r/canada • u/dasoberirishman Canada • 5d ago
Analysis Majority of Canadians don't see themselves as 'settlers,' poll finds
https://nationalpost.com/news/poll-says-3-in-4-canadians-dont-think-settler-describes-them1.9k
u/Krytan 5d ago
Why would they? The first european settlement in Canada was over 400 years ago.
That's about the same timeline to the fall of Constantinople. Do you think the Turks who rule there now view themselves as invaders or occupiers? Of course not. Even 100 years is a long time, stuff stretching back 400 or 500 years may as well be to the dawn of time as far as most people are concerned.
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u/Taipers_4_days 4d ago
Quebec City was founded in 1608. 155 years before that Constantinople fell, which means that the founding of Quebec City is significantly closer to Romans than to the modern day.
After 416 years you aren’t a settler anymore.
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u/Disastrous-Aerie-698 5d ago edited 4d ago
wow, Canadians are not seeing themselves as evil invaders? seems like the mandatory land acknowledgement before everything isn't working
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u/witty_username89 4d ago
Not to mention they’re just acknowledging the last tribe that lived there, what about all the other tribes they displaced to get the land
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u/KatsumotoKurier Ontario 4d ago edited 4d ago
This has always irked me the most. We’re just putting on a performative pity-party for the second-last conquerors. It’s pathetic and doesn’t do anyone any real or meaningful good.
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u/witty_username89 4d ago
Ya exactly, every country was tribal at one time and has been conquered over and over throughout history. Anyone alive today had nothing to do with settling Canada.
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u/KatsumotoKurier Ontario 4d ago
Anyone alive today had nothing to do with settling Canada.
Sadly some people both ITT and in our country refuse to recognize this, and have skulls thick enough that they simply fail to understand it.
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u/redalastor Québec 4d ago edited 4d ago
The Wendat moved from the Great Lakes to Quebec because they were getting slaughtered by the Iroquois. Out of the 30,000 they used to be, only 300 were left. They heard that foreigners had landed and they wondered if they could get help there because they had no other choice.
It turned out that yes the French could help because they had armors and guns. And in turn the Wendats could help them survive the winter.
But today, we’re asked to apologize for the battles in which the Iroquois have been killed despite them basically being the nazis of the time. And it’s not even a case of “it’s a long time ago, it’s our ancestors that did this”, I believe that siding with the victims of a genocide was the correct moral action.
And of course, the Iroquois never recognize responsibility for anything and still act in a hateful way towards the Wendats on social media even if centuries have passed.
P.S.: Iroquois is not how they called themselves, it’s how the Wendats called them, it means killers.
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u/_nepunepu Québec 4d ago
Cartier encountered First Nations on his first visit to Canada in 1534, who lived in where is now Quebec City. In 1608, Champlain could find no trace of the people Cartier encountered on his travels merely 70 years before.
The prevailing theory is that a group of Iroquoian tribes inhabited the St. Lawrence Valley region and in that intervening period, they were genocided and remnants absorbed by the Iroquois Confederacy tribes.
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u/eff-bee-eye 4d ago
Not just the Wendat, but the Neutral nation and Petun as well. Some were absorbed once their numbers were small. Ps. Fact check me, but I think Iroquois meant “snake”
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u/redalastor Québec 4d ago
Ps. Fact check me, but I think Iroquois meant “snake”
The Iroquois do claim that it is French for snake but it's bullshit. The French for snake is serpent.
Iroquois comes from the Souriquois (Basque and Mi'kmaq pidgin) Hirok which means killer. The “uois” was added by the Wendats to make it sound more French.
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u/Resident-Pen-5718 5d ago
It's about as effective as a parent telling their child, "you have to apologize and you have to mean it!".
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u/FeelMyBoars 4d ago
The folks in the kootneys and vancouver need to acknowledge that their land once belonged to South American first nations. If we're going back, we're going all the way.
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u/TheCookiez 5d ago
Personally I am not a settler.
I was born here. I have zero attachment to any other place on earth.
My parents where both born here.
Yes my relatives did move here at some point, but I zero connection to the place they left and if I attempted to go there everything would be so foreign to me I wouldn't be able to integrate without a lot of difficulty.
So sorry not sorry. I am not a settler. I am a proud Canadian.
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u/Less-Procedure-4104 4d ago
We don't even know what they mean by settler. No one is originally from here they may of come first but humans aren't indigenous to the Americas.
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u/WorkingAssociate9860 4d ago
The Inuit are settlers to Canada for roughly 1000 years and they're treated as indigenous. Were not far off from being as removed from Columbus as Columbus was from the first Inuit in the country.
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u/mk_gecko 5d ago
It's a very racist term. It only seems to apply to white people.
If a "white" English speaking person immigrates to Canada and a brown skinned English speak speaking person immigrates to Canada in the same year,
you can bet that only the white person is called a settler.It's totally racist.
