When I was a middle schooler growing up in Montreal four decades ago, I was taught almost nothing about Indigenous Canadian history. “Real history” supposedly began when Europeans showed up in boats to build settlements, spread Christianity, catch fish, and make money. Indigenous civilization, on the other hand, was compressed into a few pages, or even paragraphs—these being largely devoted to Indigenous practices that Europeans found instructive (often life-savingly so) in relation to hunting, foraging, and weathering the elements.

As any informed Canadian reader will know, this outdated pedagogical approach has, thankfully, been abandoned. And Indigenous history is now very much centered in most Canadian curricula. When I was a schoolboy, Indigenous Canadians were often lazily lumped together as “Indians” (with a few stray references to “Eskimos,” whom we were taught to essentially think of as Indians in Igloos.) At the very least, my own children have been taught to understand basic differences among Inuit, First Nations, and Métis populations. They are shown examples of the art produced by Indigenous peoples, exposed to samples of their (surviving) languages, taken on field trips to Iroquois longhouses (I live in Toronto now), and given lessons from Indigenous elders brought in as guest speakers.

Unfortunately, this transformation has led to another kind of historical distortion. Because the movement to revise Canadian education has arisen in part from a desire to correct (very real) racial injustices against Indigenous peoples, the lesson plans now contain an overwhelming emphasis on the (again, very real) cruelties meted out by white people—especially in regard to the country’s system of Residential Schools. Make no mistake: These subjects belong in the historical curriculum, and I am not arguing for their removal. But because the themes of cruelty and exploitation are unremitting in schooling on this subject (not to mention in books and journalism), they can elicit a sort of guilt-soaked intellectual numbness among Canadians at large.