Soundbite Histories

Daniel R. Meister

It’s part of the craft of writing: a “killer quote” that powerfully demonstrates the point the author is trying to make. Taken from a primary source, it can become the most quoted part of the secondary piece in which it appears. And when loosed from its moorings to the publication that contextualizes it, the quote is carried into the murkier waters of online venues and social media platforms where it is transformed from illustration into soundbite. This is bad enough, but what happens if a quotation was inaccurate to begin with?

In researching the origins of the “Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy, 1969,” I encountered a quote nearly everywhere I looked. Responding to criticisms of the White Paper, Pierre Trudeau reportedly said: 

“We’ll keep them in the ghetto as long as they want.”

Did the prime minister really say that? I had no idea, so I set out to track down the original source, eventually tracing it to a passage in a book:

In a television interview in March 1970, Trudeau left little doubt as to how he felt history would unfold if Indians rejected the White Paper. “We are not forcing anyone to do anything,” he said. “We’ll keep them in the ghetto as long as they want.”^[1]

The use of the term “ghetto” is particularly jarring. The word dates back centuries and originally referred to a segregated Jewish community in Venice. But by the mid-1960s it had become a racialized term that, in the North American context, specifically referred to African American urban communities. It was associated with poverty and despair and carried a great deal of stigma.^[2]

Trudeau had previously used this term—but in reference to French Canadians, not Indigenous peoples. In his 1968 book, Federalism and the French Canadians, Trudeau repeatedly warned against closing off Quebec society and thereby making it a powerless “ghetto.”^[3] But did he subsequently promise to keep Indigenous peoples in one?

The book in which the quote appears does not have notes but rather a bibliography arranged by chapter, in which there is no mention of a specific interview, and none of the published work it cites contain this line. I next turned to the interviews themselves. In the Trudeau Fonds at Library and Archives Canada, there are only two transcripts for interviews given in March 1970. The first is an interview with Hugh Downs for the NBC’s “Today” show, recorded on March 7 in Igloolik, in which the phrase does not appear. And the second is a French-language interview with Radio-Canada, conducted on March 20, where again the line is not uttered.^[4]

A theory, then, on its origins. The quote is most likely a corruption of lines from an earlier address:

… this year, we came up with a proposal – it is a policy paper on the Indian problem. It proposes a set of solutions, it doesn’t impose them on anybody, it proposes them. Not only to the Indians but to all Canadians … And it says – we’re at a crossroads, we can go on treating the Indians as having a special status; we can go on adding bricks of discrimination around the ghetto in which they live and, at the same time, perhaps helping them preserve certain cultural traits and certain ancestral rights or we can say: You’re at a cross-roads, the time is now to decide whether the Indians will be a race apart in Canada or whether they will be Canadians of full status. And this is a difficult choice … and I don’t think we want to try and force the pace on them any more than we can force it on the rest of Canadians.^[5]

Here we have the same metaphor of the “ghetto,” and the government’s role in keeping Indigenous peoples in it, and a discussion of the timeline. But the meaning is quite different. 

Most recent uses of the quote place it in the context of Trudeau responding to having to retract the “White Paper.” They also add that he said the line in anger. But the White Paper was never officially retracted, Trudeau’s definitive response occurred not in remarks made in 1969 but rather in 1970, and his mood at that time was not of anger but of defeat. 

Trudeau met with Indigenous leaders in the Railway Committee Room of the Parliament buildings on 4 June 1970. The hastily arranged meeting came at the insistence of these leaders who wanted to present Trudeau with Citizens Plus, the Alberta Indian Association’s position paper that the National Indian Brotherhood had endorsed as their official response to the White Paper.^[6] Senior civil servants took the position beforehand that Trudeau would receive the text, commonly known as the Red Paper, but would not offer a substantial response at that time beyond a promise to give it serious study. Yet quite the opposite occurred. 

As one government official put it, Trudeau’s response “reflected his ‘Gallic temperament’ more than his normal rational style of operation.” Sally Weaver, in her painstakingly researched book, notes that Trudeau’s statement had “all the characteristics of an impromptu and candid reply.”^[7] Surprising all those present, Trudeau admitted that “the government had failed in its attempts to resolve the issues”:

And I’m sure that we were very naïve in some of the statements we made in the paper. We had perhaps the prejudices of small ‘l’ liberals and white men at that, who thought that equality meant the same law for everybody … we have learnt in the process that perhaps we were a bit too theoretical, we were a bit too abstract, we were not … perhaps pragmatic or understanding enough, and that’s fine. We are here to discuss this.

