Category Archives: Pluralism

Brothers at Each Other’s Throats

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Croatia, Democracy, Extremism, Fear, Hate, Modern History, Pluralism, Polarization, Populism

 

The problem in the north of Yugoslavia was not so much resurfacing of ancient hatreds, or religious or linguistic differences, as it was economic nationalism. The northerners were producing most of the wealth of the country and felt that much of this wealth was being siphoned off by their poorer southern cousins. They were starting to believe in the north that they would all be better off as independent countries. Sounds a lot like Alberta doesn’t it? Resentment is often fuel of strife.

 

The Communist leader, Tito, had managed to suppress such serious criticisms during his life time, but as soon as he was gone such critiques flourished.

The economy of Yugoslavia had seriously unraveled during the 1980s.  The country moved into hyperinflation.  By 1989 the inflation rate was 1,240 % and rising.  These were conditions in which tensions were incubated into vigorously nasty animosities. As Tony Judt another brilliant historian said, in his book about Europe after the Second World War, “the growing distaste for feckless southerners was ethnically indiscriminate and based not on nationality but on economics.”

 

The ruling centres of former communist enclaves in Belgrade, Serbia, were also spectacularly corrupt. When these led to financial ruin, the people were ready to revolt.  These feelings were intensified by fears that a small group of former Communist apparatchiks coalescing around the brute Slobodan Milošević were planning to make a bid for power in the political vacuum that followed Tito’s death.  That is exactly what happened. He gained power by arousing and manipulating Serb national emotions.  Like Trump decades later, he was a master of that. Many Communist leaders had tried similar tactics in other countries.  As Judt said, “In the era of Gorbachev, with the ideological legitimacy of Communism and its ruling party waning fast, patriotism offered an alternative way of securing a hold on power.” Or as Samuel Johnson said, “patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel.”

 

In Yugoslavia however, Milošević and his cronies encouraged nationalist meetings at which the insignia of wartime Chetniks were on public display and this aroused deep disquiet among those groups that had been abused by the Chetniks during the war. The Chetniks were the Serbs who had fought on the side of Hitler during the war, using that opportunity to commit mayhem and destruction. Riding a wave of Serbian nationalism, Milošević was confirmed in power as the President of the Serbian republic in 1989.

Milošević wanted to forge a more unitary Serbian state. No more wimpy federalism. Like so many autocrats before and after him, he used nationalism as an instrument to cement his power. After all, he told his fellow Serbs, we are just taking what is rightly ours.  He could have said, I just want to make Serbia great again.

Naturally the other 4 republics were not so keen on Serbian domination. In Slovenia and Croatia, they saw only one way out from such domination, secession. Unlike other Communist countries where the former powerful Communists had no internal ethnic divisions on which to prey when their political power waned, in Serbia those divisions were exploited for the personal gain of the former Communist power brokers. As Judt said, “The country offered fertile opportunities for demagogues like Milošević, or Franjo Tudjman, his Croat counterpart.”  The problem as Judt saw it was that, “in Yugoslavia, the break-up of the federation into its constituent republics would in every case except Slovenia leave a significant minority or group of minorities stranded in someone else’s country.”  Then when one republic declared itself independent its neighbours quickly fell like dominoes.

 

Milošević was the first Yugoslav politician to break Tito’s ban on the mobilization of ethnic consciousness.’  He liked to portray himself as the defender of Yugoslavia against the secessionist longings of Croatia and Slovenia, and, ominously, as the avenger of old wrongs done to Serbs. He wanted to build a greater Serbia on the ruins of old Yugoslavia, but with Serb domination. Milošević was quite capable of inciting Serb minorities in Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia-Hercegovina, and Kosovo to rise up and demand Serb protection.  In fact, that was his favoured technique.  The Serbs in these other republics to a large extent merely served as Milošević’s pretext for his expansionary designs.

 

Although most Serbs at the time displayed little nationalistic paranoia, and even less interest in distant Serbs, Milošević transformed their vague memories into rabid fears and paranoia that Serbs spread around the old Yugoslavia were about to be annihilated by the majority in their republics. Milošević, in other words, used these fears to further his demagogic purposes. He used the oldest trick in the playbook of wanna be autocrats–manufactured fear. Trump does it all the time.

