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Maplewashing feat. Luke Savage
82 Plays3 years ago
We have the originator of the term maplewashing, podcaster and Jacobin staff writer Luke Savage, on the pod to discuss the way politicians, corporations and the media sanitize and conceal Canada's violent, genocidal past and present by perpetuating the notion that Canada is somehow morally superior to other countaries.
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Transcript
Introduction to Harbinger Media Network
00:00:01
Speaker
The Progress Report is a proud member of the Harbinger Media Network. A new podcast on the network that I want to highlight is the latest from Left Turn. Hosts Christo Avelis and Andy Borkowski discuss how Israel commands the unquestioned support of the vast majority of the Canadian political and media establishment. However, there is some cause for optimism, as some cracks are starting to show. And that's just one show. There's a ton of amazing content on Harbinger, and I can't say enough how much of a fantastic project it is.
00:00:29
Speaker
Get access to exclusive shows and other supporter-only content at harbingermedianetwork.com. Now, onto the show.
Guest Introduction: Luke Savage
00:00:48
Speaker
Friends and enemies, welcome to The Progress Report. I am your host, Duncan Kinney. We're recording today here in Amiskwitchi, Wisconsin, otherwise known as Edmonton, Alberta, here in Treaty 6 territories on the bank of the KissisKissau, Mississippi, or the North Saskatchewan River. Joining us today
00:01:05
Speaker
and I'm very pleased to have him on the pod. Not only is he the inventor of the thing that we are going to be discussing today, but he is also the co-host of the Socialist Movie podcast, Michael and Us, as well as a staff writer at Jacobin. Luke Savage, welcome. Welcome to The Progress Report. Thanks for having me, Duncan. It's great to be here. So this is the small talk question for the next few months, obviously.
COVID-19 Vaccination Experiences
00:01:31
Speaker
Have you gotten vaccinated yet?
00:01:34
Speaker
Yes, this weekend, this Saturday, basically by chance, as you know, it's been absolutely chaotic to roll out over here and I'm sure where you are as well. So, you know, I think it's just, it would be today or tomorrow or this week that I would have, you know, I was supposed to officially be able to book an appointment giving my
00:01:58
Speaker
of my age in postal code, but there was a random tip about a pop-up clinic in Etobicoke, so West Toronto, so I went to some kind of- Ford Country, too. Yeah, Ford Country thing was, I think, put in place on Friday. It was gone by Monday. I got there on Saturday.
00:02:19
Speaker
Uh, it was very, uh, very efficiently run. I waited in line for about 30 or 40 minutes. And, uh, then, you know, afterwards they make you wait for 15 minutes to make sure that, I don't know, your eyes don't explode or whatever was supposed to happen. Um, but, uh, there's no scanners type situation. Yeah. Yeah. Not, nothing in any, none of the warnings and Joe Warmington's various, uh, Toronto sun columns about what would happen came to, uh,
00:02:44
Speaker
came to fruition so i i left after fifteen minutes and um yeah i'm feeling fine it was just um the worst the worst side effect was uh very severe pain in my shoulder where i had the uh injection but besides that all good
00:02:58
Speaker
That's awesome. Awesome to hear. And I love hearing people's vaccination stories. I got mine. It'll be two weeks on Thursday. So I am almost, you know, I'm a few days away from having some level of protection. Uh, you know, 50% of the way to being 50% of the way or whatever.
00:03:15
Speaker
Well, I suppose we're at a critical point where the vaccination stories are probably like enough people are probably getting vaccinated now that like
00:03:30
Speaker
where there's already starting to be an ebb and how interesting the stories are. It's like a week ago, if I heard someone was vaccinated, I was like, oh, that's so cool. Tell me how it happened. And then like over the next few weeks, it's just like everyone's vaccination selfie like they're just, you know, they're all just becoming it's like the voting selfie now or it's going to be more and more like that from now on. It's just washing over you. You're not even registering it. Well, it's good. I mean, the fucking how it should be. Everyone go get vaccinated, folks. I mean, this isn't a PSA for vaccinations. But but still, if you haven't yet, go fucking do it. It's not it's not hard, especially in Alberta.
00:04:01
Speaker
But we didn't bring you on today to talk vaccination
Maple Washing and Canadian Identity
00:04:04
Speaker
small talk. Luke, we brought you on to discuss and dissect a term that you invented and popularized. Though I feel I hear from our in our pre-interview, you said that that some guy maybe said it on Twitter like a few months before you you brought it up. But the term that I'm talking about today is, of course, maple washing.
00:04:23
Speaker
And for the folks at home, why don't you give your kind of like pracy of what the hell Maple Washington is and why it is so annoying.
00:04:32
Speaker
Sure, well, yeah, so the term, I mean, there was somebody who tweeted it before me. I believe he's a Toronto-based lawyer, but it was something that came to mind for me. And I should say, I didn't see his tweet, so I wasn't stealing the term. Good, good. Great minds think alike, I guess. But yeah, it was in 2016. I was thinking a lot about
00:04:57
Speaker
The kind of issues related to this because of, you know, I think the way that the among other things that you know the way that the Trudeau Premiership which was still pretty new at that point and also the way the American election the way both of those things were being sort of discussed in Canada and and in the case of
00:05:17
Speaker
of Trudeau the way he was being discussed abroad as well. I mean, so basically the shortest, you know, definition, the most concise kind of summary of the term would be that, you know, maple washing refers to a kind of ambient cultural impulse we have in Canada, one that is
00:05:37
Speaker
you know, reflected in many of our institutions and, you know, in our media and to some extent in our governments as well, that elevates a sort of, you know, twee innocent version of what Canada is and contrast it with sort of, you know, particularly the, you know, horrendous, you know, particular horrendous scenes we might see in somewhere like the United States, for example.
