The Little Emperor, who was later knighted for his remarkable service to King and Queen and country, instructed his post factors to deal with any offspring that might result from his endless assignations. He told them to take care of the offspring only if born “in the proper time and of the right colour.”
The unborn of “country wives” faced an uncertain future and, at times, no future at all. The white men who fathered these children were under no obligation to help care for them and would do so only if they were particularly fond of the woman and had the means, which few did. At Fort Vancouver, drastic measures were often the order of the day. According to Nancy Janovicek and Joy Parr in Histories of Canadian Children and Youth, there was concern at the Fort that fetuses of mixed blood were larger, particularly the heads, making labour difficult to impossible for small-framed Native women. So a system was devised whereby a crochet hook would perforate the skull of the fetus, drain out the brain, crush the skull, and then remove the dead fetus.
This half of North America didn’t have the “Indian Wars” that so dominated the expansion of the United States. By the 1870s Washington was spending $20 million a year in the quest to conquer, once and for all, the American Plains Indians. In Canada, even during a time of festering Métis rebellion in the Canadian prairies, the Mounted Police were spending one-fiftieth that amount, $400,000.
Of course relations weren’t always more peaceful in the land that would ultimately be called Canada. There was violence in all directions—Native against Native, Europeans against Natives, Natives against Europeans. The most infamous assault by Natives on Europeans occurred in March 1649, when Iroquois warriors attacked a Huron settlement at Saint-Ignace near modern-day Midland, Ontario, creating martyrs out of the two priests, Jean de Brébeuf and Gabriel Lalemant, whom the Iroquois tortured to death.
There were atrocities on both sides, of course, and though a balance sheet is long past possible, the European—and, later, white Canadian— side of the ledger has little, if anything, to commend it:
1534: Explorer Jacques Cartier, searching for a route to China, comes upon the Stadacona fishing along the Gaspé shores. He erects a nine-metre cross bearing the words “Vive le Roi de France,” claiming the new land for France. When the chief, Donnacona, complains, Cartier says it’s merely a landmark. Cartier later returns and seizes Donnacona, taking the chief, his sons, and seven others to France, where within a few years they all die in misery.
1611: Henry Hudson establishes the fur trade in James Bay, ripping off the first Indian who comes to trade by demanding twice as many pelts as offered for a mere hatchet.
1685: The governor of New France, Marquis de Denonville, writes that Indians “pass on to us a great degree of what is most malicious in them and take themselves only what is bad and vicious in us.”
1763: Jeffrey Amherst, commander-in-chief of British North America, advises his successor “to infect the Indians with sheets upon which smallpox patients have been lying, or by any other means which may serve to exterminate this accursed race.”
1829: Beothuks, which once numbered as high as two thousand in 1800, have all vanished from the British colony of Newfoundland. Some were massacred for such crimes as stealing salted fish to fight off starvation.
1830: Sir George Murray, secretary of state, announces in London that the new occupants of America “regard the natives as an irreclaimable race, and as inconvenient neighbors whom it was desirable ultimately wholly to remove.”
1841: Governor Lord Sydenham comments that “the Indian … does not become a good settler, he does not become an agricultural-ist or a mechanic. He does become a drunkard and a debauchee, and his females and family follow the same course. He occupies valuable land, unprofitably to himself and injuriously to the country. He gives infinite trouble to the government.”
1873: Prairie whisky traders attack a band of Assiniboine they believed, wrongly, had stolen horses, killing at least twenty men, women, and children and burning down their village in what became known as the Cypress Hills Massacre.
1880: According to the Indian Act, which passes in Parliament, “The term person means an individual other than an Indian.”
1884: The Government of Canada outlaws the potlatch—the sharing and gift-giving feast that was at the cornerstone of tribal society in British Columbia. The feast is also considered “government” for the Nisga’a and various other tribes of the West Coast. Attendance at a potlatch is made punishable by jail terms of two to six months.
1885: Poundmaker, the Plains Cree chief who toured the West in boisterous support of the Canadian government, is thrown into prison for three years. His crime lies in not doing enough to keep young Indians from joining the Riel Rebellion.
1886: Prime Minister John A. Macdonald tells the House of Commons that Indians “are simply living on the benevolence and charity of the Canadian Parliament, and, as the old adage says, beggars should not be choosers.”
1905: Indian Commissioner Duncan Campbell Scott predicts Indian “civilization” might be attainable in four centuries. Might be.
1909: Captain Joseph Elzéar Bernier, in claiming one of the Arctic islands, takes his rifle and fires nineteen shots in the air. “I instructed an Eskimo to fire the 20th,” he reports back, “telling him he was now a Canadian.”
1920: The Indian Act is amended to require compulsory school attendance of Indian children. The plan is to get the youngsters to abandon the “savage” life of their parents and join the “civilization” of white society. As deputy superintendent Duncan Campbell Scott so succinctly puts it, “Our object is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic, and there is no Indian question and no Indian department.”
1927: Parliament passes a law making it illegal for anyone, Indian or not, to raise money for the purpose of arguing Indian rights. 1930: An Indian found in a poolroom means thirty days in jail for both Indian and poolroom owner.