 

Milošević did not invent the fears.  They grew up naturally when Yugoslavia disintegrated, as every national group feared they were endangered as a minority in some republic. So, for example, the Serbs, as the largest minority group in Croatia, they felt particularly vulnerable. He did not make up the fears, but he sure knew how to exploit them.

 

In the Slovene election in April of 1990 a government was elected that was still pro-Yugoslavia, but also highly critical of the Serbian government in Belgrade. In the following month of May a new nationalist party under its leader Tudjman came to power in Croatia. In December of that year Milošević seized, without authorization, 50% of the entire drawing rights of the Yugoslav federation in order to pay back pay and bonuses for federal employees. Again economics, as always, was a crucial factor in developments that often wore an ethnic or religious disguise. In January of 1991 the Slovenia government declared independence.   Within a month the Croats did the same thing. Soon the Parliament of Macedonia did the same thing.

 

The hasty recognition of the independent states by Europe, especially, Germany, perhaps were not helpful. When an independent Croatia was formed, political leaders in the Serbian capital of Belgrade began to play on the fears of Serbians with outrageous propaganda on radio and television.  This helped to invoke in the Serbs memories of massacres in World War II and prompted those Serbs to rise up in revolt against their ‘Ustache’ neighbours. The Ustache had been seen as traitors in the Second World War who supported the Nazis and did their best to exterminate the Serbs, so now the Serb minorities feared, a repeat, not entirely without  justification.

The Serb minorities in these states were deeply worried.  Clashes with authorities followed. They called upon Belgrade to help them against their ‘Ustache’ oppressors.

When Serbs were dismissed from their positions in the police force, judiciary, and military, many thought the Croats might be setting the table for another massacre. They believed they might be seeing the return of a an ethnic state with a genocidal past. Croats denied that this was the case, but there were some reasons for this angst. When Serb police were fired, Serbs armed themselves as militia. When the Croats were unable to maintain order, the Yugoslav national army, under the direction of Serbs from Belgrade stepped in at first to restore order, and later to obliterate Croatian independence. As Michael Ignatieff said, , “War was the result of an interacting spiral of Serbian expansionism, Croat independence, and Serbian ethnic paranoia in Croatia.”

 

Even though the Americans claimed to support a democratic and unified Yugoslavia, as Judt said, by then “a ‘democratic and unified Yugoslavia was an oxymoron.’” There really was no room for democracy.  Slovenia and Croatia took active measures to implement their independence by actually unilaterally seceding from the federation.  They enjoyed the tacit support of a number of European leaders.  The Serbs responded by moving the national Yugoslav army to the borders.

Although the Serbs and their army, the Yugoslav National Army bear the primary responsibility for what happened, since they hurled 150,000 shells into Croatia from the surrounding hills, but Croats were not without blame. They dynamited parts of the great city as they left so there would be nothing left for their Serb brothers. These are the type of things you can expect when all sides seem to be represented by their loudest and most extreme voices.

Unfortunately, all around us today this seems to be happening.  We had best be alert.

 

Blood and Belonging

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Croatia, Extremism, Hate, Modern History, Pluralism

 

This is now a quiet business street. Not long ago, it was hell on earth. It has been completely rebuilt.

The Balkans is one of the most interesting areas on the globe.  Michael Ignatieff wrote a series of excellent books that focuses a lot of attention the region, and were supplemented by some documentary films. Michael Ignatieff was a much better writer and thinker than he was a political leader. As he said in one of the series of books I mentioned, Blood and Belonging,

 

“…huge sections of the world’s population have won the ‘right-of-self-determination’ on the cruelest possible terms:  they have been simply left to fend for themselves.  Not surprisingly their nation states are collapsing… In critical zones of the world, once heavily policed by empire—notably the Balkans—populations find themselves without an imperial arbiter to appeal to.  Small wonder then, that, unrestrained by stronger hands, they have set upon each other for that final settling of scores so long deferred by the presence of empire.”