00:06:05
Speaker
It's our own particular version of cultural exceptionalism, which is unique to Canada, and I think quite unlike the types of cultural exceptionalism that you see in a society like the United States, which is kind of an imperial society, or even in, for example, countries in Europe that are much older, have a much older sense of nationhood or whatever.
00:06:33
Speaker
So that would be a brief summary of it.
00:06:38
Speaker
Essentially, Canada writ large believes that it is morally superior to everyone else. Because we are morally superior, all of the genocide and land theft and really the throne of blood that Canadian society sits on is just hand-waved away. It either never really happened or it wasn't as bad as you think it is kind of thing.
00:07:04
Speaker
That's right. I mean, there's an idea of Canada, which is one that I mean, I was certainly served in, you know, public school, an idea that Canada is a sort of, I don't know, a sort of multiracial Switzerland with a basically Scandinavian welfare state attached to it, you know.
00:07:22
Speaker
And insofar as there have been these things that you mentioned, insofar as Canada was a colonial society, or was not a pluralist society, or was not an egalitarian society, whatever, that's practically mythic. That's ancient history at this point.
00:07:41
Speaker
So since the 1960s, at least, that's the idea, Canada became a multicultural, multiracial, bilingual society, multilateral in terms of its foreign policy, a kind of honest broker on the international stage, et cetera, et cetera. People are so steeped in this stuff I probably don't need to kind of
00:08:03
Speaker
lay it out too much. I think you all know what I mean. But I think we could see in the wake of the Trudeau election just how easy it is for this kind of sentiment to lead people astray when they're thinking about both things that happen in other countries, but also
00:08:26
Speaker
you know, things that are happening, things that are happening here. Things can be sanitized or maple washed very, very easily. And the, you know, the worst features of Canadian society can be obscured by that. So that was that was and is something that concerns me.
00:08:44
Speaker
No, I mean, and this term has, you know, it has its own Wikipedia entry now, like you have gone on to American podcasts and kind of explained this to Americans. And I think when you kind of do that and you talk to kind of these American socialist types, like they understand it, they get it in as much as they ever think about Canada. I mean, that that has kind of been our very effective kind of like branding tool. But
00:09:09
Speaker
You know, it is an extremely tedious habit that, you know, particularly federal liberals, but I mean, again, you're right. It's totally like ambient and kind of baked into Canada writ large that this tactic is kind of deployed at will. Right.
00:09:26
Speaker
to highlight it after Justin Trudeau won the election and was saying Canada's back and there were these like rolling stone profiles on how awesome JT was, it needed to be said. 2016 was also what, Canada 150 or something, right? It was like, it was, or we were coming up on Canada 150. I can't remember the exact timing, but it was like- Yeah, I think Canada 150, that was 2017, but yeah, we were coming up on it and there was
00:09:50
Speaker
I mean, there was a sense of kind of cultural triumphalism, I think, unlike anything in my lifetime. And I mean, here we really have to, you know, the relationship, cultural and political relationship Canada has with the United States is absolutely crucial to understanding this. Because, you know, this phenomenon is, I mean, we Canada, Canadians, we are to blame for this phenomenon. But the fact is, a lot of it,
00:10:15
Speaker
has to do with things that happen elsewhere. You mentioned the Rolling Stone cover with Justin Trudeau on it. Now, that was covered in Canada by the Canadian media, right? Like our prime minister being on the cover of another country, in this case, United States, this kind of iconic publication, the kind of publication where you see, I don't know, U2 or whatever.
00:10:45
Speaker
That was treated as a news event in and of itself, which I think perhaps other countries' leaders being on the cover of American newspapers or magazines, perhaps that would be a story in other countries. But I think here it was a story in a particular kind of way. So much so that, in fact, I think a lot of people missed some of the things Justin Trudeau said in his actual
00:11:10
Speaker
There's a very strange line in that interview about his boxing match with Patrick Brazo and how, you know, they made this, you know, Trudeau like cut his ponytail off after or something. And Trudeau says some very weird stuff about how like, oh, yeah, I thought it sent the right, you know, the right message or something. You know, incredibly, incredibly strange stuff. But, you know, people, people miss this because the point is just that, oh, look, our prime minister is on the cover of
00:11:39
Speaker
is on the cover of Rolling Stone. And so it's important to emphasize here that there is a, you know, we are talking about cultural exceptionalism, but part of Canadian cultural exceptionalism, and this is a bit of the paradox here, is a sort of deep insecurity because we're not the United States, you know, we're not, you know, this
00:11:59
Speaker
this big imperial society and we are deeply influenced. We're seeped in American culture. A lot of Canadians probably know more about US politics than about Canadian politics. And so there's also a sense in something like that that's like,
00:12:16
Speaker
you know, hey, look, we made it, which I think, you know, I think, you know, we should not be particularly impressed that like Justin Trudeau was on the cover of Rolling Stone, who cares, right? But, you know, this is a feature of Canada and it's especially a feature of Canada in this sort of early Trudeau era where I think often Canadians were forming their impressions of their own government and their own prime minister based on things that they were reading
00:12:46
Speaker
Um, in, you know, the foreign press,
Justin Trudeau's Image vs. Reality
00:12:49
Speaker
they were reading American news. They're reading like the New York Times talking about like, you know, the Canadian, you know, we're living in the age of the Canadian cool or whatever, or Trudeau would go and give a speech to a bunch of world leaders in Hamburg.
00:13:02
Speaker
you know, where he'd say a bunch of Pablo about how, you know, we have to do something about inequality or whatever. And that would be covered in Canada, you know, as you know, like look at our look at our globe trotting Prime Minister, you know, setting the agenda on the on the world stage or whatever.
