Ron Christiansen and Christine Daniels’ 1970 project, published as MANY LAWS by the Canandis Foundation and The White Man’s Laws by Canindis and Hurtig Publishers, is one of the most visually striking books rejected by the Government of Ontario. It may also be one of the most valuable, if a copy could be located. One of mine went missing while developing CANADIAN MOCKINGBIRD and had to be replaced.

In The White Man’s Laws, the story was preceded by a Stan Daniels foreword, then (March 1975) President of the METIS ASSOCIATION OF ALBERTA.¹ “[G]as chambers of Auschwitz, the atrocities in Vietnam, and the starvation in Bangladesh” were all referenced for comparison, then “still being fresh in our minds.” It was hoped the book’s widespread distribution would aid Indigenous access to “the decision-making and administrative levels of the legal system” and “enable the white community to better understand the dilemma native people” faced.

Christiansen had created just over sixty beautiful internal plates defining the books visually but also partnered with Daniels to write the quickly internalized story. Both authors are now passed. During development, influential assistance arrived from Brian Thompson, Dorothy Daniels, June Stifle and many others, including “an Indian person of the older generation.” The book was a METIS ASSOCIATION project.²

Protagonist Eddy visits home from the city, where he’d been living with older sister Jeanette and attending school since an oil spill had destroyed the traditional trapping and fishing way of life. Eddy and his grandfather discuss the difficult urban experiences things encountered, “because of the white people’s desire for money and land.” Things like poverty and unhappiness, how people say one thing but do another, the police surveillance.

Then Grandfather speaks of their native worldview and peaceful, self-sufficient old ways, the spirits and the Great Spirit, and of how much was destroyed.

One of Grandfather’s last messages for Eddy was hopeful and saved for the second last page of the written story. “Maybe together you young people of all colours will make a better Canada.”

Increasingly the human layer is less defined by the static, walled-off subspecies of old, those peoples we mistakenly and dangerously called “races” from at least Carl Linnaeus’ time. Any of nationality or ethnicity or culture make more sense in Canadian English to describe the Canadian people than does race. So does gang. We should know this, generally and popularly, with the widespread understanding of genetics. Phenotypes journey and mix with increasing freedom within and outside Canadian borders.

Diversity is conventional now.

https://x.com/fordnation/status/1819067315335696690

In the quickening world, I accede to a blended future of what makes us, visually and at levels unseen without microscope. Individuals are collections of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) instructions, in base pairs contributed by parents, making up thousands of genes. The subject offers as much complexity as sought. The so-called “races” people believed in were noticeable frequencies of visible traits; colour, hair texture, eye shape and all the rest.

Families, organizations and media also contribute ideology, spirituality, morals and laws, with just as much potential variety. Historically, sets of ideas and rights connected to particular breeding populations. From my perspective, it’s reassuring to see and hear the Premier, a politician it’s true, promoting diversity. Some people still want to go on being “a representative of my race” and defend certain visible features. Likely though our society is getting passed its historical tendency to censor or restrict some looks and beliefs to privilege others. Personal preferences are not at all the same.

Métis is a French word for a mixed person, usually a combination of Indigenous and those Europeans colonizing the Americas from the 15th and 16th centuries and on. Mestizo is the Spanish translation. Mulatto is a mixed person, but of African or “Black” and European or “White” descent. The word, deriving from the Spanish and Portuguese mulato, is offensive to some people but not me.³

Analogous words exist to characterize other regional subspecies, it should go without saying. With newer “personal genomics” services such as 23andme, more detail than ever is available. Care should be taken. Who you thought you were may not turn out being what is described. It’s possible to be what or who you were encouraged to dislike.

Partway through their book, Daniels and Christiansen discuss Canada’s most famous Métis, Louis Riel. Art & Commodity hopes to review other book submissions about this founder of two prairie provinces, including Joseph Kinsey Howard’s Strange Empire: The Story of Louis Riel and Dr. Peter Charlebois’ The Life of Louis Riel, that Ontario excluded.

The rejection of MANY LAWS followed its 1972 submission by General Publishing. The process resulted in a short simple written response declaring the book unsuitable. The assigned manager was asked by his supervisor for “some reason” why, despite the evaluation file claiming a majority of panelists opposed. His answer was that “the fundamental reason is that this book is a quasi-political diatribe by the Metis against ‘the white man’ and all his ways.” That’s what it remains, as much as it is a fantasy craving what was.

Notes

1. Métis then spelled without the accent.

2. Christiansen, R., Daniels, C. and METIS ORGANIZATION OF ALBERTA  (1970). MANY LAWS. Canindis Foundation. Pages printed without page numbers. http://books.google.ca/books?id=QZkmGwAACAAJ.

3. Historically at one time so-called “white people” were calling themselves pink. I write this from the perspective of someone whose father’s ancestry is African-American, but whose grandparents’ families sought life in Canada in different centuries and for different reasons. In contrast my mother’s immediate families were Irish, but “the British kind of Irish” and the Indigenous Gaelic. Canadians following the news know who has license to represent who is fraught with controversy.

4. B145067. Archives of Ontario. In CANADIAN MOCKINGBIRD neither MANY LAWS nor The White Man’s Laws are books included in the Indigenous Studies table of censored texts found on page 106. The literary project is written about on website Art & Commodity primarily because of Ronald Christiansen’s artwork.

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Jeremy Tompkins’  Canadian Mockingbird: Exposing Censorship and Textbook-Mediated Social Engineering, the 223-page nonfiction book describing a program of covert public and Catholic, and residential school textbook censorship during Baby Boomer and Generation X eras is now available. The program regularly ignored the panel consensus of paid subject specialists, defying domestic and international protections.