My Warholian fifteen minutes of fame came not from a father (Roy) who helped hammer out over glasses of Scotch the “Kitchen Cabinet” compromise that saved the patriation of Canada’s Constitution Act (1982) or a great-great-great-grandfather, Charles Waters, an early school reformer, who hid fellow rebel, or Patriote, Louis-Joseph Papineau in 1837 when there was a $4000 bond on his head, helping Papineau safely make his way to refuge in the United States. My limited fame comes from the being the first person in Canada persecuted for questioning the international news story of a discovery of a mass grave and remains of 215 children (“some as young as three”) who had been tortured, murdered, and clandestinely buried at night by their Christian teachers and 6-year-old conscripts in an apple orchard on the grounds of the erstwhile Indian residential school in Kamloops, B.C.
I was walked out of classroom and career on May 31, 2021 for saying those who died while enrolled in a residential school did so mostly from diseases such as tuberculosis. I was fired officially in February of last year but first fell out of favour and into a disciplinary chasm with the Abbotsford School District in 2019, and among my sins was penning an email that described daily land acknowledgements at my school, W.J. Mouat Secondary, as repetitious, undemocratic, compelled, political, and untrue – especially the part about “we acknowledge the past and continuing injustices against Indigenous people.” Truth be known, I do have something in common with my ancestor Charles Waters: I am a school reformer myself, though my employer would describe me in different terms.
An “anonymous Canadian Teacher,” with the penname N. Invictus, wrote an article for the online publication Woke Watch Canada Newsletter about “the creepy, crawling recitation of the land acknowledgements.” She noticed a decade ago that these “religious verses [had] taken over every meeting and [were] recited several times a day.” She spoke to an administrator and asked that the school dispense with this ritual, which she saw as nothing more than a “self-satisfying display of hypothetical virtue.” The administrator quietly agreed under the pretense of collegiality before mentioning it was school board policy, tantamount to the hand of God. For years she had been the only staff member who remained seated, as teachers were “given the option to stand for the reading of the land acknowledgment.” She wryly noted that “even the History teachers, who privately admit to the falsehood of the recited claim, go with the flow.” Of course teachers have compelling reasons to “go with the flow,” both reputational and financial.
I remember one school morning years ago in Surrey when a vice principal directed all teachers over the PA system to stand while the land acknowledgement was read. I didn’t want to bruise my relationship with him but couldn’t restrain myself from immediately communicating my displeasure in an email, and only minutes later the vice principal was knocking on my classroom door. I expected a negative reaction but was met with a warm smile. He said district policy – again the hand of God – was to have students stand only for the national anthem, so the error was his.
Christopher Eastman-Nagle questions many of the underlying assumptions of land acknowledgments:
- Have First Nations lived in their current location since time immemorial or did they migrate to it?
- Is the historical narrative of what students experienced at residential schools balanced or accurate?
- Did nothing good ever happen at the schools?
- What if there aren’t really any missing or murdered students or secret graves?
- Was the Pre-contact or Pre-industrial life of First Peoples really idyllic, or a myth?
- Were children in residential schools destined for a bleak life or were they sent there by parents, who had to sign an application form, to escape a bleak life on the reserve?
- Is the “narrative depicting them as perpetual victims in a state of never-ending dependency on rents extracted by labelling Canada a genocidal colonial state” truly a good strategy or ultimately against their best interests?
Eastman-Nagle contends that ritualistic land acknowledgements are “almost entirely driven by Woke activists, and most of the rest of us in our communities have dutifully and politely gone along with [them]” to avoid the label of “bigoted racist” or someone who makes waves. “That silence, unfortunately, has given the impression of acquiescence.”
The teacher N. Invictus remembers an occasion which made her blood boil to the point where she “could feel the steam breathing out of [her] nostrils.” An outside speaker who was a recent immigrant had referred to Canada as Turtle Island, which to her signified an ignorance or dismissal of our cultural traditions and the immense richness that the colonial experience or Columbian Exchange had brought to the modern world, with a smaller percentage of people starving or dying young than ever before. “How dare you? is what [she] told him at the end of the meeting,” She added: “If any acknowledgement is due, I would acknowledge that I am living in the cities that our founding fathers built!”
My criticism of land acknowledgements comes by a sense of duty, to posterity and country, but also to academic values. The United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child, ratified by Canada in 1990, states under Article 13 that “the child shall have the right to freedom of expression; this right shall include freedom to seek, receive and impart information and ideas of all kinds regardless of frontiers.” But students have a gut sense that criticism of land acknowledgements would not go well with teacher or principal.
In British Columbia, there is much ado about Critical and Reflective Thinking in its curriculum where students “examine their own thinking and that of others; this involves making judgments based on reasoning, where students consider options, analyze options using specific criteria, draw conclusions…understand events, and address issues.” Land acknowledgements, however, are not to be considered intellectually. Their delivery into the receptacle-like minds of students is through rote learning (the “beat-learn method”) without critical thinking and reflection.
I have asked students individually and away from others what they think of land acknowledgments, and when the answer is negative, as it almost always is, I ask why they don’t speak up. They say they want to “go with the flow.” This is understandable as the teenage years have long been characterized by heightened conformity, as seen in their dress, parlance, and interests. It is a stage of social conformity in an age of social conformity.
I was a senior History teacher in the French Immersion program at W.J. Mouat Secondary where I heard daily that “we acknowledge the past and continuing injustices” against Indigenous communities – as though all the teachers and students at the school were participating in the genocide that MPs in the House of Commons unanimously voted to acclaim on October 27, 2022. I considered my continued silence as acquiescence. In speaking with my union, the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation (BCTF), I was told by lawyers in their legal department that fighting for free expression and against compelled speech would be the hill I die on. This was long before I questioned the school district’s charade on May 31, 2021 of having every student bedecked in orange and emotionally indignant, apoplectic or in tears over the fake news of a mass grave of teacher-murdered children.
The BCTF has taken my file to arbitration, but if I meet an arbitrator who is infused with woke dogma, I may not win. Most likely I will never teach again, for people of my age and birth characteristics and now social media infamy are less than desirable candidates. And what if I were to be hired, what then? Would I silently acquiesce to land acknowledgments and submit also to the CRT, Social Justice, DEI, Gender Theory, de-colonial and deconstructionist prattle of the new Puritans running schools? I have had abundant time to reflect on all the things in me that combined to make me give up my job for academic and moral values, and my conclusion is this: The hill my career died on is also the hill where I discovered what is most important to me.
Jim McMurtry completed a Master’s degree at the University of Alberta under the supervision of Dr. Robert Carney, a leading authority on Indian Residential Schools who documented their positive role in the development of Indigenous communities. He obtained a Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in the Philosophy of Education. As well, Dr. McMurtry has taught for four decades, most recently French Immersion History in Abbotsford, and for a time he was a college lecturer and the Principal of Neuchâtel Junior College in Switzerland.