00:13:18
Speaker
often to the exclusion of, you know, how Trudeau was actually governing, which, you know, as I never tired of pointing out at the time and still don't tire pointing out, you know, it has not been radical in any kind of sense. I mean, even by the standards of the fairly conservative standards of the 2015 liberal platform, I mean, they haven't even met kind of that baseline. And yet even by the standards, even by the standards set by like his own father and like the Liberal Party of the
00:13:48
Speaker
60s and 70s. Oh, yeah. I mean, the liberal party today does not have, I mean, there aren't sort of even basic social democratic commitments or anything like that, or commitments to the kinds of multilateralism that Pierre Trudeau engaged in from time to time. There's none of that. The Trudeau government is
00:14:17
Speaker
You know it wrote a wave of sort of anti Harper sentiment to victory and because it sort of said a bunch of the right things. You know it it had this reputation and again that actually I remember further to what I was saying before you know.
00:14:32
Speaker
I think a lot of Canadians read about the Trudeau victory in, you know, American and, you know, British press as well in like foreign English language press. I remember a piece in The Independent after the 2015 election that was arguing that Justin Trudeau was going to pursue the most, I think the phrase was like the most ambitious liberal premiership in decades or something like that.
00:14:58
Speaker
And the evidence for this was, as the piece, and I think since changed headlines, suggested Trudeau was going to give every Canadian a basic income, which of course didn't happen. The actual story was the Liberals embraced some kind of like small pilot program in a town in
00:15:17
Speaker
southern Ontario or eastern Ontario or something like that. In the American press, there were lots of comparisons between Trudeau and Bernie Sanders. I mean, it was total hyperbole. And I think in a less or in a more self-confident culture than ours,
00:15:38
Speaker
people might be sort of equipped to resist that. You know, Canadians might be like, OK, well, come on. It's not this is, you know, this is exaggeration. But because we're so, you know, we're so preoccupied as a culture with sort of getting attention abroad and we love it when our celebrities and our politicians receive adulation abroad, you know, none of that happened. And people ended up with a very different
00:16:05
Speaker
perception, by and large, I think, of the cultural moment, sort of from 2015, to some extent right up to the present. But, you know, in the Trump era, especially, people ended up with a very serious misperception of what that moment was and what was going on in it. And I think this phenomenon of maple washing is really at the root of that.
00:16:26
Speaker
Yes. And Luke, before coming out of this pod, I did give you some homework and I also did a bit of research for this pod as well. And one of those things that I asked you to do was to come up with your top three examples of kind of maple washing in action. And as I was kind of doing the research for this, there was something that I just kept coming back to that is kind of like inescapable and that
00:16:52
Speaker
Uh, really is kind of like, as said, it is kind of like a foundational way that Canadians like learn about their own history. And that is heritage minutes. You're, you're a little, you're a little younger than me, but you mean you remember heritage? Like I was watching like Simpsons reruns and fresh Prince reruns and jeopardy and stuff. And so these heritage minutes were on kind of all the time. Sure. But because the Simpsons used to be on the CBC, I used to watch it, I think at five o'clock, uh, every night. And yeah, of course you'd see the heritage minutes too.
00:17:21
Speaker
Exactly right and these heritage minutes are like I think a key part of Canadian myth building like within Canada and really I think one of the like key things that like helps us kind of forget or that encourages kind of like racial amnesia and like genocide amnesia. You know one way that I think we could kind of just dive right into this is
00:17:47
Speaker
uh one of the one of the probably the most memorable ones and that is the canadian heritage minute on the underground railway and i actually have the audio for that right here so i'm just gonna play that pa should have been here by now he's three hours late already
00:18:08
Speaker
Pa ain't gonna make it! One of them slave gotchas got so much to have, but I just know it! Liza, you both made it past the border yesterday. We've all done this before. He's our pa! He'll be here! Come. Let's pray. No more prayers!
00:18:38
Speaker
Between 1840 and 1860, more than 30,000 American slaves came secretly to Canada and freedom. They called it the Underground Railroad.
00:19:02
Speaker
So there's the Underground Railroad Heritage Minute. I mean, God bless the actors. They're really fucking selling it there. And the music, the score for that is also incredibly dramatic, right? And the overwhelming kind of feeling of this is that Canada was one of the good guys when it came to slavery. But
00:19:27
Speaker
There were slaves in Canada. Canada is an incredibly racist nation. Canada was not behind the abolishment of slavery that eventually happened in the British Empire. And I'm pretty positive that there were Canadian slave owners that got paid out when Britain eventually abolished slavery. And it's also worth pointing out that when Britain abolished slavery, they didn't just do it. They actually paid out.
00:19:57
Speaker
the slave-owning families and slaveholders. A considerable amount of money that I think only recently got paid off within the last 20 years. They took out a loan and that loan only finally got paid off.
00:20:09
Speaker
Funny, I don't remember that particular one. I don't remember it very well if I do. There's a few unaired ones. I don't know if you have any of those queued up, but there's one on peacekeeping that's very funny. Do you remember that one? Oh my God, no. What's the peacekeeping one? It's like supposed to be a Canadian peacekeeper intervening in Cyprus, in the interests of peace.
00:20:33
Speaker
It's basically like he's just breaking up like some kind of like what appears to be like a family dispute. I don't know how kind of like, you know, I'm not an expert on Cyprus, but what I remember about is just how kind of unbelievably like twee and provincial it seems and kind of cringy, which is my memory of most of these things. What are the other ones you've got?
00:21:00
Speaker
Oh, don't you worry. So the second one I have is of Sitting Bull. And it's, I mean, you can go and watch these, of course. And if you remember them, you remember them. But a very famous actor plays Sitting Bull in this one. And, you know, this, again, just an incredible example of maple watching maple washing.