 

It is not good enough to blame the melee on the assertion that this area of the world was filled with sub-rational intractable fanatics.  Though it was more than its fair share of those. We have to think more deeply than that.  We have to ask why people who had lived together for decades were transformed from neighbours into enemies?  That was the crucial question that has to be answered.

 

It was that great British philosopher Thomas Hobbes who wrote about the war of all against all that occurs in the state of nature (when there is no state) and requires the creation of a state to protect all and to provide a platform for morality when all give up the means of violence in favor of the sovereign. As Ignatieff said,

 

“Thomas Hobbes would have understood Yugoslavia.  What Hobbes would say, having lived through religious civil war himself, is that when people are sufficiently afraid, they will do anything. There is one type of fear more devastating in its impact than any other: the systemic fear that arises when a state begins to collapse.  Ethnic hatred is the result of terror that arises when legitimate authority disintegrates.“

 

This was the basis of the film Civil War shown a couple of years ago, speculating what might happen in the United States if their state broke down. Not at all an impossibility. It was brutal.

 

Tito, the communist leader of Yugoslavia, with his brand of Coca Cola Communism,  had realized that the unification of each of the 6 major Slav peoples required a strong federal state to keep it together.  Like Canada.  Who knows what would happen in Canada if the state collapsed as it did in Yugoslavia? If later any group wanted to secede it would have to deal with the minorities within in its own territory. After all, people don’t live in neatly separated enclaves.  In the case of Yugoslavia, in too many cases, this led to the forcible expulsion of whole populations.  They called it ethnic cleansing, an expression now known around the world, thanks to Yugoslavia. Remember that as much as 25% of both Croat and Serb populations have always lived outside the borders of their own republics.

 

The big mistake that Tito and the Communists had made was to fail to provide for divorce or succession. They failed to provide for the eventual emergence of civic, rather than ethnic based multi-party competition.   His doctrine of socialist rhetoric had lauded, not without some moral attraction, the “brotherhood and unity of all Yugoslavs.” This was a lofty goal, but it provided no mechanism for that to be accomplished when the state disintegrated.  That idea swiftly melted in the face of the profound hatreds that were released between the combatants. As Ignatieff said,

 

By failing to allow a plural political culture to mature, Tito ensured that the fall of his regime turned into the collapse of the entire state structure. In the ruins, his heirs and successor turned to the most atavistic principles of political mobilization in order to survive.

 

If Yugoslavia no longer protected you, perhaps your fellow Croats, Serbs, or Slovenes might.  Fear, more than conviction, made unwilling nationalists of ordinary people. …

 

Ethnic difference per se was not responsible for the nationalistic politics that emerged in the Yugoslavia of the 1980s.  Consciousness of ethnic difference turned into nationalistic hatred only when the surviving Communist elites, beginning with Serbia, began manipulating nationalist emotions in order to cling to power.

 

That is precisely the issue; people have to learn to live in plural cultures.  If difference leads to hate, as it often does, bloodshed soon follows when the dogs of hell are let loosed. No one should insist on my way or the highway, but many do. Who doesn’t like variety? Who thinks they have a monopoly on the truth? Many conservatives in the US now want a country without those nasty liberals. Of course, many liberals would like to get rid of the conservatives too. How could that happen peacefully?

 

Well, the extremists think they have a lock on the truth. Sometimes they even come to believe their own lies. This can even happen in modern countries such as the United States. Or Canada.

 

We all need to learn to live in pluralistic societies. If we can’t look out for those hounds. That is why Yugoslavia is so important. Even in Canada.

From Coca Cola Communism to Anarchy

2025 Cruise up the Danube River, Croatia, Extremism, History, Modern History, Pluralism

 

A Proud Croatian in Vukovar

At the end of World War II, communism was ushered in to Yugoslavia by the Russians. This was no favor.  Josip Broz Tito, commonly called Tito led the country as a communist prime minister from 1944 to 1963, and as president from1953 until his death in 1980. Of all the countries under the Soviet umbrella his regime was by far the least intrusive and most gentle. Some called his type of communism Coca Cola Communism.

 

To the amazement of many, Tito boldly declared Yugoslavia independent from the Soviet Union.  The people of Yugoslavia loved it. People around the world loved it, Celebrities from around the world, like Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton came to visit him. Russia was not so keen, but to the surprise of many, it tolerated Tito.

