboriginals in Canada since there are many variations. In post-colonization periods, “redskins” and the “french-sauvages” have been used as derogatory term when addressing them.
Also, there is a significant relationship between multiculturalism and anti-racism. Playing the idea of racism into the main concept, the official Canadian policy of multiculturalism almost appears as a lie. Thus, with respect to multiculturalism, I disagree with the statement that Canada presents a mosaic image and Canadians respond positively to nation building in an increasingly diverse populated society. Multiculturalism: fact or ideology? (Fleras & Elliott, 1993) This is a very important issue to be considered when viewing the truth about Canada’s multicultural title.
In regards to the Aboriginal situation, they claim that the method in which the government has dealt with their citizens is inapplicable and ineffective to them. They have long sought after a system of self government or a kind of recognized distinct society within Canada. Many ethnic groups feel that separatism is the strongest form of politic expression and thus legitimizes the particular group (Horowitz 166). I believe that accommodation and tolerance is needed when discussing the aboriginal groups of Canada. Firstly, my paper will illustrate the many issues that arise with how communitarian scholars have approached the accommodation of this ethnic minority.
The younger generation of the aboriginal culture was forced into residential schools, which isolated them from their culture, family, and their ways of life. Conflict theory is based on two principles: power is the core of all relationships and is scarce, making it unequally divided in society, and dominant groups promote their social values and ideologies at the expense of minorities (Ravelli & Webber, 2012, p. 48). The first principle can be applied to the fact that the government wanted to secure the land and follow the Anglicised method of individual property in Canada; the aboriginals were not allowing that to happen (McClinchey, B. Residential Schools, 2013). Conflict theorists would argue that this was a selfish act due to a power struggle.
The reason behind the doubts of these governments being corrupted is the amounts of money that have been spent by the Canadian government to help aboriginal communities without any positive effects on the life quality of the aboriginals communities. An example
A significant number of Canadians in Quebec wish to leave the country and form their own state. Their reasons being: they don’t believe that the Canadian government does support their cultural differences, and they believe Ottawa favours other provinces, and that they prefer English as the official language. 3 As a result, two referendums have been held in Québec asking citizens if they wish to secede from the country, and in 1982 we suffered through the October Crisis which involved a radical separatist party called Le Front de liberation du Quebec.) The FLQ used terrorist tactics to pressure the Quebec government to liberate itself from Canada. This hostility among different cultural groups suggests that, while Canada has made significant progress, it still has large cultural divides among ethnic and linguistic minorities.
It was a widely held belief that Indigenous people were an inferior race and would eventually die out. Many policies enacted on them had a greatly detrimental effect upon their cultural heritage. Policies such as the forced Indigenous people off the land and into government reserves, the assimilation policy tried to force Indigenous people to adopt a Western lifestyle by giving up their traditional lifestyle and beliefs. They were expected to live and act like ‘white Australians’ but were denied equal wages, work conditions and welfare benefits received by other Australians. Other policies attempted to ‘breed-out’ Indigenous Australians by pairing an Indiginous individual with a white partner.
In Marilyn Dumont’s “The White Judges” and Eden Robinson’s “Terminal Avenue”, Eurocentric mainstream society attempts to restrict experiences of Native and Metis culture. For both texts, bowing down to the oppressive European centre either behaviorally or mentally gives the characters a sense of embarrassment rooted in the loss of expression of their native cultural activities. The family in “The White Judges” sees efforts at marginalization that are implicit and unofficial, and deals with the problem that they have internalized both a sense of shame, and cultural aspects of the predominantly white population. Since the limits that the family places on themselves are mental, and there is no actual policy meant to implement conformity, their behaviors have not been forced to change. In turn, this allows them to have a great sense of familial and cultural togetherness, and for their isolation from society to have positive effects on the household.
“No man is above the law and no man below it.” This is an excellent quote by Theodore Roosevelt, and is self-explanatory. Time stands witness to the difference in the practices between what is written in the codes of law and what happens in the real world. Discrimination on the basis of color, caste, creed or religion has been the major issue at all times. The biggest example that stands in the history of Canada is how Aboriginal people were deprived of their human rights and were exploited physically, emotionally and sexually. The exploitation of human rights, within the borders of Canada, is not just limited to the aboriginal community, but also extends to Arabs, Muslims, and many others from countries such as India, China, Japan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Korea.
Also, many social problems were created. For instance French –Canadians feared immigrants would cause an unbalance in Quebec's delicate French-English political and social balance in favour of non-French speakers. The government responded to this by prohibiting Asian immigration, Eastern European immigration was difficult and immigration was closed to southern European and Jews. Post War caused the government to result to assimilation of immigrants, starting from schools of children very young in schools, and the rest of