Turtle Island’s Identity Continues to Be Erased

BY DAWOOD ZWINK

As a resident of the unceded traditional land of the Mississaugas of the Credit, Anishinaabe Nation, I acknowledge and extend my respect to the Haudenosaunee Six Nations of the Grand River and to the HuronWendat Nation. I also acknowledge that the First Nations, Inuit and Metis peoples know this continent’s original name to be Turtle Island.

History tells us that the Europeans’ obsession with achieving imperial domination on a global scale caused them to claim the original inhabitants’ land, create maps and change names wherever they went.

When considering Indigenous peoples’ issues from a Muslim newcomer’s perspective, one is immediately confronted with two questions: Why have this land’s First Peoples encountered so much clear racial hatred from white settlers and their institutions, and why does Canada continue to refuse to acknowledge and confirm Indigenous rights to land ownership?

Jacques Cartier, a French-Breton maritimer, who claimed Canada for France, erecting a Cross at Gaspe Photo © Library and Archives Canada, Acc. No. 1996-282-1

Even after some 500 years of the growing presence of primarily western Europeans immigrants and their descendants, the First Peoples, who were here quite a few millennia before we were, continue their struggle to survive and honor their passed-down legacy of wisdom, knowledge and guardianship. During the last 150 years, the influx of immigrants has become more diverse in terms of ethnic groups, nationalities and religions, including Muslims.

The First Peoples did not invite any of these new arrivals to settle in their homeland. They have been generous, respectful, hospitable and accommodating according to their capacity and ability. However, in return and right from the beginning they have been met with genocide, diseases against which they had no natural immunity, greed, disrespect, domination, humiliation, sexual violence and deliberate attacks on everything that makes them who they are in terms of language, culture, religion, worldview and social and family structures.

Among the many imposed realities they have tenaciously resisted is the Europeans’ practice of putting a price on everything. The resulting behavior and attitudes toward consumption, elite ownership and environmental destruction, all of which violated their communities’ norms, landed along with the first immigrants. How can such a calamity be explained?

ALIEN LAND CLAIMS This disaster can be traced back to 16th-century Imperial Europe, which was awash with racial supremacy, religious intolerance, brutal military expansion and violent absorption of all lands and peoples around the Mediterranean Sea. The Roman Catholic Church, which arguably absorbed the values and attitudes of the Greek city-states and the Roman Empire, became the foundation of Europe’s cultural development and power relations. After the Church lost its power, it was the turn of its successor, the Holy Roman Empire. Regardless of which one was in power, however, all of them had one enduring ambition: to subjugate everything in the world.

A system of European feudal monarchies emerged out of the noble families’ relentless competition for ever more land, for at that time land was considered the basis of wealth. The popes, often drawn from that same network of familial relationships, eventually acquired absolute power, only to eventually lose it to the monarchs. Claiming ownership of all the land, they parceled sections of it out to the nobility in exchange for the provision of soldiers and resources when needed.

authority, although staffed by clergy and Catholic orders and independent of the Vatican. In contemporary English, we would call the Spanish Inquisition’s ultimate goal — to establish a pure Catholic Christian society by eliminating all “heretics” (according to their definition) and non-Catholics — ethnic/religious cleansing, if not outright genocide. Papal bulls were issued that allowed Catholic “explorers” to enslave non-Catholics wherever they landed, assert their control over the land and its people and even work them to death — all to increase the wealth and power of their various monarchs. In his “The Doctrine of Discovery and the Christian Conquest of the World,” Nick Gier, professor emeritus of the University of Idaho, states, “In 1455 Pope Nicholas V exhorted Catholic EVEN AFTER SOME 500 YEARS OF THE GROWING rulers to conquer, even those ‘in the remotest parts unknown to us,’ all who were enemies PRESENCE OF PRIMARILY WESTERN EUROPEANS of Christ.”

IMMIGRANTS AND THEIR DESCENDANTS, THE The Pope gave them permission “to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all

FIRST PEOPLES, WHO WERE HERE QUITE A Saracens [Muslims] and pagans,” take their FEW MILLENNIA BEFORE WE WERE, CONTINUE possessions and “reduce their persons to perpetual slavery” (see also Steven Newcomb,

THEIR STRUGGLE TO SURVIVE AND HONOR “Finding the Papal Bull Documents,” May 20,

THEIR PASSED-DOWN LEGACY OF WISDOM, 2020). In short, this pope placed the Muslims in the same category as the world’s Indigenous KNOWLEDGE AND GUARDIANSHIP. peoples and oppressed nations. Here are some important dates that help chart the beginning of European encroach-

Those at the bottom of the social order, serfs and peasants, were bound to serve and work their lords’ land for survival. Classified as property, they were expendable (P. R. Schofield, “Peasant and Community in Medieval England, 1200-1500,” Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).

Societies were characterized by the powerful elites’ violent ambitions and vicious repression. For example, opposition to and “deviance” from orthodox Catholic belief and practice was countered by a series of Inquisitions. Opposition to Roman Catholic dominance and corruption eventually drove Martin Luther, a dissident priest, to launch the Protestant Reformation in 1517.

Europe spent centuries in continual competition and frequent conflict, which drained many royal coffers. Competitive hatred is expensive. It was a continent full of intolerance, articulated through ethnic and religious conflict, and acts of racial supremacy. This formula informed the policies and strategies applied by France and England in the Indigenous lands that, over time, were transformed into Canada.

ROOTS OF EUROPEAN RACISM AND ENTITLEMENT The desire of various European empires to get rid of their Muslims and Jews culminated most dramatically in Spain, where the Inquisition was employed as an instrument of clerical and royal policy that would devastate large sections of the world. Queen Isabella I of Castile and King Ferdinand II of Aragon established their own Inquisition in 1478. Unlike earlier ones, however, it was implemented under Royal Christian ment upon Indigenous land: • 1497: Italian John Cabot, under contract to King Henry VII of England, performs ritual claim on behalf of England. • 1534: Jacques Cartier is commissioned by King Francois of France. Upon his arrival at Labrador, he makes land claim and trades for furs with members of the local First Nations. • 1608: Samuel de Champlain extends France’s claim and engages in fur trading. • 1619: Arrival of first slave ship in Virginia. At the time that Europeans started to make land claims, there was no Canada. There were imperial powers in competition with one another that imposed slavery globally. British influence ran up the East Coast and was using and promoting slavery as part of their domination formula. What is called Canada today started to coalesce slowly. • 1670: The Hudson’s Bay Company obtains its first charter from King Charles III of England to trade furs. • 1763: The British Empire claims the territory that becomes Canada after signing the Treaty of Paris to end the Seven Years War in Europe.

These and other events enabled European racism and institutions to enter Turtle Island. They also form part of the basis for the claims of Crown Rights. All land claimed by Crown [Canada] is the product of such racist domination-related values and rights. The Crown claims ownership of 89% of the county’s land to the exclusion (extinguishment) of the Indigenous people’s ancestral rights (Canadian Encyclopedia).

Today, the White-dominated Commonwealth realms are the successors to Imperial Britain, which created a global network of colonies to channel their wealth to the “mother country.” (For one example see: “The Untold Story of the Hudson’s Bay Company, Canadian Geographic, https://www.canadiangeographic. ca/article/untold-story-hudsons-bay-company.) This devastating legacy of global plunder to benefit Imperial Europe’s wealthy elites and noble families persists even today, as can be seen around the world. Given this horrific legacy, we must ask “What is the responsibility of Muslim Canadians today?” and then act upon the answer, for we will be held accountable. ih