Yugoslavia under the communist regime had been a federal regime, like Canada. It was designed to allow different groups from different regions to live together in relative harmony.  While he was alive it worked quite well. After Tito died things fell apart and as the poet W.B. Yeats said, “Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold.” That is exactly what happened.

After the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Empire the leaders of Slovenia, Croatia, (under its first President Franjo Tudjman) and Macedonia were persuaded that they should annul their federal ties and instead each declared independence after a referendum that clearly indicated the people favored separation. The same thing of course, could happen in Canada or the United States, and in fact, there have been some recent rumblings of discontent with the federal system in both countries.  That is why for Canada and the US Yugoslavia is so important.  We should learn from it, but so far there are few signs that we will do that, or even try to do that.

Croatia declared its independence from Yugoslavia on June 25, 1991. The Croatian Parliament officially announced the separation, following a referendum held in May 1991 where over 90% of voters favored independence. That should have been simple right? Wrong! It was actually very complicated by the awkward fact that Croatia had large ethnic minorities of Serbians who feared that they would be forever after dominated by the Croats. And the neighboring Serbian state who was dominating Yugoslavia after Tito died, saw themselves as the saviors of their fellow Serbs in Croatia.

 

The Serbs did not take kindly to this rejection of the state they dominated, citing traditional ties and the need to protect Serb minorities in these states. As a result, not just war, but wars, broke out.

 

One might have thought that in modern times with the advent of civilization, things would be more civilized and less bloody.  If one thought that one would be wrong.

 

Tito was a powerful and charismatic leader who amazingly managed to weld together the various ethnic groups of the country that otherwise found it all too easy to attack each other. However, as soon as he died in 1980, the ties that bound these ethnic groups began to fray. As Adam Michnik once said, “the worst thing about Communism is what comes after.”  There is at least a sad grain of truth in this remark.

 

With the collapse of the communist state of Yugoslavia, a number of states that had been held together by the iron fist and charisma of its long standing-leader, Tito, broke off like pieces of glass from a broken window.  With that breakdown the rule of law, such as it was under Tito, evaporated.  Anarchy soon prevailed. When states collapse, they rarely do that in an orderly fashion.

 

This is even more remarkable because Yugoslavia was generally considered the most liberal of all of the Communist regimes. Why did it collapse into such bloody anarchy while Czechoslovakia did not in 1989?

 

No treaty, no law governed what would happen when Yugoslavia broke apart.  It was thus even more fractious than the splintering of Mennonite churches, if that is possible. The basic problem was that the Imperial power, Soviet Russia disappeared, leaving a terrible vacuum behind.

As usually happens, the void was filled by the worst.

There are no innocent beliefs

Conspiracy Theories, Death of Truth, Epidemics/Pandemics, Ethics, Health, Philosophy/Ideas, Pluralism, reason, Skeptical Philosophy, Social Democracy and Trust, Sociology of Knowledge, Trust and Distrust, Vaccines

 

According to Professor Arthur  Schafer, if we are credulous people then we can easily believe the Christian story, or the Muslim story, or the Jewish story.  Or we can believe as the Mennonite woman interviewed by the CBC believed that eating flowers was as effective at defeating the measles virus as vaccines.

 

If we are credulous, we can believe anything because it makes us feel good. Then we can believe horoscopes because that makes us feel good, even though there is absolutely no evidence to support such beliefs. Even reputable newspapers publish horoscopes. It makes their readers feel good. Then they are more inclined to purchase the newspapers.

If we are credulous people, we can believe that Bill Gates implanted tiny chips into vaccines so that he could control the world, or kill millions of people, without any evidence at all. If we are credulous people our political leaders can make us believe that an election they lost was stolen by the opposition, even in the complete absence of any evidence.

If we are credulous people, we can believe that ivermectin can kill the coronavirus just because it is very effective at killing parasites in livestock even though we have no evidence to support that belief at all. If we are credulous people we will believe anything at all,  just because our political leader who has virtually no scientific knowledge at all, tells us to believe it. Credulity is a very dangerous thing. Not just for individuals, but for society. Society does not work well unless we believe our leaders when belief is rationally justified and do not believe them when the evidence does not support their claims. We cannot afford credulity.

