As the echoes of postmodern thought linger like the last gasps of disco, Western “settler scholars” have been spinning a new tune. In the week of October 2-6, for instance – on the very eve of the Hamas attack on Israel – Western University in London, Ontario and its affiliated colleges staged “EDID Awareness Week 2023”. It was timed to coincide with the latest of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s newly imposed holidays for national penance, “Truth and Reconciliation Day”, held on September 30.
“EDID” stands for Equity, Diversity, Inclusion and Decolonization. In this instance, “Decolonization” appears less an educational priority than a political slogan, its applicability to Canada’s historical and contemporary landscape not rigorously interrogated but assumed as self-evident. In the rush to embrace these modern shibboleths, we run the risk of going against the foundational principles of education, and even civilization at large – in favour, moreover, of an increasingly fashionable dogma that just so happens to be violent and revolutionary to the core. Most people don’t know what they’re signing up for when they claim to support “decolonization” and its abuses in educational materials.
The theory goes back more than 60 years. Having started off with a literal bang in post-Second World War Europe, the decolonization band’s North American debut was quieter and appeared, to many, destined for obscurity. Still, its mainly academic adherents continued to scribble away on their new ideological songbook, waiting for the day or event that would enable it to be pushed onto popular political playlists. Over the past several years and especially over the past eight months, decolonization has done so with – again, a literal – vengeance. Today, alarm bells sound from within those hallowed halls of academia to anyone awake to hear them.
Decolonization is of a piece with doctrines like critical race theory, diversity-equity-inclusion (DEI), systemic racism/anti-racism and various other offshoots of the academic “studies” variety. All hold that society is systemically divided between a class of oppressors/exploiters and various victimized/oppressed minorities defined by their (racial, sexual, etc.) identities. In short, these doctrines – however au courant or “progressive” they might seem – are all derived from 19th century Marxism. And while the designated victim groups are fluid and often-shifting, the oppressors invariably fall into one category: “privileged” “white” “European” “settlers”.
Though not a brand-new idea, decolonization has become more prominent as proponents have come up with new variations, claiming for example that colonization need not involve actual colonized geographical spaces or political units, but can survive long after a country becomes independent to infect organizations, companies, professions, academic disciplines and even scientific fields. Closely linked to the rest of DEI as it may be, decolonization is more than a mere add-on or dangler. It is the first and worst of the bunch, and also the final: an explicit call to arms. Long couched in abstract and speculative rhetoric, decolonization’s mask finally dropped with the Western left’s grotesque response to the Hamas atrocity, in which the Jewish victims were soon painted as “settlers”, “colonists” and the “oppressors” of the very Hamas terrorists who raped and tortured them.
Math gone mad: In Toronto, Haverford College lecturer Tarik Aougab (left) called an “EMERGENCY” online “Equity Forum” to promote the “decolonization” of his chosen field – plus apparently to talk about shunning Israeli academics. (Source of right photo: Jack Boland/Postmedia News, retrieved from National Post)Decolonization examples are everywhere. At the University of Toronto, Haverford College lecturer Tarik Aougab announced an “EMERGENCY” online “Equity Forum” meeting for all UofT Math undergraduates, entitled “Decolonizing in Mathematics”. An already-bewildering conjunction, Aougab’s email further noted the meeting would have “a focus on Palestine and the idea of academic boycott.” From the seemingly objective discipline of mathematics, to a loaded ideology, onward to a land that is neither a colony or colonizer, and lastly to an intellectual calling for some of his counterparts to be frozen out of professional discourse seems like quite a ride for one “Equity Forum”.
First came the assertion that mathematics is fundamentally ‘Eurocentric’, crafted by and for the benefit of white males as a tool of domination. Next came the claim that mathematics serves as a conduit for ‘hate facts,’ such as statistically illuminating the issue of black fatherlessness in the U.S.
