To the End of the Hyphen-Nation: Decolonizing Multiculturalism Karina Vernon University of Toronto

“Visible minority” is defined by Statistics Canada and by the Employment Equity Act as “persons, other than Aboriginal peoples, who are non-Caucasian in race or non-white in colour” (emphasis added).

One of the realities is that when we talk of multiculturalism, we are currently talking about visible minorities only.

The Toronto Roundtable on Multiculturalism Mosaic to Harmony: Multicultural Canada in the 21st Century (2007)

ow is an especially powerful moment to be researching and Nteaching in the field of Canadian literature. Across Turtle Island powerful and creative indigenous-led movements are mobilizing on a number of fronts: to protest violations of indigenous treaty rights; to call for restitution; to defend land, water, sky, plants, and animals against corporate encroachment; to seek justice for housing infrastructure crises; to call for public inquiries into murdered and missing indigenous women, and to reinvigorate Aboriginal cultures. What is extraordinary about these movements is not the scale or strength of Aboriginal resistance.

ESC 42.3–4 (September/December 2016): 81–98 As Kwakwaka’wakw activist Gord Hill points out in his recent critical history, indigenous peoples have continually resisted the brutalities of colonialism for five hundred years, from the Beothuk resistance in New- Karina Vernon is foundland in the early seventeenth century (19), to the Red Power Move- an Assistant Professor ments of the 1960s and 1970s (58), to the Kahnawake Warrior uprising of English at the at Oka. The recent and ongoing protests in resistance to the Northern University of Toronto Gateway Pipeline; the Pictou Blockade against Northern Pulp Mill; the Scarborough. Her first Elsipogtog First Nation resistance of hydro fracking in New Brunswick, book, Black Atlantis: and the Idle No More protests during the winter of 2012–13 sparked by the A Recovered Archive Canadian federal government’s proposed changes to the Indian, Fisheries, of Black Canadian and Navigable Water Acts (amongst others; 21 Kino-nda-niimi Collec- Prairie Literature brings tive): these and other watershed movements squarely build on the strong to light a previously legacy of indigenous resistance in the Americas and reverberate into the hidden archive of black future. What is different about these resurgent movements is the degree of prairie writing, from the continent-wide non-indigenous participation and support. As the writers eighteenth-century fur of The Winter We Danced: Voices from the Past, the Future, and the Idle traders to contemporary No More Movement observe, “it engaged the oft-slumbering Canadian writers, and is under public as never before. Within four months, the Idle No More movement contract to Wilfrid moved beyond the turtle’s continental back and became a global move- Laurier University ment with manifold demands” (22). Aparna Sanyal sees such indigenous- Press. She is currently at led movements as “a gift from Canada’s fastest-growing population [that] work on a new sshrc- shows that the cultural centre of the country is shifting.” In this context, supported monograph, it becomes an especially exciting endeavour to teach Canadian literature “Black Art and the at the postsecondary level, when to teach students about the histories of Aesthetics of Social colonial injustice means also to connect them with those of the present—as Justice.” well as with the radical re-imaginings of Canada that these vigorous social movements invite. Or at least, that is how I wish it would feel. In reality, teaching indigenous literatures in the multicultural Canadian literature classroom remains as fraught an endeavour as ever. In some ways it may be more so. In this paper I weave together three scenes from my Canadian literature classroom into my analysis of Statistics Canada’s “Ethnic Diversity Survey” (2002), an extraordinary document on multicultural belonging, in order to probe the unconscious ways in which multiculturalism shapes the reading and misreading of indigenous literatures, as well as the possibilities of future practices of solidarity and alliance building on Turtle Island. While this paper seeks to probe the unconscious pedagogical work that multiculturalism as a social policy performs and why it makes teaching and learning indigenous literatures in multicultural contexts difficult, I want to differentiate the motivations of this paper from those of the pedagogical “complaint tradition.” Teachers’ complaints about the perceived

