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Why Is Anti-Indigenous Racism on the Rise?

The new “Indian problem”

Over the August long weekend in Alberta, a banner appeared on a fence northwest of Edmonton, proclaiming “The Indians have done nothing in 100 years and now they wanna tell us how to run Alberta.” No one was sure who put it up—a local separatist group contacted by APTN denied responsibility—or which “Indians” were supposedly giving the province unwanted advice. But the sentiment was clear, and emblematic of current attitudes toward Indigenous people across this country.

A decade ago, in the salad days of Justin Trudeau’s reign, truth and reconciliation were embraced as a necessary step toward a brighter future; understanding Canada’s shameful treatment of Indigenous people was key to addressing the persistent inequities facing First Nations, Métis, and Inuit communities. In 2021, there was a global outpouring of grief as several communities, beginning with Tḱemlúps te Secwépemc, announced they had identified hundreds of probable graves at former residential school sites. A new federal holiday was created to honour residential school survivors; Canadians bought orange shirts and began acknowledging that “every child matters.”

But today, many Canadians feel the pendulum has swung too far; acknowledgement of residential school history is one thing, but concrete measures to address injustices are quite another. It seems many Canadians believed residential schools were the only federal crime to atone for, perhaps because we don’t have a holiday commemorating illegal land expropriation or underpayment of treaty annuities.

Of course, there have always been Canadians who bristle at Indigenous people exercising their legal rights, but a wider shift is underway. A combination of factors—the flagging economy, the brain-rotting fumes of disinformation permeating social media, rising extremism in Canadian politics—are tipping the scales when it comes to public discourse on Indigenous issues. Many Canadians are aggrieved and anxious, and everywhere they look, they see reasons to blame Indigenous people for their problems. There’s a sense that the sputtering national project of reconciliation has taken something away from them and that Indigenous rights must be quashed to restore their sense of security and prosperity.

“I want to get rid of the Indian problem,” Duncan Campbell Scott, deputy superintendent of the Department of Indian Affairs, said in 1920. “I do not think, as a matter of fact, that this country ought to continuously protect a class of people who are able to stand alone.” To accomplish this goal, he amended the Indian Act to make residential schools compulsory for First Nations children, to permit forced enfranchisement of First Nations, and, later, to bar First Nations from hiring lawyers or filing land claims. Scott believed, fervently, that Canada would be improved by dissolving everything that made Indigenous people distinct: their languages, cultures, laws, customs, beliefs. But his fixation on Indigenous people went beyond their supposed threat to national unity and prosperity. In 1921, he wrote a letter complaining about dancing on reserves, writing “they should not be allowed to dissipate their energies and abandon themselves to demoralizing amusements.”

More than a century later, many Canadians share Scott’s passion for getting mad about whatever Indigenous people are doing, no matter how little it affects them. Every court victory or assertion of constitutional rights—even for harvesting, fishing, or ceremony—is met with alarm and fury, perhaps none more than Cowichan Tribes v. Canada, commonly known as the Cowichan decision. This landmark 2025 victory in the Supreme Court of British Columbia for the Cowichan Nation affirmed their title over a former village site on what is now privately owned land in Richmond, just outside Vancouver. The ruling acknowledged this title coexists with fee simple ownership—as it does in Haida Gwaii where Haida title overlaps with private properties under the “Rising Tide” agreement signed in 2024—and sparked a panic, with Richmond........

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