00:21:23
Speaker
Commissioner McCloud, where are the rest of your men? You've got more men back there than I have in the whole of Western Canada. Yeah, but Sitting Bull held a war dance last night. General Terry in Canada, Sitting Bull has kept the Queen's peace. He's agreed to meet with you. And the spotted eagle. That face doesn't look ready to come back to the States without a fight. President Hayes says you will be received kindly.
00:21:50
Speaker
The grandmother's medicine house is no place for lies. Not two more words. This country does not belong to you. We will stay here and keep the grandmother's peace. She will let us raise our children. We do not want lies. These men, Walsh, MacLeod, they're the first white men who never lied to us. I didn't know then that they'd be starved out of Canada and go back to the States. Walsh would resign over it. The Sitting Bull would be murdered.
00:22:21
Speaker
Canada, the good guys when it comes to indigenous people somehow. Like I don't know how you can listen to that and not come away with it being like, yeah, like, you know, they were treated poorly, but at least Canada didn't treat them as poorly as the United States. Like really the kind of classic maple washing narrative, right? Where we compare ourselves to the United States. But this, of course,
00:22:44
Speaker
obviously like misrepresents what happens, right? Like the fucking rich Protestant families in central Canada were scared shitless of Sitting Bull and of like Indian revolt in general. And they didn't have an army back then. All they had was this Northwest Mounted Police.
00:23:01
Speaker
And so this diplomacy that they used with Sitting Bull was simply because they didn't have the resources to wage the war of extermination that they wanted to wage. And then Canada ended up- Did the Heritage Minutes, I mean, do they ever, like, I mean, this is partly
Myth-building in Canadian History
00:23:15
Speaker
a rhetorical question. I think I know the answer, but I mean, do they ever, like, did the Heritage Minutes ever engage in, like,
00:23:23
Speaker
like bearing witness to actual like, I mean, are they always just like celebrating moments in Canadian history? Like is there a heritage minute about residential schools, for example? There's only one way to find out. My computer keyboard is pretty broken, but Heritage Minutes, Canada, residential schools. Let's see what comes up.
00:23:46
Speaker
I mean, there might be one or two, but New Heritage Minute explores dark history of residential schools. Right. So new one, new one. Right. Yeah. It's like four years ago. Right. Right. But I mean, they also mentioned it at the end of that Heritage Minute, too, like what eventually happened to Sitting Bull, as well as hundreds of thousands of others, hundreds and thousands of other indigenous people on the plains, which is that Canada starved them out and Canada starved. Starvation was like official government policy.
00:24:16
Speaker
which was, and it was essentially how the West was colonized with as little kind of trouble as like, you know, by trouble, I mean, like, white people getting murdered as possible, right? And, you know, this is all covered much better. And by, you know, book Clearing the Plains by James Daschak and Howard Adams is Prisoners of Grass or Prisons of Grass.
00:24:34
Speaker
But like this is one of Canada's like greatest shapes is like what we did to the indigenous people on the plains via starvation. And it's just kind of like, oh yeah, they use starvation to starve out Sitting Bull. Like they, you know, like this passive voice as if like the Northwest Mounted Police weren't intrinsic to the strategy of doing it. Right.
00:24:56
Speaker
Yeah, well, I mean, and that actually, you know, in I wrote an essay, I guess, in 2017, kind of trying to lay out, you know, I first talked about Maple Washing in the CBC Radio essay, and then in 2017, I wrote kind of a longer essay, kind of getting at the historical
00:25:12
Speaker
sources of it and I think that one of the kind of, one of the sources or one of the explanations for something like what you just described is the fact that like, to some extent, I mean the modern idea of Canada is really a creation of the 1960s, right? Like it was a conscious project of kind of state building and nation building, like building a new national imaginary. Like that's what you and I were taught
00:25:40
Speaker
We were taught on the basis of that when we studied in public school. And, you know, that's not to say that like the passive voice made sense there. Obviously, you know, it's the same state, it's the same crown, you know. But, you know, I think a lot of people's, you know, our kind of collective historical memory often sort of almost mythologizes rather than historicizes sort of what came before like, you know, Expo 67 or whatever.
00:26:10
Speaker
And you can see that's stuff like what you just played as a result. Yeah, and this isn't, I mean, this isn't the only kind of really bad one when it comes to, you know, maple washing Canada's history of genocide and its relationship, historical relationship with indigenous people. But one of the most hilarious fucking heritage minutes is the one of gray owl.
00:26:35
Speaker
And I had to kind of give you a bit of a precyon who Grey Owl was when we were chatting originally, but I just discovered something while I was on the podcast now. Okay, so just to set the scene, Grey Owl is this essentially Englishman who came to North America and turned himself into a pretend Indian, said he had an Apache mother, wrote a bunch of famous books.
00:26:58
Speaker
And here's the Heritage Minute, and then I'll get into why it's even more hilarious in a second. The world's most famous Canadian, Grey Owl, just back from a triumphant British tour, is to be a reluctant guest at a gathering of First Nations. Archie, you may not realize this, but right now you are the most famous Red Indian in the world. These are your people. You have to be there.
00:27:24
Speaker
Let's go. Sure, sure. His name is Abchi Bomani. And if he's a Red Indian, I'm the king of China. It is an honor to make a man called Grey Owl, who has brought much respect for our people. Imposter, rascal, dreamer. And yet the Englishman who called himself Grey Owl, awoke the whole world to our vanishing wilderness. I'm very happy to be here.
00:27:54
Speaker
My brother says, men become what they dream. You have dreamed well.
