 From The Conversation, this is Don't Call Me Resilient. I'm Vanita Srivastava. British people love to claim like this was our invention, right? We created the technology that allowed you to spool the cotton much faster. Yeah, but they don't want to talk about where that cotton came from because it didn't come from Britain. It came from the colonies. Here at the Don't Call Me Resilient Studios, we've been busy planning Season 4, which drops this November, and we've even started to think about Season 5. But we had to stop production to talk about something that we felt we just couldn't ignore. We've been watching this incredible spectacle around the Queen's death, and with it this outpouring of support and love for the British monarchy. Queen Elizabeth, as you guys know, was the official head of state of Canada, and in her funeral this past Monday was made a federal holiday. Here in Ontario, the Minister of Education directed schools to conduct a moment of silence in honour of her to recognize the profound impact of Queen Elizabeth II's lifelong and unwavering devotion to public service was what the minister said. But in the middle of this, what appears to be a united Canadian outpouring of love and grief for the Queen and the monarchy she represented. Not everyone is feeling it, including me. Not everyone wants to mourn or honour her and what she represents. And there are a lot of reasons why. With me to explore these feelings are two scholars who are regular contributors to Don't Call Me Resilient. Veldin Coburn is an assistant professor at the Institute of Indigenous Research and Studies at the University of Ottawa, where he teaches a class called Colonialism, Territories and Treaties. He is Anishinaabe Algonquin from Pickwock-Nigan First Nation and the co-editor of Capitalism and Dispossession. Welcome, Veldin. Thank you for having me. Also with me is Cheryl Thompson, assistant professor of median culture at the School of Performance and the director of the Laboratory for Black Creativity. She is the author of Uncle, Race, Nostalgia and the Politics of Loyalty. Welcome, Cheryl. Thank you for having me. We've all been watching this giant spectacle around the Queen's death. Cheryl, what's been going through your head as you've been watching all of this? I just pause and think about how we get possessed by these grandiose outward expressions of Western domination. I heard them in the coverage, you know, they kept saying, this is going to be the most watched funeral in the history. And it's like, yeah, Sherlock, because it's on every channel. It's like, we can't actually avoid it even if we want to. It's not because we want to watch. It's because it's watching us. Understand me. How many people have died in the last 10 days? Oh, I know. You're talking about COVID, but not just COVID. No, just in general, just think about food insecurity. I'm thinking about Turks and Caicos. That is a British colony. Is anyone having a day of mourning because a tornado or hurricane just went through? So for me, it's the grand disconnect that I see in the dominant culture to what monarchy actually means. Either they don't know or it gets suspended for this time. I'm just wondering what you think the Queen represents to all of these people that are there. They're lining up. They're 12 hours in line. And you know what, the BBC described the crowd as a diverse crowd. No. No. I kept saying to my Caribbean people on Twitter, have you seen any Caribbean person go up and say anything? I did not see one J.A., i.e. Jamaican person in that crowd mourning the Queen. I watched some U.S. coverage and the U.S. coverage they went to into a part of Brooklyn and they must have found the three black people they could find in Brooklyn who were mourning the Queen because the story kept going back to them. It didn't go beyond the three that they found. And so what I'm saying to you is that for me, monarchy is the psychic hold of slavery. It's like the internalization of your own inferiority is completely represented in the exaltation of monarchy. So every time I see the whole procession, I just keep thinking to myself, that's white supremacy. This is the biggest display of the superiority of people who are Anglo-Saxon Protestant. It's just what it looks like. Now does it mean that I am accusing these people of being racist? It's like people can't disconnect structures from individual acts. Yeah, exactly. We're not talking about this woman who died in her mourning family, we're talking about the structure. Honestly, a lot of it was really traumatic. I actually, I constantly had to turn off everything. I like to watch the news late at night because if you watch it very late, like after midnight, then you start to get the other stories that have been left behind. I heard about Puerto Rico after midnight. Oh, there's the floods in Puerto Rico. By the way. After midnight. I'm like, okay. So now I know. We're coming up on September 30th, National Day of Truth and Reconciliation, a day of mourning and here we are mourning the head of the British monarchy, which sponsored so many of these atrocities, including the reserve system, the residential school system. Veldun, how do you feel about this? You know, my thoughts are with other parts of the world as well. So Pakistan, right? And that's sort of in your neighborhood, Vanitas, the divisions, the territorial tensions that were left in the wake of the British leaving, not necessarily the motive, settler colonialism that we've seen here, but definitely military occupation and the administration by a military governorship