Held on October 31 – just weeks after the Hamas atrocity – the event was met with rolling eyes from online critics. And it would be tempting to shrug it off as 21st century academic self-parody or an acutely poor-taste attempt to exploit a terrible tragedy. But it would be unwise to dismiss this and many similar events and proclamations as the essentially harmless manifestations of some as-yet-undiagnosed mania. There is far more to the decolonization movement than long met the eye, vastly more than a college lecturer “evidently having gone mad”, as one X commentator said of Aougab. It’s so much more than that – but most of the radical agenda has yet to be exposed.
How Math Became Racist
The assertion that “math is racist” isn’t entirely new. As a graduate student at Queen’s University nearly a decade ago, I used to chuckle at that and similar slogans splashed in white paint over the concrete sidewalks leading to the limestone halls of this elite and historic Canadian campus in Kingston, Ontario. I stopped laughing by about the halfway point in my program. There is nothing funny in proclaiming that “math is racist.” In fact, the statement encapsulates a large corpus of malevolent thought that forms an increasingly influential component – decolonization – of a potentially catastrophic ideology.
The idea has had a long gestation. Postcolonial theorists like Edward Said and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak by the early 1970s laid the theoretical groundwork for questioning conventional narratives across fields. First came the assertion that mathematics is fundamentally “Eurocentric”, crafted by and for the benefit of white males who wielded it as a tool to shape the world stage for their domination. Next came the claim that mathematics serves as a conduit for “hate facts”, such as statistically illuminating the – nearly taboo – issue of black fatherlessness in the U.S. or the real nature of the alleged gender pay gap.
By the early 2000s came a more explicit internal critique by new “ethnomathematicians” following the work of the Brazilian Ubiratan D’Ambrosio. “Ethnomathematics recognizes that every cultural group has developed its own ways and styles of dealing with quantification, classification, measurement, and explanation of natural phenomena, in order to survive and to improve the quality of life,” D’Ambrosio argued. All systems of calculation are, therefore, relative – and equally valid. D’Ambrosio is also responsible for the sentiment that mathematics is not necessarily about arithmetic or multiplication per se, but about “transforming students into more critically aware and culturally sensitive citizens…contributing to a more just and equitable society.”
The stage was thus set for the concept to jump from academia and bring about the politicization and subjectification of mathematics from the moment kids enter school. This began years ago and spread all over North America, but was largely withheld from parents, often leaking out only accidentally. This was seen in the recent controversy over Ontario’s “new” Grade 9 math curriculum, introduced in 2021. Its preamble, parents and critics only recently discovered, declared that “mathematics can be subjective” and “has been used to normalize racism and marginalization of non-Eurocentric mathematical knowledges (sic).” It decried “the colonial contexts of present-day mathematics education”, urging “a decolonial, anti-racist approach.”
When Ontario’s Conservative government, caught out, excised the preamble, the NDP opposition and “anti-racist” activists went ballistic. They should have been relieved, for the curriculum remains infected with the mindset, as does the revised preamble, which goes on about “systemic barriers, such as racism, implicit bias, and other forms of discrimination” that are said to cause poorer math performance among certain groups. It also restates the claim that “mathematics is subjective,” implying that those who think of it as objective are racist.
Indeed, Jason To, the Toronto District School Board’s coordinator of secondary mathematics and academic pathways, created a webinar in which he openly states that anyone using the phrasing “2 + 2 = 4” to prove their point is engaged in an act of “covert white supremacy”. The mocking rejoinder “2 + 2 = 5” has become a kind of rallying cry for defenders of objective math (and truth). One is social justice critic James Lindsay, author of Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody. Lindsay touched off a social media storm with his meme providing the correct answer to 2 + 2 along with the (satirical) comment that this was “a perspective in white, Western mathematics that marginalizes other possible values.”
Despite such pushback, decolonization’s momentum has only intensified around the world, with movements such as #RhodesMustFall in South Africa, for example, where the most obvious and alarming protests against the STEM fields have been staged, spreading virally, including in this video where one student protest organizer suggests “the whole project of Western modernity should be scratched off.” Decolonization thus thrusts at the very pillars of objective knowledge.
