I wasn’t expecting a school class trip to invoke despair about the state of Canadian history. But it happened anyway.
It shouldn’t have been a surprise. Canada has a long history of national forgetting and cultural erasure. We know about some parts of this — about the assimilation efforts of residential schools, most notably.
But less often noticed is the weird Canadian tradition of deliberately misrepresenting and then forgetting large chunks of our national story in the interest of reaching out to cultural minorities.