It has no consideration for where you come from, what you did, your ancestry, your socio-economic status, ...
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u/Defiant-Plantain1873 4d ago
It’s not even like only white people have ever been colonised, until like 1470 Spain was almost completely colonised by Moors and had been for about 800 years.
If you had a time machine and went back to 1450s Spain, would you consider the Moors settlers? The majority would have been born and raised in Spain, it’s all they’ve ever known as home, going back multiple generations all their family would be from Spain. They clearly weren’t settlers then, especially not on an individual basis, they just happened to live there.
Many Canadians can trace their routes back hundreds of years, how much of a settler can you really be if your family has lived in a place since before the industrial revolution.
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u/AlmostButNotQuiteTea 4d ago
You forgot the golden rule though.
White people can't have racism done to us, it's our super power.
Someone beat you up because you're white, in the wrong area? Didn't happen, impossible.
Someone called you cracker and tried to hurt your feelings? Didn't happen, remember racism can't happen to you.
Oh those job posting, university seats and government grants are only for Indigenous, and PoC? Doesn't effect you. Remember. No white racism.
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u/PreemoisGOAT 5d ago edited 5d ago
at work we had someone come tell us how there are no such things as Canadians
she had it set up where we say where we're from and as soon as someone said Canada she went into her speech
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u/LUFC_hippo 5d ago
I’m sure they didn’t mind getting paid in imaginary Canadian dollars for that nonsense
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u/L_viathan 5d ago
They get real money. Far too much real money.
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u/madbuilder Ontario 4d ago
The point is that she believes in the (federal) authority behind the dollar in spite of what she said "there are no such things as Canadians".
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u/pokemanfan95 5d ago
They say that, until they need somebody to blame for something.
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u/PreemoisGOAT 5d ago
they blamed the government in the same discussion and oh their paycheck they're getting also comes from tax money
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u/Firepower01 4d ago
That's insane. When I was a kid growing up in the 90s/2000s we were proud about more and more people identifying primarily as Canadian. We encouraged a unique Canadian identity that we seem to be moving away from in favour of promoting this cultural mosaic.
I hate it. What about us who have been here for generations? My family came here from Italy generations ago, I think I am like fourth or fifth generation. I have zero connection with Italy, I do not really consider myself culturally Italian at all. I'm not supposed to call myself Canadian? Bullshit.
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u/insid3outl4w 4d ago
It’s because the rate in which immigration has increased has caused the number of Canadians (especially younger in school and working age) to increase. As a result they still feel closer to their home countries. White people use these immigrants to virtue signal for diversity points in their schools and workplaces to make themselves appear more woke.
The Canada you explained in your first paragraph was from a time when the rate of immigration was less than today. Our Canadian culture could accommodate a slower pace of change. Right now our cultural cohesion is being stretched to the point where being Canadian means less and less
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u/OpinionedOnion 5d ago
My grandparents are immigrants and I was born here. Why should I feel like a settler?
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u/propjon88 5d ago
I don't remember settling anything.
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u/MeanE Nova Scotia 5d ago
I settled Catan a few times.
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u/PacketGain Canada 5d ago
Same! The key is to trade away all your most valued resource and then play the Monopoly card!
Ruin families, it will!
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u/Xyres British Columbia 4d ago
Catan was how I found out that my wife was a really poor loser early in our relationship.
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u/JournalofFailure Newfoundland and Labrador 5d ago
I settled for my mediocre life and job, if that counts.
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u/Expensive_Peak_1604 5d ago
I settled on my couch for a movie night last weekend.
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u/notacanuckskibum 5d ago
I wasn’t born here. But I immigrated legally into an established country that accepted me. I see myself as an immigrant, not a settler.
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u/Cascadian_Canadian 5d ago
That's because I'm not a settler or a fucking colonist. My ancestors like 5 generations ago were. I'm just a dude trying to pay my bills. Don't fucking label me.
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u/Cool-Sink8886 4d ago
My ancestors were shipped here for being orphans and poor. it wasn't even a life they asked for.
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u/Coalnaryinthecarmine 4d ago
About 2/3rds of French Canadiens are descended from unattached women that were shipped here; a large number of canadians of distant scottish descendant were shipped/or forced to come here after they were kicked out of their own traditional land in the highlands. Irish came fleeing famine or religious persecution. I suspect just about every historic 'settler' group has similar stories of fleeing dispossession.
It's almost as if the people who sold their possessions and left everyone and everything they had ever known - likely for good - to move thousand of miles across the ocean at a time when the fastest method of communication was a multi week voyage with a real possibility of contracting a deadly disease, were not motivated by "settling the frontier" or "earning their fortunes" but came as a last resort to avoid dying homeless in Europe.
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u/Cool-Sink8886 4d ago
Yep, I’m part Irish, English, and French.
The English side came as Home Children. Their parents died, and they were orphaned young boys, so they were shipped off to Canada to work.
The French side was likely one of those women.
