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In the winter of 2012-13, John Ralston Saul watched as the Idle No More movement swept across the country, bringing thousands of aboriginal people into the streets to draw attention to a wide range of issues.
When the round dances stopped and the media moved on, he decided to write something – a pamphlet or manifesto that would help explain to a non-aboriginal audience what had just happened. According to Mr. Saul, when aboriginal leaders speak, many Canadians tend to misinterpret what they are saying.
The result is his new book The Comeback, the story of a movement that has been building from a low point a little more than a century ago to where it’s now poised, he says, to reclaim a central place in Canadian affairs.
The author begins by dismissing sympathy, the lens through with which many Canadians view aboriginal issues. That’s just soft racism, he argues. Sympathy is fine as a point of entry, but it obscures why things are the way they are.
“The actual problem is they have rights, and they’ve been removed,” he says during a conversation in his Toronto living room this week. “If they had their rights back in the full sense of the word, you wouldn’t have to feel sympathy. Sympathy is a way of not dealing with the central issues of the treaties.”
The treaties are at the heart of The Comeback. The opening page is dedicated to an image of the Peace of Montreal of 1701, signed by the Iroquois, more than 30 other first nations and New France, which Mr. Saul calls the beginning of the Canadian idea of “treaty.” These agreements to share the land are what make modern Canada possible. “We are all treaty people,” Mr. Saul says. “Every Canadian is a signatory to those agreements, and those agreements have a meaning.”
Up to roughly 1850, indigenous people were powerful leaders and partners in Canadian history, Mr. Saul says. It was in this early settlement period that the habits of the country were formed, Mr. Saul says – for example, our accommodating attitude to newcomers, of accepting complexity and flexibility rather than insisting on rigid identities in the European or American style.
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