Forging White Settler Nationalism and Entrenching a Hierarchy of Racialized Belonging in Canada

• In Event: Race and Language Learning in Multicultural Canada

Abstract

In the 1960’s, the Canadian federal government attempted to forge a new national policy of unity based on the formulation of “multiculturalism within a bilingual framework”. The pressure to forge a new national narrative stemmed from rising Quebec nationalist sentiment, demands for substantive recognition from Indigenous communities and the pressure to modernize Canada’s national image both at home and abroad. Thus the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (1963-1970) was initiated (Ashforth, 1990) and produced two enduring pieces of legislation - The Official Languages Act (1969) and The Multiculturalism Policy (1971) - which gave rise to a new national narrative of Canada as a white settler nation based on two founding peoples, the English and the French, the peripheral inclusion of ‘multicultural’ or racialized communities, and the erasure of Indigenous groups from the status of founding peoples.

In this paper, a Foucauldian genealogy of archival material on the Royal Commission will reveal the conflicts and contestations which underlay the emergence of this ostensibly seamless national policy (Foucault, 1977). Specifically, I will trace the elision and erasure of substantive contestation against this new national formulation from both Indigenous communities and ‘other ethnic groups’ (which is how non-French and non-English immigrant groups were defined by the Commission) throughout the inquiry. The archival records of the preliminary and public hearings of the inquiry reveal the processes by which claims by Indigenous communities for recognition as ‘founding groups’ were erased and demands for substantive group rights by ‘other ethnic groups’ (exemplified by demands for collective language rights) were elided into weaker individualized ‘multicultural’ rights. Thus, with the concomitant changes to immigration policy in the 1960’s, a racialized hierarchy of difference and belonging in the Canadian nation emerged out of the commission through a complex set of discursive operations to set aside Indigenous claims to founding group status and ‘other ethnic group’ claims for collective rights. Specifically, a critical reading of related archival documents reveals that in order to establish and maintain the national narrative of multicultural tolerance and diversity within a bilingual nation, the exclusions and erasures of racialized bodies historically articulated in the vocabulary of racial and ethnic preference were shifted decisively into the domain of language through the collapse of racialized groups into linguistic and cultural categories.

The legacy of the Royal Commission’s national narrative of “multiculturalism within a bilingual framework” finds its current expression in The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms which entrenches this hierarchy of difference and belonging through the guarantee of collective rights for the English and French against a weaker protection of individualized multicultural rights for all ‘other ethnic groups’ (Meyerhoff, 1993). Concretely, this has meant the lack of direct official federal support for heritage or international languages (that is all other languages besides English and French) learning programs and significant L1 loss and language shift in these communities. Ultimately, this hierarchy of rights organizes a legacy of racialized citizenship which frames and delimits all linguistic and educational claims by racialized and Indigenous communities in contemporary Canada.

Author

• Eve Haque, York University