The Irish side were Catholic who had their lands seized by the Protestants, and eventually left for Canada.
Not really any easy lives for any of them.
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u/DigitalTor 5d ago
Canada: we welcome immigrants in our accepting, tolerant society. Come be a Canadian!
Also Canada: we decided to call all non-Indigenous people "settlers" and "colonists" even if they were born here or been here for centuries - no matter.
Immigrants: ...
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u/Commercial-Kick-5539 4d ago
This is just the continued trend of trying to make white people feel guilty about things they haven't done or had no part in.
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u/TerryFromFubar 5d ago
Also, it's very weird to rename everything to literal descriptive aboriginal anglicisations from dead languages with a lack of oral or written history.
If there is a cultural or oral toponymical history then I am all for it. But so many renamings are based on 'what we think aboriginal people would have called this place based on the questionable work of linguistic researchers in the 1990s.'
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u/AlanYx 5d ago
To be a "settler", you have to have somewhere you could (at least in theory) return to. Most of us who were born here, and whose parents were born here, simply have nowhere else to go. It's unfair to call that sort of person a settler.
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u/compassrunner 5d ago
OF course not. And it's not just the 18-34 year olds. A lot of people born here don't identify as settlers.
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u/SctBrnNumber1Fan 5d ago
Ya fuck that, my parents, grandparents, and great grand parents were born here... I've had several conversations over the years with Inuit and first Nations people where I said that and asked "how many ancestors need to be born here for me to be able to consider this my homeland too" and that usually gets the message through.
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u/PhantomNomad 5d ago
My family can trace it's roots to North America from the late 1700's. There is no way I'm a settler or colonist. Maybe my great grandfather that moved from out east to the prairies, but by then we had already been here for 100 years.
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u/UselessPsychology432 5d ago edited 5d ago
I'm really glad a majority of people are rejecting this divisive settler/colonizers narrative.
It's fucking disgusting to hold people even tangentially responsible for things that other people did, just because of their skin colour. It would be so dumb if it wasn't malicious.
All of this identity politics stuff is meant to divide the working class along racial, gender etc lines to fight amongst itself, rather than focus on the politicians and their corporate masters that are really fucking us all
Edit: for all you commenters denying that the settler/colonizers narrative promotes blaming current Canadians, here's a link to a particularly deranged comment (though there are others):
https://www.reddit.com/r/canada/s/VajC8HZgPt
Very easy to say when you're descended from colonizers who raped, murdered and abused my people. A lot harder to say when you have generational trauma from the people who surround you every day on the street- the people who while they themselves are not native to this land, scream about how we can't let anyone else in.
Meanwhile the people who came from this land, who have been here long before "Canada" was misconstrued and given as a name of a country... we watch and say "damn, couldn't you have said that shit before you came here and murdered us and tossed our children in boarding schools to be raped by priests, beaten by nuns, and have the newborns tossed alive in a fire????
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u/CaptainCanuck93 Canada 5d ago edited 5d ago
It also simply ignores that human migration, both violent and peaceful, has been a constant in human history, and it's naive to think a single person has completely innocent ancestors
What's your "start date" for when you believe the world should be mapped for who is indigenous to where?
If the starting point is 2000 years ago, you might consider the Jewish people to be the sole indigenous people of most of modern day Israel, as the semi-autonomous Roman province of Judea still existed and was overwhelmingly of Jewish ethnicity. But if you set the "start date" just a little over a hundred years later, after the Romans killed, expelled, or enslaved most Jewish people from the core of Judea after the 3rd Jewish Revolt, and renamed the territory Palaestina, surely the non-Jewish people who moved into the region at this stage have some claim to being "indigenous" from there too, after being on the land for almost 1900 years?
If the starting point is 1000 years ago, should we consider almost the entire population of Turkey as "settlers" on indigenous Greek land?
If the starting point is pre-European arrival to North America, should we consider the Haudenosaunee settlers on the indigenous land of the Huron-Wendat people, who were nearly entirely wiped out by the Haudenosaunee about 100 years after European arrival and now have many of their former lands occupied as reservations of the Haudenosaunee granted by the British and later Canadian governments?
Trying to untangle the knotted up cord of human history to figure out where and whom is indigenous to what depends on setting a "start date", and that exercise often leads to contradictory positions and self serving
We should focus on the real and terrible actions that the Canadian government actually did to Aboriginal people and how we do actually have an obligation to right those wrongs, rather than focusing on labels with racist undertones
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u/DrB00 5d ago
I believe the dinosaurs were the first indigenous. So we need to respect our dinosaur overlords.
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u/LuminousGrue 5d ago
Dinosaurs became modern birds, and trust me the geese know.
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u/Vecend 5d ago
If you look at history every modern nation has settled or colonized their current lands from some other people, I doubt even the first nations are innocent of this, we need to move on from worrying and apologizing about what people did 100+ years in the past and fix what needs to be fixed for people to live decent lives in the present.