00:28:07
Speaker
So you can become an Indian if you dream that you're one, I guess, is what you're supposed to take away from that. I'm not familiar with that story at all. Again, I feel like you come from a different generation of heritage minutes because I don't remember that one either. It's funny, all the ones that I remember, I think I said this to you when we were talking yesterday, are these ones that are just very twee and are trying to claim
00:28:34
Speaker
various things for Canada in like the most dubious ways. So like there's a one where I guess the guy is he going off to war and he draws Superman and then he gives a picture of Superman to his girlfriend and he says like, you know, hold on to this, it might be worth something someday. And I guess it's like,
00:28:51
Speaker
the implication is like Superman was like Superman's likeness was once drawn in Canada by the guy who created him or something. Or there's a very similar one with Winnie the Pooh, where it's like the bear that inspired Winnie the Pooh was at a zoo in Winnipeg or something.
00:29:09
Speaker
Um, and, and like a young Christopher Robin saw him somehow, possibly not even went, like, I don't know if Christopher Robin even saw the bear in Canada. The bear might've later been in Canada after meeting Christopher Robin. I don't know. But then again, it's like, so Canada claims Winnie the Pooh. And it's like, I mean, we did also give the world Neil Young and Joni Mitchell. Like surely we can do better than this.
00:29:32
Speaker
You have to come back to the gray owl one. So there might be a crossover here with Michael and us because gray owl, so I think what happens here, so Pierce Brosnan is gray owl in this,
00:29:43
Speaker
in this Heritage Minute, but he doesn't have a single line or say a single word. He just kind of like appears and people are talking to him, right? But here's the thing. I just discovered this now. This is totally memory hold for me. There was a 1999 film called Grey Owl directed by Richard Attenborough, then starring Pierce Brosnan as Grey Owl. So the very likely the images for this were just stolen or used from that movie.
00:30:05
Speaker
And like the hilarious like the first thing that comes up in this movie is that like in the Wikipedia entry that comes up when you just search on Google is budget 30 million dollars box office six hundred and thirty two thousand and six hundred and seventeen dollars. Oh, man. And this is this is while Brosnan is like known, you know, fairly exclusively as James Bond. This is Bond era Brosnan.
00:30:32
Speaker
Bond era Brosnan peak Q rating Bosnan. It has a 17% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. It is. I think you kind of have to watch it for your eventually on your socialist movie podcast now because this movie is totally vanished from my brain. I had no recollection that this thing ever existed. It sounds like the kind of project that like I wouldn't be surprised if like it turned out Steven Seagal wrote the screenplay or something.
00:30:58
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, amazing, amazing. But to come back to the, like the, okay, so Grey Owl, whatever was this famous English guy, pretended to be an Indian and they made a heritage mint about it. But like the whole idea of like white people appropriating indigenousness is like incredibly common and happening more and more and more these days.
00:31:16
Speaker
Eastern matee, you know, not a thing or like the whole Michelle Latimer story. Like this is an extremely common trope and it's not something that should be celebrated. It needs to be like stopped and called out because like, you know, Pierce Brosnan slash gray owl was, was, got famous and made a bunch of money out of pretending to be an Indian. I get tired from this heritage minute and from my surface level understanding of this character, it's really hard to understand. I don't really see how he helped indigenous people in any way. You know what I mean?
00:31:45
Speaker
Right, right Okay, so we've got some other heritage minutes lined up we're kind of moving into like borders and immigration now and this this next one Is both incredibly famous burned in my memory and the end really just kind of like gives the game away Especially when it just kind of comes to Canada Both fair for the white
00:32:12
Speaker
All you have to do is go down in the tunnel with the nitro and set the charge. And my wife, you pay both? Okay, okay, I do very good, you see. Now pour it in the hole gently, understand? Any little bump in that stuff will blow... Damn, that's the third one we lost this month.
00:32:41
Speaker
Cochran, get another volunteer. I went back in again, but I lost many friends. They say there is one dead Chinese man for every mile of the trek. That's what they say. Okay.
00:33:08
Speaker
So yeah, so I mean, here's, you know, at the end, you can't see it obviously, but like he's talking to his grandchildren.
00:33:15
Speaker
as an old man, and he's just telling that, yeah, the thing that this country was built on, the Transcontinental Railroad, was built on the dead bodies of Chinese laborers. How many miles are there in the track? Thousands? That one, though, I haven't actually seen that one, I don't think, but is that not trying to point out exactly that? Is that not trying to bear witness to that? A little bit.
00:33:44
Speaker
It makes it look like it's like, oh, he's just doing what he had to do. I mean, maybe they're kind of accepting it a little bit, but it is still, uh, he's still like telling his grandchildren in a way that's like.
00:33:56
Speaker
not that this was bad, just that it happened and that it's sad. You think the implication is that it was some kind of sacrifice that was made or whatever as opposed to- This is the price we pay for me being here and for Canada existing, you know what I mean? It's even obliquely mentioned, he wouldn't just have been paying for his wife to come over. His wife would have had to have paid the Chinese head tax, which would have been in place at the time.
00:34:25
Speaker
It's a funny one. The last Heritage Minute that we have to discuss features one of Canada's greatest villains and really one of the proto examples of one of Canada's
00:34:44
Speaker
exports, most popular kind of recent exports, which is like racist white nationalist YouTubers. Before that, we had Emily Murphy. We learned about Emily Murphy in social studies. I think they used to be on the $50 bill or something. They used to be on some of our money. In Edmonton, the famous five shit is fucking everywhere where I live. There's a statue of this person in my town.
00:35:07
Speaker
And she was incredibly vile. Even by the standards of 1910s, 1920s Canada, she was an incredibly racist and white supremacist person, and it was reflected in her writings. But let's listen to the final Heritage Minute, and we'll get into it. But the Supreme Court of Canada agreed, you see.