82 | Vernon decline in quality of student literacy and thought forms a robust tradition going back to the early modern era. The tradition of teachers’ complaints is inevitably ideological and is invested in the maintenance of particular class and race hierarchies. As James and Leslie Milroy put it, “Language attitudes stand proxy for a much more comprehensive set of social and political attitudes, including stances strongly tinged with authoritarianism, but often presented as ‘common sense’ ” (46). This paper does not intend to contribute in any way to that tradition. I have the privilege of teaching Canadian literature in the Toronto suburb of Scarborough, a location recently ranked as the most diverse in North America. Toronto is more ethnically diverse than Miami, Los Angeles, or New York City, with 49.9 percent of Torontonians being born outside of Canada. The University of Toronto Scarborough claims with pride to be the most diverse campus in the world; 10 percent of the student body is international but the majority are first-generation Canadians (The World at utsc). The students I teach care deeply about issues of power, gender, race, sexuality, and class. They are, like many students in the humanities, fiercely compassionate and often idealistic social beings, and this makes them exceptionally sensitive students of Canadian literature. The object of my critique, then, in my reconstructed classroom scenes, is not a particular class or student body. As Richard Cavell notes, the teaching context is far from being “a unified space”; it is not a site of knowledge transfer from teacher to student, but, “a number of transvestic sites that are produced by and through the agendas of those who participate in it, including the instructor” (101). In such a dynamic space, surprising knowledges, “unconscious contents—subjec- tive, historical, cultural” (Sugars 17) regarding the repressed ideologies of multicultural belonging can emerge. By returning to the scene of teaching, I seek to bring to consciousness what other analyses of multicultural policy (see, for example, Reitz et al.) often fail to look at: the way multiculturalism as an educational project has, to borrow a phrase from John Willinsky, taught Canadians how to divide the world. How Aboriginal issues are discussed in the multicultural classroom is something that those in the First Nations studies program at the University of British Columbia argue “has not been sufficiently addressed in educational institutions, and yet, is something that desperately needs to be discussed” (“What I Learned in Class Today” np). By now some readers may be wondering if or to what extent social justice should emerge as a pedagogical project in a Canadian literature classroom in the first place. They might ask why students of literature should be seen, as Lisa Kabesh puts it, as “receivers of ethical truths” and

To the End of the Hyphen-Nation | 83 why literature itself should be the “vehicle for the ethical conversion of national subjects in particular” (25). Indeed, these are important questions. Kabesh argues in her superb dissertation, “Teacher, Detective, Witness, Activist: On Pedagogy and Social Justice in Asian Canadian Literature” that the short answer to “why the classroom?” is “deceptively straightforward”: because it is one of the primary spaces to which literature scholars are proximate. Thinking about teaching and learning in the classroom has the potential, as [Roy] Miki explains, to increase attention to “the pedagogical scenes of our practices … whether in the classroom or in our research and writing, or in our social and cultural relations with each other” (Miki “Globalization” 97). Furthermore, because the classroom is one of the primary sites of action that literature instructors inhabit, and because it is a political space that is located in and contingent on systems of social and political relations and norms, the classroom becomes one site in which scholars can intervene in these “local/global” systems. (11) In my own teaching practice, the classroom is a potent site of intervention into the political systems in which my and my students’ subject positioning and privileges are based. For instance, my status as Assistant Profes- sor becomes ironized—sometimes more, sometimes less—by my subject position as a racialized black woman, since blackness has historically been repressed by Canadian literature as both a field and as an institution. Sara Ahmed has written about how being a professor of colour causes a kind of category “trouble” (177). In On Being Included, she quotes Pierre W. Orelus, who writes, “After I formally introduce myself in class, I have undergraduate students who ask me, in a surprised tone of voice, ‘Are you really the professor?’ I have overheard some of them asking their peers, ‘Is he really the professor?’ ” (177). I am not myself unfamiliar with this question, nor its underlying tone of astonishment. Sometimes this question takes the form of a statement: I am told, as many women professors are, that I look too young to be the instructor, a comment that blatantly inter- rogates my authority and credentials. As Ahmed explains, “Being asked whether you are the professor is a way of being made into a stranger, of not being at home in a category”—in this case, CanLit—“that gives residence to others” (177). Yet I have found myself at times instrumentalizing the category trouble that my gendered racialization produces in pedagogical contexts. As Ahmed writes, “I realize how much we come to know about institutional life because of these failures of residence, how the categories in which we are immersed as styles of life become explicit when you do not

