There is a scene in the 1960 movie, Inherit the Wind, (about the Scopes Monkey Trial) where Spencer Tracey and Frederic March, courtroom adversaries, discuss faith. March insists it is necessary for the masses to believe in something beautiful; it makes their lives more palatable. Tracy counters with a story about his childhood yearning for Golden Dancer, a rocking horse he had long coveted in a store window. With much scrimping and saving by his parents, he awoke one morning to find it at the base of his bed.
But the story does not have a happy ending. The first time he rode it, it fell apart, so poorly constructed was it, "put together with spit and sealing wax. All shine and no substance." This story relates to the ignorance and bigotry that hides behind great displays of religiosity, as evident in a previous scene, and is a major subtext of the entire film as science, in the form of evolution, confronts biblical literalism.
That got me thinking about the power of myth, both for good and ill, which brought me around to the often destructive influence of national myths, ones that are foundational to how people see their countries and themselves. Some are obviously destructive, such as American exceptionalism and the belief in the United States as a land of unparalleled opportunity, where anyone can become anything.
Then there are those that suggest something good, like Canada being an accepting, tolerant land that welcomes all and treats everyone well. As recent events have shown, we can no longer accept such anodyne myths as approximations of truth. They conceal too much ugly reality.
Consider, for example, this:
Before the remains of 215 Indigenous children were found in British Columbia last month, two-thirds of Canadians say, they knew a little or nothing about the history of this country’s residential school system.
It’s one of the findings in a survey commissioned by the Canadian Race Relation Foundation and the Assembly of First Nations.
They polled Canadians the week after the discovery at the site of a former residential school in Kamloops, B.C., was announced.
For many Canadians, it seems to have been a moment of shattered ignorance.
As Tom Parkin reports, ignoring reality was at the forefront of Jagmeet Singh's recent angry speech in the House of Commons, prompted both by the unmarked Indigenous graves and the horror that took place in London, Ontario.
“Some people have said, ‘This is not our Canada,’ ” Singh told MPs.
“But the reality is, this is our Canada. We can’t deny it. We can’t reject that, because it does no one any help. The reality is: Our Canada is a place of racism, of violence, of genocide of Indigenous people.”
Singh may be sensing a widespread mood. In an opinion poll Leger released last week, 57 per cent of Canadians said the Kamloops graves made them “question the whole moral foundation that Canada has been based on.”
Parkin says this is not a message that Canada's political and business leaders will take kindly to or promote.
The deaths and burials at residential schools were known by Indigenous families, but news media didn’t tell those stories. Nor is the frustration with ongoing racism, and fear of violent racists, new in Canada. Many Canadians live with both every day.
These are the experiences of what political science calls the “subaltern” classes of society — groups who have no say and no command in politics or business. And they certainly don’t decide the meaning of their country. Not usually, anyway.
Subaltern society is divided into identities, each pushed to the margins of political discourse, isolated from each other, and without the common networks, culture, or political language to tell a common and unifying story. That now seems to be changing.
“This is our Canada” isn’t just a demand to look objectively at Canada’s past; it’s a call to disparate people to find a new moral basis for their country.
And it is also a call for all of us to take a good, long look in the mirror.