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u/notsumtin 5d ago
All of this identity politics stuff is meant to divide the working class along racial, gender etc lines to fight amongst itself, rather than focus on the politicians and their corporate masters that are really fucking us all
There's a reason that this current wave exploded onto the media landscape after the Occupy protesters started reaching the public about the corruption within our banking systems, and refused to turn into violent mobs.
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u/JadedArgument1114 5d ago
Yeah, it was very obvious. People may have forgotten but during the beginning of Occupy it was reasonable and popular and it had news anchors and billionaires freaking out on all the corporate news and then suddenly the media jumped hard on racial identity conflict stuff after eventually ignoring all occupy stuff. I don't know if the "progressive stack" identitarianism Occupy turned into was organic or astroturfed but at the beginning it had attainable and realistic goals and it scared the hell out of the billionaire class.
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u/Techno_Dharma 5d ago
David Graeber wrote a tell all book about the experience and failures of the occupy movement, he was one of the original organizers and he named the orgs that stepped in to cause division in the movement. It's a short read and totally worth picking up, title is The Democracy Project.
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u/notsumtin 5d ago
I don't know if the "progressive stack" identitarianism Occupy turned into was organic or astroturfed
At the Occupy camp in my city, one of the most prominent topics discussed was warning people about the inevitable co-opting of the movement by corporate interests. So from my perspective, if people were sounding the alarm about something which did actually happen shortly after, it wasn't organic.
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u/JadedArgument1114 5d ago
There is a reason that Fred Hampton was assassinated by the American government while Elijah Muhammad was able to die peacefully in his bed at 78. Racial/social divisions have always been exploited when the commoners start getting uppity.
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u/blurryeyes_ 5d ago
Absolutely. I was thinking about this today but within an African context. Leaders who wanted equality, autonomy empowerment for their people were exiled and/or assassinated while warmongers, criminals and puppets get to rule for decades
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u/Aggressive_Ad_507 5d ago
The more I learn about the First Nations people the more I see them as people with hopes, dreams, struggles, and stories, just like the rest of us. It breaks down the racism I grew up with as part of my time.
The settler/colonial vs first Nations narrative does the opposite. It creates division and resentment between groups. There is a lot of hurt and pain in recent history that must heal. But I don't see how dividing us is going to do that.
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u/risen2011 Nova Scotia 5d ago
I was born on this continent. I am not a settler. My ancestors were, but I am not. End of story.
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u/turnedtolook 5d ago
True store, On me mudder's side, the King of England burned our homes on the Outer Hebrides and deported us to PEI as part of the Highland Clearances.
So now what, go back to Scotland and demand our land back HAHAHAHAHAHA
Being a 'settler/colonialist' was not all it was cracked up to be
My dad only got to Canada in the 1950s
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u/ether_reddit Lest We Forget 4d ago
My great-grandparents were basically refugees from Scotland, fleeing poverty and famine.
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u/Evilbred 5d ago
My ancestors arrived here after the ancestors of the current First Nations peoples, but I was born here on this land just as they were.
I don't have ancestral rights in Ireland or France, this land is my land, just as much as it belongs to anyone living today.
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u/Wheels314 5d ago
My ancestors arrived at established colonies that were already settled. None of them were settlers.
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u/jascas 5d ago
My ancestors were British Home Children. They didn't choose to come here.
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u/CurtAngst 5d ago
It’s amazing how few Canadians know about this. My Irish great uncles were basically stolen by the Catholic Church, separated and sent to Canada at 8 and 10 to be indentured servant/slaves to the Protestant Brit’s on their newly “discovered” land.
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u/BugPowderDuster 5d ago
My ancestors were migrants. They moved to several different countries before managing to retain one home and continuous employment.
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u/LuntiX Canada 5d ago
Same. While yes, they were mostly blue collar tradesmen and farmers from the US and Europe/UK, they all settled in established cities when they all migrated to Canada. The ones that had farms weren’t even the first farmers on those lands, they bought the land from other farmers. The land was already settled. They just worked it.
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u/LeonardoSpaceman 5d ago
Should we work on the housing crisis or..... fight over the colour of crosswalks and identities?
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u/DankeBrutus 5d ago
It's easy to perform. It is not so easy to do anything that provides material benefits to people.
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u/OkSpend1270 5d ago
Lots of Canadians who are of European descent and who have been here for centuries also have Indigenous heritage, like myself. Many might not even know it until they take a DNA test. That is an issue that I have with this divisive narrative. What does this mean for them? Would they still be settlers/colonizers who need to hold themselves accountable for something in which they had no control over? Or would they be less at fault for colonialism given their ancestors were Indigenous?
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u/canadianmohawk1 5d ago
I ask myself this everyday, being mixed Haudenosaunee (Mohawk) and European descent and living on Huron-Wendat (Algonquin) 'unceded' lands.
My answer to myself is usually: 'Whatever' and then I roll my eyes and disregard it and move on.