84 | Vernon quite inhabit them” (178). In other words, my being this class’s instructor means that, like many of my students, I am the very subject of the multicultural imagination that I seek to investigate here. In fact, as Wah’s On this October day in my second-year Introduction to Canadian Literature class we are investigating the hyphen, the paratextual mark vignette that multiculturalism bequeathed us for understanding our identities in relation to Canada’s national imaginary. The hyphen, that precarious float- powerfully ing bridge we walk to make the distance between another place and here; that horizontal dash-, an incomplete equals sign; the hopeful shape of a reveals, level playing field. I am showing my fifty or so students the ways poet and critic Fred multicultural Wah materializes the hyphen that usually floats invisibly between the categories of identity. On the one hand, Wah’s Diamond Grill celebrates discourses the hyphen as an “operable tool” (“Half-bred poetics” 60), a “bridge, a no- man’s land, a nomadic, floating magic carpet” (60), a potent sign for the actively repress mobility of mixed race. But on the other hand, Wah’s book also reveals the limits of the hyphen for theorizing more complexly mixed identities. consciousness For instance, multicultural discourse, and in particular the hyphen, was never designed to make visible the contact zones between First Nations of such contact. and the diasporic peoples who have territorialized in Aboriginal nations on Turtle Island. One of the powerful lessons of Diamond Grill for me is that multiculturalism has given us no adequate language—no sign—for tracing or remembering the complex and subtly hybrid cultures that have arisen from the interaction of First Nations and Chinese diasporas. We are not encouraged by its discourses to think, for instance, First Nations- inflected-Chinese-Canadian, or First Nations-inflected-black-Canadian, despite the long and intimate interaction of these peoples. In fact, as Wah’s vignette powerfully reveals, multicultural discourses actively repress consciousness of such contact. So repressed are such contact zones in the multicultural imaginary that, stunningly, the Chinook-Chinese contact zone of Wah’s own family remains invisible to him too, until the moment of his writing. Wah writes: Whenever I hear grampa talk like that, high muckamuck, sit- kum dollah, I think he’s sliding Chinese words into English words, just to have a little fun.[…] I don’t know, then, that he’s using Chinook jargon, the pidgin vocabulary of colonial interaction, the code-switching talkee-talkee of the contact zone.¨ […] And I only realize, right here on this page, when the cooks in the kitchen swear You mucka high! at me, they’ve transed

To the End of the Hyphen-Nation | 85 the phrase out of their own history here. I thought they were swearing in Chinese. (70)

How does Wah manage in this writing to bring to consciousness what multicultural discourses normally repress? Wah moves away from the dominant epistemological and creative method of the book. The hyphen makes no appearance in this vignette. Instead, the footnote that he inserts into his prose and which ruptures the page like a ground shifting reads like a breakthrough in the logic of multicultural discourse: it enables Wah to shift toward a more enabling paradigm, the contact zone, borrowed from Mary Louise Pratt (68). Significantly, as Wah shifts from the hyphen to contact zone, rather than using the usual numbered footnote, Wah inserts an icon, a three-leaf clover, tripartite sign of both the aleatory poetics of place, race, and identity that Pratt’s term helps Wah bring to consciousness, as well as an apt visual image of the tripartite structure of the complex subjectivity Wah is imagining: First Nations and Chinese and Canadian. My affect when I’m teaching Diamond Grill betrays to my students, I am sure, how excited I am to share this book. I find it deeply intelligent and innovative, philosophically, linguistically, and structurally. So I’m surprised as I pause in my lecturing to discover that my students are not nearly as troubled by the limits of the hyphen as I am, particularly not by what I’m arguing about the hyphen as it regards contact zones and First Nations. In what ways, I ask my students, can we read the hyphen that floats in Wah’s book, between Chinese and Canadian as a strike-through, a sign that puts under erasure the invisibly present third term, First Nations? I look out at the lecture hall. My students begin one at a time to respond. What they tell me is that they rarely, if ever, conceive of their identities in terms of the hyphen. Like writer and critic George Elliott Clarke, they cannily perceive the hyphen to be less an ampersand and more a double-edged minus sign (Odysseys Home 40), one that renders them simultaneously less ethnicized or racialized and less Canadian. Minelle Mahtani’s 2002 study “Interrogating the Hyphen Nation: Canadian Multicultural Policy and Mixed-Race Identities” elaborates Clarke’s insight. She argues that the hyphen marginalizes—literally decentres—ethnicized and racialized Canadians by creating specific socio-spatial boundaries—what geographer Gillian Rose calls the “distance-difference” mark—between the identifications “Canadian” and “not-Canadian.” Mahtani concludes that most immigrants and racialized Canadians prefer to be called simply “Canadian” not only to avoid “a whole geography and history of explanation” but also

