Over 150 years of absolute bullshit

Happy birthday, Canada, you tired old fart!

Tomorrow television anchors, bored mayors and jingoistic revellers from coast-to-coast will enrobe themselves in scarlet and bathe in maple syrup like a deleted scene from Riverdale. The country’s 150th celebration will be a party unlike any other—a national celebration befitting of Canadian heroes like Bono and the cast of X-Men: Dark Phoenix.

The festive Canada 150 veneer—and its white-washing of Canada’s tremendous history of violating any people who weren’t European, straight and male—has astoundingly become even thinner this week. In a “microcosm of colonialism,” Indigenous protesters were arrested Wednesday night while trying to set up a tipi on Parliament Hill. It was an attempt to highlight the country’s history of assimilation ahead of a cloying fête that will vanilla glaze over those historical atrocities.

With that in mind—and under the belief that the first step in reconciliation is hearing truth—The Coast presents an incomplete timeline documenting just some of the events in this land’s past. It’s a list that stretches back thousands of years before confederation, and is unlikely to inspire true patriot love. Too bad. This is Canada.

———

12,700 BC
The earliest carbon-dated Mi’kmaw artefacts.

9,000 BC
Indigenous settlements are present in what will become Nova Scotia.

796
The Three Fires Confederacy is formed by the Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi nations.

1142
The Iroquois Confederacy is formed.

1606
The Wabanaki Confederacy is formed.

1628
Olivier Le Jeune, a seven-year-old slave, becomes the first Black person to live in “Canada.”

1725
The first treaty is signed by European settlers and the Mi’kmaq.

1734
Marie-Joseph Angélique, a slave in Montreal, is tortured and hanged after being accused of setting a fire that spread throughout the city.

1749
The English settlement of Halifax is founded, in opposition to previous treaties and occupations. Governor Edward Cornwallis issues a proclamation for Mi’kmaw scalps.

1755
 The expulsion of the Acadians.

1760
Slaves advertised for sale in Halifax.

1783
3,000 Black Loyalists flee America for Nova Scotia. Over 1,000 soon leave and emigrate to Sierra Leone.

1784
The first race riot in Canada occurs when white residents of Shelburne attack and beat Black Loyalist settlers and burn down homes in the nearby Birchtown. None of the rioters face criminal charges.

1791
Mary Postell is re-enslaved by her former owner, Jesse Gray and sold for 100 bushels of potatoes. Gray also attempts to sell her children into slavery. Postell tries to take Gray to court, but Nova Scotia magistrates acquit him.

1831
The Mohawk Institute, Canada’s first residential school, opens and attempts to assimilate Indigenous children.

1832
The African Chapel, later renamed the Cornwallis Street Baptist Church, is established.

1835
The Slavery Abolition Act outlaws slavery in British colonies.

1867
The Dominion of Canada is formed

1869
Métis, led by Louis Riel, fight against the newly formed government in the Red River Rebellion. Canada officially bans abortion.

1885
The Canadian Pacific Railway is completed. Hundreds of Chinese immigrants die during the construction.

1894
The Coloured Hockey League is founded in Nova Scotia, 23 years before the NHL.

1918
Nova Scotian women are granted the right to vote in provincial elections. A year later, Canadian women are given the federal vote.

1919
Gabriel Sylliboy becomes the first Mi’kmaq elected as Grand Chief. The League of Indians of Canada is founded by F. O. Loft to address the country’s failure to recognize land rights. The Department of Indian Affairs attempts to revoke his status in response.

1921
The Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children opens, in part because white orphanages wouldn’t accept Black children.

1923
The Chinese Exclusion Act bans all Chinese immigrants from Canada for 24 years before it’s finally repealed.

1925
Canadian members of the KKK are estimated to number in the tens of thousands.

1930
The first children arrive at the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School.

1931
J. Massey Rhind’s statue of Edward Cornwallis is erected in downtown Halifax.

1933
The Christie Pits riot breaks out between Jewish Torontonians and Nazi supporters.

1940
Women in Quebec are granted the right to vote.

1942
The Canadian government detains some 20,000 Japanese Canadians in internment camps and sells off their homes and businesses to pay for the costs.

1946
Viola Desmond refuses to leave a whites-only area of a New Glasgow theatre and is subsequently arrested.

1960
First Nations individuals are granted the right to vote in federal elections without having to give up treaty rights or Indian Status. An estimated 20,000 Indigenous children are stolen from their families and adopted out to white families during the “Sixties Scoop.”

1966
Chanie Wenjack, a 12-year-old Anishinaabe boy, dies from starvation and exposure as he flees Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School.

1967
The Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission is established. The Shubenacadie residential school closes after having indoctrinated over 1,000 children.

1969
Africville is demolished in the middle of the night, its former residents having been forcibly relocated in the months prior. Bill C-150 decriminalizes abortion, contraception and homosexuality. The federal government’s White Paper proposes to abolish the Indian Act and transfer all responsibility for Indigenous peoples to the provinces.

1973
The Calder case becomes the Supreme Court of Canada’s first Indigenous land claims decision and spurs the federal government to adopt a land claims policy.

1981
Toronto police raid four gay bathhouses and arrest over 300 men during Operation Soap. Mass protests held in response eventually evolve into Toronto’s Pride festival.

1982
The Constitution Act recognizes “existing Aboriginal and treaty rights.” Legal abortion access is discontinued in PEI.

1983
Donald Marshall Jr. is acquitted after serving 11 years after a wrongful murder conviction. Nova Scotia’s last racially segregated school closes.

1989
Fourteen female engineering students are murdered at the University of Montreal.

1990
The Oka Crisis sees thousands of military troops confronting Indigenous activists who are protesting the expansion of a golf course on Mohawk land.

1996
The last federally operated residential school closes.

1997
All education on reserves is handed off from Nova Scotia to the Mi’kmaq.

2003
Kirk Johnson wins a racial profiling case against Halifax police, who had stopped him 28 times over a five-year period.

2005
Same-sex marriage is legalized throughout Canada. The RCMP launch project E-PANA, focusing on the unsolved murders and disappearances of young women along the Highway of Tears.

2007
Canada’s $2-billion settlement with residential school survivors comes into effect. The federal government refuses to sign the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

2008
Stephen Harper publicly apologizes for the residential school system and the forced assimilation of Canada’s Indigenous peoples.

2009
Black Nova Scotian Shayne Howe awakens to find a burning cross with a noose on it placed outside his home.

2010
Halifax officially apologizes for the destruction of Africville. Viola Desmond is granted a posthumous pardon. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission officially launches, two years after it was first created.

2011
Halifax Regional School Board votes to change the name of Cornwallis Junior High to Halifax Central Junior High.

2012
Attawapiskat chief Theresa Spence begins a hunger strike in support of Indigenous rights. The grassroots Idle No More movement is founded.

2013
The Elsipogtog First Nation sets up a blockade against SWN Resources’ fracking exploration.

2014
Premier Stephen McNeil apologizes to former residents of the Nova Scotia Home for Colored Children who suffered decades of physical and sexual abuse.

2015
The Liberals promise to resettle 25,000 Syrian refugees by the end of 2016.

2016
The Canadian government launches a national inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous women and girls. The Supreme Court rules that the legal definition of “Indian” includes Métis and non-status Indigenous peoples.

2017
Six people are killed and 19 injured in the Quebec City mosque shooting.

2017
Bill C-16 grants federal protection to transgender individuals. Prince Edward Island becomes the last province to provide local, legal access to abortion services.