Lies of Omission

There can be not reconciliation without truth

First Voice is a coalition that includes provincial and municipal politicians and bureaucrats as well as representatives of Indigenous groups and organizations. Their “work focuses on promoting and supporting local implementation of the Calls to Action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), the Calls for Justice of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG), and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP).”

“Our name,” FV’s website states, “reflects the self-determining principle that meaningful action on urban Indigenous issues requires prioritizing the values, perspectives, and lived experiences of First Peoples.”

Action Item 42 on a list of 42 goals of the community plan released by First Voice is arguably the most important in the entire document.

42. Seek a formal apology from the provincial government for the legacy of harm that resulted from the exclusion of Indigenous Peoples in the Terms of Union with Canada in 1949.

Such an apology must be drafted in full collaboration with all Indigenous groups in the province, including urban Indigenous people, and should become a foundation for establishing a renewed relationship between the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador and Indigenous Peoples in the province.

The most important item listed last, including the ones in the section on justice in which it is placed. The *only* explanation of any kind for this action item is  appropriately stark given the gravity of the claim it contains.

“Our province has a uniquely dark and problematic colonialist history,” the authors write ominously. “The lands that are now known to most people as Newfoundland and Labrador were, like much of Canada, stolen from Indigenous Peoples without their consent. In our province these peoples are the Inuit, the Innu, the Mi’kmaq, and the Beothuk. As the first overseas territories to be colonized by the British Empire, it was here where the culture of the Beothuk was extinguished forever. And as the last province to join Confederation with the rest of Canada, it was here where Indigenous Peoples were excluded from the Terms of Union in 1949. This denial of the very existence of Indigenous people limited access to programs and services that otherwise would have been available to Indigenous people, communities, and nations in Newfoundland and Labrador.”

These are bald assertions that make it seem all of these claims are well-known or easily established fact. They aren’t. 

What’s more, the footnotes that back up this string of sentences are astoundingly skimpy. The one about the Beothuk goes to “A Legal Analysis of Genocide: Supplementary Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.” There’s actually no discussion of the Beothuk in the paper, except for a passing reference supported by a footnote to another paper that actually says very little about the Beothuk, who they are and what happened to them.

The other one in that paragraph – the one about the Terms of Union -  is for Maura Hanrahan’s paper for the Blame Canada commission in 2003: “The Lasting Breach: The Omission of Aboriginal People from the Terms of Union between Newfoundland and Canada and Its Ongoing Impacts.”

[It is] something uniquely dark, problematic, colonialist, and deeply sinister to spread lies – known falsehoods  - and pretend that they are true.

Despite the provocative title, Hanrahan does not actually show that Indigenous people were excluded by government officials and politicians from the Terms of Union. In fact, she doesn’t do anything to explain the reference in the title in the mere two pages in the entire paper that discusses the entire relationship between the Crown and Indigenous people in Newfoundland and Labrador up to the time she hit the last key on her keyboard typing the paper up.

The handful of references to the Terms of Union in Hanrahan’s paper are to a single 1999 article by Jerry Wetzel published in the Newfoundland  Quarterly in 1999.  If you trace *that* reference you find even less useful information, let alone evidence. Wetzel’s paper is a screed. It’s identified as a polemic in the editor’s preface. There are no references that could back any of the claims he makes, just lots of assertions of fact that are, as it turns out not factual at all.

Some of you may be surprised by this but it’s sadly typical of politics in Newfoundland and Labrador. We thrive not only on narratives of victimhood but on the half-truths and sometimes whole lies needed to make them work.  We tell ourselves lies for many reasons but in *this* case, people prefer the lie not only because it supports their current political need but because what actually went on raises far more uncomfortable issues about what is happening today than it resolves. And in the most simplistic sense, the lies make it easier to fit into someone else’s political agenda based on *their* experience rather than comes to grips with the reality of our own.