The Foreigner Within

Aboriginal peoples have lived here since time immemorial, but it is only gradually over the course of history that Canada has come to acknowledge their contributions. Despite the strong presence of the first inhabitants, Canadian identity was not initially defined as an aboriginal identity. Aboriginal peoples were not identified by name among the founding peoples of Canada. Instead, they were physically confined to reserves and consciously forgotten by history. The rewriting of history to accord them their place as founders is a task that has only recently been begun. The figure of the aboriginal has come to haunt the Canadian identity, just as in psychoanalysis the repressed once again comes to the surface.

Rémi Savard has offered what is probably the best characterization of the aboriginal identity with his description of the aboriginal as l’étranger venu d’ici – the foreigner within. This apt expression refers to two components of the process of constructing identity: lineage and relationship to others. Aboriginal people, the first inhabitants of Canada, are at the same time foreigners in their own land. They have lived on the margins of Canadian society, have had no real political power until recently, and are still wards of the federal state. In the course of the 1980s, however, they developed a greater capacity to act on their own behalf and acquired more bargaining power in relation to the federal and provincial governments. They are now exercising new power through which they are radically changing their collective identity.

Today, aboriginal peoples, overcoming the lack of self-respect and the tendency towards self-destruction that have marked much of their recent history, are affirming their identities with new pride. They do not have the same negative self-image as before, but in the non-aboriginal population social representations of aboriginal people have failed to keep pace, so that picturesque but outdated stereotype of the Indian still holds sway. As Denys Delâge has shown, the relationship between whites and Indians can be seen as a classic example of social representation of identity as the inverse of oneself, in which “one is the reversed mirror image of the other.”

While aboriginal peoples can be divided into subgroups and are fairly heterogeneous in terms of living conditions, they also have a common reference to a mythic traditional way of life. Initially based on a shared tradition and history and a common relationship with nature and with the Other, their collective identity now also relates to their objective situation as wards of the federal state living on reserves. This has given them a new shared feeling of being in a condition of dependency that, in turn, provides the motivation for their common desire to put an end to it.

The contribution of the aboriginal peoples to the construction of the identity of the first, non-aboriginal inhabitants of the country was considerable but, as Denys Delâge has shown, it has largely been unrecognized. The early Canadians borrowed a great deal from the culture and values of the aboriginal peoples. This contribution remains to be studied, but knowing that it exists is already a step forward that will need to be taken into account in future work.