Symbols rarely evoke feelings of true unity

As the seventh parliamentary poet laureate (2016-2017), I knew I had to compose a chant — a dirge — entitled, “For the Murdered and the Missing: A Spiritual.” The piece includes these lines: “Someone’s flag looks like blood on snow./ Someone’s history’s a damn crime show.”

What better way for me — an AfroMétis (part Cherokee definitely, part Mi’kmaq maybe) — to talk about violence against Indigenous sistren, if not to render as horror a national symbol that represents usually just patriotic kitsch?

The lines got posted to my parliamentary website in November 2017, some three and a half years before revelations emerged about hundreds — and likely thousands — of unmarked graves of children buried on the grounds of residential schools that sought to “kill the Indian in the child,” but just ended up killing children.

That bleak news made the Maple Leaf seem even bloodier; so I well understand those who hesitate to embrace it as an expression of patriotic pride, given the cultural genocide carried out under its banner in the name of a putatively Caucasian God, a Britannic Majesty, and a Eurocentric country.

True: Most of the century of violations of Indigenous peoples occurred under the old Canadian flag — the Red Ensign, i.e., ye olde Royal Navy flag, but bearing the Canadian coat of arms.

Still, no matter what flag we choose to salute, the evils were perpetrated by Canadian governments in cahoots with several Christian churches: The Red Ensign was just as scarlet as the maple-leaf flag is crimson.

A further besmirching of the flag was perpetrated during the neofascist “Occupy Ottawa” campaign last winter, when Canuck truckers (recalling the “hard hats” rowdily demonstrating on behalf of U.S. outlaw prez Dick Nixon in 1970) attempted a putsch, arraying the Maple Leaf with the Confederate Stars and Bars and the Third Reich’s swastika, two loathsome banners of virulent racism.

Yes, this was a desecration and a disgrace, and one was — and is — right to feel appalled.

However, from the standpoint of the victims of Canadian state promulgations of racist or ethnocentric intolerance — see the Chinese head tax, the barring of Jews fleeing Hitler, the internment of Ukrainian, Italian and Japanese Canadians, the seizures of Doukhobor children, the unequal treatment of francophones, the forced sterilization of cognitively impaired persons in Alberta, the segregation of African Canadians in Nova Scotia and Southwestern Ontario, et cetera (emphasis necessary) — there may be a depressing similarity between long-reviled, foreign symbols of bigotry and the domestic experience of prejudice under “our” very own flag(s).

But this problem is rooted in the structure of Canada: Being a monarchy — and thus a hierarchy — different citizens experience vastly different degrees of status. Put simply: The closer one is to the monarch in race, ethnicity, language, accent, religion, class, and sexual orientation, the greater is one’s status in Canada.

Thus, “national symbols” can only rarely offer deeply felt national cohesion.

Indeed, the citizens of the world’s second-largest country, boasting five and a half time zones, also experience fractured sympathies resulting from drastically different regional and provincial cultures.

Note, for instance, that Atlantic provinces had centuries of separate existence (as British and/or French colonies) prior to Confederation in 1867, 1873, and 1949. Thus, there are compilations of Newfoundland English, P.E.I. English, Nova Scotian Gaelic and of Acadian French. What symbols beyond the fishery and the sea can truly serve to unite just these four provinces? (Even so, one observes the friction between Indigenous and settler-descended fishers.)

European-colonized Quebec begins in 1605 — 262 years prior to Confederation in 1867 — and received royal protection for French, Catholicism and its legal system. Consequently, Quebec evolved a “distinct society.” Yet so did Manitoba, a province with a proud tradition of rebellion, from Louis Riel to the Winnipeg General Strike. Similar distinctions can be made for the Rest of Canada.

So, we may not all rally around the monarchy, the Mounties or even the Maple Leaf, for the historical experience of that trio can be exceedingly negative for some (or many) Canadians.

Thank God, then, that wilderness, hockey, and doughnuts provide unifying touchstones …