According to Weaver, “as he continued to talk, Trudeau’s approach became more informal, and his parting comments shocked the [Indigenous] audience” – in a positive way:

But let me just say that we will be meeting again, and we will be furthering the dialogue, and let me just say that we’re in no hurry if you’re not. You know, a hundred years has been a long time and if you don’t want an answer in another year, we’ll take two, three, five, ten, or twenty – the time you people decide to come to grips with this problem. And we won’t force any solution on you, because we are not looking for any particular solution.^[8]

Weaver continues: “Trudeau’s statements represented the first major political victory for the Indian movement … his response to the Red Paper undercut the [DIAND’s] efforts to carry the policy forward. The outcome of the meeting was not welcomed by some department officials who felt, as one of them phrased it, ‘the policy could have been carried out with more vigour and courage.’ Another official was of the same opinion: ‘If we had made it firm, the Indians would have accepted it. They would have had to; they had in the past.’”^[9]

Trudeau’s position on “Aboriginal Rights” was complex and evolved over time. During a televised interview during the final days of the 1968 election, he was asked what he was planning to do for Indigenous people. He replied: “Here, like so many Canadian politicians, I don’t know enough about the Indians. I feel strongly the need to find solutions. I can only say it is a problem I am willing to discuss with sociologists and with people who know something about it. I am sorry.”^[10] This position shifted to intransigence, a refusal to recognize “Aboriginal Rights”; to some degree of recognition of the wrongheadedness of his government’s initial approach; and ultimately to overseeing the recognition and affirmation of “aboriginal and treaty rights” in Section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982.

This trajectory cannot be captured in any quote; sometimes, a soundbite simply isn’t sufficient.

Daniel R. Meister is an Adjunct Research Professor in the Department of History at St. Thomas University who is researching the history of Canada’s policy of multiculturalism. He is a Regular Contributor to Active History.

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Notes

^[1] Pauline Comeau and Aldo Santin, First Canadians: A Profile of Canada’s Native People Today (Toronto: Lorimer, 1990), 10.

^[2] See Bruce Haynes and Ray Hutchinson, “Symposium on the Ghetto.s: The Ghettos: Origins, History, Discourse,” City & Community 7, no. 4 (Dec. 2008): 347-52.

^[3] Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Federalism and the French Canadians (Toronto: Macmillan, 1968), 42, 164, and 200. The book was originally published in French a year prior.

^[4] “Transcript of Prime Minister’s Interview with Hugh Downs for NBC ‘Today’ Show Recorded at Igloolik, Saturday, March 7, 1970,” and “Transcription de l’entrevue du Premier Ministre, Radio-Canada, le 20 mars 1970,” both in vol. 13, MG26 O13, Pierre Elliott Trudeau fonds, Library and Archives Canada (LAC).

^[5] “Transcript of the Prime Minister’s Remarks at the Vancouver Liberal Association Dinner Seaforth Armories, Vancouver B.C. August 8, 1969,” vol. 42, MC26 O13, LAC. The relevant portion of these remarks are also available online. During this same speech, Trudeau also made another statement that has been widely quoted since. Modifying his earlier writing on federalism, and drawing on Renan, he remarked: “We can’t recognize aboriginal rights because no society can be built on historical might-have-beens. We must forget many things if we want to live together as Canadians.” See ibid., 12; and Trudeau, Federalism and the French Canadians, 192.

^[6] Sally M. Weaver, Making Canadian Indian Policy: The Hidden Agenda, 1968-1970 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), 183-84.

^[7] Weaver, Making Canadian Indian Policy, 184-85.

^[8] Weaver, Making Canadian Indian Policy, 185. See also Anthony Westell, Paradox: Trudeau as Prime Minister (Scarborough, ON: Prentice-Hall, 1972, 180-81.

^[9] Weaver, Making Canadian Indian Policy, 186.

^[10] Quoted in Robert Wright, Trudeaumania: The Rise to Power of Pierre Elliott Trudeau (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2016), 259.