86 | Vernon because they wish to embrace a definition of national identity that is not dictated by ethnicity but by “multiple identifications” (19). For me this question of the “multiple identifications” that claiming an unhyphenated “Canadian” identity enables is crucial. With whom can such identifications be forged? Whom do these attachments deny? With these questions in mind, I turn now to the second scene from my Canadian literature classroom.

Earlier in the term, my students and I are reading George Copway’s memoir Life, History, and Travels of Kah-ge-ga-gah bowh published in 1847. In this text Copway movingly describes how Ojibwa families claimed particular segments of present-day Ontario as traditional territory and he details the challenges his people faced as a result of the influx of tens of thousands of British and other non-native immigrants on to their hunt- ing grounds in the 1820s. Although the text we are reading concerns the ground beneath our feet, the class seems disengaged, restless. I notice this affective shift in class every time I teach indigenous literature, or whenever I talk about the cost of Canadian nation-building to indigenous peoples, and it troubles me. Determined that the legacies of colonization should be central to the ways we teach and read Canadian literature, I struggle through the rest of the native literature on my syllabus. But throughout the term I remain unsure of how to gently nudge my students toward an awareness that we, all of us in this class, inhabit a geography of colonialism—and that this matters. I am reluctant to confess here that it is not my white students who seem the most resistant to talk about colonialism. I’ve noticed that for their part, white students often respond by expressing feelings of guilt—not necessarily the most helpful emotion, for it rarely motivates the responsibility necessary to actively dismantle systems of oppression. Still, as Harsha Walia observes, guilt can be “a sign of a much- needed shift in consciousness” (47). No; often, and to my surprise, the most resistant students tend to be students of colour. Because I teach in Scarborough, students frequently enter in the classroom with their own too-intricate histories of ancestral dispossession and struggle. Some were born in places that have recently undergone their own decolonizing movements. Others have arrived from difficult conflict zones: Sri Lanka, Somalia, Eritrea. What accounts, then, for their apparent turning away from Aboriginal social justice issues, especially in the current context of such inspirational and widespread alliance-building between native and non-native networks?

To the End of the Hyphen-Nation | 87 Of course, we might well ask why native literatures should be absorbed into and taught in the context of a Canadian literature classroom in the first place, and why it should bear the burden of doing the kind of provoca- tive, discomfiting political work I am calling on it to perform from within a Canadian literature space. I teach Canadian literature from a critical antiracist and decolonizing perspective, using epistemologies developed by scholars such as Jo-Ann Archibald, Renate Eigenbrod, and Marga- ret Kovach, who lay the groundwork for approaching indigenous stories with the principles of respect and reciprocity. But I am not an indigenous scholar, and my classroom—notwithstanding my anticolonial methodol- ogy—is a space embedded in a settler regime that regulates and circum- scribes our social relations as “multiculturals.” My coverage of indigenous histories and literatures in a CanLit course might be seen by some, including my students, as an appropriative move. Perhaps, then, I should read their restlessness in the classroom as another canny refusal: a recognition of the cultural and political sovereignty of indigenous literatures that ought not to be co-opted into a multicultural frame. Yet, perhaps it is something else. It may well be that some of my students find my discussion of colonization triggering, since its history of violence not only echoes the histories of colonization that resound in so many places but also brings up other triggering experiences of childhood or intergenerational trauma, violence, and poverty—responses that are not specific to those who are indigenous, nor those who have experi- enced colonial violence directly. What I initially read as restlessness and disengagement, then, might at times be a defense operation or a trauma response. Perhaps I should be doing more to protect students from the potential of experiencing secondary trauma in the classroom. What would this look like, and how would it affect the teaching of indigenous literature (or black, or Asian-Canadian or other literatures that represent traumatic histories, for that matter)? I don’t generally issue trigger warnings or shy away from engaging those historical and contemporary events character- ized variously as traumatic, charged, or painful. I believe it is part of my job to teach these as a necessary aspect of teaching my field, as well as to help expand students’ historical imaginations. As Taiaiake Alfred reminds us, a big challenge faced by indigenous peoples who are seeking restitution for past and ongoing injustices is “The complete ignorance of Canadian society about the facts of their relationship with Indigenous peoples and the willful denial of historical reality by Canadians [which] detracts from the possibility of any meaningful discussion on true reconciliation” (181). Alfred observes that because the media limits its discussion of history