Back then in around 2016, it seemed almost too absurd. What: were we going to all get shipped off back to Europe as “white settlers”, “usurped”, “fleeing in boats”? As the land was being decolonized, were they going to take all our stuff and redistribute it? Or – as the best of possible outcomes, perhaps – would we “colonizers” simply be taxed into poverty by a cold, indifferent state authority? While it scared me to my core already at the time, looking back I can see how, for most people, merely to ask such questions would prompt a comforting answer. No, of course none of this would ever happen; nobody could be that crazy or hateful. It could never be taken so far. How much has changed.
“Communist Canada”
In my student years, DEI meant control over speech. Its origins lie largely with French linguists and literary theorists Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida (more on that can be read here), with help from German-American Marxist Herbert Marcuse. “EDID” scared me most because of that additional “D”. If Foucault and Derrida’s deconstructionist project was about surveillance of all speech so that society could theoretically be steered into a state amounting to “equity”, “decolonization” – coined and first championed by Caribbean-French intellectual Frantz Fanon – was a direct call to arms, a militant call to arms.
‘I’ve heard the “math Is racist” thing a thousand times,’ she tells me. ‘Why is it that all of a sudden everyone’s talking “colonization” and “decolonization”, though?’
Last September, I made contact with a reader of my Substack, a Mathematics and Statistics double-major at UBC. The daughter of immigrants, she has become outspoken because she is disappointed to see what is happening to her adopted home country of Canada – the country of her South Asian parents’ dreams, gone mad. She bluntly terms it a descent into “Communist Canada”. That conversation was just before Hamas and Gaza, before “decolonization” was blaring from all the airwaves.
That event took her from anger and disappointment to confusion. “I’ve heard the ‘math Is racist’ thing a thousand times,” she tells me. “Why is it that all of a sudden everyone’s talking ‘colonization’ and ‘decolonization’, though?” She was asked to sign pro-Palestinian petitions, and heard most political science students she knows on campus state their support for the Hamas attacks. She saw anti-Semitism seriously on the rise, with posters proclaiming the Jewish State of Israel a colonial entity guilty of an ongoing 75-year apartheid.
“I felt annoyed that in a math club, they [had] to push politics into it,” she says. “Also, if I said no I felt like a bad person and judged.” She sends me screenshots of workshops advertised for math students on “Indigenous” and “Two-Spirited” “Knowledge Systems”, 2SLGBTQIA+ “ways of knowing”, and “deconstructing colonial power structures using action-based approaches.” Many of these workshops are mandatory for her role as a Math Club facilitator.
Previously, she said, “When professors talked about decolonization it was all about ‘forwarding’ (whatever that means) the voices of queer and BIPOC students, and a lot of rumours of openly racist hiring practices.” It’s so clear, she wrote, “that they’re desperately trying to show that they’re prioritizing BIPOC candidates even. It’s blatantly out there in the open. There’s also a floor in at least one dorm for Indigenous students only, so I guess segregation is back.” Decolonization is used as a cudgel to rationalize such measures.
The additional, more recent steps for “decolonizing the classroom” leave her appalled. “Changing the content of a math course and teaching it differently will make math seem malleable,” she says. As an immigrant, she is also a student of language and alert to the creeping in of the linguistic poison into her beloved chosen discipline. “If everyone can just propose their own statements and proofs to make math ‘accessible’ and ‘inclusive’, [we] just diverge further from the truth,” she says. The point of math since at least the time of the ancient Greek Euclid, after all, has been to apply accepted principles to reach proofs that are logically true, everywhere and always. Many disciplines and classes, she notes, are already described as just a “form of knowledge”, and this is increasingly “implied and accepted” in math classes as well.
If they can do this to math, they can do it to anything, and what my friend sees happening in her field has already happened in innumerable others, in our political discourse, and with our history: the twisting of the predominant woke, postmodern neo-Marxist type’s own narrative. If math really is “decolonized” and disintegrates into contending versions based on the practitioner’s race, sexual preferences, gender, disability, etc., it won’t be long before the newest bridges topple and airliners plummet from the skies. We risk a retreat into a second intellectual Dark Age.
