Geoff Russ: This is the land of the Canadian people

Canadians whose families have been here for centuries are hardly uninvited guests, argues Geoff Russ. Photo by Stephen Waycott /Getty Images

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Canada can be a home to everyone except those who made it, as the official story so often now goes. At universities, in corporate boardrooms, and at municipal ceremonies from Victoria to Halifax, Canadians are reminded that they sleep, live, and breathe upon somebody else’s “traditional territory,” as “uninvited guests” on “stolen” land. This is the doctrine of delegitimization, designed to make Canadians politically and spiritually docile, for whatever reason. 

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In fact, Canada is the traditional land of the Canadian people because this is where they became a people in the first place. True, at some point, their ancestors may have set sail from Britain or France or wherever else in the world their forebears sailed from. But a country that your family has not lived or died in for four generations or more is no longer a homeland. Visiting London or Normandy may feel more familiar than Rio de Janeiro, but you are still a tourist in-spite of your surname.

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The original colonists and those who followed became Acadians, Canadiens, Maritimers, and British Columbians a long time ago, while others made families with Indigenous people, creating the Métis. All were distinctly North American, with their own songs, fables, and even accents (though these are sadly fading).

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That transformation happened in North America, and it makes no difference that the languages they speak today originally came from Europe. That transformation predated Confederation. 

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Colonists on the St. Lawrence in the late 1600s were already calling themselves Canadiens, and French military officers did not hesitate to recognize that they were different, nor did the colonials themselves.  

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During the Seven Years’ War, the tensions between the native-born people of New France and their European officers were apparent. 

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“War in this country is very different from the wars in Europe. The Canadiens and Indians would not march with the same confidence under the order of a commander of the troops from France, as they would under the officers of this colony,” remarked Pierre de Rigaud de Vaudreuil, the first Canadien-born governor of New France, on the eve of the British conquest.  

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Likewise, during the War of 1812, General Isaac Brock had great reservations about the North American-born members of the militia compared with his British regulars. All of these were signs that Canadians, both English- and French-speaking, had become something different from their counterparts in the metropole, though bound by loyalty.  

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People like to call Canada a “land of immigrants.” Canada is a country with many immigrants, to be sure, but not everyone can claim the immigrant story, and many have no reason to try. By the 1930s, nearly everybody living in Newfoundland was locally born. Such people cannot be called Europeans maintaining a colony. A people’s land becomes traditional when children are born in the same place where their grandparents are buried. Bonavista, Alberta’s foothills and the Ottawa Valley are traditional Canadian lands within a national homeland.