The fact is, according to Arthur Schafer, that our society which many of us think of as secular, is actually “impregnated with a lot of irrational superstitions.”

Today almost no one agrees with William Kingdon Clifford, says Schafer. Schafer says instead, people believe things just because authority figures, such as Presidents, or mothers, or church leaders tell us to believe them. They are willing to accept all manner of irrational beliefs. According to Schafer, many people believe what they have been told to believe by their parents as they grew up, without challenging those beliefs at all. They require no evidence to support them.  As a result, children born and raised in a Muslim home usually become adherents of Islam. Children born and raised in a Christian home usually become adherents of Christianity. Parents want their children to believe them, even when they give no good reasons for doing so.

As a result, Schafer argues that people are entitled to believe what they want to believe, but are not allowed to enforce those views on other. This is called tolerance. In a pluralistic society, we must tolerate diverse views provided they don’t hurt others. To get along with others we must learn to respect their diverse views and must reject their harmful views, that are unsupported by evidence,  but in such a way that we can still tolerate each other. We have to learn to live together. Sometimes that is not easy.

This is the attitude of tolerance. This is a liberal good—a very important  good at that. We tolerate the fact that others have irrational beliefs. We tolerate that they believe any kind of superstition no matter how nonsensical as long as they don’t try to impose it on us.

But Clifford goes farther than that. Clifford is different. He doesn’t believe that your belief in horoscopes is innocent. According to Clifford, says “there are no innocent beliefs.”  All beliefs have consequences.  Many liberals hold that I have the right to believe whatever I want, so long as I don’t harm anyone else. Clifford says that by believing irrational things we are exposing ourselves and the societies in which we live, to serious potential harms. As long as we would harm only ourselves that might be acceptable. But by our actions we are actually exposing many others to serious harms as well through our credulity. That we are not entitled to do. That is morally wrong, he says. Credulity is a harm that we must work hard to suppress. Tolerating irrational beliefs is a sure way to encourage such harms.

 

The Ethics of Belief

Epidemics/Pandemics, Ethics, Health, Pluralism, Skeptical Philosophy, The Sleep of Reason, Vaccines

 

One thing I have learned from the Covid-19 pandemic and the measles vaccine fiasco, particularly among Mennonites, is that it is important—vital in fact—that important beliefs are grounded in rational thinking, evidence, and facts.  Wishes are not helpful. Neither, in my view is faith. I know this will be controversial. So be it. More on this later.

 

There was an interesting philosopher in the 19th century in England by the name of William Kingdon Clifford. He is no longer very well-known but he had some good ideas. Some were very controversial. Radical even.  Here is one of those ideas: “ It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.” He wrote that in his book The Ethics of Belief which was published in in 1877 or in 1879 depending on whom you believe.

 

Here is another f comment from the same book equally as radical:

 “If a man, holding a belief which he was taught in childhood or persuaded of afterwards, keeps down and pushes away any doubts which arise about it in his mind, purposely avoids the reading of books and the company of men that call in question or discuss it, and regards as impious those questions which cannot easily be asked without disturbing it—the life of that man is one long sin against mankind.”

 

Clifford took beliefs seriously. And I have to agree with him. In simplified terms he believed it was immoral to believe things for which one has insufficient evidence.

 

Here was an example of what he meant by this claim. Clifford told the unhappy tale of a shipowner who was planning to send to sea a shipload of people on a rickety old boat.  The ship-owner had doubts about the seaworthiness of his ship but nonetheless sent ship out to sea anyway heavily loaded with people.  He believed the ship was seaworthy but he really had no good reasons for that belief. In the case of something as important as sending a ship-load of people to sea he ought to have been more careful. He should not have assumed without good evidence that the ship was alright.  Clifford argued, persuasively, to my mind, that the ship owner was guilty of negligence  for the deaths (not murder which requires intent to murder) even though he sincerely believed the ship was sound. According to Clifford “[H]e had no right to believe on such evidence as was before him,” that it was safe to send those people on that ship. His decision was morally wrong. Serious issues require serious deliberation. Clifford said the owner ought  to have checked the boat thoroughly.  He should have examined it carefully, got expert advice if needed, weighed all the evidence with scrutiny and care before sending the vessel out to sea.