Decolonization’s Origins
Seeking to find out how decolonization gained its first foothold in Canada, and then spread, my investigation leads me to University of Calgary Professor Emeritus Thomas Flanagan. Flanagan is a widely published expert on Indigenous political activism and litigation against the Government of Canada. Decolonization’s entry into Canadian discourse, he notes, was closely tied up with the nation’s intensifying Indigenous politics.
Flanagan recommends I read The Fourth World: An Indian Reality (1974) by Secwépemc member George Manuel and journalist/Indigenous rights activist Michael Posluns, and Dene Nation: The colony within (1977), edited by long-prominent socialist intellectual Mel Watkins. These two “studies” tell a compelling narrative and, through a more contemporary lens, their implications are prophetic.
“Always a violent event”: Frantz Fanon, Caribbean-French Marxist intellectual and author of The Wretched of the Earth, is recognized as the godfather of decolonization, a process that to him was about far more than gaining independence and needed to be a wrenching and traumatic transformation.
First, however, it makes sense to take a look at the ur-origins of decolonization. Central among its small coterie of founding theorists such as the French poet and politician Aimé Césaire and the Tunisian-born essayist Albert Memmi is the aforementioned Fanon. Born and raised on France’s Caribbean island-colony of Martinique, Fanon fought for Charles de Gaulle’s Free French Army in the Second World War, experienced racism as a black soldier in Europe, then studied widely in France, earning degrees in medicine and psychiatry. Like Great Britain, France was coming under enormous pressure to surrender rule over its many overseas possessions, and Fanon was a vocal proponent.
But his views went far beyond merely advocating colonial independence. For Fanon, “decolonization” was as much a psychological as a physical or political process – and it was to be a wrenching and traumatic one. Decolonization is not merely the attainment of independence from colonial powers, a peaceful transition of political power, or even a straightforward war of independence. Fanon came to view decolonization as a radical process of transformation, a complete overhaul of the social, economic and political order that had been imposed by colonial rule.
‘The practice of violence binds [the people] together as a whole,’ Fanon wrote in The Wretched of the Earth, ‘since each individual forms a violent link in the great chain, a part of the great organism of violence which has surged upward in reaction to the settler’s violence in the beginning.’
Fanon’s seminal 1961 The Wretched of the Earth struck France like a barrel of gasoline poured onto the raging bonfire of the country’s tumultuous, brutish and seemingly never-ending war over its beloved colony of Algeria. Whether the terminology used is “national liberation, national reawakening, restoration of the nation to the people or Commonwealth, whatever the name used, whatever the latest expression,” Fanon insisted in the book’s opening lines, “decolonization is always a violent event.”
By Fanon’s account, decolonization must fundamentally alter the way of life for both the colonized and the colonizer in a process that involves the reclamation and revalorization of native culture, identity and self-determination – “by any means necessary,” as his later adherents (including the American Malcom X) would proclaim. “The practice of violence binds [the people] together as a whole,” Fanon wrote, “since each individual forms a violent link in the great chain, a part of the great organism of violence which has surged upward in reaction to the settler’s violence in the beginning.”
Decolonization thus becomes a program not merely of political decoupling, but of complete disorder, a total, unstructured upheaval. Fanon insisted that the radical rehumanization of the colonized could not occur without the complete dismantling of systems of power. “To destroy the colonial world means nothing less than demolishing the colonist’s sector,” he wrote, and “burying it deep within the earth.”
Coming as it did after numerous former colonies and European-ruled mandates had achieved independence peacefully – India, Egypt and Oman from Britain, Syria from France, to name a few – while others fought wars but then made peace and maintained close ties with their former colonizers, The Wretched of the Earth can be regarded as one-sided and tendentious. Coming out amidst a vicious war that middling estimates suggest killed upwards of 500,000 people, it seems profoundly irresponsible, a rationalization for unrestrained bloodlust. And indeed, the first rulers of newly independent Algeria immediately massacred 100,000-300,000 Algerians who had worked with the French.