over there that has left a century or so of hostilities between peoples that have ancient ties. And yet Pakistan, the country is under water right now and 1500 people have died and that has barely registered it. And for me, it was really obnoxious. This ostentatious display of imperial pageantry, mourning an individual who is the embodiment of, I guess, the state. It was like almost this, it's like this cult of personality that we ridicule in the West of backwards authoritarian, almost totalitarian, even in North Korea, for example, the totalitarian regime there, is the flocking of people who are probably downtrodden themselves. Their life outcomes were structured by a system that had this hereditary luxury of a family that can call themselves majesty, the imperialism too, as well as they're celebrating it. It's like, you know, if you're treated like us in the colonies, the Caribbean, African colonies, Asian colonies, and then the Americas as well, even I guess Australia too, for the indigenous peoples and nations around here, it was kind of, you know, there's a little bit insulting, just the fawning over a person who probably didn't care at all for them. But they think it's some sort of like maternal figure. In terms of our empathy, I don't really see it amongst ourselves. It was a matter of not our own truth and reconciliation, but the truth and reconciliation of all the, I guess, the subjects that have been colonized by this imperial power over almost a millennium of trotting around the world and subjugating nations. And stealing things. I mean, you said, you know, my part of the world, when I think about like my growing up as a, you know, South Asian kid in Canada that this idea of, you know, I heard a lot of people saying, well, this is new. This idea where we're talking about the impacts of colonialism and how people are just starting to talk about it. Well, not if you grew up in this kind of a community, this is not new. This is like day to day conversation. You understand right away the impact that British colonialism, British imperialism, the empire has not just on your home country, but also on your immediate family. Like there's, there's a lot of impact there. There's a lot of poverty. There's a lot of trauma, all of that. So I hear what you're saying in terms of this, who's celebrating? Why are they celebrating and what are they hiding and burying in order to do that? The Minister of Education actually directed all schools to do a moment of silence. And this week, the thing that's really, really on my mind is, you know, how do we explain this kind of hypocrisy to the children in schools that, you know, this week, we're going to take a moment of silence and we're going to honor and respect the monarchy. And next week, we're going to talk about Indian residential school systems and the history here in Canada. Do you, do you have some ideas of how we begin to talk about that hypocrisy to children? There's, there's so many hypocrisies in education. It all is ultimately tied into curriculum as well. The curriculum is so restricted that you just have to get through it. Like, I actually understand teachers at the primary level because they just have to get through it. So is there a time to really unpack and get into the nuance and get into the details? Maybe, but in most classes, I'm sure it was just, let's keep it top line. Maybe some principles might have said, here's what you should say to the kids. And they just go in and, you know, they just keep it so that everybody's on a unified front and they just keep it moving. In 1952, there was a more of a homogeneous population in the schools. It's just facts. The students were mostly white, European, descended, British, white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant in English, Canada, and so were the teachers. Now we flash forward to today and you literally have the offspring of colonization in the classroom. And yet who is at the front is still the lineage of the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant or they might be Southern European of some kind. Either way, European, descended person is still at the front, but you have all the colonies literally in the classroom. I think that's an awkward conversation. Any conversations around slavery, colonization, indigeneity, land, freedom, all those major concepts that are keep coming up the last few years are going to be complicated because the, if we see the teacher and I am an educator, so please teachers don't hate me, but if you see the teacher as the agent of the state at the end of the day, most teachers as agents of the state are going to keep to the state's line. Yes, they just are. Well, they were directed to. I also think it's an interesting how in some ways education is like the military. The directive comes down, you're the foot soldier, you go out and do the work. It just you don't, it doesn't mean you agree. I'm sure there's a lot of our teachers in the education system that are like, oh, man, do we really have to, but what power do you really have when the directive comes out? That's why everyone listening to this, please understand politics matter. You know, who you put in that position of minister of X matters. They make the ultimate decision. Everyone who comes under that, what can they really do? You know, the thing that's driving me crazy, too, is if Veldin, when I see that, like I've seen so many commentators on TV and even we had articles that say, you know, OK, we understand colonialism. We understand the colonialists were there. You may complain about colonialism, but