On February 10, 2023, Alberta premier Danielle Smith posted a video of herself walking on Parliament Hill and urging viewers to remember where “we” come from, and “how Canada was founded.” Smith continued: “Many years ago, the Indigenous people of this land and those who came from across the world united to tame an unforgiving frontier, ensuring prosperity for countless future generations. It was their duty to support one other as neighbours, and to build this country together, developing democratic institutions that would yield good and stable governance.”
Smith’s remarks epitomize a troubling trend in the province she hails from: an attempt to ignore Indigenous perspectives on Canadian history. Never mind whether any Indigenous people would characterize their homelands the way Alberta’s premier does—as “unforgiving frontiers” needing to be tamed—Smith’s vision of Canadian history doesn’t include space for them to have any perspectives at all. Never mind what failed Treaty promises, residential schools and decades of successive iterations of the Indian Act did to undermine Indigenous governments, lands, families and societies. First Nations are simply subsumed by Smith as willing participants in building a capitalist democratic nation state. It is a triumphalist vision. It’s also emphatically bad history.
Smith’s party has a track record of making Canadian history a contentious issue. Her predecessor, Jason Kenney, announced a rewrite of the entire K–6 curriculum in summer 2020, stating that his government particularly hoped to remove the “ideology” they contended was in the unreleased NDP draft curriculum, and reinsert the “history.” Our heroes—like John A. Macdonald, like our war dead on Vimy Ridge and Juno Beach—have been crushed under a mass of liberal biases, opined Kenney. What was unfurled in the spring of 2021 was a social studies curriculum so hurriedly prepped that many people saw it as an attack on the public education system itself.
Content heavy, even in the youngest grades, the UCP’s draft social studies curriculum promised to require that students memorize a heap more and think a whole lot less. The Grade 2 draft curriculum read like an outline of two semesters’ worth of a university-level western civilization course (minus, of course, the critical analysis), with topics such as the essential wisdom of Plato and Socrates, the major tenets of Christianity, Judaism and Islam, and the leading theories behind the fall of the Roman Empire all to be covered in the portion of the day that 7-year-olds devote to social studies (as at least one teacher satirized, perhaps between morning snack and recess). So many members of the public were appalled by the assertion in the Grade 2 materials that “most” Albertans are Christians, and “newcomers” bring other religious traditions and may “struggle to find acceptance,” that the Ministry of Education hurriedly yanked the line from the drafts on its public consultation websites.
That forms of violence were perpetrated on Indigenous people during the settlement of the Canadian West is acknowledged openly now.
Situating Indigenous cultures squarely in a hazy, mysterious past, reassuring us that they made some positive “contributions” to modern (white, Christian) Canadian society, the social studies draft makes a brief detour to New France in Grade 3 before landing, in Grade 4, in the western “untamed wilderness” evoked by Danielle Smith. Here, after a cursory mention of how Plains Indigenous people used “all” the parts of the buffalo, we are treated to a throwback to the Eurocentric way of interpreting the settlement of the Canadian West, where, in essence, Treaties and the North-West Mounted Police peaceably cleared the way for white settlers, their ranching, their farming and their civilization. Roundly criticized for their advisers’ assertions that residential school history was “too sad” for K–6 and should wait until junior high, the UCP curriculum team deigned to mention it in Grade 5.
Maybe it still comforts some, but this is not how Canadian history is taught in graduate schools nor in undergraduate classrooms. It is not how it is explored in academic books or analyzed in our country’s courts and tribunals. We have moved past the smug assumption that the Canadian West was the “mild” frontier (compared to the US and its Wild West, with its violent Indian wars). That forms of violence were perpetrated on Indigenous people during the settlement of the Canadian West, whether on reserves, through the pass and permit systems, in residential schools, in the child welfare and the criminal justice and the healthcare systems—that they were excluded from participating fully in Canadian life, and not treated as equal partners or even as neighbours in some project of developing Canada, as Smith’s casual revisionism would have it—these things are acknowledged and taught openly now. And we’ve started to become the better for it.
The UCP would have Indigenous perspectives and the more difficult aspects of Canadian history scrubbed from the K–6 curriculum. But they were unprepared for the protest from teachers, school boards, parents and the public at large that followed the release of the draft curriculum. Backlash came from people concerned about the whitewashing of history, about the normalizing of white, Christian viewpoints in the social studies curriculum, but also from experts in how children learn, seemingly none of whom were consulted by the UCP.
As a parent of a fourth grader at the time of the draft curriculum’s release, I kept visualizing the effortless way I had watched my son’s (white) kindergarten teacher introduce the Blackfoot name of the ubiquitous Alberta wild rose bushes, kiníí, on a ridge near our home in the foothills a few years before, and also their rosehips (“itchy bum berry”). Like my son’s kindergarten teacher, maybe first let’s look around the neighbourhood and only then tackle the UCP’s “short version of Western civilization from Mesopotamia to the present”—although I hope my children aren’t required to. With the uproar surrounding particularly the disastrous social studies draft, most of the UCP curriculum was shelved for “revisions.”