88 | Vernon to the last five or ten years, “the general public focus on the inefficiently spent billions of dollars per year handed out through the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs system” (181). Reading indigenous literature brings home the truth that, as Alfred puts it, “Something was stolen, lies were told, and they have never been made right […] old families and recent immigrants alike, have gained their existence as people on this land and citizens of this country” (182) based on these as-yet unaddressed injustices. At the same time, teaching this history requires sensitivity and care. Embracing what African American feminist scholar Patricia Hill Collins describes as an “ethic of caring,” I recognize that “personal expressiveness, emotions, and empathy are central to the knowledge validation process” (np): in class I model my own affective responses to literature and work to create opportunities for students to voice their own emotional responses, if they wish. Still, despite all my best intentions, it could simply be that I am doing it wrong. I am open to this possibility. There is undoubtedly much room for me to improve as a teacher. Yet I also know I am not alone in my struggle to teach a decolonizing CanLit. Colleagues at other institutions have confessed to also witnessing the profound affective shift that occurs whenever attention is turned to indigenous literature and the legacies of colonial violence. While it may be students’ canny critique of our disci- plinary cooptation of indigenous cultural property, as well as a potential secondary trauma response, I suspect the issue goes much deeper than either of these two explanations allow. I believe we need to probe more deeply the ways multiculturalism as a state policy shapes our identifications in conscious and unconscious ways. In what follows, then, I turn to an extraordinary document produced by Statistics Canada on the affective social bonds of visible minority Canadians. I examine the “Ethnic Diversity Survey” in detail in order to think more deeply about the ways colonial ideologies explicitly structure multicultural belonging in Canada and what this means for the future of non-native movements for indigenous self- determination. In 2002 Statistics Canada, in conjunction with the Department of Canadian Heritage, undertook the most extensive demographics survey ever carried out in Canada in order to assess “how people’s backgrounds affect their participation in Canada’s social, economic, and cultural life”; in other words, to examine if and to what extent visible minorities’ identification with their “ancestries” and “ethnic and cultural identities” prevented their integration into the multicultural social body. In a nutshell, the survey was intended to put to rest debates about whether multiculturalism “works”