 

Clifford would have been appalled by Donald Trump. Why? Because Trump always invariably say he makes his decisions on the basis of instincts. Not evidence! Instincts. I have heard him say that many timers. Instincts are not evidence. Instincts are not reasons. Important decisions, such as decisions about sending a boat load of people to sea must be based on evidence, not instincts or hunches. Important decisions a  president can make such as whether or not he should send bombers around the world to bomb his enemies, or deciding whether captured illegal immigrants should be sent to El Salvador or whether government departments should be closed on account of waste, fraud, and abuse must all be dealt with on the basis of evidence—the best evidence available—and good solid logical reasoning. Not instincts.

 

What does this have to do with Mennonites and vaccines? Everything!

Does God Make Mistakes?

2024 Trip to Eastern Canada, Culture Wars, Gender Warfare, Pluralism

 

 

One day in Prince Edward Island rain was forecast for the entire day. So we took a break and did nothing. As well, we felt we needed a break from driving and seeing things. So we stayed put. We do that from time to time on trips. We don’t have the energy to keep going every day.

 

We did hear about people in New Brunswick talking about their new laws targeting trans people. That really seems despicable to me. I think in a few years people will realize how nasty that really was. Some of the evangelicals justify their position on the basis that “God does not make mistakes?”

 

What would they say about our granddaughter who was born with her intestines outside her body.  Thanks to modern science, not God, the doctors knew in advance because of an ultra sound test and were prepared to deal with it. In the good old days, such a “mistake” would have resulted in her death.  We called it a miracle birth. Which it was. But it was a miracle of modern science and God should not get the credit. The scientists who invented the techniques to make for such tests saved her life. Did God not allow her to be born like that?

 

As a result of the surgery on the first day of her life, her intestines were immediately put back where they “belonged” and she lived. Fantastic. But I think God, if there is a God, made a mistake. And doctors “corrected” that mistake.

 

What about children who are born with cleft palate or a cleft lip?  It results in a horrible disfiguration that in many parts of the world permits humans to inflict untold misery on the children with the defect. I recognize that humans are the real problem here, but God, again if there is a God, gets the credit for the condition of that child?  Or can we blame the parent for that?

 

How about intersex children? These are children who are born with reproductive or sexual anatomy that doesn’t fit into an exclusively male or female (binary) sex classification. In some cases no one can tell if the child is a boy or a girl. It could be either.  Is that not a mistake? Why does God allow that? How can you impose a gender on such a child. Intersex traits might be apparent when a person’s born, but they might not appear until later (during puberty or even adulthood). In the US now, according to their new president, the country will only recognize 2 genders. What will they do with intersex children? Guess? Flip a coin?

Unfortunately, for Republicans and Canadian conservatives, not everyone’s sexual characteristics fit neatly into 1 of the 2 traditional categories. An estimated 1.7 of children born each year have variations of sexual characteristics. These variations are diverse. Some children have genitalia outside the norms for boys or girls. Some have feminized bodies but also have XY (male) chromosomes. Some have masculine bodies and XX (female) chromosomes.

Many of these children undergo surgery to “normalize” them because that is what their parents want. They want “normal” children, but that is not what God gave them. I actually don’t think this is a mistake at all. These children are just different. But in much of modern society, different is bad. Different means a mistake was made. And different means some children suffer needlessly.

I say, let it be. Whisper words of wisdoms, let it be. Some people are different. Thank God.

Pluralism around the Sault

2024 Trip to Eastern Canada, Colonialism, History, Indigenous People After Contact, Moral Humility, Pluralism

 

 

The Clergue blockhouse at Sault Ste. Marie

 

The Clergue blockhouse was right beside the Ermatinger house and was part of the original North West Company post at Sault Ste. Marie. Both of which were right beside our hotel.  Of course, I don’t think too many elites stayed in this block house. That was for the lessers.