00:35:32
Speaker
I could not become a senator because under the British North America Act, as a woman, I was not a person. I, Emily Murphy, author of the Janie Canuck books, pioneer in the war against narcotics, first female magistrate in the empire, but not a person. So we took it all the way to London. A group of Canadian women laboring 10 long years against ridicule,
00:36:01
Speaker
Husband saying, there, there, dear. Until those noble lords of the Privy Council agreed in 1929. I, Emily Murphy of Alberta, and all Canadian women after me, persons under the law. So we could sit in the Senate after all.
00:36:31
Speaker
Was the end of that so we could sit in the Senate after all? Yes, that's the big win. That's a nice little that's I love that as a it's a nice little cherry on top at the end. So, yeah, I don't know. I'm not I don't know a huge amount about Emily Murphy, but I do understand she was involved in, you know, she had some involvement in kind of the eugenics movement of the early 20th century. And, you know, she was
00:36:59
Speaker
You know, she was a kind of, I mean, I guess they didn't use the phrase white nationalism at the time, but that's that was kind of the crux of it. Yeah. I mean, the line of, you know, Canadian, all Canadian women were were persons is just a false patently untrue. Right. Like indigenous women were not considered persons by this ruling and were not even able to vote until the fifties. Emily Murphy sure as shit did not give whether black women or Asian women
00:37:26
Speaker
indigenous women were persons and was in fact incredibly aggressive to any type of liberatory politics or politics where those people were considered anything less than kind of degenerate scum who were kind of, you know, what were they doing? They were sullying the bloodline of, you know, the great Canadian Northmen, right? Like the language that she used is like,
00:37:50
Speaker
incredibly racist for its time, which says a lot for, you know, 1910, 1920s Canada. And she had an incredible platform, right? Like she was a regular columnist in Maclean's. Her Janie Canuck books were popular, not just across Canada, but worldwide. And it was these like incredibly lurid, you know,
00:38:11
Speaker
made up descriptions of like drug use and of like this very QAnon like conspiracy called The Ring, which was like kidnapping white women into sex slavery and stuff. And anyways, I really hate Emily Murphy and more people should hate her because she's fucking awful. And that's really just one of the big reasons why I wanted to bring that Heritage Minute onto the podcast. Okay, let's close up our convo on Heritage Minutes. Is there any
00:38:38
Speaker
final thoughts on the matter of these kind of little propaganda minutes before we turn into other, more recent examples of maple washing. Well, it's hardly as weighty as anything we've been discussing, but I think it was yesterday that you informed me that the Peach Basket that James Naismith used as the first basketball net or whatever, the Peach Basket wasn't even Canadian. The Peach Basket was in the United States and he spent most of his time in America. Is that right?
00:39:06
Speaker
Yeah, he's a Canadian American. He was at the University of Kansas for most of his kind of like adult life. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and like, where does basketball, where is basketball the most popular and like, who gives the most shits about basketball, not Canadians, right? Isn't our national sport technically lacrosse lacrosse, the summer sport. Yes. Lacrosse and winter sport. I think that's how they get around it, but yeah. Right. Right.
00:39:30
Speaker
But I can't have you on, and I am obliged to talk about the Alberta angle when it comes to Maple Washington.
Ethical Oil and Alberta's Industry
00:39:37
Speaker
We have this very interesting kind of recent mutation of maple washing, which was kind of created and really popularized not by liberals, but by conservatives. And this is the whole like ethical oil angle, right? It's really my home province's greatest contribution.
00:39:55
Speaker
to the Maple Washing Discourse, and created by Isabelle Van, since been propagated by the oil and gas industry and its lobby groups and really all Albertan governments of all stripes at all levels. The idea that Canada's oil is this pure ethical construct that isn't built on genocide racism, the degradation, exploitation of workers for rich oligarchs.
00:40:17
Speaker
you know, it takes the novel approach, not of comparing us to the United States, which would most want people watching does, but instead, you know, to Saudi, to Saudi Arabia, to Russia, to Nigeria, and other kind of foreign bad places that we don't like, you know, that we have, but we, of course, are obviously happy.
00:40:33
Speaker
to trade with and there are I think no single better distillation of the ethical oil mindset than this 2016 image macro that went, became a news story and I don't know if you saw this when it came out, Luke, I think you did, but why don't you tell the people what the hell it is I'm talking about?
00:40:59
Speaker
Well, so I don't have it in front of me, but this is the one of the two women kissing and it's like, you know, this can happen here at the point of extraction and it can't in Saudi Arabia. Oh, yeah. Here it is. So colloquially referred to as the hot lesbians ad in Canada. Lesbians are considered hot in Saudi Arabia. If you're a lesbian, you die. So this was from the Canada oil sands community says choose equality, choose Canadian oil.
00:41:28
Speaker
I mean, especially ironic frame for like Albertan conservatives to adopt for like oil, like Albertan conservatives who, as we all know, are famous for like their upstanding record on like issues surrounding LGBTQ rights.
00:41:44
Speaker
Yes. Yes. And like your brain just melts when you see this because yeah, like just the most blatant appropriation of kind of like, uh, the dumbest kind of like pro LGBTQ take possible, which is, and this, this ad was created by a guy named Robbie Picard who started this kind of like pro oil sands, like
00:42:08
Speaker
ethical oil maple washing group. I think it's called oil sand strong these days. It's gone through a number of iterations. He wants actually zip tied himself to my building that my coworking space is in. He went zip tied himself to the door on like a 4pm on a Friday afternoon and videotaped himself doing this because I think he believed that Greenpeace had their office. I think maybe Greenpeace had their offices here for some time, but like that no one from Greenpeace was there. They used it as storage.
00:42:38
Speaker
And this guy who does stunts like that, creates this hot lesbian ad, was literally on the stage introducing the fact that our government was going to launch an inquiry into anti-energy, anti-Alberta activities. And literally on stage with the premier and the energy minister announcing that this thing was going to happen.
