Elbows Up!, page 15
Canadians now find themselves in a position familiar to First Nations on Turtle Island, holding one end of a treaty while the other end is shredded. Between 1778 and 1871, the United States government entered into more than 500 treaties with First Nations. Of those, 374 were ratified by Congress. In 1871, Congress decided that these nations were no longer nations, and the treaty-making era ceased. Of the 374 treaties ratified, guessing that zero have been honoured would be an extremely safe bet. Many of these treaties were coerced at gunpoint, and the U.S. just didn’t imagine honouring many more.
Canada has signed more than seventy treaties with First Nations, and they tend to be labelled either historic or modern, with treaties signed before Confederation deemed historic, while the eleven signed after are called modern or the Numbered Treaties. Canada’s history with treaties is slightly better than the empire’s to the southern side of the Medicine Line. Canada still enters treaties (whether these are good agreements, or coerced, is a story for a different book), and the government and provinces are currently settling long-standing treaty disputes like the one with my community.
Genaabajing is one of twenty-one communities that signed the Huron-Robinson Treaty of 1850. That treaty included a verbal process and a written one, and since the written one was in English, you can guess what happened. The treaty written down was not the one agreed to verbally. And even if it was, Canada—or the Crown—rather quickly stopped honouring the treaty anyway. The communities sued almost twenty years ago, and won. The compensation is in the billions.
It was in the first Trump administration that Canada got a sense that its treaties with the U.S. might be in danger when he cancelled the U.S.–Canada–Mexico free trade agreement. He did the same thing when he was re-elected in 2024, cancelling the treaty his own government had negotiated.
In 1779, the Haudenosaunee gave the nickname Hanödaga:yas to George Washington. It translates to “Town Destroyer” or “Village Eater.” It’s a term for the nature of the colonizer, those that come in peace but lay waste to all that they touch.
Trump is just the modern incarnation of this historic monster.
But this time, it’s the villages and towns of colonialism that are under threat. The new colonizer will seek to kill all the buffalo, whatever form they take today, and stack their skulls in pyramids of destruction. This is their nature.
For a culture that brought this violence—and has manifested its fear of it being returned upon them in decades of sci-fi and horror movies—its turn toward itself is no doubt scary. This contributes to the slow reaction to what is the obvious disintegration of the systems of resistance that we are witnessing.
The fact that Black and brown people have been sounding this alarm for generations does not seem to have mattered. Even though some have always lived with America being an authoritarian state, those that benefitted the most from it have rarely wanted to hear the truth. Perhaps if they had actually got to know any of us, they might have learned the strategies we used to survive the coming of the village eaters the last time. Perhaps it is time for them to embrace the prophecy of the seventh fire themselves, so that it isn’t just us that survives this moment.
These strategies are acts of intergenerational resistance. It can require the breaking of laws in the present to preserve justice in the future, especially when those laws seek to reduce the possible futures available. Many of the acts taken are little spoken about because these moves must be made in secrecy, away from the means of surveillance that those who would consume our villages employ. Our resistance will not be borne on the information systems they control; it will sprout from the ways we communicate, and from shared physical spaces where these acts of resistance will spread. Perhaps most importantly, it is to understand deeply that the land is the both the source of our resistance and our salvation. Canadians need to truly reimagine their relationship with the land, and perhaps even consider its centrality to a new national identity born of this moment—not as an arena of dominion, but one of right relations. That it is the treaty we make when we are born from the land.
Treaties with the U.S. are unlikely to serve anyone well in the immediate future. Instead, Canadians should look toward the treaties they already have. There are nations here that know what it is to resist a colonial threat. We are still doing it. This is in fact the differentiation point from the U.S. that would best serve Canada in this moment. We need a move away from the systems that these two colonial siblings share, and it is time for Canada to embrace a different nature. One that, instead of denying its history, as this place has done for so long, faces it. Stares at its own eyes in the reflecting pool, and dives deep to emerge in a new form.
We will still be here, as we always have been, but it’s time for these nations to make the changes necessary to live with us—or face the flames that are coming from the fire they started and fed with us as their fuel.
MORDECAI RICHLER
THE NEW ROMANS (1968)
The North American Pattern
As I have little that’s fresh to say about the United States and our relationship to it, I’m obliged to reiterate here arguments previously published.
A truism or two first.
Canada has not one, but two cultures. If the French is cocooned by language, the English, we are told again and again, is threatened by American-made vileness. For years Faulkner, Classic Comics, Ed Sullivan, Partisan Review, Elvis Presley, Henry Miller, and Huckleberry Hound have all been spilling freely over the border, stupefying our young ones; but recently Canada has grown resentful. Canadians, without yet building an Uhuru Stadium, unless Expo qualifies, have become proud to be…well, Canadians, and the upshot has been an increasingly truculent, occasionally touching national pursuit of something or other we can be true to. A heritage. A tradition. Anything.
