Explaining Canada’s Cult of ‘Decolonial Futurity’ to Americans
Legions of Canadian university students are now required to mumble fatuous platitudes about decolonisation as a condition of graduation. It’s effectively become Canada’s national liturgy.
Last month, I received a tip from a nursing student at University of Alberta who’d been required to take a course called Indigenous Health in Canada. It’s a “worthwhile subject,” my correspondent (correctly) noted, “but it won’t surprise you to learn [that the course consists of] four months of self-flagellation led by a white woman. One of our assignments, worth 30 percent, is a land acknowledgement, and instructions include to ‘commit to concrete actions to disrupt settler colonialism’… This feels like a religious ritual to me.”
Canadian universities are now full of courses like this—which are supposed to teach students about Indigenous issues, but instead consist of little more than ideologically programmed call-and-response sessions. As I wrote on social media, this University of Alberta course offers a particularly appalling specimen of the genre, especially in regard to the instructor’s use of repetitive academic jargon, and the explicit blurring of boundaries between legitimate academic instruction and cultish struggle session.
There's a mandatory course for @UAlberta Nursing students called “Indigenous Health in Canada.” An important subject. But as one student told me, it’s just “4 months of self-flagellation led by a white woman.” Course materials suggest it’s basically activist political propaganda pic.twitter.com/9k0H20e4u5
— Jonathan Kay (@jonkay) January 20, 2025
Students are instructed, for instance, to “commit to concrete actions that disrupt the perpetuation of settler colonialism and articulate pathways that embrace decolonial futures,” and are asked to probe their consciences for actions that “perpetuate settler colonial futurity.” In the land-acknowledgement exercise, students pledge to engage in the act of “reclaiming history” through “nurturing…relationships within the living realities of Indigenous sovereignties.”
My source had no idea what any of this nonsense meant. It seems unlikely the professor knew either. And University of Alberta is not an outlier: For years now, whole legions of Canadian university students across the country have been required to robotically mumble similarly fatuous platitudes as a condition of graduation. It’s effectively become Canada’s national liturgy.
After my tweet went viral, I was contacted by a US-based publication called The College Fix, which covers post-secondary education from a (typically) conservative perspective. Like many observers from outside Canada, reporter Samantha Swenson couldn’t understand why Canadian students were being subjected to this kind of indoctrination session. “I hope you can answer,” she wrote: “Why do schools make mandatory classes like these?”
I sent Swenson a long 13-paragraph answer—which, at the time, felt like a waste of my time: I assumed the reporter would pluck a sentence or two from my lengthy ramble, and the rest of my words would fall down a memory hole.
Samantha Swenson - Liberty University
So when her article did come out—under the title, Mandatory ‘Indigenous Health’ class for U. Alberta nursing students teaches ‘systemic racism’—I was pleased to see that I’d been quoted at length. I especially appreciated the fact that Swenson had kept in my point that educating Canadians (especially students in the medical field) about Indigenous issues is important work; and that courses such as Indigenous Health in Canada would provide value if they actually served up useful facts and information, instead of self-parodic faculty-lounge gibberish about “decolonized futurities.”
For those who are interested, here is the full email I sent to College Fix reporter Samantha Swenson, explaining how Canada got to this strange place:
From: Jonathan Kay
To: Samantha J. Swenson
Sat, Jan 25, 3:01 PM
Thanks for your email. Explaining this kind of stuff to Americans is difficult, but here goes. I will try to be (as) brief (as possible).
Canada and the United States both did terrible things to Indigenous people—including pushing them into reserves (Canada) and reservations (United States) that often consisted of economically marginal lands that racist white farmers, ranchers, miners, loggers, and urban planners didn’t want. In this (very) broad respect, the histories of the two nations are somewhat analogous.
However, for complicated geographical, historical, and political reasons that are too difficult to summarize in this space (and which, in any case, I lack the expertise to authoritatively communicate), a much larger share of Canadian Indigenous communities became (or, more often, remained) acutely impoverished and isolated—being cut off from the educational and professional opportunities that emerged during the twentieth century, as Canada became an industrial (and then post-industrial) economy.
Unlike in the United States, many of these Canadian Indigenous communities are, to this day, “fly-in” hamlets that cannot be easily accessed by all-season roads, let alone proper highways or rail. As noted above, the lands they occupy are economically undesirable—frozen in winter, and marshy and flood-prone in summer. Drinking-water contamination is a constant problem, in part due to the fact that it is difficult to recruit and retain technical experts. [In many communities], the few jobs available are dispensed at the pleasure of band councils, which receive most or all of their budget from the federal government. As one would expect in any economy structured along such lines, corruption levels are high and productivity is low.
There are countless success stories that show that Indigenous Canadians can thrive and prosper if they receive the same opportunities as people like me. Unfortunately, for the reasons I have explained, these communities tend to operate as giant welfare traps where there is little incentive to pursue job skills or get an education. These communities often feature low average lifespans—and massively elevated levels of disease, poverty, and suicide. It’s a tragic and enduring problem, and I don’t pretend to know how to fix it in a way that most Indigenous people would find acceptable.
For generations, these places remained out of sight and out of mind for most urban Canadians. Conservatives typically didn’t care about these communities. And while progressives (as we would now call them) did care, such caring became expressed through a deeply unhelpful political mythology, whereby it was imagined that such communities would blossom into prosperous, egalitarian, autonomous (or even sovereign), culturally authentic mini-nations if they were simply given enough money [and power].