00:43:04
Speaker
And just Alberta politics are just in fucking credible, right? Like this inquiry, I don't know how close you've been keeping track of it, but it is currently going on its third extension, the deadline for its final report that's supposed to be due at the end of the month, which is what? We're recording this on May 18th, so we're 13 days away, less than two weeks away from the end of the month where this thing is supposed to come in. I'm on the edge of my seat.
00:43:34
Speaker
He's got three extensions. He's got an extra million dollars in budget for this thing to really kind of go and, you know, excavate this conspiracy theory, right? That there is this transnational group of rich
00:43:50
Speaker
million American millionaires who stand to benefit somehow from funding environmental groups in Canada to stop pipelines. Flying very close to sort of George Soros stuff and then close as well to the next stage of that, which is even uglier.
00:44:10
Speaker
Exactly, yes, very much so. The ethical oil stuff is, again, baked into the kind of atmosphere here in Alberta, but it is, again, the stupidest and most useless PR strategy that you can concoct.
00:44:28
Speaker
it only works on the people that it works on. You know what I mean? If you're a conservative and you've heard this ethical oil frame for the past five years, you think it's great. And if you think that we eventually have to transition to a new sort of economy, you don't give a shit.
00:44:43
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's extraordinary. I actually wrote about Alberta and sort of oil sands identity politics myself a few weeks ago. And I used to write a lot about it when I was at press progress. And I got to know these various characters, guys like Derek Phil de Brant, wonder what he's up to these days.
00:45:05
Speaker
Actually, he's got his own independent media shop. He's revived the Western Standard, which was Ezell of Ansel magazine that was famous for reprinting cartoons of Mohammed. He's a media baron now.
00:45:21
Speaker
Fantastic. Well, I remember some years ago, he brought or his writing association through him brought an idea that he had championed since his days at the Canadian Taxpayers Federation, some stupid idea where like the
00:45:39
Speaker
It was like some idea, I don't know why he was advancing this in the confines of Alberta. If I remember correctly, the idea was basically to punish provinces in the form of like, you will lose equalization payments if you don't fully develop your natural resources or whatever. This was the idea and it was one that he'd
00:46:02
Speaker
that he championed for a while. But I mean, that's just like one among many examples. And I guess we'll talk about the Bigfoot thing. But like the extent to which, you know, the right in Western Canada has turned like oil into like a cultural identity is just extraordinary. And it's it's even more extraordinary in light of how the same people I mean, this is the this is horseshoe theory in action, right? It's like the same people who have have structured
00:46:32
Speaker
much of their politics around complaining about oversensitivity, snowflake culture, cancel culture, the fact that the state is now, as they argue, tied up in all these things. It's like these are the people that are creating a government war room to fight anti-oil sands prejudice. It's extraordinary.
00:46:56
Speaker
Yeah, the War Room is just the cousin of the fucking inquiry, right? And it built in the same kind of overheated campaign rhetoric of 2019. And it is just as dumb as the inquiry. And you're right, they did bring up famously recently this Bigfoot family movie, kind of blowing up the fact that this kind of not very well-known Belgian French animated film had a
00:47:21
Speaker
a message in it that was hostile and perhaps untrue about just how good oil and gas development really is for the world. And there is a bit of maple washing in that movie as well. There's a scene where they cross the border into Canada and this toothy fucking Mountie salutes them as they drive across the border unmolested. And then they come back to Alaska and the border regime there and it's
00:47:48
Speaker
It's very suspicious, it's dark. The guy has his aviators on and he's thoroughly checking them out. Our border regime is just as violent and as brutal as the Americans border regime is. We just have a press that's probably a little less interested and a little not as good, quite frankly, as digging up the stories of kids in cages
00:48:13
Speaker
that happened here. There was some 2017, 2018 story by the CBC that was like, oh yeah, there's 117 kids and people under 18 in indefinite immigration detention in Canada. Probably around the time that those photos went viral of I guess it was border services or RCMP greeting asylum seekers at the border or whatever. And it's like those people were
00:48:40
Speaker
definitely or almost certainly just taken to a detention facility right after. They were arrested and thrown into a prison cell. That went viral just in the same way that Justin Trudeau's tweet after there was a Muslim ban.
00:48:56
Speaker
Right at the start of the Trump presidency, Justin Trudeau had that tweet where he said, you know, all are welcome in Canada or whatever. I can't quite remember how he how he phrased it. But yeah, I mean, essentially, like, you know, actually, you know, let me just find it. I've got it here. Hang on.
00:49:13
Speaker
It is a hilarious example of like, I'm just going to say a thing because it feels good and it's in the news right now. And then it was like, oh yeah, I'm not going to follow through on any of the actual shit I said, which is just kind of classic Justin Trudeau. Right. So he tweeted, to those fleeing persecution, terror, and war, Canadians will welcome you regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength. Welcome to Canada.
00:49:36
Speaker
So that was another one of these things where that became a huge international news story. But nothing about Canada's refugee policy was actually changed in relation to that. And I think there was a higher number of asylum seekers in the early Trump era at least. But yeah, nothing about
00:49:58
Speaker
Nothing about candidates border policy was changed and Canadian border officials were collaborating with their American counterparts. So, you know. Yeah, they didn't, they didn't rescind the safe third party agreement. You know, like there still was as just as many kids in cages as there was no actual changes. And yeah, there were just people crossing that like, what was the right losing its mind about at the time, like Wrexham road or like into Manitoba. There were like African and Haitian refugees trying to cross on foot. Anyways, it's.
00:50:28
Speaker
Yeah, just classic JT though, which is just like tweet a nice thing, send out a nice message, but bash, bask in the accolades, but don't actually fucking change the material conditions on the ground for the people that you were talking about who are fleeing terrible situations.
