Tsilhqot'in apology issue gone sideways
The discussion of who should have done what in regard to the 150-year-old legally-sanctioned assassination of the Tsilhqot'in chiefs, seems to have gone sideways. Unsurprisingly, Svend Serup's response ("Reconciliation needs truth," Citizen, April 11) to Terry Burgess, seized on the one arguable premise Burgess advanced - that projects such as Waddington's ill-fated railway were all "being done in preparation for joining Canada."
Svend, understandably, doesn't confront much in the rest of Burgess's letter which is solid historical fact, but goes off on a tangent about the relationship of Canada's creation to aggressive American Civil War-era intentions. Worse, Svend decides that his point is even better driven home by bringing up a massacre of Inuit by "a group of aboriginals" that shows that native life, before contact, was not all harmony and light - as if this matters to the wrongs committed against the Tsilhqot'in chiefs and people.
If I get the logic straight, you can't really blame non-existent Canada for duplicity and legally sanctioned murder, since an unrelated indigenous group, surprised and slew Inuit almost 100 years before. Svend is probably referring to a bloody attack by Chipewayans (Ojibwa), witnessed by Samuel Hearne in 1771 on the Coppermine River, a few thousand kilometres north of the Chilcotin. Even Judge Begbie, who reluctantly sentenced the Tsilhqot'in chiefs, would have ruled such "evidence" as utterly irrelevant.
As I say the debate has gone a little sideways from the most important aspect: a grievous and devious wrong was done: Trudeau's exoneration, late and feeble as it was, is appropriate because he is the current leader of our predominantly white Canadian settler society, whose living and prospering here was enabled by countless lies, betrayals and harm perpetrated against the rightful owners of lands that now are called B.C. and Canada. The exoneration is a small step towards reconciliation - something Svend Serup's idea of "truth" will never bring about.
Norman Dale
Prince George
