A collection of 45 posts
In 2021, Canadians were told that the remains of 215 Indigenous children had been found at a former school. The story turned out to be false—but no one in authority seems to know how to walk it back.
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.
In the 24th instalment of ‘Nations of Canada,’ Greg Koabel describes how British adventurers briefly seized Quebec and Acadia following the Anglo-French War of 1627–29.
University of Western Ontario instructors spent months denouncing an outspoken education student who’d asked awkward questions about Indigenous reconciliation—until a UWO tribunal concluded they’d violated her rights.
Lidia Thorpe is not treated more harshly because she’s an Indigenous woman. In fact, if it weren’t for these two immutable characteristics, she wouldn’t be where she is today.
The works of literary critic Adam Kirsch and of novelist and memoirist Joan Didion provide a salutary rebuttal of settler colonialist theory.
The same reporter who helped spark Canada’s 2021 social panic has published a new article walking back his original errors—but those mistakes remain uncorrected on the Times’ website.
When lawyers asked the Law Society of British Columbia to correct the false claim that ‘the bodies of 215 children’ were discovered in Kamloops, the legal regulator accused them of bigotry.
In the 22nd instalment of ‘Nations of Canada,’ Greg Koabel describes how Louis XIII and Cardinal Richelieu used their nascent Quebec colony as a means to promote French global power and spread Christianity.
In the 21st instalment of ‘Nations of Canada,’ Greg Koabel describes how the arrival of Dutch fur traders sparked an upheaval in regional Indigenous geopolitics.
In the twentieth instalment of ‘Nations of Canada,’ Greg Koabel describes how Samuel de Champlain and Récollet missionaries established a fledgling French colony in what we now call Quebec City.
Many of the public figures who stoked the country’s morbid 2021 social panic are now doing their best to change the subject.
Charlie Wenjack has come to symbolise the deadly horrors of Canada’s Residential Schools. Unfortunately, many details of his tragic story have been misrepresented in the process.
In the eighteenth instalment of ‘Nations of Canada,’ Greg Koabel describes the confusion that resulted when French and Indigenous fighters jointly assaulted an Iroquois village in 1615.
A new book tries to explain how millions of Canadians became convinced that the bodies of 215 ‘missing’ Indigenous children had been discovered in British Columbia.