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u/Spicy1 5d ago
Doesn’t matter that people reject it. My kids came home talking about how they were told they’re colonizers in class, I assume on the basis of their shade of skin. Their mom is considered POC by some and I come from a culture that had 500 years of foreign oppression.
It’s disguisting, and it’s being pushed in schools.
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u/risen2011 Nova Scotia 5d ago
My ancestors were put on boats and deported. Some would consider that genocide these days.
These binary oppressor-oppressed narratives only benefit grifters trying to get political power or make a buck.
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u/Bloodaegisx 4d ago
I had less than stellar grades in Highschool so I went to Polytech to upgrade and had to take their Indigenous Studies course as a mandatory extra course.
Instead of focusing on traditions, cultures, values and history a majority of the program was talking about how great things where before the colonizers came, there was no war and only peace. We even had to write a short "apology" to the missing Indigenous women about how we failed them.
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u/rusalka_00 5d ago
I don’t even understand how skin colour is an actual indicator of who is a “settler” and who is not.
Every race and ethnicity has people with white coloured skin.
There are plenty of countries with predominantly white coloured skin people that had no role in colonizing the Americas.
There are plenty of Canadian POC families that have been here for generations, benefiting off of unceded lands.
IF we are actually going to label people as settlers, then why not use a measure like an ancestry line? “Are you direct descendant of a colonizer or settler?”.
AND then, if you’re bold enough to slap the label of “settler” or “colonizer” onto someone that you’ve shown to be a direct descendant of a settler or colonizer, then be prepared to slap on labels of “rapist”, “genocider”, “war mongrel”, “murderer” (everything you can think of) onto everyone, since everyone is a descendant of at least one of those things.
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u/butters1337 5d ago
It's fucking disgusting to hold people even tangentially responsible for things that other people did, just because of their skin colour. It would be so dumb if it wasn't malicious.
Call it what it is: racism.
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u/RustyFoe 5d ago edited 4d ago
I really wonder how long this country wide apology tour is going to last for. Are we really all supposed to hang our head in shames for all of eternity?
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u/legocastle77 5d ago
With more and more people hitting hard times, I suspect that the tour is coming to an end. Apologizing for things that have nothing to do with you or in many cases, even your ancestors is getting pretty absurd when many people you can’t even afford to pay rent or put food on the table.
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u/JD-Vances-Couch 5d ago edited 5d ago
I support native rights, acknowledge and am ashamed of what our ancestors did and what continues to happen, and even support some land back claims especially the Six Nations of the Grand River, who were robbed of the land granted to them for fighting against the Americans. Without their dedication to our defense we would likely be another US state.
Calling myself a settler is where you lose me, though. I was born here, my grandparents were born here, and my great - great grandfather was sent here alone at 14 years old to work and live on a settler farm, where he faced excessive abuse until he hopped on a freight train to Saskatchewan, and found a job in a grocery store. My family wasn’t settled here willingly
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u/fugaziozbourne Québec 5d ago
All of this identity politics stuff is meant to divide the working class along racial, gender etc lines to fight amongst itself, rather than focus on the politicians and their corporate masters that are really fucking us all
Scream this from all the rooftops, everybody. This culture war went nuclear exactly when we occupied Wall Street. That wasn't a coincidence.
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u/Huntersbriar 5d ago edited 4d ago
“‘There is much creepy virtue-signalling in whites abasing themselves as “settlers.” But there is no road forward because, fundamentally, it is a collectivist concept. Fernwood’s book plug ends with a sympathetic academic claiming “settler colonialism as a mode of domination is fundamentally constituted by the unequal relationship between indigenous and non-indigenous collectives.”
Precisely. This approach blames some people not for what they did but for what somebody like them did. Or somebody quite unlike them in the case of “new Canadians” and their children. It absolves others of all blame based on skin colour and falsifies their ancestors’ history. It denies the very possibility of reconciliation and falsifies the reality that all cultures are a blend of influences that arise as people interact, borrow, impose, improvise and adapt. And it falsifies the present.
At bottom there is neither an “Indian” problem nor a “settler” one. There is a historical problem, the aftermath of massive collision between two very different cultures half a millennium ago. And a human problem: being just and compassionate in our own time.‘“
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u/CrabbyPatty1876 5d ago
By this standard then even the "natives" settled here
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u/LymelightTO 5d ago
In reality, yes, but I think the native groups generally reject the assertion that they migrated to North America, because it conflicts with their oral tradition which emphasizes that they've always been here.
Your argument would be generally accepted to be factual from an archaeological perspective, but I wouldn't expect it would gain any political traction if you were making that argument directly to indigenous people.