As a parent but also a professional historian, I’m concerned about the UCP’s attempts to rewrite the social studies curriculum in the past two and a half years, and the threat this still poses should the NDP not form the next provincial government. The existing curriculum, while ready for the update the NDP was preparing, at least emphasized how to ask good questions. The UCP sought to replace that with nothing but prepackaged answers, in the guise of endless dates and names and facts.
As a professional historian, I’m prompted to ask, “Whose version of history is being presented here?” and “For what purpose?” Danielle Smith putting her blithe Eurocentrism on display during a stroll in Ottawa—the talk that began with fanciful notions about Canada being founded in a shared quest for turning untamed wildernesses into prosperity and ended with a pro-oil-sands screed against carbon taxes—makes it abundantly clear what ignoring Indigenous perspectives on Canadian history enables us to likewise brush under the rug. To name just a few: Indigenous dispossession. Indigenous sovereignty. Indigenous rights to be consulted about the lands and resources that have disproportionately enriched white Albertans. The prosperity that Smith refers to is under threat, she argues, by a federal government that unjustly taxes Albertans. And it is on that “victimization” that the UCP would like the Albertan public and Canadians at large to remain foused.
Earlier in the same week as Smith’s remarks in front of the Parliament buildings, former professor Frances Widdowson took a flamboyant stand for removing Indigenous perspectives from the highest levels of education in Alberta. Widdowson—a political scientist, not a historian—has insisted, especially since her termination from Mount Royal University in Calgary at the end of 2021, that she is fighting “fascism” in the postsecondary system. Widdowson believes a poorly defined boogeyman called “postmodernism” has ruined the university and is stripping professors of their academic freedom. Those who labour in the academic vineyards, according to her, have been forced to replace the spirit of open inquiry and any notion of free speech with a doctrine of “wokeism”—which, for those unfamiliar with the term, is meant to conjure up spectres of identity politics and victim Olympics.
Widdowson has claimed that she herself is victimized, hindered by woke policies such as the University of Lethbridge’s Indigenization initiative from expressing her opinions that residential schools and the assimilation policy writ large in Canada were not genocide. Her plans to deliver a public lecture at the U of L on February 1, 2023, were thwarted by hundreds of protesters. Widdowson was forced to give that talk (“How ‘Woke-ism’ Threatens Academic Freedom”) on Zoom, but she did deliver a two-part, in-person lecture as planned to a U of L philosophy professor’s classroom that same week. Titling her lecture “Should universities ‘foster respect’ for Indigenous ‘ways of knowing’?,” Widdowson—predictably—answered “no.”
Widdowson begins her lecture with a sweeping proclamation that she is opposed to the relativism that has permeated historical thinking since the 1960s (a.k.a. what she calls “postmodernism”). No, instead, universities should be citadels of Enlightenment principles, zealous guardians of the Enlightenment’s pursuit of Universal Truth. Much of Widdowson’s belief that Indigenous ways of knowing should not be respected by academic institutions centres on her preoccupation with the “preliterate” nature of pre-Contact Indigenous societies. Indigenous ways of knowing (at least in Widdowson’s view) are heavily based on the pronouncements of “knowledge keepers,” who may in turn be basing their knowledge on “revelations,” which cannot be scientifically tested, and are heavily dependent as well on “oral histories,” which Widdowson summarizes are “often inaccurate” since Indigenous people didn’t have any “writing to pin down those observations.”
It is worth noting here that in Widdowson’s body of work, the “preliterate” nature of pre-Contact Indigenous peoples is key to the “cultural gap” or “developmental gap” that she claims still exists between European civilizations and Indigenous societies. As she wrote in her 2008 book (coauthored with her husband, Albert Howard), Disrobing the Aboriginal Industry: The Deception behind Indigenous Cultural Preservation, “never has the cultural gap between two sets of peoples at the time of contact been wider… [Indigenous peoples] were in an earlier stage of cultural development in comparison to Europeans, who were making the transition from feudalism to capitalism.” Developing a system of writing, in Widdowson’s view, was a necessary precursor not only to economic development but also to a culture’s achievement of logic, science, philosophy and history, for only writing can be properly analyzed. And “postmodernists” have tried to “disguise this gap in development” between Indigenous people and Europeans by recasting “aboriginal recollections as ‘oral literature.’ ”
Widdowson’s facile brushing aside (as “relativism” and “postmodernism”) of all the contributions made since the 1960s by scholars of women’s history, Black history, Chicano history, Indigenous history, LGBTQ history and social movements at large deserves scrutiny. It is doubly weird that Widdowson, who has described herself as a “historical materialist” (i.e., a Marxist) downplays to such degree any utility in oral histories, given that labour historians were among the first in the academy to use them to uncover details about working people’s lives and pursuits of equity—since, historically, working-class people scarcely had the time to write things down, if they were even literate enough to do so. Was the (white) working class also suffering from a “development gap,” one wonders?
