Nuance 2

What makes a country a nation? I have often pondered this. I don't have a hugely comprehensive sense of world history, but I know a little bit, so I will try to focus on what I already know, and for this I will begin with our own dear little Cananda. We were once, until fairly recently, a British colony where the white occupiers oversaw the destruction of 634 First Nations in Canada, speaking more than 50 distinct languages. The First Nations peoples had been already almost exterminated, through epidemics, armed conflict, and especially government sponsored and endorsed acts of cultural and ethnic genocide. The colony, Canada, since the British defeated the French on the Plains of Abraham in 1769, was to be exclusively and unilaterally British, but for the presence of Quebec and the other French presence in the Atlantic provinces, especially New Brunswick. There is of course, the infamy of the genoccide and deportation of the French Acadians from New Bursnwick by the British in the eighteenth century. Canada remained for the next couple of centuries an almost exclusively British-French entity with marginal input from the surviving First Nations, and that became almost nonexistent as the genocide gained momentum during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In 1867 Canada became a federation first of four then eventually, within the next forty years, nine provinces, followed by Newfoundland in; I think 1949. In 1926, Canada became, with royal consent, a fully independent nation. It is still hard to say, or define, exactly what makes us a nation. The British heritage has been rapidly diminishing, even though this same heritage is what a lot of older generation, and mainly conservative and white Canadians, mainly lay claim to. Following, and even preceeding the First World War came immigrants from other countries in Europe. From the 1880's on, many Germans came from Russia to open up for agriculture and settlement the lands of the prairies, my great grandparents among them. Then came Ukrainians, and of course, Chinese and South Asians had already been embedded since the construction of the railroad as indentured labourers. Then there were several generations of racism and white supremacy keeping them down and oppressed, which also excluded the many Africans who had sought refuge here on the Underground Railroad only to be treated here worse than second class citizens, and of course the handful of surviving First Naitons people were languishing on reserves, or being destroyed for life in residential schools. Especially following the Second World War came waves of other immigrants, from Italy, Portugal, Greece and eastern European countries. They were often treated as less than fully Caucasian by the arrogant British squatters. It was only by the 1960's that Canadian citizenship was equally open to all, regardless of race or nationality, and then we were getting waves of new immigrants and refugees from Hong Kong, India, Fiji, Uganda, Vietnam, Pakistan, Latin America, the Philippines, Latin Anerica and the Middle East. Even if Canada adheres to a parliamentary and legal system based largely on the British model, and even though English and many other British residues help identify Canada as Canada, and even with the influence of the British Crown, as we are still a constitutional monarchy within the British Commonwealth of Nations, this is still a nation in evolution, and the many diverse nations represented by our immigrants, along with globalization, are going to be the tools and instruments that will further define our national identity. This will likely take a few more generations, given that by that time this planet is still in any condition to sustain us.