Asterix, Tintin, Pocahontas: the burning of thousands of books in Canada triggers the debate on racism and the cancellation

“Where books are burned, people also end up burning”, wrote the poet Heinrich heine. Like any sentence, the context is important: on May 10, 1933, in Berlin and other important cities of Germany, books of a “non-Germanic” spirit were burned. Adolf Hitler He was already chancellor and in a few months he would become the Führer.

Heine’s sentence reappears like a ghost when news of recent days broke: it was discovered that in Canada in 2019 155 children’s titles were destroyed in a total of 4,700 books, among which were Asterix, Tintin, Lucky Luke and Pocahontas, to have a “negative representation of indigenous peoples”.

Of course, these are two different contexts, even opposed, but a great controversy opens: what is the limit when we look at the past? Is it legitimate to eliminate artistic products that have formed several generations to build an egalitarian future? What is the horizon of the culture of cancellation? What is the context of this great debate in Canadian society?

On reconciliation

It was the Providence School Board, in charge of French-speaking Catholic establishments, which took the decision to remove from the shelves of the libraries of some thirty schools the books that have a “negative representation of indigenous peoples”, with the goal of ending “racism, discrimination and stereotypes, in the hope of growing up in an inclusive country”. Those responsible for the initiative claim that it is an effort to reconcile with the “first nations”. The books were recycled and some were burned, and the ashes were used as compost to plant a tree and “turn negative into positive”.

The investigation that uncovered the controversial decision was conducted by Radio-Canada, who accessed a document whose titles had been deleted and the reasons given. To define it, the Providence School Commission had “native companions”. What they found in these books were historical errors, racist images, sexualization and disrespect. Also the use of terms such as “Indian” and “Eskimo”, considered for years as pejorative. In a statement, the Ontario Ministry of Education stressed that the selection of books is the responsibility of each school board.

Academics, intellectuals and artists came to mark the danger of the initiative. “Its destruction surprises me and seems excessive to me,” said the Quebec writer on Twitter. André Xmas, including the children’s novel, Traffic among the Hurons, published 20 years ago, was on the committee’s list. Noel wrote on Twitter. The ethnologist Isabelle picard, a member of the Huron-Wendat people, declared on social networks that “reconciliation will certainly not be done this way”.

Cultural genocide

The destruction of books in Canada has several lines of interpretation. The first and most urgent is the recent discovery of what many call “cultural genocide”. Just a few months ago, the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations discovered hundreds of anonymous graves in a school: “the largest to date in Canada.”

Between 1863 and 1998, more than 150,000 indigenous children were separated from their families and taken to public boarding schools, according to a report by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Investigations maintain that minors were not allowed to speak their language or practice their culture and many were abused and abused.

The anonymous graves were on the site of the former Marieval Indian Residential College in the town of Saskatchewan, which joins the remains of 215 Indigenous children at another residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia, the westernmost province of Canada. . So far, there are 1,200 anonymous graves, but experts say more than 6,000 children have died in these centers. The state announced that it would allocate 321 million Canadian dollars (256 million US dollars) to various initiatives, such as the transformation of these buildings into places of memory.

Election campaign

All of this has opened up a broad debate on the prevalence of racism. In this sense, the context is special: Canada is in the middle of a federal election campaign. Reconciliation with indigenous peoples is one of the central issues among the candidates in the public debate. Erin O’Toole, leader of the conservatives, assured that “it is possible to withdraw the books and the comics without burning them, but it is necessary to have an approach respectful of the questions of reconciliation and of our history”.

For his part, the Prime Minister Justin trudeau, leader of the Liberal Party, assured that, “personally, I am never in favor of burning books”, adding: “It is not for me or the non-natives to tell the natives how they should feel or act to advance in the theme of reconciliation ”.

The setting is also the pandemic. Just days ago, Trudeau was returning to his bus after visiting a brewery in London, Ont., When he was stoned by protesters. Apparently this has not to do with the indigenous issue but with the measure he ordered: those who do not get the COVID-19 vaccine will lose their jobs. Last week he had to cancel a campaign rally because a crowd stormed the event. This explains the level of polarization in Canadian society.

False Aboriginal origin

The debate intensifies from cases where the indigenous question has been exploited. For example, Suzy kies, member of the review committee in her capacity as “keeper of indigenous knowledge” and one of the heads of the Autonomous Peoples Commission of the Liberal Party, who recently discovered that she was of no ancestry native, as she herself had mentioned. A few days ago, he resigned from his post.

There is also the case of the filmmaker Michelle latimer, who accessed various government programs to make the problems of indigenous groups visible. She claimed to have Aboriginal roots: in her words, she came from Kitigan Zibi, a reserve in Quebec. Everything changed when, at the end of 2020, the members of this reserve denied. In an interview, he also said he grew up in northern Ontario, was “Algonquian-French-Canadian” and his mother “belonged to the First Nations”. A genealogist debunked these versions by concluding that Latimer has two indigenous ancestors, but that they lived in the 17th century.

Latimer claimed to have a “legitimate connection” to these peoples, but when all of this came to light she said that she had hidden her childhood origin through the “oral history” her grandfather had told her. . “My path to reclaiming my story continues to evolve as I learn more about who I am and where I come from. At this point, until the investigation is complete and verified, I have no reason to doubt what my grandfather told me, ”he wrote on his Facebook page.

Cancellation culture

Behind this burning of books there is a visible tendency to cancel a certain part of the culture. “This is not the first time that these accounts have been accused of racism. Comics Asterix, for example, they underwent changes in the representation of black characters (reduction of the color and size of their huge red lips) when they were re-released in the United States in 2020 ″, he recalls Marina Estévez Torreblanca in a column of Efe.

So much so that this year, the classic French comic book featured Adrenalina, the feminist character who brings her to new times. It is with the launch of Vercingetorix’s daughter in Latin America: a female protagonist who opposes the social and paternal mandate. “The comic was not racist in 1931 (when it was first published), although it may be in light of today’s mentality,” defense lawyer explained. from the publisher.

In August 2007, the Congolese student Welcome Mbutu Mondondo filed a complaint in Brussels against Tintin in Congo claiming the book was an insult to its people and called for its ban. In a column of Culture Info, the historian Omar Lopez Mato realizes an important point: “The protagonist chases the elephants to seize their ivories (act which cost the Kingdom Jean Charles of Spain, a century later) and deals with people of color, who border on racism by presenting them as kind and naive children. Although he makes anti-colonial allusions since the policies of Belgium and Leopold II in the Congo, they had come close to the aberrant ”.

Cancellation cases have increased in recent years. And while many generated an interesting debate, others suppressed it. Looking at the past with the eyes of the present reveals certain contradictions. This is why the context is important. The solution that many have found is to add an explanatory post on the historical context to read these products.

There is the case of the HBO platform, which added in the introduction to blown away by the wind an explanation from a cinema specialist Jacqueline Stewart, since according to her, “this epic drama of 1939 must be seen in its original form, contextualized and debated. Treating the world through the prism of nostalgia denies the horrors of slavery and its legacy of racial inequality. The debate is still open and, with what has happened recently in Canada, it will be better to continue it.

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