Widdowson’s consecration of the written word ignores the fact that written sources require as much “interrogation” as she believes oral histories do. Anyone who has taken an undergraduate-level history course in the past half-century could help Widdowson with how to interrogate a (written) primary source, how to ask questions like: Who authored this? What was their perspective? What were their motivations? Their biases? Whose perspectives are being left out here? And why might that be so? As someone who deals with government records about Indigenous people all the time, I would argue that understanding the biases of government officials is exceedingly important to interpreting the document trail they left behind.
The most telling part of Widdowson’s lecture (which she encouraged to be recorded and shared) was when she stated that U of L’s Indigenous policies and especially its initiative of “fostering respect” for Indigenous ways of knowing has had “serious consequences” for her own career. Widdowson claims her academic freedom was trampled. I think what really happened was that she was criticized for her poor ability to think historically. What largely brought the protesters to the atrium at U of L, again, were Widdowson’s views on residential schools, which are neatly encapsulated in a paper she delivered to the annual meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association in 2017. This paper, titled “The Political Economy of Truth and Reconciliation: Neotribal Rentierism and the Creation of the Victim/Perpetrator Dichotomy,” draws on zero historical sources in order to make broad assertions about the residential school experience in Canada: no archival documents, no oral histories. Her arguments in this paper cannot be “tested” in the manner in which she lectured Lethbridge philosophy students that real forms of knowledge must be tested. Meanwhile she details why Indigenous ways of knowing fall so short of Western scientific methods and modes of inquiry.
Widdowson asserts that residential schools, for all their faults, provided a preliterate society the opportunity to acquire the “knowledge, skills, values and disciplines needed to participate in a modern society.” She also suggests that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission incentivized Indigenous Elders to stretch the truth about physical and sexual abuses in order to gain larger payouts. Many of the testimonies of residential school survivors, writes Widdowson, have “an air of improbability about them.” She muses, “it is hard to believe that so many intensely religious people would have collectively taken part in brazen actions regarded as mortal sins.” Whether Widdowson personally believes or not that “intensely religious people” had it in them to commit mortal sins doesn’t feel like a tested, learned, academically sound theory at all. It just sounds like her opinion.
One should draw on a plethora of actual historical evidence—archival sources, oral histories and other forms of data—before drawing a conclusion.
Historical academic standards generally suggest that one should draw on a plethora of actual evidence—including archival sources, oral histories and other forms of data—before drawing a conclusion. Widdowson’s views on residential schools do not hold up to these standards. Likewise, her opinion on the “development gap” that she asserts holds Indigenous cultures back is difficult to square with any actual scholarly study of Indigenous peoples. I think, just to draw one example from recent projects I’ve worked on, of the Indigenous leaders who negotiated the treaties on the Canadian prairies. They were described (by government officials) as men who spoke several Indigenous languages, had long histories of interacting with British officials and fur trade economies, and often understood English to boot. They bargained hard for concessions that the federal government was loath to promise them, such as agricultural implements, work animals and instruction in how to farm. They protested when the government failed to fulfil these treaty promises, and they protested government policies that deliberately kept them from scaling their farming operations or selling their crops. Government repression is in full view in these historical sources, like the section of the Indian Act that until 1951 forbade Indigenous people and band governments from retaining lawyers. But the supposed “gap in development” that Widdowson insists has held Indigenous people back from equally participating in Canadian society? It is not apparent.
To the Lethbridge students, Widdowson decried the inclusion of “knowledge keepers” within the academy. Letting Elders within the ivory tower, Widdowson reasoned, threatens to “lower standards” for the entire university because the directive from on high to respect Indigenous ways of knowing precludes any scrutiny of their traditional teachings. In her several books, Widdowson has argued that First Nations, given the developmental gap, were not ready to participate in industrial capitalism, and (as she writes in Disrobing) universities or other institutions adopting “low standards hides the fact that most native people have not developed the skills, knowledge or values to survive in the modern world.” As she continues in the 2017 paper, “aboriginal cultural development will require intensive educational methods. Real education for aboriginal people will mean actual attempts to improve literacy and scientific education in communities where books are rare, animistic beliefs still hold traction, and ill-informed ‘wisdom-keepers’ are deferred to. How this developmental gap can be bridged will not be easy.”