Fanon inspired guerrilla movements across Sub-Saharan Africa, notably in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau, as well as Cuban revolutionaries like Che Guevara. His influence extended for decades. Thomas Sankara, who installed himself as autocrat of the already-independent Republic of Upper Volta in a 1983 coup d’état, renaming the country Burkina Faso, had formally studied Fanon’s work (as well as Marx). Fanon’s echoes sound clearly in Sankara’s speeches – such as his declaration of the “necessity of madness for fundamental transformation” – and in some of his policies, such as his then-unprecedented demand that the World Bank forgive his country’s debts. “The similarities between the two are too numerous to ignore,” wrote James J. Fisher in the Intellectual History of Thomas Sankara.
“Our revolution is not a public-speaking tournament. Our revolution is not a battle of fine phrases,” said Sankara in a typical speech. “Our revolution is, and should continue to be, the collective effort of revolutionaries to transform reality, to improve the concrete situation of the masses.” Sankara was assassinated in 1987 by his former friend and comrade Blaise Compaoré.
Many other liberation movements, by contrast, fought relatively constrained wars and refrained from widespread reprisals once the fighting stopped, seeing fit merely to expel or curtail the activities of the former European colonists while maintaining close economic, political and military relations. The Fanon formula, then, was hardly applied everywhere. Still, it proved intoxicating to leftist intellectuals in European countries, who used it as another weapon in their long campaign to delegitimize Western civilization, in turn accelerating the erosion of self-confidence among Western elites. Fanon’s ideas also played a supporting role in the United States’ internal political instability of the late 60s and early 70s, informing some of the thinking of the revolutionary Black Panthers and similar groups.
Decolonization Colonizes Canada
Retroactively applying decolonization theory to a former colony that achieved independence more than a century earlier with scarcely a drop of blood shed and the willing cooperation of its (beloved) mother country seems like quite a reach. And applying the Fanon formula to address the social problems of a country with no history of internal violence nor legacy of slavery should be an immensely hard sell. And yet, decolonization gained a toehold in Canada 50 years ago, one that, though quiescent for decades, metastasized into what we see today. It did so through the invention of a kind of “internal colonization” concept.
The term’s known usage in Canada stems from the Berger Inquiry of 1974-1977. It had been called to examine Indigenous and environmentalist concerns over the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline, a proposed project to carry natural gas from recent discoveries in the Beaufort Sea and Mackenzie River Delta, across northern Yukon, southward up the river valley through the Northwest Territories to Alberta. In the eyes of many Canadian leftists, it threatened to score a line across the raw, untouched visage of the pristine lands home to the Inuvialuit, Dene and other Indigenous peoples.
Berger’s proposed Mackenzie Valley Pipeline moratorium read like the opening lines to a dialogue on environmental stewardship and an assertion of Indigenous sovereignty that the decolonization movement would wave like a flag through the whole history of Canada.
Coincidentally, University of Toronto professor Mel Watkins was keen to promote his own recently formed decolonial ideology, largely adopted from Fanon. Indigenous voices, long relegated to the echo chambers of the disregarded, were now to be given a stage, their stories to be woven like threads through the Berger Inquiry. The project, the emerging narrative held, was not just a pipeline; it was a cultural artery that could bleed out the life force of entire communities.
Issued amidst the three-year-long Berger Inquiry, the Dene Declaration cut through the bureaucratic fog like a sharpened blade:
“What we the Dene are struggling for is the recognition of the Dene nation by the governments and peoples of the world…We the Dene are part of the Fourth World. And as the peoples and Nations of the world have come to recognize the existence and rights of those peoples who make up the Third World the day must come and will come when the nations of the Fourth World will come to be recognized.”
Superficially, nearly every syllable of the Dene Declaration testified to the Dene’s ironclad connection to the land – a connection, they suggested, unacknowledged by the technocrats dreaming of pipeline routes. But the declaration’s mindset, its portrayal of history, of Indigenous-white relations during and after contact, of the various treaties, and the juxtaposition of the actors, was suffused with cultural Marxism. A clarion call amidst the mechanical hum of allegedly racist “economic progress”, the Dene Declaration called for what an academic might term – in French postmodern Foucaultian terms – “discursive warfare”. It carved out a space where sovereignty was not proven or granted but asserted, where Dene voices, once apparently muffled under the snow-heavy boots of industry, now rang clear proclaiming that decolonization was not a philosophical abstraction but an intrinsic, non-negotiable Canadian reality.