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u/CrabbyPatty1876 5d ago
They can reject it all they want but archeological evidence is far more important than a game of telephone
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u/forestly 5d ago
isnt it technically true because of crossing over the bering strait from siberia..... lol. people in nunavut/alaska/russian north look similar
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u/Western-Bad-667 5d ago
Some of my ancestors bought a bill of goods from the federal govt about the land of milk and honey, emigrated from Britain, and found themselves dumped in the middle of the bald prairie with no water for miles. They worked unbelievably hard just to survive and eventually built farms, helped to build a church and a school and a town, and kept their end of the deal. They were settlers. I am fortunate to be a Canadian because of them. I am not a settler - that honour belongs to them.
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u/RhubarbFriendly9666 5d ago
both my great great grandparents, one side French and one side English, got the milk and honey treatment only to find barren rock on the Canadian shield. but somehow they had 13 kids each and built a farm and figured how to work the land. my grandparents still own a cottage on a piece of the one lot, the rest was donated to the church by my great grandmother. Canada stands on the shoulders of giants.
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u/geeves_007 5d ago
I mean on one hand our leaders clamour to defend "Jus soli" despite the fact that it is routinely exploited by birth tourists. Are these people "settlers" too?
I am 4th generation Canadian, but not First Nations. I am a settler, apparently. But a baby born today as a result of birth tourism is somehow not a settler, unless they are European. Am I getting that right?
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u/PlaintainForScale 5d ago
All of my grandparents were born here. Anyone who wants to label me a settler can eat shit.
My maternal grandfather watched his older brother enroll in the military at 17 after lying about his age. He was a navigator that flew in a Lancaster Bomber in WW2. His life came to an abrupt end at the age of 21 when his plane was shot down over France.
Never once have I attempted to label someone without family who fought and died for this country as anything less than deserving or anything less Canadian than me.
Fuck that divisive bullshit.
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u/HurlinVermin 5d ago
If you were born here or became a naturalized citizen, you're a Canadian. That's the only identity you need.
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u/KageyK 5d ago
Sorry, I was born here. Therefore, I'm native Canadian, as were my parents.
I might have ancestors that settled here somewhere back in my family line, but I hardly had control of their decisions.
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u/bigoledawg7 5d ago
There is a sinister sub-narrative that wants people to feel guilt and shame for events in the past that have nothing whatsoever to do with us, while ALSO ignoring all the fantastic and wonderful contributions of our ancestors that we are not allowed to celebrate. Just another distortion in the biased rhetoric that is entirely intentional.
And while we are all supposed to be equal, it seems attacking the white culture is Open Season while every other culture and race is allowed to get away with astounding hypocrisy and racial bias.
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u/King-Conn 5d ago
I am not ashamed of my heritage nor should anyone else be.
My ancestors are Irish, German, and French. They lived forever in Nova Scotia as fishermen until the first and second world wars.
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u/WardenEdgewise 5d ago
While I completely understand and appreciate the indigenous peoples situation, my ancestors have been on this continent for 10 generations. Am I a settler? If I am a settler, what do I do about it?
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u/Confident_Plan7187 5d ago
give them all your money and live in shame or something
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u/PCB_EIT 4d ago
My friend's brother literally writes articles about how bad colonizers/settlers are for part of his job.
I called him out one day for buying a house. I asked him why he did knowingly buy stolen land and when he planned to return it. The mental gymnastics he made to justify it were insaneeee.
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u/Ancient-Industry-772 5d ago
If you are a settler, so are they. Just because they settled here before our families did doesn't make them less of a settler. Plus, there is plenty of historical evidence that shows native tribes from north/south America attempted to settle/colonize in other areas around the world as well.
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u/rwags2024 5d ago
I’d wager the majority of indigenous people don’t see themselves as settlers either
“We all” came here from somewhere
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u/SmallMacBlaster 5d ago
“We all” came here from somewhere
Yup. Be it 500 years ago or 10,000 years ago. It's irrelevant. We are all humans that should be treated equally.
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u/GomarMeLek 5d ago edited 5d ago
Almost 50% of people living in Canada are either migrants or second generation migrants.
More than 60% if we include 3rd generation "migrants". So of course almost no one feels like a settler.
Edit : updated the 2021 % with 2024 estimates.
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u/trblcdn 5d ago
My ancestors who came in the 1600's were def colonizers. 100% both French and British sides. After that for maybe a generation you can call them settlers - even though they were BORN here so did not "settle" or join an existing group. After that, no.
I have no relatives living outside Caanda. Not one other than a few cousins who moved to the US about 50 yrs ago
I am not a settler, I am Canadian. Same as every other person born in Canada.
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u/Fun-Persimmon1207 5d ago
The First Nations did not magically appear here. They immigrated from Asia and as such are just as much settlers on this land as my ancestors.
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u/juiceAll3n 5d ago
Yea because we don't give a fuck about identity politics nonsense. We focus on real world important things like paying bills and keeping a roof over our heads + food on the table.
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u/Shakethecrimestick 5d ago edited 5d ago
My question to this idea of settlers/colonizers - where do we draw the line?
