THE FIRST NATION
Turtle Island’s Identity Continues to Be Erased Some of the roots of hate toward Canada’s Indigenous people BY DAWOOD ZWINK Jacques Cartier, a French-Breton maritimer, who claimed Canada for France, erecting a Cross at Gaspe Photo © Library and Archives Canada, Acc. No. 1996-282-1
Even after some 500 years of the growing presence of primarily western Europeans immigrants and their descendants, the First Peoples, who were here quite a few millennia before we were, continue their struggle to survive and honor their passed-down legacy of wisdom, knowledge and guardianship. During the last 150 years, the influx of immigrants has become more diverse in terms of ethnic groups, nationalities and religions, including Muslims. The First Peoples did not invite any of these new arrivals to settle in their homeland. They have been generous, respectful, hospitable and accommodating according to their capacity and ability. However, in return and right from the beginning they have been met with genocide, diseases against which they had no natural immunity, greed, disrespect, domination, humiliation, sexual violence and deliberate attacks on everything that makes them who they are in terms of language, culture, religion, worldview and social and family structures. Among the many imposed realities they have tenaciously resisted is the Europeans’ practice of putting a price on everything. The resulting behavior and attitudes toward consumption, elite ownership and environmental destruction, all of which violated their communities’ norms, landed along with the first immigrants. How can such a calamity be explained?
A
s a resident of the unceded traditional land of the Mississaugas of the Credit, Anishinaabe Nation, I acknowledge and extend my respect to the Haudenosaunee Six Nations of the Grand River and to the HuronWendat Nation. I also acknowledge that the First Nations, Inuit and Metis peoples know this continent’s original name to be Turtle Island. History tells us that the Europeans’ obsession with achieving imperial domination on a global scale caused them to claim the original inhabitants’ land, create maps and change names wherever they went. When considering Indigenous peoples’ issues from a Muslim newcomer’s perspective, one is immediately confronted with two questions: Why have this land’s First Peoples encountered so much clear racial hatred from white settlers and their institutions, and why does Canada continue to refuse to acknowledge and confirm Indigenous rights to land ownership? 18 ISLAMIC HORIZONS MAY/JUNE 2021
ALIEN LAND CLAIMS
This disaster can be traced back to 16th-century Imperial Europe, which was awash with racial supremacy, religious intolerance, brutal military expansion and violent absorption of all lands and peoples around the Mediterranean Sea. The Roman Catholic Church, which arguably absorbed the values and attitudes of the Greek city-states and the Roman Empire, became the foundation of Europe’s cultural development and power relations. After the Church lost its power, it was the turn of its successor, the Holy Roman Empire. Regardless of which one was in power, however, all of them had one enduring ambition: to subjugate everything in the world.
