For indigenous people, the only thing worse than being called immigrants by the Governor General is supposed friends on Facebook agreeing with him.
“We’re a country based on immigration, going right back to our, quote, Indigenous people, unquote, who were immigrants as well, 10, 12, 14,000 years ago,” he said. Whoa, whoa, whoa there your grace! How’s that for a happy solidarity day?
And this guy represents our supposed ally the Queen of England, great. At least he had the sense to tweet an official retraction.
“And I want to clarify a miscommunication. Our Indigenous peoples are not immigrants. They are the original peoples of this land.”
At least your GG had the sense to quickly apologize, Facebook friends, not so much.
You may wonder why he so quickly changed his tune. Well, its 2017 and a mountain of evidence is piling higher and higher validating the oral traditions such as that of the Onkwehon:we of Six Nations who say that they have been here since time immemorial.
The NY Times published an article in April about a scientific study that claims humans were here in this continent 130,000 years ago. The bones of a mastodon were apparently broken open by ancient humans who wanted to eat the marrow. It’s a heated subject. It is possible there are other explanations for the fractures but the study determined that the bones were still fresh when they were broken with the rocks.
This evidence flies in the face of firmly established theories claiming all humankind left Africa around 80,000 years ago. Maybe all humans except Africans are immigrants if the Governor General wants to be that way. To get some perspective, even using the Bering model indigenous people were here thousands and thousands of years before the pyramids were made.
The NY Times story corroborates with the Two Row Times article we published just over a year ago “100,000 year old stone tools found in Haldimand Norfolk.” It’s good to note here that we aren’t even getting into linguistic and DNA evidence in this editorial for space reasons – let’s just say the argument is growing.
Humankind may have begun South America. That is still a possibility. Maybe we all originated from the Gulf of Mexico – the point of impact (just kidding). If we did move here everyone needs to remember that there were no other humans here when we arrived.
Today a Polynesian voyaging canoe completed its three-year journey around the globe. A dozen crew members relied only on ocean swells, stars, wind, birds to sail across 74,000 kilometres proving that ancient travellers did not need a frozen land bridge to cover great distances.
Oral tradition and archaelogical evidence supports the theory of ancient trade routes.
Acknowledging that indigenous peoples enjoyed the benefits of an advanced civilization destroys the primitive people narrative that the Eurocentric scientists promote.
After all if Europeans couldn`t cross the Atlantic until 1492 then “savage” “sub-humans shouldn`t be able to either, or so they have been telling us.
It would be most helpful to all concerned if the Governor General simply explained to his Canadians why racism has been tightly bundled with the Bering Strait theory for the last 150 years. Maybe if we were all immigrants the blatant theft of land wasn’t so bad after all – just one group of immigrants replacing another.
Hopefully the Queen’s people will stop calling us their indigenous people as if we belong to them.