One wonders, though: If Widdowson is so secure in the Western scientific method and the ongoing gifts that the “Enlightenment” holds for modern academia, why is she so worried about Indigenous Elders being invited inside academic institutions? What threat do their perspectives pose to such an overwhelmingly superior, and dominant, culture?
I think, much like for Danielle Smith and the UCP’s K–6 curriculum writers, that the real issue is that they don’t want Indigenous perspectives included in Canadian history at all. For anyone curious about the wordy second half of Widdowson’s 2017 paper title—“Neotribal Rentierism and the Creation of the Victim/Perpetrator Dichotomy”—she defines “neotribal rentierism” as processes that “are oriented towards extracting ‘rent’ so as to incorporate aboriginal groups into late capitalism.” In other words, not being equipped (developmentally) to participate in capitalist endeavours on their own terms, in Widdowson’s view, Indigenous people instead demand compensation, “a form of circulation that is becoming increasingly common in addressing the conflicts between aboriginal peoples and the Canadian state.”
And there we come to the crux of the matter, full circle to the underlying issue with Premier Smith’s smooth omission of Indigenous points of view about the great national project she describes, the one where Indigenous and settler Canadians supposedly united in order to transform “untamed wilderness” into prosperity. Prosperity for whom? For if Indigenous perspectives on Canadian history aren’t sidelined, if Indigenous viewpoints are allowed space, and if—most dangerously of all!—they hold any validity for the public, perhaps, then, the rent comes due.
Smith subsumes First Nations as willing participantsin building a capitalist, democratic nation state. It’s emphatically bad history.
Widdowson was turned back from giving a public lecture in Lethbridge by the drumming and shouting of hundreds. The UCP social studies curriculum was shelved, for now. And Premier Smith now faces backlash for her revisionist stab at historical storytelling. It is worth mentioning too that in the very same week as the Widdowson / U of L drama and Smith’s controversial remarks, the Law Society of Alberta was forced to deal with a measure that sought to remove Indigenous cultural competency training as a mandatory course. Its members did vote down that measure, resoundingly, to the tune of three to one, and the training remains. A great many Albertans apparently don’t buy into the notion that the pursuit of history involves the slow uncovering of a universal truth—with only one valid viewpoint—the inexorable march of progress, the metaphorical hallways in which we can showcase our hagiography of heroes. Inconveniently for Premier Smith, Widdowson and the architects of the UCP’s K–6 social studies draft curriculum, scholarly assessments of historical events in Canada do not tend to support an overarching narrative of white victimhood.
It would seem that a majority of Albertans see through these narcissistic (one might even say “colonial”) traits: of doing exactly what one is accusing someone else of doing—crafting a totalitarian, doctrinal view of history, and dumbing history down to boot—of blaming the victim (preliterate societies were inferior, after all, and if residential schools were insensitive, they were only trying to help bridge that developmental gap), and of accusing the victim of being the aggressor (“they” took away my academic freedom, the narrative of history that made me feel good, my heroes, and now they are fleecing Canadians with their demands for compensation!).
In my work, which deals largely with Indigenous legal claims, when I have brought scraps of documentary evidence that illuminate conditions on reserves in the late 19th and early 20th centuries out of the archives and back to communities, people have often cried. The letter from the farm instructor to the Indian commissioner, describing how he narrowly avoided a fist fight with the Indigenous farmers to whom he had denied a permit to sell their products (1920s, Saskatchewan). The journal of the Oblate priest who baptized the dying baby, fed only with fish broth while government officials “scaled back” the rations (1880s, Alberta). The perfunctory, one-paragraph letter to the parents in the north, telling them their toddler had died in a distant southern sanatorium (1950s, Manitoba).
People react emotionally to these scraps of evidence, I presume, not because they didn’t know what happened. It was, indeed, their own lived experience, or that of their parents and their grandparents. I think they’ve cried because the voices of those who denied it ever happened have been so very, very loud.
The truths about Canadian history are by no means finished being told, and (in the manner of Widdowson’s “open inquiry”) perhaps this is a project that never ends. The outpouring of grief that can accompany telling historical truths isn’t finished either. The Canada I dream of my children becoming adults in—the reconciled Canada—will be hard won, not with glib assertions like Premier Smith’s about mystical partnerships and neighbourliness but with education, with time, with truths and with tears. Children in our K–6 schools and young adults in our universities are more than capable of being exposed to different perspectives, difficult past events and ongoing injustices. As the TRC’s final report insisted, changing the undeniable inequities in Canadian society will only happen if first there is listening. The majority of Albertans consistently show that we are ready to do just that. A minority keeps trying to take away our opportunities to do so.
Gretchen Albers is a historian who works principally with Indigenous communities in the prairies on land claims and treaty rights issues being heard by Canadian tribunals and courts.
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