A hand-me-down holiday
Sin Jawns elites, truth, and reconciliation
Today is National Indigenous People’s Day.
Celebrate. Reflect. Learn. Grow.
That’s what the day is for.
Rather than celebrate *that* day either with a holiday or with a program of activities honouring the aboriginal and Indigenous residents of Sin Jawns, the City council decided to relabel an existing holiday and call it National Indigenous People’s Day (observed).
Hard to imagine anything more insulting to Indigenous people and to all the residents of the city than this.
The City’s news release on the declaration is nothing but one bit of nonsense after the other.
The City claims there are “jurisdictional limitations” that prevent the City from closing its offices on the actual day. Not so. The City has the power to close its offices at any time Council wants. That’s what will happen on Monday coming despite the fact that the third Monday in June has not been a Shops Closing Act holiday since 1992 and it has never been a day set out in the Labour Standards Act that requires offices in the province to close and pay employees for the day off. If the City can close on Monday because it is listed as a paid holiday for employees in its union contracts, the City could have shut down its own operations today as well and on every June 21 afterward. There are no obstacles to that except integrity.
The City has no power to change the day on which people observe NIPD, anyway. That day was setby the Governor General in 1996. But Council does have the power to pretend its doing something real, which it has done superbly.
The City release links to the 42 demands of First Voice, a political group with which the City is now allied. This declaration of renaming Monday’s holiday for City staff supposedly meets the need to make NIPD “an official and statutory holiday” as if there were any other kind of statutory holiday. Oddly, then, the group still lists its demand for a statutory holiday on June 21 as “Not Yet Started” even though a representative of First Voice is included in the official City release. That’s not because First Voice is slow in updating its website. That’s because this news release does nothing meaningful. After all, the group has known about this for some time and knew long enough ago to approve a line in the City’s news release. Changing the website was easy to do. Not changing it means something, which is that the City has done nothing.
The release states that the holiday “previously called Discovery Day [was] to commemorate the arrival of John Cabot on the island of Ktaqmkuk (Newfoundland) in 1497.” This one sentence has more than one problematic aspect. For starters, it’s wrong to call the island of Newfoundland by any Mi’gmaw name for it. The one used actually has no certain meaning, according to the Qalipu Mi’gmaw website. It may mean “the larger shore or the other shore” and that actually suggests a name used by people not from here. The other Mi’gmaw name for the island is Mekwe’jite’wa’kik which means Red Indian Land. While that’s a more accurate and meaningful name, it may be uncomfortable for people who are not indigenous to the island or anywhere else in the province. And that's why calling the island any Mi’gmaw name in preference to any other is questionable.
After all, the people who lived here before Europeans arrived were the Beothuk. Unless we have the name they used for the place, we are arguably better to use the English or French words for it rather than falsely claim that a Mi’gmaw name for the island is any more right than an Innu or Inuit name. We know Innu and Inuit people had more to do with the island before Europeans arrived than any evidence suggests Mi’gmaw people did. Honour and respect Qalipu and Mi’gmaw people as aboriginal Canadians but let’s not in the process invent a past that did not exist or erase the Beothuk people who did.
Calling the island of Newfoundland by any other name than the one it has officially, especially a Mi’gmaw one, simply plays a very modern, very superficial, and highly political game. This is the same game we saw in the renaming of Red Indian Lake based on American popular culture rather than actual events in Newfoundland.
More troublesome, though, is the claim that the “the Truth and Reconciliation Commission called on all governments to acknowledge the problematic nature of the narrative of discovery in relation to Indigenous Peoples.”
This move by the City has nothing to do with any recommendation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its comments. What the City is doing is like the call to get rid of the word colonial in Colonial Building because of “decolonization” or lopping the word plantation from a local building because of the connection between plantations and the enslavement of Africans *somewhere else.* In this case we have something that has been called “Discovery Day” but nothing about the day is truthfully linked to the notions the TRC and other Indigenous groups are concerned about.
The name of the defunct provincial holiday simply describes the experience of John Cabot in finding land he apparently did not think was there. Connections to Papal edicts and rationalizations for European settlement in the New World used in some countries is tenuous in Newfoundland and Labrador given the actual experience here over hundreds of years. It's one discovery story and an old and discredited one anyway. Cabot got here in 1497 but the specific date and whether he entered the harbour at St. John's is guesswork at best. The Norse were here 500 and more years before that. They have a discovery story too. And before that going back 9,000 years plenty of other people discovered the place. But none of that is about an American idea of a doctrine that roots all that happened afterward. We could have kept the name discovery day and instead set it to honour when humans first arrived.
What really we have here in this renaming is a very modern example of anti-democratic politics. Elites make decisions behind closed doors using whatever reasons they want to make up. In some cases, as noted here before, they are prepared to spread falsehoods to give their actions some cloak of legitimacy. In this case, there is considerable effort to justify a hand-me down holiday no one pays any attention to anyway. City employees will be at the cabin on Monday enjoying a barbecue like they have done for decades under a different name. The rest of us will be working as usual, except the provincial employees who also get the day off while others work.
A genuine alternative, a sincere and legitimate effort to meet the intent of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee would look very different compared to this pompous farce. For starters, the City would celebrate June 24 as St. John’s Day. That’s how the City got its name. That’s the Cabot story, at least according to the popular version of things and that's enough of a story to work with. Make it a day to celebrate all the individuals and groups that make up the capitol’s community. This has been overdue for decades and as we head into a future with a much more culturally diverse province, a day that honors all communities in our wider community is much needed.
In the same spirit, the City would program events at public spaces on National Indigenous People’s Day, June 21. Give City employees the day off, something that is entirely within Council’s power. Make a collaboration with other groups or neighbouring towns and cities. Create an Indigenous Festival. That is precisely what the TRC intended. And the City politicians can join with others to encourage the provincial government to review all its statutory holidays with an eye to recognizing June 21st on the date it falls.
And in a wider sense, the City could support the discovery of the actual history of Newfoundland and Labrador and the place of Indigenous people in that history rather than play silly games with words or foist myths and fabrications like the ones in the First Voice document. That would be inconvenient for some. But it would honest and the rest would be a stronger community with a shared understanding of who we all really are. That would be exactly what the members of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission wanted. The half-truths, lies, and hand-me-down holidays wrapped up in the City’s decision about St. John’s Day are not. They’re just appalling.
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