This is part three of a three part blog post series providing historical context to the Idle No More campaign written by Tony Kaye. Tony completed his Master of Arts in history at the University of Saskatchewan. His thesis focused on British colonialism in northern Ghana, and he also studied Treaty History in Canada. His ancestral background is a mixture of Métis, Chinese, and European.
Natives surely questioned what their place could be in a new way of life. Being wards of the state, and under the legal precedent of the treaties, native leaders on their reserves received all kinds of financial payments from the colonizer, but they could not really decide how to spend the money without permission from the Canadian government.
Everyday life changed so much on the colony now that nobody called the colonizer the colonizer anymore. Natives shook each other’s shoulders sternly and often to remind each other that the colonizers were now called Civil Servants, and that the colony was now a nation, and that natives weren’t the colonized now either. They were “Special Interest Groups†and even had special colonizer, uh, Civil Servant members of Parliament to speak to when problems came up. Meanwhile, the top echelon colonizers like Chief Commissioners, Indian Agents, and the NWMP became more recognizable to the present day as Prime Ministers, Premiers, Indian Affairs Ministers, the RCMP, Priests, Teachers, etc. And the Queen…uh, is she still around? Well, people in Canada only seemed to hear from her on the radio these days during Christmas.
But don’t worry, there’s a Governor General now.
Native chiefs received money from the Government of Canada to provide the basics of life for their people. It turned out some of these chiefs appeared to be stealing and mismanaging money that was supposed to care for their reserves. All of this looked really, really shameful because almost all of native people were not finding a place in the modern, better way of life and its utopian benefits. Instead, the opposite was happening. Native people were dying while Settlers flourished to heights of quality of life never recorded before in human memory.
On paper, natives could choose to either live on reserve as Native Indians or leave their reserves and become enfranchised as Canadian Citizens and live in the cities or wherever. Notice how to twenty-first century native eyes this has become an escape-hatch from abject poverty and crime, but to nineteenth century native eyes, leaving the reserve was the final step off traditional land and into oblivion? Interesting what time and historical amnesia can do. In fact, the treaty commissioners engineered this move off reserve as an eventual transition to aid the civilizing process of natives into dominant society. They wanted a slow revolution.
In reality, all of this civilizing was really taking forever to create hard and fast benefits for natives, especially if they chose to leave the reservation and assimilate into city life. The first generation or two after colonization, or pioneering, depending on what side of the Atlantic your ancestors were born on, native people were struggling to carry on with the new and prevailing changes to daily living that dominated the country off reserve. Things like raising children, or needing to earn money, or going to school, or any other part of life that relied on having a firm sense of self and family, were not at all clicking with natives. But could you blame them? Little boys and girls had to face it all alone with no healthy attachments to their parents. Many of the first generations of natives living after treaty were like zombies from the guilt and shame at almost loosing everything they ever had before contact with Europeans, before all this change for the better arrived.
The bad didn’t stop there. Some of the priests and teachers in Residential Schools beat or even murdered or raped native children—by the hundreds—as a cruel way to make them speak English or French but not their mother’s language. Anything but act like a native. Actually, the survival rate for children in the schools from deaths resulting from combined sickness and violence was a face-whitening 50%.
Eventually, other civil servants, teachers, and priests began noticing that more natives than non-natives were in jail for committing crimes. And natives more often lived on the streets or by the river. Or they lived in homeless shelters because they had no family, or they drank Listerine (boiling it first with water to prevent hospitalizing sickness), or their families didn’t know how to care for them, or simply because they wanted to be really alone right now.
“We’ll get back to you about this,†all the experts said, “and look into it. There’s something not right here…â€
Injustice
The life that emerged for Canadian citizens in the twentieth century was supposed to be full of opportunities for peace, order, and good business. To that end, the first Canadian politicians devised bold strategies to convince European migrants to live on the Canadian prairies—once all the natives were put aside somewhere. And, glossing over many unforeseen historical twists and turns, those early ranchers, oilmen, and business executives essentially built Canada into a land easy for the living, especially after the Second World War. It seemed that if a person could acquire a job, an affordable rent or mortgage, and a spouse, you earned all the trappings of a cushy, consumerist, and middle-class North American lifestyle.
So why were all these natives not experiencing these supposed benefits? Why couldn’t they get a job? Why couldn’t they keep their pants on and stay married? And not beat their children? Or their wives? Or husbands? Why couldn’t they finish high school? Or go to university? Why do they drink all the time? Why do they roam the streets at night? Why are they always in trouble with the cops? Why do their leaders have no accountability with the money my taxes pay for? What makes them so special?
I’ll leave it up to you, dear reader, to reflect on why so many natives are left behind in Canadian society while the history of colonialism has drained out of our ideas about the Canadian past. I’ve touched on the consequent physical displacement and familial dislocation that followed the days of treaty making and nation building. We should have some idea now about how longstanding racist ideas about ‘Indians’ have often blinded the public about the historical construction of so many social problems undermining the health and vitality of native society in Canada.
People have different thoughts about how to solve the myriad of difficulties on reserves, and about who is to blame, and, ultimately, who should take the first step. If you are among the many who say First Nations need to take the first step, well, for many decades, they have been trying.
Their first steps have usually included hand-wringing cries for a radical change in the relationship between government and First Nation bands. Their first steps have usually been vocalizations of the need for people to just notice the hundred or so most distressed native reserves in the country. I know a lot of native folk hate the idea of emphasizing the power of colonialism over the history of their communities—they rightly contend that colonialism has not fully extinguished their voice or identities. Actually, it is a common feeling among former colonized peoples to somehow deemphasize their colonial past and point out the continuity of their pre-contact history. It seems the way forward for many colonized people is to start asserting their own identity and voice instead of the many evils committed by the colonizer.
For instance, the voices behind Idle No More already know the colonial linkages between their people and the Canadian government. Their focus for the future seems to build a historical arch or narrative that begins with First Nations culture, then assesses the impact of the contact period, and concludes by emphasizing the eternal strength of First Nations culture.
I’ve heard in the lastest day of global action that First Nation leaders do not want to look to the past but instead want Canadians to find ways to build a new future. The voices behind Idle No More want a change to the paternal relationship that persists in the national DNA holding together the reserve system. They also want the rest of the country to get up to speed on a larger perspective of the status quo and see that government responsibilities to Native communities do not come from some pitiful kind of charity or development portfolio. Instead, I’ve heard heartfelt and proud speeches from elders and activists in the Idle No More movement try to remind us that the treaties are indispensible threads that knit together the fabric of everything that defines Canada for both settler and native.
First Nation communities are not a gone astray recipient of the public purse, like a corrupt municipality or funding body, even though they receive payments from the federal government. They are foundational diplomatic agreements that are responsible for founding the nation of Canada. Native reservations are the remnants of distinct pre-contact nations whose to date relationship with Canada has been primarily based around the slow and total subjugation of native culture. The point of learning this history is to begin privileging the voices of First Nations in movements like Idle No More so the relationship in Canada can change from paternalism to partnership.