In the end, Justice Thomas Berger suggested a decade-long intermission on the grand plans of “oil barons” and “politicos.” His proposed moratorium read like the opening lines to a dialogue on environmental stewardship and an assertion of Indigenous sovereignty that the decolonization movement in later decades would wave like a flag through the whole history of Canada up to the present. The pipeline – that steel serpent of progress – would remain caged in drafting rooms and blueprints. Canada’s left had carved out a new space in the discourse, environmental activism and demands for “social justice” riding the coattails of Indigenous moral standing. The Berger Inquiry’s implications would reverberate for decades.
What is important to be aware of, Flanagan reminds me over our Zoom call, is that Watkins – author of Dene Nation: The colony within – had a team of academics from the U of T and York University assigned to this issue, travelling continuously between Toronto and the North, nominally working “for” the Dene, white men and women counselling Indigenous Chiefs on their state of colonization and how to get out of it. The team included James Laxer, along with Watkins a co-founder of the NDP’s hard-left “Waffle” movement of the early 70s. A weird blend of leftist ideas and impulses, the Waffle movement was nationalist (“independent socialist”) rather than, like Marxists, internationalist.
Either way, decolonization was as inextricably bound up with hard-leftism in Canada as in the U.S., Europe and Africa. The ideological leanings of Watkins and Laxer, steeped in the tumult of the era, were not merely academic musings but reflections of a broader Marxist-Leninist Zeitgeist. Assigned readings in the program designed by Watkins and company included Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and other radical work gaining cultural traction across the West.
Internal colonization in the flesh: The Dene Declaration and associated activism were largely stage-managed by white leftists, including Mel Watkins (middle) and James Laxer (right), founders of the NDP’s hard-left “Waffle” movement, who exploited the Berger Inquiry to insert the then-obscure decolonization narrative into Canada’s native politics. The tactic appalled a number of Indigenous leaders; still, the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline was blocked. (Sources of photos: (middle) Toronto Star file photo; (right) Boris Spremo/Toronto Star; both retrieved from Canadian Dimension)But they hardly represented Indigenous people themselves. The Dene activists and their declaration were opposed not merely by the Pierre Trudeau government but by prominent native leaders. “Even Harold Cardinal, respected Cree leader, condemned the Dene Declaration,” Glen Coulthard, Associate Professor of Political Science and First Nations and Indigenous Studies at the University of British Columbia, points out in his introduction to The Fourth World (revised edition). “Halting work on the pipeline,” Coulthard cites Cardinal, was an “intrusion of left-wing thinking that is perhaps much closer to the academic community in Toronto than it is to the Dene.” This in turn suggested, as Coulthard writes, a “theoretical and practical influence of white agitators,” implying that the Dene were “therefore not acting in the interests of their own people.”
Some of the North’s Indigenous peoples – especially the Inuvialuit – would come to rue the Berger Inquiry’s largely self-inflicted outcome. The Mackenzie Valley Pipeline was their one serious shot at generating genuine economic wealth to provide permanent jobs and fund their own self-determination – rather than live off Ottawa, to decolonize in practical terms. The project was revived in the mid-2000s and formally approved, but then dropped, probably forever, due to low natural gas prices. Meanwhile, dozens of southern First Nations began working to become part of the modern economy. All three of Canada’s current liquefied natural gas projects in B.C., for example, have significant Indigenous participation and one is majority-owned by a First Nation.
Nations within Nations: The “Fourth World”
My UBC friend the mathematician: “What is the ‘Fourth World’?” It’s another of those buzzwords going around campus. “It’s nations within nations,” I respond. “In the West at least, probably to no end.” In The Fourth World: An Indian Reality, the above-mentioned Manuel and Posluns posit that Indigenous tribes, including the Dene (with their modest population in Canada of 1,680), constitute what might be termed a “Fourth World” – entities within nations to be added to the Cold War era’s classification of “First,” “Second” and “Third” world countries.
