Adam Zivo Racial Hierarchies Are Gaining Traction in Canada A growing movement seeks to brand non-indigenous residents as “settlers” and relegate them to second-class citizenship

https://www.city-journal.org/article/canada-indigenous-identitarianism-settlers-race

It is increasingly fashionable in some progressive circles to label non-indigenous North Americans as “settlers,” mere guests on indigenous land. Who would have thought that blood-and-soil nationalism—the odious ideology that claims that only certain races belong to certain territories—would return, wrapped in the mantle of social justice?

This movement—call it “indigenous identitarianism”— is gaining traction across North America but has been especially influential in Canada, my home country. There, it has already begun to erode democratic decision-making in favor of race-based hierarchies. Americans would do well to look north to see how this path, if followed, could shape their own political and civic life.

Indigenous identitarianism generally posits that North America’s non-indigenous residents should be considered second-class citizens, either legally or symbolically. It suggests that they continually express gratitude for the “opportunity” to live on a continent “owned” by indigenous peoples.

To illustrate: Deanne LeBlanc, an award-winning academic at the University of British Columbia, wrote in a 2021 issue of the Canadian Journal of Political Science that non-indigenous Canadians should “consider themselves ‘foreigners’ in need of invitation onto Indigenous lands,” even if their families have lived on this continent for several generations. Similarly, Kaitie Jourdeuil, an academic at Queen’s University, published a 2022 article in The Conversation arguing that indigenous peoples should be given the right to make and enforce laws over 89 percent of Canadian land. That would mean some degree of disenfranchisement for millions of people.