This area of North America where Lake Huron and Lake Superior meet, including Sault Ste. Marie, Ignace Michigan, the Mackinac Straits, and St Joseph’s Island, were vitally important in the fur trade. There were many varied First Nations, and the French and English, and later the Americans and Canadians. Barbara Huck called it “The Crossroads of Humanity.” Often they fought each other; at other times they lived together peacefully. As Huck explained,

“For a half-century. Michilmackinac [a little south of Sault Ste, Marie] flourished. Living at a crossroads of humanity, the people of the straits were at home with diversity, unfazed by racial, linguistic, or religious  differences. A multilingual, multiracial community evolved as French traders married local Odawa and Ojibwe women. Prefacing the Metis community that would grow up around the forks of the Red and Assiniboine Rivers in Manitoba a century later, their mixed blood children soon became the dominant population of the straits.”

In Manitoba as well the Métis people became dominant, for a while.  When Manitoba became a province of Canada in 1870, 80% of the people were Métis. A lot of Manitobans have forgotten this. Some of the Indigenous people had left and the hordes of European immigrants, including Mennonites were not yet there.

It was also interesting what happened after America declared its independence from England. As Huck said,

“In 1775 the New England colonies rebelled, and the British turned to their new-found native allies.  Weighing the situation, the Odawa, Ojibwe, Winnebago, Sauk, Fox, Menominee, and Sioux decided that as rigid and obtuse as the British might be, they were not as bent on clearing and settling the land as the American rebels were.”

 

Where many nations live together, they have to make serious efforts to recognize each other and not assume, that all wisdom resides in their own community. They did learn that in the area around Sault Ste. Marie. Sadly, such lessons are sometimes hard to learn and too often not passed on to the next generation. I am a great believer in pluralism. It breeds humility, something always in short supply. Live and let live. We can all learn from each other. None of us have a monopoly on the truth. Pluralism is not always easy, but it sure beats warfare.

As Sally Gibson wrote in a chapter of Huck’s book,

“Sault Ste. Marie has long been a stopping place for travellers. Once a seamless zone of trade, the area is now separated by the Canadian-American border and twin cities name Sault Ste. Marie on either side of the St. Mary’s River Rapids. The rapids drop almost seven metres over less than three kilometres, draining Lake Superior. Travellers today can enjoy the natural beauty of the area and find remnants of the fur trade that stimulated early European settlement.”

 

Of course, once European countries arrived on the scene it did not take them long to make claims on the land. That’s what Europeans (later Canadians or Americans) do.  As Gibson said,

“The territory around Sault Ste, Marie was claimed for France by Sieur de Saint Lusson in an elaborate ceremony…recognizing the importance of the location, New France granted a seigneury on the St. Mary’s River to Chevalier de Repentigny in 1751.”

 

Of course, Gibson did not say by whose authority France did that because none of the people from Europe had any authority to make such grants. Americans always claimed land by conquest, but the locals in Canada had never been conquered. And the locals had never ceded the land. So there really was no basis for the grants. France could have used some humility.

Chevalier de Repentigny farmed the property and fortified it but he left within 5 years as soon as the 7 Years War broke out between France and England. After the French fell in that war, the English took over, but they really had no authority either. Of course, that did not stop the English from granting exclusive rights to the land in 1765 to an English trader Alexander Henry. He was given authority to the Lake Superior area. What did mean? I would say, as a recovering lawyer, that such a grant would be void for uncertainty. What area was covered by the grant, if the grant was otherwise valid?

I have always wondered what would be the legal effect of the United States placing a flag on the moon?  Would that give the Americans ownership of the entire moon?  Half the moon?  The light side of the moon? A square mile? An acre?  Or no part? How can you make such a decision? When you get right down to it claims of “ownership” are usually dubious at their root. Once more that should generate some humility.

Take another example. Indigenous people roamed the North American continent for thousands of years. Many of them were nomadic. Others were more sedentary farmers. What part did each First Nation own? How can you tell? By what right?

Really all claims of ownership are dubious?  Whether you are talking about the jungles of the Amazon or the plains of North America or the city of Steinbach?  All of them are fundamentally dubious!

I taught real estate law at the University of Manitoba Law School for about 10 years and nothing I learnt or taught there gave me any more certainty.