As decolonization increasingly infected the humanities and social sciences on campuses, political activist organizations, and even some governments, the STEM fields stood as the rational world’s bulwark against this encroaching darkness. It was the realm where the clarity of numbers and the evidence of experimentation remained uncompromised by the whims of political fervour.
As presented in the Dene Declaration, the Fourth World concept pleads for global recognition. The treatise posited that Indigenous groups represent a separate world within the geopolitical landscape, existing in a state of “internal colonization”, as Flanagan puts it during our conversation. By painting an idyllic picture of a pre-colonial past, contrast is created with the current state of alleged victimization. “Manuel wanted to say, ‘We’ve been colonized too,’” Flanagan notes. While alluring to the student-activist type, the Fourth World notion is an over-simplification that glosses over the complex fabric of international socio-political dynamics, diminishes the progress Indigenous peoples have made within the structures of modern nations, and ignores the agency Indigenous communities have forged through active participation in – as opposed to continued separation from – modern society.
As it happened, the Mackenzie Valley project was quashed and Indigenous groups gained increasing self-determination – dependent, however, on ever-expanding pipelines of federal funding to sustain their elevated status. Watkins and his team succeeded in nesting their radical ideology within Canada. “The ‘Fourth World’ concept was absorbed into the broader discourse of decolonization,” Flanagan notes. Decolonization itself appeared to fall dormant, the live threat of its surrounding theories only arising again quite recently.
The Fourth World: An Indian Reality by Michael Posluns and George Manuel posited that Indigenous peoples constitute separate entities existing in a state of “internal colonization” and victimization, deserving of global recognition. Depicted at right: Denesuline people at Christina Lake, Alberta, 1918. (Source of right photo: Library and Archives Canada/PA-17946)
More recently, as decolonization increasingly infected the humanities and social sciences on campuses, political activist organizations, and even some governments, the STEM fields – science, technology, engineering and mathematics – stood as the rational world’s bulwark against this encroaching darkness. It was the realm where the clarity of numbers and the evidence of experimentation remained uncompromised by the whims of political fervour. That fortress, too, has been breached. Increasingly there are programs to “decolonize” these fields as well, to insert “Indigenous ways of knowing” alongside mainstream astronomy, for example. And there’s the woeful erosion of math, as the 2+2=5 example above illustrates.
The idea dizzies both me and my new, dear Canadian immigrant friend who loves math and who loves her country. I look to my book again, reading what Frantz Fanon actually has to say in the The Wretched of the Earth. “To blow the colonial world to smithereens,” he wrote, “is a clear image within the imagination of every colonized subject.”
If Canadians continue – complacently, or perhaps paralyzed by fear – to yield to the decolonization movement’s revisionism, we do not simply alter the complexion of knowledge; we undermine its very foundation, flirting with a dystopian intellectual future reminiscent of the oppressive shadows of the past: to intellectual stagnation, to the Dark Ages. To preserve the integrity of our scientific and mathematical domains is to protect the future of knowledge gathering, of innovation, of seeing the world rationally enough to build bridges that stand up. For if 2+2 really can equal 5, then no bridge – real or figurative – can stand.
The Militarization of Today’s Decolonization Movement
Unravelling histories, then penetrating into our son or daughter’s most basic reading, writing and arithmetic, decolonization’s bold design only spreads dread: the thought of its incipient militarism gives me particular fright, with prominent militant groups all led by Ivy League graduates in the United States: Black Lives Matter, Antifa and others. This has intensified with the left-wing narrative forged since Hamas’s October 7 attack, leaving “pro-Palestinian” and “Indigenous” rights activists seeing themselves as allied in reclaiming “colonized” territories from the grip of their “colonizers,” equating Jewish presence in Israel and European presence in Canada as ongoing colonial occupation. To be “decolonized”. But how?
The protests and activism have included blockades of Jewish-owned businesses, synagogues and a Toronto highway overpass leading to Canada’s most heavily Jewish-populated urban district, death threats, genocidal chants, and pressure to shut down Jewish cultural events and theatre performances. Much of the activity is based on the accusation that Israel is the aggressor, an imperialist-apartheid-settler-colonial state, and that all actions by Hamas and other terrorist groups are caused by and the fault of Israel; accordingly, Jews are never innocent and are never the victims.