1945: Veterans of both World Wars have to sign their treaty rights away to fight for their country. On return, they’re not allowed to join the Royal Canadian Legion and are given none of the vast support services offered to other returning veterans.
1951: The law prohibiting potlatch ceremonies is finally lifted after sixty-seven years.
1961: Aboriginals are given the right to vote in federal elections, several decades after Canadian women fought for and won the same right.
IN 1975, the same year Grand Chief Billy Diamond signed the James Bay Agreement on behalf of the Crees of northern Quebec, the country’s minister of defence talked about Canada’s Aboriginal population in a Maclean’s magazine profile. “What did they ever do for Canada?” James Richardson asked. “Did they discover oil? They didn’t even invent the wheel. Why, when we came here, they were still dragging things around on two sticks.”
Such thinking, common then, only slightly less common now, gives some sense of the world Billy Diamond was up against. It must have seemed an impossible task to challenge such formidable forces as the federal and provincial governments and international hydroelectric developers. The surveys had been done, the big machinery was already in place, dams were being constructed, work camps were in full force, and the first world oil energy crisis had both the government of Quebec and the government of Canada looking most favourably upon alternative sources. Particularly such renewable sources as the untapped potential of the rivers pouring into James Bay. As Premier Robert Bourassa said, “What a waste!”
The 1970s were a time of increasing confrontation, mostly verbal, between Native and non-Native forces. Some of the nastiest exchanges took place in the early days of Justice Thomas Berger’s long inquiry into the social, environmental, and economic impact of the proposed Mackenzie Valley Pipeline. A landmark ruling by the Supreme Court in the Calder case had opened the door to an explosion of land claims, with the newly formed Dene Nation of the Northwest Territories among the most confrontational and, ultimately, pers
uasive. When Berger finally reported in 1977 he recommended that land claims be settled before any northern development began. Then, with the energy crisis slowly easing, the competing companies eventually pulled out and forgot all about the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline for the next thirty years.
One of the Alberta Natives who testified before that inquiry in the spring of 1976 was Nelson Small Legs Jr. Like Billy Diamond, Small Legs was considered to be on the leading edge of the emerging new generation of Aboriginal leadership. Two days after he testified, however, Small Legs took his own life. He left behind a suicide note: “I give my life in protest to the Canadian government for its treatment of Indian people for the past 100 years.”
Nelson Small Legs Jr. also left a second note, this one demanding a full investigation of the conduct of the federal Department of Indian Affairs. The first note became a rallying cry for increasingly confrontational young Aboriginals. The second note was ignored.
More than a dozen years after Aboriginal rights were headline news during the James Bay court battles and the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline hearings, two events put Aboriginal issues back on the front pages and evening news.
Meech Lake and Oka.
IT WAS ELIJAH HARPER JR., a forty-one-year-old Cree from Red Sucker Lake, Manitoba, who effectively killed the Meech Lake Accord that was supposed to bring Quebec into the constitutional fold and fix Confederation once and for all. The federal politicians who pushed the accord, as well as much of the media that supported it, insisted on placing the bulk of the blame for its failure on one premier, Newfoundland’s Clyde Wells. Wells had taken power two years into the accord and become increasingly critical as final ratification approached on June 23, 1990.
Wells’s rising concern was pivotal. His eloquent arguments against the devolution of so much power to the provinces had a huge effect on public opinion. But it was Harper who denied unanimity. He killed the accord and knew instantly that Wells would get the blame. What politician—what editorial writer, for that matter—would risk the political incorrectness of blaming a Native?
Harper accepted that the accord offered much to Quebec, but recognition of Quebec, one way or the other, had nothing to do with his decision. Meech Lake, in the opinion of many Native leaders, offered absolutely nothing—zero—to the Aboriginals of Canada. Quebec might have been left out of the 1982 Constitution Act because it refused to sign, but Natives also felt their interests had been largely ignored during the years leading up to repatriation. They had launched several unsuccessful protest trips to London in an effort to get the British Parliament and the Queen to ensure that the British government still had a responsibility for Canadian Aboriginals. Their fear was that the “sacred” rights of the 1763 Royal Proclamation would never be properly protected in the new Constitution if those obligations were to rest with Canada rather than the United Kingdom. As it turned out, the Constitution Act did recognize those rights, and time would suggest that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms will ultimately prove the best protection of all. At the time of Meech, however, Natives felt that, once again, they were being left out.
In Reflections of a Siamese Twin, John Ralston Saul writes that from the middle of the sixteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth Natives were held to be equal to European immigrants and that neither the French nor the English could have done without their assistance and cooperation. To him, Natives make up a “triangular reality” that is Canada.
Meech Lake not only contained nothing for Aboriginal Canadians, it increased provincial powers. And Aboriginals believed they had every reason to fear such a shift.
Between June 12 and June 21, 1990, New Democratic member Elijah Harper had said “No, Mr. Speaker” eight different times to deny the unanimity required to table the accord for ratification. On June 22, with only Manitoba and Newfoundland outstanding, there would be one final chance before the houses rose for the weekend for both provinces to come on board. Failure to do so, politicians and most of the media were saying, would mean the end of Canada. The pressure on Harper in Manitoba and on Wells in St. John’s was almost unbearable.