To the End of the Hyphen-Nation | 89 or not. The premise of the “Ethnic Diversity Survey” was that multicultural policy can be regarded as a “success” if it has led to a “socially cohesive society” in spite of racialized and ethnicized Canadians’ simultaneous strong ties to their own “cultural life.” But how exactly is social cohesion to be measured and quantified in social scientific terms by a survey? Reitz et al. readily admit that the abstract “concept of social cohesion itself cannot be directly measured in a survey” (20). Hence, the “eds” and the analysis of it focus “entirely on the social integration of individuals” (20). Respondents were selected from those who answered the long questionnaires of the 2001 census. The population sampled in the survey was selected “on the basis of the responses given to questions on ethnic origin, place of birth, and place of birth of parents” (Statscan). Of the 57,242 persons targeted, a huge number, 42,476, responded. The results produced a massive storehouse of information regarding the connection between the strength of ancestral, religious, and linguistic identification and “belongingness” in Canada. How exactly was this “belongingness” measured? Participants in the “eds” were asked to report on their levels of civic participation (voting in federal, provincial, and municipal elections; volunteering); their sense of “trust” in Canadian society; their self-perceptions about the “Canadianness” of their identity; and, most importantly for the purposes of this paper, the “diversity” of respondents’ social networks. Why does the “eds” focus on the question of the diversity of racialized and ethnicized Canadians’ social networks? As Augie Fleras and Jean Kunz have observed, since 1971, when the Multiculturalism Act was passed, multiculturalism policy and programming has evolved from a discourse that celebrated—and, I would add, manufactured—differences to one that focuses now on “integrative citizenship.” If, in the 1970s, multiculturalism sought to respond to the problem of “prejudice” through a discourse of “cultural sensitivity” and the metaphor of the “cultural mosaic,” today multiculturalism policy aims to address the new concerns of globalization security through an emphasis on “inclusive citizenship” and “belonging.” According to Will Kymlicka, multiculturalism has been “successful” when it encourages the four following points: “adopting a Canadian identity; participating in Canadian institutions; learning an official language, and having inter-ethnic friendships” (quoted in Reitz 14). This last index of inclusive citizenship, having inter-ethnic friendships, was one of Trudeau’s stated goals of multiculturalism, too. In his 1971 parliamentary speech introducing multiculturalism policy, he said the government would pro- vide support for implementing the policy in four ways, the third of which

90 | Vernon was, to “promote creative encounters and interchange among all Cana- dian cultural groups, in the interest of national unity” (quoted in Reitz 19). Hence, in section 8 of the survey, the participants were asked, “As far as you know, how many of your friends have ^top ethnic ancestry^?” (53). A second question probes, “Up until you were age 15, how many of your friends had ^top ethnic ancestry^?” (56). Because ethnic and especially racialized groups “may not be equal in terms of socio-economic opportunities, political power, social status, or interpersonal acceptance,” Mai B. Phan and Raymond Breton argue that racialized Canadians “will be more likely to continue to identify with their own group or become marginalized. They may also develop an oppositional culture to the mainstream” (95). Hence, to them, as to other analysts of multiculturalism, an index of the “belongingness” of racialized people to the nation, and a sign of a successful multiculturalism policy, can be measured by the degree to which an individual’s “social network” includes affective attachments to individuals of other ethnic ancestries. But looking at the structure of the “Ethnic Diversity Survey,” it is clear that the “national unity” that Trudeau and other multiculturalists imagined, and, indeed, what constitutes “belonging” in this document, is premised on an explicitly colonial framework. Significantly, despite the policy’s long-standing emphasis on “inter-ethnic friendship” as a sign of a cohesive multicultural society, no Aboriginal people were surveyed, since the questionnaire excluded “persons living in collective dwellings, persons living on Indian reserves, persons declaring an Aboriginal origin or identity in the 2001 Census, or persons living in Northern and remote areas.” A separate publication from Statistics Canada explains that “Canada’s Aboriginal peoples were not included in the target population [of the “eds”], as information on this population was collected through the 2001 Aboriginal Peoples Survey” (“eds: Portrait of a Multicultural Society” 1). Despite the focus of the “Aboriginal People’s Survey” on the non-reserve population, it also does not imagine or seek to understand native-non-native social alliances. Its primary focus was to collect data on the social and economic conditions of Aboriginal people, including information on housing, water quality, and Aboriginal languages. This is how multiculturalism “divides the world” (Willinsky). It does not think in terms of “contact zones” but imagines the multicultural as always and forever separate from the Aboriginal. Within the terms that it seeks to understand the belongingness of visible minority Canadians, what did the “eds” find? If the results are to be interpreted at face value, they are astonishing. They emphatically confirm