Critique of Performative Politics
00:50:44
Speaker
I mean, this is a bit of a digression, but I think that Trudeau and his people were acutely aware of the fact that
00:50:52
Speaker
If they got if they went viral like outside of Canada if they got you know coverage if they got adulation
00:51:00
Speaker
outside of Canada, that would be reported on in Canada. And so, like, ergo, you know, Canadians' perception of their own government would be refracted through that. I think, I mean, they, they got away with that for years. I mean, I think it wasn't until, you know, it emerged that, you know, I mean, there was the, there was the SNC-Lavalin scandal, there was other things kind of took the sheen off the Trudeau government. But I mean, you know, then when it emerged that
00:51:25
Speaker
you know, the prime minister had done blackface more times than he was willing to put a number on. I think that's sort of like, you know, they're like, okay, well, we need, we're going to have the consultants told him after that, like, okay, now it's time for you to grow a beard because we need to like create, we need to symbolically distance you from your previous mischievous self, you know, the kind that, you know, the kind that
00:51:47
Speaker
The guy that did Blackface and sung Deyo at a upscale private school or whatever. Now you're going to look wise and experienced, which I think is what they're going for now. Yeah. I said earlier, what's my top three of maple washing? I think it's unquestionably Heritage Minutes. I think Ethical Oil is number two.
00:52:10
Speaker
And last, but certainly not least, is something that you could probably just smoosh them together. I mean, one is international, one is kind of local, but the peacekeeping kind of myth slash kind of Canadian copaganda, right? Where it's like as the kind of defund the police narrative and discourse was rolling around Canada,
00:52:35
Speaker
The thing you constantly heard from elected officials and our chiefs of police and police spokespeople was that, oh, it's fine up here. The United States is bad. But we don't murder Black people wholesale here in Canada. And it's like, well, I mean, yeah, Black and Indigenous people die all the time in police custody. That's just not true. And the peacekeeping thing is also just like, peacekeeping doesn't exist anymore in any real way.
00:53:03
Speaker
Well, and even in so far as like it does, like we don't do it. I mean, like, you know, it hasn't been involved in it in a major way for decades.
00:53:13
Speaker
Exactly. It's mostly India, from what I understand, and African countries are the biggest contributors to the peacekeeping program. And we have a bunch of examples of peacekeeping just being incredibly ineffectual at actually stopping tragedies. Romeo Delair has this entire career about being sad that he wasn't able to do anything to stop the Rwandan genocide. And he was a peacekeeper.
00:53:39
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, the whole idea of peacekeeping, I mean, that ties very much into my thesis on where the whole Maple Washington thing comes from, which is that a set of experiences, cultural experiences and political experiences in basically the 50s, 60s and 70s,
00:54:00
Speaker
You know, it was in that time that, you know, against the backdrop of those experiences that the sort of modern Canadian identity was created. And in a big way, like we still refract everything kind of through that. So like Canada still has a reputation that, you know, to some extent has always been, you know, mythical and a bit of a fiction, but also, you know, is just
00:54:24
Speaker
the product of a different historical moment and is not really applicable anymore. Our contributions to peacekeeping and the whole enterprise of peacekeeping being just one example of that. Yeah. So this has been a wonderful walk through the terrible world of maple washing, Luke. Any kind of final thoughts to wrap it up?
00:54:47
Speaker
I think it's interesting, you should have made this point during the ethical oil discussion, but it is interesting the extent to which we think about this as a liberal phenomenon in a big way it is, but conservatives do it too. I don't actually think that had occurred to me, it hadn't occurred to me the extent to which it's a cross-partisan phenomenon until you brought up the thing about ethical oil. I'd never thought about ethical oil in that way.
00:55:17
Speaker
I think that's an important friendly amendment to this whole idea of maple washing. Yeah, no, thank you for coming up with a thing in the first place. So we're coming to the end of our time here. It's time to kind of plug your pluggables. How can people find you on the internet, follow along, and support your work?
00:55:36
Speaker
Sure, yeah, Luke W. Savage on Twitter. And I do have a podcast, as Duncan was kind enough to mention, Michael and Us. And it's kind of a lefty, current affairs podcast, culture podcast. But we do watch a movie or show almost every episode, often kind of probing the kitsch, liberal or conservative kitsch of sort of the Bush era.
00:56:03
Speaker
Um, but you know, we've, uh, that was kind of the original concept of the show. We've since expanded and we, we talk about a lot of stuff now, including, uh, some films we actually like it's a mix of stuff. Most recently, we actually listened to the Obama Bruce Springsteen podcast, um, and have some, uh, have some thoughts on that. So God bless not the work for me, but I'm glad someone's listening to it.
00:56:26
Speaker
Well, lonely is the path of the Ronin. Yes, all right. Well, folks, if you like this podcast and you want to keep hearing more podcasts like this, there's a couple of easy ways you can support us. I do this every podcast, but I really do appreciate the people who go out of their way to go to the website and give us 5, 10, $15 every month. There are just under 500 people around between 450 and 500. I got to pull out the number who helped keep this little independent media project going.
00:56:55
Speaker
And if you want to help us out, it's very easy. It's right in the show notes. There's a link there. And you can also just go to theprogressreport.ca slash patrons, put in your credit card and contribute. We would really appreciate it. If you have any notes, thoughts, comments, things you think I need to hear, things you think I messed up on, I'm very easy to get a hold of. You can reach me by email at Duncan K at progressaborda.ca, or I'm also on Twitter at Duncan Kinney. Thanks so much to CosmicFamby, you communist for the theme. Thanks again to Luke Savage for coming on the show.
00:57:24
Speaker
Thank you for listening and goodbye.