The national media, naturally, flew off to both provincial capitals for the showdown. Manitoba was expected to go first, and if the accord fell in its legislature, whatever happened in the Newfoundland House of Assembly would be academic. If Harper buckled and Manitoba approved the accord the pressures of the entire country would fall on Wells, who was balking and insisting on hearing first from his people.
I was dispatched to Winnipeg. But so, it seemed, was everyone else. Not only was the national media taking over most of the hotel space around the legislature, the Prime Minister’s Office had sent an entire team of legal arm-twisters to try to talk some sense into Harper. The shy, ponytailed Native must not be allowed to destroy the country over some minor point—Aboriginal inclusion in the Constitution—that could easily be cleared up at a later date.
Trouble was, no one could find him. Native leaders from across the country and Harper’s own extended family had also descended on the capital, and they had ensconced Harper in a place where no one could reach him.
That’s where Billy Diamond came in. I called Billy in Waskaganish and he put in a call to Ovide Mercredi, who was then with the Assembly of First Nations. Mercredi in turn contacted Phil Fontaine, the Manitoba leader in the AFN and a close friend of Harper’s. I was lying on the carefully made bed of my hotel room, wondering what I might write about with absolutely no access to the main story, when the telephone rang.
It was Phil Fontaine.
“Meet us here,” he said, giving me directions to a downtown corner.
I was met by two Native leaders and a white lawyer. We shook hands and they walked me to a hotel several blocks away from the legislature. We got in the elevator and rose to a high floor with a huge, multi-roomed suite in one corner.
There, sitting in a chair by the window, holding an eagle feather in his hand while reading quietly from a black Bible, was Elijah Harper.
“You can stay the night,” I was told. “No one’s going to get any sleep around here.”
It was a remarkable experience. The man who—some were saying— held the very future of his country in his hands was holding the feather of a bird, periodically spinning it. He sat quietly, though the large room was anything but quiet. There were leaders like Fontaine and Chief Gary Potts of the Bear Island band in northern Ontario, cousins and brothers of Harper, Crees down from Red Sucker Lake, national leaders, lawyers, friends, and the curious.
The only ones missing were the federal negotiators, who kept calling and demanding a meeting they never got, and the mainstream media, with one lucky exception.
There was room-service food and coffee. Elijah Harper, who spoke so softly it was sometimes difficult to hear him, was interested in talking about anything but the pressures and the accord, and so we talked about residential schools and hockey and his own fascinating life.
Harper, like Billy Diamond, was born on a trapline in the winter of 1949. He was the second of thirteen children Allen and Ethel Harper of Red Sucker Lake would have, so many children that Elijah was raised by his grandparents, good and quiet people who clung to the “heathen ways” of the Cree traditional teachings.
At age eight, again like Billy Diamond, he was sent off to residential school; but for him it didn’t much take. He lasted eight unhappy years and then returned to Red Sucker Lake to take up what he believed would be his life calling: trapping.
Like so many who’d gone through the experience of residential school, he found he was straddling two worlds, the footing unsteady in both. Like the others, he believed, wrongly, that he was alone. It is the mark of his generation to feel that way and only later to discover that others, of similar experience, are much the same. They have a special bond.
The story of the residential schools in Canada is one of shame and of sexual and psychological abuse. Billy Diamond, who would say he had one of the better residential school experiences at Moose Fa
ctory, told me that “I lost my foundation years as a child. I was forced to develop into manhood without parental guidance. I lost everything as a Cree child for thirteen years and those years were filled with loneliness and isolation, with punishment and torture and forcible confinement.” And he, remember, was one of the lucky ones.
It is, therefore, somewhat just that these same schools would educate a generation of smart, worldly, uncowed Native leaders who would one day lead the fight for retribution. Almost all the young Aboriginals who would become pivotal to advances made in the last quarter of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first came out of this experience: Nellie Cournoyer of the Inuvialuit, Georges Erasmus of the Dene Nation, Jim Antoine of the Northwest Territories, Fontaine, Mercredi, Diamond, Harper…. The list is long, and impressive. Many, like Phil Fontaine, had a hideous, abusive experience, but all took what they could use from the books and teachers to move on to legal careers and leadership roles.
At the end of 2006 an estimated 80,000 former residential school students became eligible for compensation that averaged $24,000. The 12,000 to 20,000 who suffered more extreme abuse, both physical and sexual, could collect an additional $5,000 to $275,000. The settlements showed that one lesson learned at these schools was to fight back.
Elijah Harper had quit his horrendous residential school experience and decided to live as a trapper. But school, without his even realizing it, had opened his eyes to other possibilities, and he grew so upset with conditions back on the reserve that he decided to head back to school with a new attitude and new ambition. He would get an education, and then he would return to Red Sucker Lake and work to improve things for the small band.
He took courses and was eventually accepted by the University of Manitoba, where he linked up with another angry young Native, Ovide Mercredi. Their ever-widening circle would include the likes of Phil Fontaine and Moses Okimaw, who would also end up in Winnipeg in the third week of June 1990.
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