To the End of the Hyphen-Nation | 91 what students consistently reveal in class. “Visible minorities are willing to express a higher degree of ‘belonging’ in Canada than non-racialized Cana- dians” (Reitz and Bannerjee 135). Whereas non-visible minorities’ degree These figures of belonging was measured at 54.8 percent, the visible minority total of belonging was several points higher: 58.6. Black and South Asian Canadi- are even more ans in particular reported an extraordinarily high degree of belonging in Canada: 60.6 percent and 64.9 percent respectively. These figures are even astonish- more astonishing given the high degree of inequality and discrimination simultaneously reported by these groups. The survey asked about personal ing given the experiences of racial discrimination, feeling “uncomfortable or out of place in Canada” and feeling vulnerable to hate crimes. A total of 35.9 percent high degree of of visible minority participants reported experiences of discrimination, in contrast to 10.6 percent from white Canadians (Reitz and Bannerjee 128). inequality and The highest rates of experiences of discrimination were reported by black respondents (49.6 percent), Chinese (33.2 percent), and South Asians (33.1 discrimination percent), yet, curiously, these were the same groups that also report the highest degrees of belonging. simultaneously In this class, now toward the end of my Canadian literature survey, reported by my students and I are reading Dionne Brand’s poem “Land to Light On.” As my students offer, the title of the poem suggests the ways that Brand these groups. figures her speaker as a highly deterritorialized migrant, one who hovers perpetually above the ground in the imagined space of diaspora, searching for a place to land. But as the speaker discovers, there is no land to light on that is not fraught with histories of violence and dispossession; as the poet puts it, “Everywhere you walk on earth there’s harm, / everywhere resounds.” At the end of the poem Brand’s speaker relinquishes the dream of landing or otherwise claiming a territory as her own: I’m giving up on land to light on, […] I’m giving up what was always shifting, mutable cities’ fluorescences, limbs, chalk curdled blackboards and carbon copies, wretching water, cunning walls. Books to set it right. Look. What I know is this. I’m giving up. No offence. I was never committed. Not ever, to offices or islands, continents, graphs, whole cloth, these sequences or even footsteps (47)

Many in the class express feeling greatly troubled by this poem, particularly by Brand’s overt rejection of the nation, both colonial and postcolonial. In fact, one of my students makes a video for her final project in answer to

92 | Vernon Brand’s poem; it includes a powerful chorus of speakers, all significantly, self-identified people of colour, repeating the line, “I will not give up on a land to light on.”

If read superficially, the results of the “Ethnic Diversity Survey” would seem to be a cause for celebration. Doesn’t it demonstrate that the category “Canadian”—once the sole property of “ordinary” or non-racialized “Cana- dian-Canadians” (Mackey 102)—has finally been pried open to include people of colour? Isn’t this a victory for Canadian multiculturalism and for people of colour themselves? Certainly, the Canadian media interpreted the results of the survey this way. cbc News reported a good news story based on the survey results: “Discrimination Down in Canada,” it announced. “The number of Canadians facing discrimination because of the colour of their skin or based on their religion is going down reveals the 2002 Ethnic Diversity Survey released Monday by Statistics Canada” (np). Buried at the end of the article, in the last paragraph is the finding that “Nearly one-third of African-Canadians who were interviewed said they had sometimes or often been treated unfairly because of their skin colour, compared with 21 per cent of South Asians and 18 per cent of Chinese” (np). The Canadian Race Relations Foundation quoted selectively from the survey: “immigrants were more likely than people born in Canada to report a strong sense of belonging to their ethnic or cultural group, according to new data from the Ethnic Diversity Survey.” But what the survey reveals in truth is that multicultural belonging in Canada is fundamentally structured as a social relation that denies and undermines the interconnectedness of racialized and Aboriginal peoples, their histories, interests, and their struggles. If racialized people in Canada are currently expressing higher degrees of belonging to nation, it is nothing to celebrate, for as the survey itself shows, this belonging is neither an index of a more racially equitable society nor a sign of true “national unity,” for it continues to perpetuate our isolation from one another as raced and Aboriginal people, socially, politically, and imaginatively. What the “Ethnic Diversity Survey” also reveals is that by asking my students to re-orient their political imaginations, I am asking a lot. I may be asking too much. Multiculturalism policy extends to the immigrant, ethnic, and racialized person—those of us who, like my ancestors, were once constituted under the category of “non-preferred races”—not just entry into the nation but full citizenship in it. At times, this citizenship itself comes close to feeling like exaltation. As Sunera Thobani explains, the nation has manufactured its social cohesion by creating a social dialectic