What is so embarrassing is that while we are determined to defend our culture against any comer, nobody is sure what our culture is, how it differs from the British or American, or come to think of it, if we even have one. Once we were content with a modest but coy definition. We were neither British nor American, but something else. Something nice, very nice. The continued quest for that “something very nice” has created one of the few original Canadian enterprises, the What-Is-Our-Identity business, and a spiteful subsidiary, anti-Americanism.
Alas, I’m not anti-American. Far from it. As a boy in Montreal I can remember that my family was convinced that we gained from dissension between Canada’s two cultures, and we looked neither to England nor to France for guidance. We turned to the United States. The real America.
What America, America meant to us in those days was Roosevelt, the Yeshiva College, Danny Kaye, a Jew in the Supreme Court, the Jewish Daily Forward, Max Baer, Mickey Katz records, Dubinsky, Mrs. Nussbaum of Allen’s Alley, and Gregory Peck looking so cute in Gentleman’s Agreement. Why, in the United States a Jew even wrote speeches for the president. Returning cousins swore they had heard a cop speaking Yiddish in Brooklyn. There were the Catskill hotels, Jewish soap operas on the radio, and above all, the earthly pleasure grounds, Florida. Miami! No manufacturer had quite made it in Montreal until he was able to spend a month each winter in Miami.
We were governed by Ottawa, we were also British subjects, but our true capital was certainly New York. Success was (and still is) acceptance by the United States. For a fighter this meant a main bout at Madison Square Garden, for a writer or artist, praise from New York critics, and for a businessman, a Miami tan. During the war, in Montreal, our heroes were largely American or American-made. We understood intuitively, for instance, that no Canadian soldier ever would have snarled, “Send us more Japs!” He might have come up with, “No offense to peoples of Asian extraction, but I think we could cope with more Japanese here.” Our hearts went out, not to the Black Watch, but to John Wayne and the U.S. Marines. Others precious to us were John Garfield, Joe DiMaggio, and Frank Sinatra, and the most serious crisis of the war was the ban on American comic books, which meant that we were deprived of Captain Marvel and The Batman for the duration and had to put up with drab Canadian imitations.
It was nice, very nice, that Walter Pigeon, Canadian-born, was a Hollywood star, but if you wanted Lauren Bacall you had to be Bogart. An urban American.
By the time we reached university we were, as I recall it, thoroughly embarrassed to be Canadians. Charged with it, we always had a self-deprecating joke ready. Then one or perhaps two of us dared to say out loud, “I’m going to be a writer.” The immediate rejoinder was, ‘‘What, you’re going to be a Canadian writer?” It was a confession of limitation not an honourable ambition.
As recently as 1960, when I returned to Canada after several years abroad, I found that many Canadians were still prepared to blame the Americans for all our failures. If only they would leave us alone, we would be big, important, and above all, cultural. We were urged to buy (and read) Canadian magazines, which were being driven into the ground by “unfair” American competition. “If the Canadian magazines are allowed to die,” a concerned Hugh MacLennan said, “we would become the northern equivalent of a banana republic.” But among those publications seeking shelter under a cultural umbrella, Chatelaine, a specialist in recipes and royalty stories, was typical. The sad truth was, and still is, that most educated Canadians would rather pay more for American periodicals than have the best Canadian magazines, because without them we would feel intellectually cut off.
As Morley Callaghan once said, “The effort to direct our culture away from the sources of light is all very well for speeches by ministers of education…but it has nothing to do with the real problem…Canada is a part of the North American cultural pattern. We have our own idiosyncrasies up here, you know, our own peculiar variation of the culture pattern…But it is still definitely American.”
Living in London for so long, as I have, the lesson, if it ever had to be learned, is that we Canadians are North American by tradition and culture, and, compared to how foreign we are in England, the difference between, say, a Torontonian and somebody from Denver is no more than a regional nuance.
When I return to Canada from time to time, what I always find most tiresome is the cultural protectionism, the anti-Americanism. No heritage is worth preserving unless it can survive the sun, the mixed marriage, or the foreign periodical. Culture cannot be legislated or budgeted or protected with tariffs. Like potatoes. I also feel it’s time we recognized that the best, as well as the worst, influences in the world reach us from the United States, and furthermore, it is most likely that we will always be an American satellite.
However, if I still feel the longest unmanned frontier is an artificial one, I no longer look forward, as I once did, to the day when it might disappear and we would join fully in the American adventure. Vietnam and Ronald Reagan, among other things, have tempered my enthusiasm. Looked at another way, yes, we are nicer. And suddenly that’s important.
PAUL MYERS
The Canadiafornian
Growing up in Toronto in the 1960s, my early awareness coincided with Canada’s very public exploration and declaration of its national pride. Though the significance of adopting the maple leaf flag in 1965 was beyond my young comprehension, its clean, modern, red-and-white simplicity resonated as something new and exciting. The centennial celebrations of 1967 remain vivid: the Confederation Train’s stop in nearby Don Mills, Ontario, thrilled me, and our family camping trip through the Laurentians en route to the futuristic pavilions of Expo 67 in Montreal showcased a modern nation that blew my young mind. At a vibrant one hundred years old, Canada felt undeniably cool to a boy like me, and I felt a quiet gratitude for my parents’ journey from Liverpool, England, which had offered us a life in this young and evolving country. Of course, I was then unaware of our internal dialogues and the burgeoning national recognition of the distinct contributions of Québécois and Indigenous voices within our “cultural mosaic.” Yet I instinctively understood that, unlike the American “melting pot,” Canada seemed to invite Europeans, Africans, adventurers from the British Commonwealth, and even draft-dodging Americans to contribute their skills and ambitions to defining, populating, and fostering the idea of a great nation.
