“We’re calling into question Canada’s entire narrative,” says Hayden King, an Anishinaabe essayist and professor of Indigenous nationalism at Ryerson University in Toronto. And Canadian history – all those dusty tomes about European settlement in unpopulated wildernesses – is also getting a reboot. In the West, Indigenous-led pipeline resistance is rocking Confederation. Wilson-Raybould’s demotion and departure from Trudeau’s cabinet has put the Prime Minister’s commitment to Indigenous people under scrutiny. The Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women’s Inquiry has shown the problems and systemic biases that exist in policing across the country. That contrasts sharply with Canada, where Indigenous issues currently command centre stage. politics,” he said, “I just don’t think it’s an issue that really registers.” It’s true that his new book pays some heed to Indigenous identity issues, Fukuyama noted. But south of the border, as Fukuyama put it to me on the phone shortly before his Toronto visit, few people are sweating over Indigenous issues of any sort at all. If Fukuyama seemed a little bemused by the Indigenous territorial acknowledgments before a speech he gave in Toronto recently, who could blame him? Territorial acknowledgments are an all-Canadian symptom of our growing national angst about the theft of Indigenous lands. Suddenly, Canadian liberals are worrying about being trumped in a whole new way. “Even a separation would not have represented a fundamental threat to democratic values,” he declares, “since an independent Quebec would have remained a high-quality liberal democratic state.”īut is it too soon for Canucks to gloat? As Trudeau’s recent run-in with Indigenous MP Jody Wilson-Raybould indicated, reconciliation always seems to be the hardest word.
“Multiculturalism was born in some sense in Canada,” he affably writes while discussing Quebec’s current reconciliation with the rest of Canada over separation. “Unless we can work our way back to more universal understandings of human dignity,” he writes, “we will doom ourselves to continuing conflict.”Ĭanada is different, Fukuyama thinks. Faced with activist movements for women, racial minorities, the disabled, immigrants, gays, lesbians, transgender people, disgruntled white people and Indigenous people, liberal democrats are too divided to cohesively win and hold power, he warns. In his latest book, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), Fukuyama ascribes Trump’s election to identity politics, which he describes as “one of the chief threats” to liberal democracy.
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