Surely someone who has ancestors who lived in ancient cultures of South America are not "colonizers" as their ancestors were colonized by the same people who colonized present day North America. What about those from India, they were colonized at a time, or other areas of South East Asia, or Africa.....so why not just outright say it, it's not "colonizers" or "settlers", it's Western European....but Western Europeans colonized each other over history, so who is colonizing and who is colonized? If I have Irish ancestors who were starved out of Ireland but the English (the same English who colonized), do I have the "generational trauma" of colonization?
Humans are nomadic. Over the entire history of humanity, people/tribes moved around and took land from each other. Why is land divided by the North Atlantic so unique in how it was taken? And don't kid yourself, before that happened, North America wasn't some Utopia of peace and prosperity - it was land fought for and taken over by fighting tribes. So what, as long as skin colour is close enough, we don't acknowledge?
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u/This-Importance5698 5d ago
I was born here.
I have just as much right to be on this land as any indigenous person.
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u/Asherwinny107 5d ago edited 5d ago
The only European descended people I've ever met who "proudly" wear the label of colonist, are often wealthy college kids who wouldn't know a hards day work if it slapped them in the face.
I've never understood this whole propaganda campaign. Did anyone actually expect majority of Canadians to shoulder the actions of ancestors they are sometimes three generations removed from? Or in most cases shoulder the action of people they have no connection to?
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u/awsamation Alberta 5d ago
Hell, Canada has been around long enough that how many European descended people have absolutely no ties to the original colonization.
My great grandfather came here shortly after WW2. Our families story is better described as refugees than colonizers.
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u/Prudent_Selection382 5d ago
Cant settle because housing is a fucked market making a home impossible
Were all drifters
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u/crazynekosama 4d ago
The most recent immigrants in my family were in 1905 from Poland. My great-grandmother was the first one born here in Canada. They came here to have a better life because there were so many issues in Poland. They didn't settle. They moved into an area already built in Toronto. They stopped speaking Polish and Anglicized their names so they could get work. So my great-grandmother couldn't speak much Polish. I definitely can't. I don't know anything about Polish food and culture beyond when my great-grandmother made cabbage rolls.
Then I've got a giant Irish background. People who came here just before the famine and in the years during and after. Not sure how those poor Irish could be considered settlers. Not sure how I could go back to Ireland and it be my home. I've never been. I know of no family there.
The oldest family we can trace coming here is after the American Revolution. They first immigrated to the US from France because they were Huguenots. And then that branch of the family moved into Ontario during the American war because they were loyalists.
All that to say history is complicated and to say we are all just settlers and colonists does a huge disservice to all the people that came to Canada. 99% of whom were just ordinary people, trying to survive while all the powerful people were doing all their geo-political shenanigans.
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u/Automatic-One7845 4d ago
I was born in a hospital 30 minutes from where I grew up, what did I settle? The street that was built in the 60s? This ridiculous narrative from the left that white people are settlers or colonizers in 2024 is absolute insanity and should be laughed at. It's this level of cognitive dissonance that got us in this predicament, we're listening to people who have MULTIPLE mental health diagnosis as if they're the ones correct! We're literally letting the inmates run the asylum!
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u/nuggetsofglory 4d ago
Considering how most of the atrocities commited against Indigenous were done by the government and Church, maybe we should be holding them to the fire more than we do average canadians whose families may or may not have had anything to do with or any real choice in the matter.
Or y'know, the corrupt chiefs putting themselves before their people. Almost like people and groups with "power" would rather we blame each other than put the blame where it truly lies.
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u/-SPIRITUAL-GANGSTER- 5d ago
If I’m a “settler” or a “colonizer,” then what are the 6 million people who’ve been shoehorned into the country over the past 9 years?
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u/Lunaciteeee 5d ago
Half my family originally came to Canada to escape persecution during WW2. I'm ineligible to emigrate back to Europe or Asia. Even if I were, I'm not even fluent in languages other than English + French.
Anyone who wants to claim I'm a "settler" can fuck right off. This is what happens when academics form an echo chamber rather than an open forum of discussion.
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u/A_Snow_Mexican 5d ago
Should really stop finger pointing at the average Canadian and maybe blame The Governments of the past and the Churches that made the mess. We just live here man.
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u/WalterWurscht 5d ago
How long ago is a settler before they are Canadian? I am a believer in the Beringa land bridge permitting the settlement of north America 10,000 years ago...so are First Nations nothing more that ice age settlers?
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u/BrightPerspective 5d ago
Bah, "settler", "colonizer". These words are just bigotry.
I was born here. The land flows in my veins like any other.
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u/64Olds 5d ago
Glad it's not just me.
The CBC is the worst offender here. I'm sorry, but I am sick and tired of hearing about settler colonialism and residential schools on the public broadcaster every single hour of every single day. We know the story - stop shoving it down our throats. I used to dearly love the CBC but it's absolutely fucking unlistenable these days, and if they don't change, I'll be happy to see PP defund the shit out of it.
