Indigenous land acknowledgements have become so common that many Canadians no longer give them a second thought – simply accepting a kind of tuneless new national anthem before events of all sorts. And that’s why they’re so dangerous. The enforced conformity and compelled speech they depend on are not just threats to individual freedom, writes George Ramsay, they also create a divisive moral hierarchy based on race. In this originally reported story, Ramsay delves into the dangers posed by Canada’s broader shift to enforced verbal compliance, reveals the inspiring stories of a few brave souls who have dared to challenge this social tyranny and offers practical tips on how the rest of us can fight back too.

The secret to every good magic trick, Michael Caine’s character explains in the 2006 movie The Prestige, is a willing audience. “You want to be fooled,” he says. Anyone watching the Oscar-nominated documentary film Sugarcane could find themselves slipping into a similar act of self-deception. Focused on a residential school in northern B.C., the Canadian-made Sugarcane withholds key facts, arranges other evidence in confusing ways and encourages viewers – already primed to think the worst of residential schools – to reach unfounded conclusions about what they’re actually seeing. Even professional movie critics have been fooled. Documentary filmmaker Michelle Stirling pulls back the curtain on the dark magic behind Sugarcane.

The most dangerous myths are those everyone claims to be true. Set in motion by the evidence-free “discovery” of 215 unmarked graves at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, Canada’s myth of the missing children has come to dominate native discourse at home and abroad. And anyone who asks for proof of this tale of officially-sanctioned mass murder is now labelled a “denialist.” Seeking to bust this myth is the important new book Grave Error: How the Media Misled Us (and the Truth about Residential Schools). In an exclusive preview, co-editor Tom Flanagan explains how the “missing children” narrative first took shape and how this book sets things straight.

Late in life, Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe was asked if his view of colonialism had changed in the half-century since he wrote Things Fall Apart, his famous first novel critical of British rule. “The legacy of colonialism is not a simple one,” he replied, “but one of great complexity with contradictions – good things as well as bad.” Today our understanding of that complexity is rapidly being obliterated as governments, universities and museums race to “decolonize” their institutions and make colonialism synonymous with racism, violence and exploitation. In his controversial new book Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, British ethicist Nigel Biggar seeks to revive the notion that the British Empire contained “good things as well as bad.” The Scottish-born Biggar recently connected with Peter Shawn Taylor to discuss the morality of empire, Canada’s own colonial legacy and how it feels to be named an “honorary” Courageous Canadian.

With so much pressure to apply Indigenous ways of knowing to many subjects and public policy imperatives, it has become necessary to remind everyone of the crucial importance of Western ways of knowing to life in the 21st century. The scientific method, open discourse, archival evidence and rigorous use of logic undergird modern civilization and have made our digital age possible. Using this toolbox of time-tested concepts, academics Hymie Rubenstein and Tom Flanagan investigate recent claims regarding missing students and unmarked graves at Canada’s allegedly genocidal Indian Residential Schools. They find the current narrative to be sorely lacking in facts and other reliable evidence.

It stands as one of this country’s worst mass murders: eleven dead on and near the James Smith Cree Nation in rural Saskatchewan by the hand of career criminal Myles Sanderson. But after a brief flurry of attention and trite claims that a history of colonialism and racism were to blame, Canadians have shown little interest in discovering the real reasons behind this tragedy. Or how to ensure it never happens again. Hymie Rubenstein looks closely at the details of Sanderson’s violent life of crime and why Canada’s criminal justice system repeatedly set him free. In our efforts to reduce the suffering of Indigenous Canadians, are we actually making things worse?

Canadians seem to think they know all about their country’s discredited Indian Residential Schools. They’ve certainly been made painfully aware by governments, Indigenous organizations and leaders, academia and the mainstream media of the official narrative – a litany of sheer horror. But what was life at and around these schools actually like? At a time when “lived experience” is all the rage, the voices of the dwindling surviving number of the many thousands of people who once worked in them have fallen silent. Rodney Clifton is one, and his lived experience includes falling in love with and marrying a Siksika woman. In this clear-eyed and deeply humane account, Clifton bares his heart in recounting his times working as a young man in the residential schools system in Alberta and the Far North.

Whether you consider him a patriot or traitor, Louis Riel’s two rebellions in the 1800s were grounded in practical matters of geography and political representation – with the overarching goal of bettering the lives of the Métis people Riel claimed to represent. But today, a nasty dispute among Métis organizations is fixated on internal power struggles and matters of racial identity rather than greater prosperity and respect for all. At the centre is a multi-million-dollar lawsuit that turns on competing definitions of Canada’s mixed-race Métis and arguments over who should represent them. Peter Best explores the legal origins of this fruitless struggle and what it might hold for Canadian taxpayers of all races and combinations.

If Canada’s past is not to become a pure tool of politics and ideology, we must insist that the facts still matter, including if not especially in controversial areas like Indigenous history. In a meticulously documented essay containing original archival research, Greg Piasetzki chronicles the remarkable career of a late 19th – early 20th century Canadian who embodied many of his era’s signature characteristics – enlightenment rationality, belief in progress, idealism and commitment as well as vanity, opportunism and jarring prejudice. The facts, Piasetzki finds, make for a fascinating though decidedly mixed and at times disturbing story. So why, he asks, do this complicated man’s present-day Indigenous supporters insist on elevating him to near-sainthood?

His commitment to universal rights began in high school, his admiration for Martin Luther King Jr. runs deep, he spent years representing underprivileged defendants in the legal system, and he wrote a book on behalf of Indigenous people and their environment. Robert Girvan believes passionately in the equality of every person and has a visceral horror of prejudging anyone based on their race, colour or other immutable characteristics. He respects Canada’s system of laws and considers even-handed justice among humanity’s noblest ideals. The former defence lawyer and Crown prosecutor believes all of that is under attack – by what he used to consider his own side. Girvan bares his heart and soul in dissecting the grave threats to liberal ideas and Canada’s very institutions posed by the increasingly extreme diversity and identity politics movements.