As Brian Lilley wrote in the Toronto Sun, “None of this is what we would expect in a Western liberal democracy, but these theories don’t seek to uphold the civilization we have, they seek to destroy that civilization.” American independent journalist Bari Weiss (formerly of the New York Times) was even more direct. “Decolonization isn’t just a turn of phrase or a new way to read novels,” she wrote in The Free Press. “It is a sincerely held political view that serves as a predicate to violence.”
In a recent article for The Epoch Times, Barbara Kay traced this viewpoint back to Fanon’s idea that violence is necessary for the liberation of the oppressed. The consequences, she warned, could be catastrophic. “Promotion of permanent victimhood of beatified indigenous people and permanent evil of white Canadians, with the only solution liberation through violence, is a recipe for civic disaster,” Kay wrote. The eruption of deliberate church burnings beginning in 2021 – hardly condemned, barely investigated, never solved and still ongoing – was the first physical warnings of what might befall the nation.
Restoring Society’s Foundations
My decade-long brush meditations on decolonization – a journey in which my initial dismissal of the concept as mere academic frivolity had given way to a recognition of its potentially cataclysmic consequences – recently experienced a further, abrupt shift in my perspective, triggered by two especially disturbing insights. First: the left’s tendency to rationalize – or even celebrate – the barbarity of a genocidal terrorist movement like Hamas in the standoff between Israel and the Palestinians. Second: the notable revival of Indigenous militancy in Canada.
Decolonization’s romanticization of militancy (which ultimately means the killing of fellow citizens, let’s not forget) disregards its real-world impacts, exacerbating tensions and hindering sustainable, peaceful resolutions.
Barbara Kay is again worth quoting on both trends. “Canadian intellectuals are playing with fire in nudging indigenous grievance-collectors into an invidious identification of their situation with the current ‘any means necessary’ [pro-Hamas] narrative,” Kay wrote. “No Canadian identity group should be endorsing – let alone celebrating – sadistic depravity as a heroic political act. Those who do have forfeited the right to sympathy for their own grievances from Canadians who retain a moral compass.”
The increasing Indigenous militancy – backed by students and faculty, inspired by conflicts like Gaza’s – reflects an academic ideology favouring radicalism formerly in the wave of “DEI”, soon-to-be “EDID”, whether “D” for “decolonization” is added explicitly to the acronym on campuses or not. It is particularly disturbing to witness videos of faculty and students at the Canadian universities I once revered openly endorsing terrorism and the genocide of Jews, under the guise of protesting against the genocide of Palestinians.
One of many sickening such examples, as the CBC reported within a month of the slaughter and kidnappings, was the case of Natalie Knight, an instructor at Langara College in Vancouver and “Indigenous Curriculum Consultant”, who was filmed at a rally outside the Vancouver Art Gallery in support of Hamas’ so-called “resistance”, calling its orgy of rape, baby-killing, torture and kidnapping an “amazing, brilliant offensive”.
Such positions reveal a shocking disregard for the basic principles of human life and peaceful coexistence – never mind literacy and numeracy, now clearly under attack by DEI’s assault on language and EDID’s on standards in nearly all fields. Who cares about the details of how to run a power grid, for instance, or how to navigate through geopolitical complexities? Who cares about balancing the budget, or ensuring smooth immigration policy – or the costs of renaming Yonge-Dundas Square? Decolonization’s romanticization of militancy (which ultimately means the killing of fellow citizens, let’s not forget) disregards its real-world impacts, exacerbating tensions and hindering sustainable, peaceful resolutions.
Here, we must heed the wisdom of history, trusting in the strength of those pillars that have held our societies aloft through so many a global crisis. In the end, we must strive for transformation that truly moves us forward, rather than opening old wounds anew.
Brock Eldon lives in Hanoi, Vietnam with his wife and daughter. His debut nonfiction novella – Ground Zero in the Culture War – can be found here.