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u/Euler007 5d ago edited 4d ago
Did the indian tribe see themselves as asian settlers? They had a 12,000 to 30,000 years head start.
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u/Ms-Unhelpful 5d ago
Well, the majority of canadians were born in Canada, so why would they see themselves as settlers?
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u/NO-MAD-CLAD 4d ago
Gee, should we be calling First Nations people settlers because their ancestors crossed the frozen waters between North Eastern part of Russia and Alaska to get here? Should we call people in South America that are descendants of those that crossed the bearing straight settlers as well?
This is all about fabricating rage by nitpicking timelines. No human being on earth is native to the Americas.
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u/ImperialPotentate 5d ago
I was born on this land fair and square, so I'm no "settler." It's time to get over this divisive bull-shit.
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u/LeonardoSpaceman 5d ago
It's actually kind of funny, I look like a white guy but actually have a huge amount of Metis heritage.
No one cares. Ironically, they all judge people based on appearance.
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u/LastNightsHangover 5d ago
a huge amount of Metis heritage.
And of course the double irony being Metis culture was borne as a result of cultures coming together...and being rejected by their European and Indigenous families. Even untill recently treaty bands didn't want to recognize Metis.
The more things change the more they stay the same.
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u/ladyoftherealm 5d ago
I was born here, as we're my parents, their parents, and as far back as my family can find.
This is my home, and I'm not going anywhere
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u/Thadius 5d ago
My maternal line has been here since new France, my original grandmother in Canada was one of the "filles du roi", my paternal line descends from the Young Family (among others) who were UEL.
My family has been here longer than several countries have been in existence.
I am not a settler, and to say so causes more division than the reconciliation is seeks to foster.
I ask, where is the line? What is the date? Every human in North America came here at one point in history from another place? All over the world peoples existed and then were decimated, nations stood, and fell, or were taken over. I lament the way the First nations were treated, they went through some pretty damn horrible things and policies, but some of my family were Highland Scots that were treat abhorrently and literally kicked out of their homes as well, as were some of my Irish ancestors; the story is not unique.
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u/painfulbliss British Columbia 5d ago
My direct ancestor arrived in Massachusetts in 1540 and two hundred years later my family arrived in Canada.
The idea that myself or my children are settlers is beyond absurd. I completely reject the premise that any particular person of native decent has any more right to live in Canada than I do.
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u/PhilosopherStoned12 4d ago
Finally! People refusing to be put into these arbitrary groups identities based on skewed semantics and the bastardization of language.
No shit no one sees themselves as settlers we can barely settle our bills in today's day and age. I feel unsettled most of the time.
Ironically if we all just treated one another the way we'd like to be treated none of these wild sociopathic phenomena would come into being, but hey, here we are trying to divide ourselves into little groups of disadvantage so that everyone can compare their levels of disadvantage/ underservedness or whatever the PC flavour of the month is.
Reading the comments here made me have some hope for common sense.
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u/joshlemer Manitoba 4d ago
In other news, majority of Canadians also don't see themselves a fur traders, trapper, explorers, or railway builders.
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u/Imaginary_Newt5705 4d ago
My great-great grandmother didnt settle shit. She came over on a boat as an orphan too young to even remember her name. So when she landed they named her Blanche Langlais, literally White English.
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u/skyshroud6 4d ago edited 4d ago
Ask someone who spouts "colonizer" of what they think of Norwegians, Japanese, and Taiwanese people? All three basically did the same thing we did to their own aboriginal populations, but they don't get talked about because it was longer ago, and they're not French/British.
The Sami people of Norway are probably the closest to what the British/French did in North America. They even had residential schools.
The people we think of as "Japanese" are largely decended from people from the Korean peninsula, that colonized the Japanese islands, pushing the aboriginal Ainu people up north and basically wiping them out. This was even in a similar time frame to the colonization of North America, it took place in the 18th-19th century.
The aboriginal groups of Taiwan are actually Polynesian, and Taiwan is the original Polynesian "starting point" so to speak. These people are still being assimilated and culturally wiped out today.
No one talks about any of this though of course. It's only white North Americans that are colonizers, whether you were born here or not. Everyone else gets a pass.
Edit: Clarification as re-reading this I realized it was a little unclear. The colonization of Japan by people from the Korean pennisula happened before the 18th century. The 18th century is when mass forced assimilation began however.
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u/Ok_Rest_5421 4d ago
This western liberal obsession with “settlers and colonizers” is fucking absurd at this point
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u/ThisIsTheNewSleeve 5d ago
That's a really weird question to ask someone. Like, I was born here, to parents that were also born here, to grandparents that were also born here to great grandparents that were also born here, and so on...
We never settled anything. We haven't even ever known anyone who settled anything. So why would we consider ourselves a "settler"?
There's a difference between acknowledging the dark history of the country, and trying to get people to feel like something they just aren't, nor have ever experienced.