Reference no: EM133820938

Assignment:

This discussion might feel a bit heavy so let's engage with it carefully and thoughtfully. But heavy topics are not to be avoided - they are often the most important.

I want to draw you back to one piece of this week's module, where we talked about the foundation of Canada which was, I'm sorry to say, the genocide of Indigenous nations. For those of you who grew up here, you may have already known this. If you are new to Canada it might be a surprise. But the facts of history are unavoidable: Canada's leaders used violence, manipulation, kidnapping, and theft to explicitly try to erase Indigenous people from existence, in order to build Canada.

When we think about this, we often remember the racism of early settlers who believed that they were "better" than Indigenous people. This is a very important factor. But there is another factor that the lesson highlighted, which is that Canada was built to expand capitalism, and Indigenous people did not want to participate in that system.

What does this make you feel? If capitalism had to be established through a genocidal attempt to destroy hundreds of other nations - their languages, their spiritual and cultural life, their political and economic systems - how does that reflect on capitalism itself? When we do "land acknowledgements" admitting that this happened, does this make it better, even when the capitalist system is still in place? Or does it feel like a false apology?