Needless to say, this hasn’t happened: For the most part, those Indigenous communities that have flourished have done so by entering into real-estate or resource-extraction partnerships with large corporations—a development that, of course, has utterly horrified progressive activists, who’d imagined that the coming Indigenous economic renaissance would be built on eco-tourism, traditional handicrafts, intersectional film documentary projects, and the like.
Canadian progressives have crowd-sourced an increasingly absurd quasi-religious mythology that casts Indigenous societies as Edenic, pacifistic, matriarchal, ‘genderqueer’ enclaves whose moral example will lead the rest of us away from the false god of capitalism
One issue here is that, since many Indigenous communities are difficult and expensive to get to from big Canadian cities (where almost all of us live), the vast majority of the academics and activists who purport to champion Indigenous rights have no real knowledge of Indigenous life. Instead, they’ve crowd-sourced an increasingly absurd set of quasi-religious mythologies that cast Indigenous societies as Edenic, pacifistic, matriarchal, “genderqueer” enclaves whose example will help lead the rest of us away from the false gods of capitalism, fee-simple land ownership, biological sex dimorphism, and all the other evils of our fallen-from-grace white supremacist society.
To some extent, what is described here is loosely analogous—in American terms—to the wealthy white gated-community suburbanite with an “in-this-house” lawn sign, who doesn’t know many black people, but is utterly convinced that, left to their own devices, troubled black communities in cities such as Minneapolis and Baltimore would blossom into safe, vibrant, and prosperous neighbourhoods if only we got rid of the police and donated more money to BLM.
You also saw the same utopian impulses among the activists who created the CHAZ/CHOP zone in Seattle. In fact, perhaps the most succinct way to put this (at least in the context of your original question) is that Canadian universities are full of academics who see Indigenous communities as writ-large CHAZ/CHOPs.
Like pretty much every progressive mania, the phenomenon we are discussing here was originally rooted in the well-intentioned progressive reflex to address real problems—before it all degenerated into just another set of slogans and postures that signal one’s adherence to the standard Canadian progressive canon. Land acknowledgements, which became popular in the 2010s, are the most obvious example. But others have become common, as well—such as the insistence that Indigenous people have mystical “ways of knowing” that supersede the laws of science, or that the possession of Indigenous DNA allows members of the [LGBT] community to access a rarefied (and literally undefinable) designation known as “two spirit.”
Jonathan Kay
Over time, this movement has become increasingly cultish—as my Twitter thread made clear. In fact, it’s become obvious that the movement’s most dedicated acolytes channel it as a deflected form of Christian religiosity. They denounce themselves as “settlers living on stolen land” (or some such), speak of their “whiteness” as a form of original sin, and insist that those around them pursue Indigenous “reconciliation” (the term has become a catch-all) as a form of inward psycho-spiritual purification.
The trend I am describing has been going on for many years. But it accelerated enormously in mid-2021, when it was falsely reported by many news outlets that the bodies (or “remains,” or “unmarked graves”) of 215 Indigenous children had been found on the grounds of a former church-run school in British Columbia—the implication being that this was an act of racist mass murder.
Tom Flanagan
Dozens of churches were burned across the country, Justin Trudeau lowered the flags on federal buildings for almost six months, and journalists casually denounced Canada as a genocide state. In fact, not a single body was ever found, and it’s now clear that the episode was a national social panic. But by the time anyone (including me) discovered this, it was too late: The idea that 215 little bodies had been lifted from the earth had become a sort of national martyrs myth—and has become so central to progressive political dogma in this country that Trudeau’s government has even mulled legislation that would criminalize “denialists” (such as me, I guess) who dispute the mythology of 2021.
Little of this background has been reported in the United States, which is why Americans are so bewildered when they see snippets of it, such as the screenshots I tweeted. I hope I have properly explained the background to such incidents. As insane as this stuff may seem at first glance, I’m guessing it makes more sense when one realizes that large sections of Canadian academia have become more or less theocratic in their epistemological approaches. And this is why programs such as the nursing stream at University of Alberta now feature mandatory Indigenous-themed courses, which—from what I can tell, at least in this case—seem to consist of little more than a white professor holding forth with her cultish views and demanding that they be parroted by classroom congregants.
The pity of it is that Canadian nursing students could learn an enormous amount of valuable information if they were exposed to actual Indigenous reserve-resident people who simply spoke in plain words about what life is like in their communities.
The pity of it is that, as I mentioned in that thread, Canadian nursing students could learn an enormous amount of valuable information if they were exposed to actual Indigenous reserve-resident people who simply spoke in plain words about what life is like in their communities.
I once did some reporting in a northern Indigenous community called Attawapiskat, and spent a lot of time speaking with two nurses who worked at the local health clinic. Their descriptions of what they’d witnessed in that tiny troubled community broke my heart, and have no equivalent in white parts of Canada. Nursing students in my county should know about these horrors. But instead, when they show up to their mandatory Indigenous-issues class, they are babbled to by a white woman obsessed with her own settler “positionality” and the ideological crimes of colonialism.
It’s a perfect microcosm of what’s become of the academic progressive fringe here in Canada—which perhaps explains why my tweet was so popular, and thereby came to your attention in the first place.
Hope this is helpful. —Jon