what you got out of it is amazing. You got this system of commerce. You got the trains. I mean, the BBC correspondent, BBC Asia, you know, the economic correspondent was like, you got a financial system left in Hong Kong because of the British. I'm like, do you see what's happening in Hong Kong right now? You know, so why is this missing from this conversation? I saw something that was it did wrinkle me. It was on Don Lemon on CNN. They had a British royal watcher. Oh, my gosh, I saw this. Yes. And I think Don Lemon is can be pretty quick sometimes and he should have caught it. But he went to commercial and this this woman comes on and he talks about reparations for, I guess, all the bad things of colonialism, especially on to African people of African descent. And she comes and says, well, we have to go back to the beginning of the supply chain where who was putting these slaves into into cages who are then selling them? Well, it was their own people. And I wanted to say, well, you know, this is a system kind of introduced by the British themselves. When you come in and you tear up the polities and you leave society in such ruins and then you install this system, I think the the moral culpability lies with that end of the society. Hunter Rent talks about how you can get your own people to turn against your own in very atrocious ways based upon the systems that are introduced. But you know, what's also missing in this conversation and it's nuanced, I get it, is the fact that slavery has always existed. Slavery is eons, eons old, right? Slavery is actually not the issue. It is under British colonization that the degradation of the body is attached to the black body, that the black body is then deemed not human. Right. Under other systems of slavery, you were still a human. It was slavery was almost a kind of punishment, right? It was like you did something you're enslaved now. You were still a person. The British are the people who said, you know, I think if we're going to keep this going, we kind of kind of make it so that black people aren't really human so that people enjoy the sugar, right? Because they're not going to be able to enjoy the sugar if they know that it's like other humans basically creating that for free. But if they're not human, then it's much just like the cotton. It's cotton. I was going to say sugar, cotton, the clothing. The sugar, cotton, tobacco. Go through the list. It's much easier to consume the commodities of other people's denigration if you begin to believe that they're not human. And so how did they do that through the visual culture? The last 300 years, there was a production of images that created a denigrated black body. So that is the difference. And I hate when they say, well, Africans sold other Africans in slavery, it's a much more complicated scenario, because they didn't necessarily then say when they sold their own into slavery, they're not human anymore. And they also didn't know that, oh, they're going to take this international. They're going to now take this to islands and make this a system of capital. I don't believe that was the thought. So I think it is a complicated scenario to explain 400 years of history in a flippant comment like that. Right. Well, that goes to like the sort of idea of personal responsibility. And you're born with your lot, especially with the monarchy and the social hierarchy that may have become public consciousness even after medieval state has been abolished. And, you know, we can have the House of Commons, but people are still thinking to say, you know, I'm always going to be lower class. I'm going to be part of the lower classes. And I'm proud to do that. Like I'm not going to be nobility and I'm not going to be a royal. But the idea of this individual, too, is like it was so complex. And to say, like, you know, actually, we should just trace it back to these five people, probably in Nigeria, who caged up their own. And I said, well, you know, perhaps they might have had prisoners. A lot of societies did that and they put them into cages. We've all had economic arrangements in our society where we've used slavery. Indigenous peoples had slaves, even on the west coast of Canada. But in your manner of deploying them for the dehumanized actions within your society was an altogether different story that you glossed over. Take like the the the cotton gin. British people love to claim like this was our invention, right? We created the technology that allowed you to spool the cotton much faster. Yeah, but they don't want to talk about where that cotton came from because it didn't come from Britain. It came from the colonies, right? It was shipped in. And so we think about the north end of the UK. And it's real, a lot of the factories that were like building up those like working class communities were literally benefactors of slavery. So how do you have those complex conversations with people? It's really difficult because all they remember is when the factory closed and how they came onto hard times. So we're talking about all of these, you know, atrocities, actually, and awful things that, you know, the monarchy represents. And now King Charles is now Canada's official head of state. Do you think we're going to get an apology from him? Do you think he's going to apologize for the monarchy's theft of land in Canada or the exploitation of indigenous peoples or any of these things? I think he might pass that on to William. I'll say that in Canada, not likely. There's a little bit of writing on the wall in some of the nations of which the indigenous