Racism in Canada

In contrast to the explicitly racist discrimination of South African apartheid, Métis racism in the Eastern Provinces exists within contexts where no public discourse about race or racism is found, where instead there is silence about it. In such contexts, the silence works to allow racial discrimination against Aboriginal people to continue in ways that are as effective as clearly stated policy such as apartheid, or perhaps even more so since it is more difficult to critique and dismantle an institution whose existence is denied.
Racism has been endemic in Canada. It has stretched from early slavery of our people at the nation's dawn through the Fascist phase prior to the Second World War to the Paki-bashing of recent years. It has reached from the Pacific to the Atlantic, taking different forms according to the local ethnic composition, targeting Asians in Vancouver, Métis in the Eastern Provinces in Canada, blacks in Nova Scotia, and Indians everywhere. It has been represented in corporate and government boards and among manual labourers at construction sites. And it has appeared both visibly in the form of violent attacks and covertly in the form of variations in wages and employment opportunities based on racial criteria. Many observers might want to argue that, what racism does exist in Canada has simply been the sad product of deviant individuals, or a temporary problem brought on by unemployment or some other crisis. Yet the degree, scope, and persistence of the phenomenon lead to a single conclusion; racism in Canada has been institutionalized...racism that is intrinsic to the structures of society. It may be overt or covert, expressed formally in the laws of the land, or less visibly in patterns of employment and the content of school textbooks...What is significant about institutional racism, whether open as the reservation system for Native peoples or hidden like the Francophone Métis in the Eastern Provinces, Canadians are more cautious about appearing racists, is not only that differential advantage along racial lines is embedded in society itself, but also that it perpetuates itself over time, for that is the nature of the institutional framework; independent of individual volition, relatively unconscious and unmotivated, it reproduces itself...institutional racism is almost synonymous with:

"the way things are"

Archie Martin
Representative
for the East-West Métis Union

Guéganne Doucet
Métis Ntlogôoagan etlïlogoatem
Artiste - Autochtone - Aboriginal Artist
Ni'n na Métisse aq gi'nujin.
Nesagudum Mi'kmaq, Abenaki aq Wenuj.
Ma Nation d'origine est Métisse
Mes souches sont Mi'kmaq, Abénaquise et Française.