To the End of the Hyphen-Nation | 93 between two necessary but opposing figures: “The figure of the national subject is a much venerated one, exalted above all others […] In the trope of the citizen, this subject is universally deemed the legitimate heir to the rights and entitlements proffered by the state” (4). On the other hand is the “outsider”—Indians, immigrants, and refugees—“cast in the trope of the stranger who ‘wants’ what nationals ‘have’ ” (4). “Exaltation functions,” Thobani argues, “as a form of ontological and existential capital that can be claimed by national subjects in their relation with the Indian, the immigrant and the refugee” (5). Thobani observes that multiculturalism in our current neo-liberal era intensifies the feeling that the multicultural, too, is exalted, by “promot[ing] the advancement of certain classes of ethnic and racial professionals up the corporate ladder as Canadian and international firms sought to maximize their cultural assets in the global market in order to promote their own interests abroad” (162). Thus, to ask my students to affiliate themselves with indigenous-led struggles against colonialism and for restitution is to ask them to disidentify with the national, to give up the ontological and existential capital that multiculturalism seems to offer, and to identify in solidarity with peoples whom “state policies and popular practices […] has marked for physical and cultural extinction [and] utter marginalization” (6). And why would a canny social subject do that? Because the ontological capital multiculturalism offers the racialized subject is illusory. As Sunera Thobani reminds us, multicultural policy was not designed to address the political needs of ethnic or indigenous peoples in Canada but to further exalt French and English Canada as the “two founding races,” seen in perpetuity as “the legitimate heirs of the rights and entitlements proffered by the state” (3–4). The Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, struck in 1963 to address the confronta- tions between French and English Canada resulting from francophone demands for greater autonomy, was mandated “to develop the Cana- dian Confederation on the basis of equal participation between the two founding races, taking into account the contribution made by other ethnic groups” (Hawkins 1). Situated within this two-founding-races framework, “the Act naturalized the character of the nation as bilingual and made its objective the strengthening of the ‘cultural and social fabric’ of whiteness in the face of increasing non-white immigration” (Thobani 157). Not only does official multiculturalism further exalt whiteness, it “reproduced the colonial erasure of Aboriginal peoples as the original presence in the country” (144), an erasure which we continue to see reproduced in multicultural state policies and programs and which structures the possibilities of multicultural affect and affiliation in troubling ways.

94 | Vernon A 2010 report on a series of roundtable discussions tellingly titled “Canada’s Approach to Multicultural Diversity: Excellent in Principle, but a Challenge in Practice,” published by Citizen and Immigration Canada, discovered that nothing has significantly changed since the “Ethnic Diver- sity Survey” of 2002. “Instead of uniting Canadians of all ethnic origins,” it found in practice, multiculturalism has caused divisions along the lines of time of arrival in the New World, power, and skin tone. This involves individuals such as Aboriginal Peoples, members of the Charter groups, and those of European descent who do not demonstrate their ethnicity in terms of skin colour and visible minority status.[…] The concept of multiculturalism as a framework for intercultural relations within a single society is largely alien. (np)

Is it possible or even desirable to think about a decolonization of Cana- dian multiculturalism? I have hope that the recent indigenous-led movements flourishing in the second decade of this millennium are signs of such a decolonization process in action. The native and non-native solidarity movements flaring up seemingly daily across Turtle Island to push back against the tar sands and hydro fracking, against poverty, pipelines, and against violations of treaty rights suggest the creative ways it is possible to decolonize relationships. Black-Cherokee writer Zainab Amadahy uses the term “relationship-framework” to describe such ethical social relationships between indigenous and non-indigenous people, which also pushes back against the multicultural model of exaltation. She writes, “Understanding the world through a Relationship Framework […] we don’t see ourselves, our communities, or our species as inherently superior to any other, but rather see our roles and responsibilities to each other as inherent to enjoy- ing our life experiences” (np). Such inspiring practices of decolonization are creating new contexts of hope beyond multiculturalism that enable us to walk together for justice in this divided world.

Acknowledgement I am grateful to the two anonymous readers who read the first draft of this paper. Their generous and intelligent feedback helped me to improve the argument immeasurably.

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