Provoked by @ddupreejr's thread on US Presidents sucking and some "Canada's better!" comments: A LONG thread on why Canada isn't much better than the States when it comes to being racist. This starts way back with the first colonists, with American events added for context.

1490s, King Henry VII commissioned Cristoforo Coumbo AND Giovanni Caboto (John Cabot) to conquer lands for spices and slaves. In the Northern East Coast, Caboto found villages, but no people. In 1997, Ottawa spent over $20 million to celebrate his attempts to enslave Indigenous

1530s, Mi'kmaq and Iroquois peoples helped Jacques Cartier and his men survive the winter, and he repaid them by capturing Chief Donnacona and 9 others to bring back to France. He promised to return them in a year, but Donnacona died in France in 1939.

1570s, Martin Frobisher traded with the Inuit of Baffin Island, but then kidnapped one to barter with when his men went missing. His men were never found. It appears we were a little kidnappy back in the day. And he was pretty much a pirate.

1600s, Samuel de Champlain seemed to get on well with the Huron and Algonquin peoples, as far as settlers go. He made treaties with them and wanted them to intermarry with the French to become one people, and not in a cultural destroying way even.

Champlain hired Mathieu da Costa as an interpreter. He was New France's first Black citizen, before the Code Noir came into effect in 1685 and French colonies had the right to enslave Black and Indigenous peoples and to expel all Jewish people from the area.

In 1670, a couple French guys went North for better furs. The French didn't support that, but the Brits, King Charles I and Prince Rupert, helped fund the Hudson Bay Company, and granted a company full rights on Rupert's Land all around Hudson Bay.

Then in 1763, when Britain took over New France, the Royal Proclamation, aka "Indian Magna Carta," guaranteed property rights for all Indigenous people to appease them, which meant more Black people enslaved instead.

Even Mohawk Chief Joseph Brant (Thayendanegea) owned Black slaves, including Sophia Burthen Pooley, sold to him when she was just 5-years-old.

In 1777, many slaves in the British colony of Québec escaped to Vermont, when it became the first state to abolish slavery. The original "underground railway" went north to south!

In the late 1700s, Britain gave freedom to any slaves in the colonies that fought with them against Americans. 3,000 "Black Loyalists" settled in the maritimes. They gave 10km on either side of the entire Grand River, the Haldimand Tract, to the Six Nations.

While the states drafted the Fugitive Slave Act, which made it illegal to help free slaves, Upper Canada made the Act to Limit Slavery which freed any enslaved people once they got here (1st in Brit Empire!). BUT, many freed slaves were kept as indentured servants 7 extra years.

1799 saw our first general strike. The First Nations, Métis, French, and Scottish voyageurs working for the Hudson Bay Company demanded better pay. HBC fired them, so they took their canoes and went to work for the rival North West Company. The competitors merged 20 yrs later.

In 1807 it became illegal to buy or sell people throughout the entire British Empire. Then Upper Canada helped over 30,000 people to freedom in the "Underground Railroad" from 1810-35 (name in the 1830s), and in 1833 any slaves in any British colony were freed.

A few years earlier, in 1830, in the States they rounded up 100,000 Indigenous to walk the Trail of Tears, many died on the way (later used as a strategy by Hitler), while in 1831, Upper Canada opened its first residential school in Brantford. We opted for a cultural genocide.

Seneca Village in New York and Africville in Nova Scotia were communities where former slaves lived free from persecution but with zero infrastructure. Both were later destroyed: Seneca Village became Central Park in 1857, and Africville was bulldozed/burned down in the 1960s.

The States had Jim Crow laws after emancipation, but many areas in Canada had specific segregationist laws, including separate schools or sometimes Black children were just denied education. Segregation laws were on the books until the 1980s in places. This clipping is from 1922:

AND THEN, we became "official" and had Prime Ministers. I'm just going to do a few of them. Lots were just in for a few months, and others were in power over and over again because we don't have term limits. John A. MacDonald was in office for 19 years in total.

His statue keeps getting dumped with red paint here. He created the Northwest Mounted Police to get the Indigenous out of the way of the coming railway system, and he took advantage of starvation from colonist overhunting in the prairies to drive Indigenous onto reserves.

Both Canada and the U.S. gave away plots of land of 160 acres each to new settlers, but Canada's Treaty 1&2 never compensated the Indigenous for the land we divvied up. We just acknowledge that we live on stolen land regularly.

MacDonald had a 5 year break from office, when Alexander Mackenzie took over to solidify The Indian Act, to school the Indian out of the child. It undid the Royal Proclamation, took back land, banned culture, and started gender-based restrictions in status identification.

Macdonald got back into power to have Louis Riel arrested and hanged, and then John A. forced Indigenous children to watch the hangings of 8 warriors at Battleford. This was 5 years before 150 Lakota were killed at Wounded Knee, North Dakota.

The hanging came just a few weeks after the famous last spike in the railway, where we convinced Chinese workers to come here to risk their lives for very low pay, hundreds died, and then charged them a head tax in case they tried to stick around after finishing the railway.

Wilfrid Laurier rescinded the rights of "Status Indians" to vote (the few who could under the previous law), and banned "undesirable races" from entering Canada, just after the NAACP was formed in the States in part by W.E.B. Du Bois who, fun fact, made infographics like this:

During WWI, we interned 4,000 Ukrainians in camps and put 80,000 others to work. We both had suffragettes fighting for the vote for women - white women - but the US had the Night of Terror when 33 women were tortured for fighting for the vote. Our Nellie was a eugenicist though!

Here's Part 2: https://twitter.com/MarieSnyder27/status/1285213946832723969