In time, I also became aware of the enduring national conversation about our identity and aspirations. While a singular definition has always been elusive, a common thread seems to be defining ourselves in contrast to our American neighbours. To ironically echo Kendrick Lamar, given his history with Toronto’s Drake, our view of those south of the border is simply, “they not like us.”
I come by this knowledge first-hand, because I am a Canadian living in the U.S.A.
While I am Canadian by birth and by nature, my wife and I left Toronto in 1997, captivated by Northern California. Work visas transitioned to green cards, and eventually we bought a perfect little bungalow in Berkeley, across the bay from San Francisco. A tall palm tree stands beside a towering evergreen in our backyard, the latter a constant reminder of home. By 2014 (during the Obama years, I should add), seeking full democratic participation and community engagement, we both became U.S. citizens. For me, the dichotomy of being a dual citizen shapes all questions of Canadian identity—and equally, what it isn’t.
I love Canada. I love California. I am the Canadiafornian.
Presently, I hold a U.S. passport but maintain my Canadian one. Adding a layer, I keep a U.K. passport, courtesy of my British parents, and I like to joke that I’m not just cosmopolitan, my trio of passports are like three flavours of ice cream, which makes me Neapolitan.
Crucially, my world view remains staunchly Canadian, but with a light fleece replacing a seasonal parka. I still cherish the values that Canada bred in me: a belief in fairness, kindness, and what we used to call “multiculturalism.” I am an advocate for, and a grateful beneficiary of, a publicly funded healthcare system, which falls under a broader national aspiration toward social justice (and I have a very Canadian readiness to recognize the times in our history when we’ve fallen short of that promise).
Being Canadian in 2025 has involved the constant and compulsive sharing of memes, TikToks, and Reels dissecting who we are, who we’ll never be, and how Canada steadfastly remains a friendly yet fiercely independent sovereign nation. While I’ve written for U.S. and U.K. publications, I stay closely connected to Canadian media, particularly cherishing my occasional cbc appearances, which always feel like going home, regardless of my actual location.
I stay informed on news from both sides of the border, thanks partly to a daily text exchange with my two brothers, one in Mississauga, the other in New York. We were raised with a healthy skepticism toward jingoistic nationalism and empty flag-waving, but when our core values and identity are challenged, the maple leaf flags proudly emerge.
One positive outcome of the recent “51st state” nonsense has been the renewed focus on our identity. The familiar rallying cry of “elbows up” implies an aggressively defensive stance, as opposed to a jingoistic threat of aggression. As Canadians, we aim to be good neighbours, just as I believe most Americans want to be good neighbours to us.
To be a Canadiafornian is a constant act of translation: miles to kilometres, Canadian to American spellings (humour vs. humor), and converting my media work fees. (My wife’s name is Liza, which is spelled with either a “zed” or a “zee” depending on who I’m talking to.)
We blend in so seamlessly that most Americans might not even realize we’re Canadian, walking among them like undercover agents, noting the contradictions of American life while simultaneously explaining “snow days” to Californians. Arguably, this could be the reason that there is typically no greater cheerleader for Canada than a Canadian expat. We’re begging you to notice that we’re not like you. In our California home, we have a miniature clay Mountie statue in the dining room, I have a Canadian flag poster in my studio, and I rotate through a variety of proudly Canadian T-shirts, some emblazoned with vintage cbc logos, and have a distinct preference for shirts bearing the band name Sloan.
No matter how long we live stateside, we still manage to view the United States through an outsider lens, and I’ve long believed this perspective affords Canadians certain insights that Americans—raised on American exceptionalism—might have missed. Our comparative humility lets us offer constructive criticism in an unthreatening manner.
And there’s plenty to criticize; the Canadian expats I know down here, and quite a few Californians, share my disbelief at the political inaction regarding sensible gun control and the lack of a national healthcare system, which basically means that if you survive getting shot, the threat of medical bankruptcy looms over your hospital stay.
Living in California is a continuous process of adaptation and discovery—navigating a new cultural landscape, embracing a different climate—and while it’s nearly impossible to get truly good poutine, I still thrive on the Golden State’s energy and the pioneering spirit of immigrants from all over the world who came to this place, just as we did, to reinvent themselves in the Wild West.
But it isn’t Canada. Canada is home.
LESLIE HURTIG
The Sky Is Falling…Again!
I recall a political cartoon that was published in a Canadian paper in the early 2010s. It featured a silvery-, wild-haired man flapping about with an encyclopedia under his arm. Bright yellow chicken feet stuck out from his well-tailored suit. He was yelling, “It’s too late to save Canada!”