peoples make up the majority. So congratulations to Barbados. But here in Canada, where we make up 4.5 percent of the population, we're still way outnumbered by ardent and very fervent, almost rabid sometimes, monarchists. I remember 10 years ago when I was still in the public service and I'm just finishing up my PhD and I worked at Ida, an indigenous person working in Indian and Northern Affairs, Canada, as it still was then. And my manager at the time was somebody who was this devout monarchist. That was at the time that Will and Kate got married. And so she was up at like 2 a.m. in the morning and she had her royal pajamas. I knew it was kind of odd being indigenous working there. I was naive at the time and thinking, hey, you know, I can do some good for my own people. But I've since been deprogrammed, but. But I don't think we're going to get that just because the mass of indigenous peoples isn't quite like, say, in Barbados, where they probably were, by far and away, the predominant majority, even like not just having a plurality. So we might have like 30, 40 percent monarchist, but not quite a majority here. So other states and Jamaica, I guess, is entertaining. The idea is, you know what, Charles, don't even show up, you know, because the ink is just going to dry in a few days anyways. And you don't have to go home, but you can't stay here. You know, Caracom, which is the big collection of Caribbean islands that have been calling for reparations for many years. I mean, the last five years, there's really been a shift in a lot of Caribbean countries. You can think about the last world visit from William and Kate. There was a lot of pushback and a lot of protest. But the reason I say that he's going to pass it to William, because let's face it, King Charles is what, mid-seventies? I'm just saying, I don't think we have a lifetime, right? We got a good decade, maybe 15 coming ahead, right? So the reason I say that is because William is a millennial. There's more of a likelihood in William's lifetime that he's had actual interactions with non-white people. It is very realistic in King Charles's lifetime. The only racialized people he's ever interacted with either worked for him or they were the people who were like, we love you so much. Harry might be able to help massage the situation. So I actually think King Charles will say absolutely nothing to any of the so-called Commonwealth nations. I think he's going to skirt it completely. One thing about the Queen that she did have is that nice little dainty voice that everyone thinks is so innocent. And let's face it, King Charles is not going to have that. So any apology that he might give, I feel like it would probably be a disaster. Even though when he gave the public speech, that recorded speech, about the death and what was going to happen, many people said that it was a good speech. They liked his tone. Yeah, but if you watched it, it's like the voice was talking and the body was saying something else. So I think it's going to be business as usual. To be honest, the monarchy isn't a very much a state of flux. Like I said, a lot of Caribbean countries are like, we're done. And they were literally just holding on for the Queen. I share that dim view of King Charles. I think it's going to be entirely status quo with him. But I also I'm also not holding out a whole lot of hope for William when he ascends to the throne, if he does, just because perhaps there's like those familial tensions now, because they do have a black sister in law, you know, his and she has kind of upset the internal dynamics as well. It was the British media that turned her black. I mean, she's she's too much black for them last fall. I was just on social media is just seeing what Cheryl's alluding to is there isn't quite the same barrier, although there is a bit of aloofness amongst, you know, Prince William and Kate's when they were doing their tour of the Caribbean or they're like, you know, sort of their tour of the colonies after seeing the pictures, like they're playing the drums with people and sitting down. I said, Kate, I think she's I think she's going to get cornrows, right? She's going to be one of those white girls that go down on spring break just to ingratiate themselves amongst the subjects in the colonies. Do you guys want to talk about something that we haven't talked about? For us here, we kept going in circles around Mary Simon. We were trying to figure out, you know, how is it that, you know, we have this official representative of the crown in Canada, who's also indigenous. What do you think about her role moving forward? On the one hand, I mean, she's Inuit, so she doesn't necessarily stand in for every indigenous nation. So there's those amongst 60 of us. And there's the importance of the idea of our relationship with the crown too. So the Inuits and they've there's they're almost like de facto while they're an ethnic majority in Nunavitz, it's federal territory, though when they voted on that as modern land claim in the early 90s and late 90s, the establishment is a territory where they make up about 85 percent of the population there is they did ratify the fact that they would like to be a sort of a federated unit within the Canadian sort of constitutional arrangement, although they're not necessarily a federated unit like a provinces. But they did state that they wanted a relationship with the crown. And these are the peoples that Mary Simon comes from. And that's great. It's a modern agreement, too. So it's not like the shady sort of it's still from my viewpoint sort of sells the Inuit short, although it's what they chose to do. But for a lot of other indigenous peoples, they still have hostility towards the crown. We'd like to abolish the crown because we're very much pro sovereign. Or there are others who say, well, we'd like to find our place within the Canadian constitution ourselves as separate peoples. And that we'd still have to have like a nation-to-nation relationship with the crown. So in that sense, like it does put a lot of things into flux for us that we can't necessarily quite tease out is would we'd like to be separate and sovereign? Would we like to be part because we wouldn't want to exercise, say, national authorities, like have our own armies in the same way that provinces that come into confederation say, well, we'll take care of our internal affairs. Canada, you've mimicked a model, especially in the Federalist Papers in the United States as they looked at the Iroquois of the Six Nations Confederacy and said, what a unique political arrangement. We'll just rip them off too and say, well, when we bring the 13 colonies together, we'll unite the states, we'll give them states rights, but then those will be sub state level governments and, you know, they can all have their own armies and systems of taxation. We'll centralize a few of those functions, but internally, they can take care of their own affairs, sort of like what Nunavut does. Although it doesn't say specifically for the Inuit, they do de facto make up 85 percent of the population. If a word happened on Algonquin territory, and we have the largest modern treaty on your way in Ontario's history for 36,000 square kilometers, and we're like two years out from the execution of that conclusion. We've been negotiating since 1991, and we don't get any of the sort of territorial rights and it'll just kind of be compensation for past wrongs or at least an arrangement for us to modify our territorial title. So it's not like we'll have a governing space that's territorially bound for ourselves. I don't know, it's the transient nature of the personal embodiment of who's in this particular position. It's a complicated relationship. Is there something that you want to address in this conversation before we leave each other? I mean, the only thing I can maybe say is maybe there's never been a moment where Indigenous people in black communities could come together in consensus around a single issue. This might be the moment. Well, that's a good thing. Yeah, even a few sort of white colonized people, too, because of the Irish. Ireland, I don't know if you heard Ireland, they had a really, they had a reaction and it wasn't a good one for the British people. I really liked reading the Irish Times, for example. It was a fun week to read that. If this bigger head brings all the loyal monarchists together across the globe, where the sun never still doesn't set on the British Empire, is that it makes us understand one another, especially from Indigenous peoples over here to Indigenous peoples in Africa, so from far off different places and the Indigenous peoples in Asia. So, yeah, she can bring us together, too. So a lot of the political leaders have said, we're in a very unstable time right now, so we really need to make sure we keep all the institutions together. And I thought to myself, if your life was fallen apart, you'd probably want something new. If the marriage is unstable, you're not trying to hold on for dear life to keep the marriage together, you're gonna want a divorce. We're in a point where that's actually the tension for me. There's a whole swath of the population that's like, let it crumble, rebuild, let's start over. For me, the solution to a failing monarchy is definitely not more monarchy. Guys, thank you both so much. It was a pleasure. Pleasure, Cheryl. Yes, thank you so much. This was a good conversation. That's it for this episode of Don't Call Me Resilient. Thank you so much to Veldan Coburn and Cheryl Thompson for taking the time out of their lives to share their insights. Let us know how you feel about any of these issues we discussed today. Queen Elizabeth, the crown, reparations, colonialism, or the governor general, find us online. I'm on Twitter at writevenita, that's W-R-I-T-E-V-I-N-I-T-A. Please tag our producers at ConversationCA and use the hashtag Don't Call Me Resilient so that our producers and other listeners can get in on the convo as well. And if you'd like to read more about the complicated history of the monarchy and Canada as part of the Commonwealth, go to theconversation.com. We have some good stories up there, as well as our own show notes with links to stories and research. And finally, if you like what you heard today, please tell a friend or ask your prof to assign us instead of a textbook. If we are one of your favorite podcasts, please consider leaving us a positive review on whatever podcast app you're listening to. Those reviews really help a lot and we personally find them super motivating. Don't Call Me Resilient is a production of The Conversation Canada. This podcast was produced with a grant for journalism innovation from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The series is produced and hosted by me, Venita Srivastava. Our senior producer is Lee Genovaro and Jennifer Morose is our consulting producer. Shout out to our newest staff members, Daniel Piper is our producer, Rukhsar Ali is an assistant producer, Remitula Shake is our sound mixer, Atta Kakaki is helping out with marketing and visual innovation, and Scott White is the CEO of The Conversation Canada.