Category Archives: Indigenous Issues

Emigration to Canada is not entirely a pretty Story

2018 Trip to Iceland, Indigenous Issues

 

We had a very interesting visit in Hofsós Iceland. It is a beautiful little fishing village. But there is more to this village than fishing.

Hofsós also has an interesting  Museum of Emigration. This museum told a very interesting story. In the second half of the 19thcentury Iceland experienced climate change. As conditions got colder, farmer got more difficult. Life was harsh. Many people faced starvation. This led to a sharp increase in poverty and deprivation. Many people longed for a better life. Many were attracted by stories from agents of the Canadian and American governments of better conditions in North America.

Canada offered migrants from Iceland free land.  This was very hard to resist. This was the time in Canada when the government wanted to populate the west with white migrants from Europe. Mennonites were also offered free land. Mennonites were even promised freedom from military conscription.  Unfortunately many of the migrants did not understand what they were getting into. Icelanders, for example, did not know what to do with trees. After all they came from a treeless island. They did not understand how to use the tools they were given. They had no experience with the type of farming that was required to succeed in North America. As a result times were very difficult for these migrants to North America.

Many in our group of tourists were amazed that Canada would offer these people free land. How generous! It was generous. However it was not all selfless generosity.

There is another side to this story. This was also the time during which the Canadian government was trying to “clear the plains” to use an expression used by James Daschuk in his fine book, by that name, Clearing the Plains.

The government of Canada, after it was formed in 1867, wanted to pacify the Plains Indians, as they were referred to at the time, and avoid the messy and costly wars of conquest in the United States. The American government in one year spent 25% of its budget on these wars. It was vital to the plans of the Canadian government that Indians be kept on their reserves. As a result it was unlawful for any of them to leave the reserves without the approval of the government Indian agents.  To encourage the Indians to go to the reserves and then to stay there the government employed draconian tactics. Those tactics did not exclude enforced starvation! As Daschuk said, “while the Indians were starving, in many cases to death, the authorities withheld food that was available.”[1]

Daschuk added, “Instead of supplying rations to famine-stricken populations, ‘in a national famine’, As Morris had promised rations were used as a means of coercing Indians into submitting to treaty.”[2]“Submitting to Treaty” meant, entering into a treaty with the federal government and then staying on the Reserve, keeping the plains clear instead for European immigrants. The Canadian government wanted to fill the plains with white Europeans, after first removing the natural impediments—i.e. the indigenous people. What makes this even more remarkable, is that many of the indigenous people wanted to farm the land. They wanted to learn from the Canadians how to farm. the Canadian government often stood in their way preventing that from happening.

Canada was remarkably generous to the European immigrants. To the indigenous people they had displaced they were not so generous. It was not all a matter of kindness and light. I do not criticize the Europeans for accepting the invitation to move.  I will criticize their descendants however, if they choose to ignore the fact that their opportunity came in part at the expense of local people. They should not forget that. None of us should forget that.

[1]James Daschuk, Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life, (2013) p. 113

[2]James Daschuk, Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life, (2013) p. 114

Pigs in Heaven

Books, Indigenous Issues

Pigs in Heaven is a sequel to Kingsolver’s Bean Tree her amazing book about a young girl Taylor on the run from a suffocating life in Kentucky where she is scared she is going to get pregnant like all the girls in her small town of Pittman. Instead  on the way to Arizona she stops at service station/restaurant in the middle of nowhere, an Indian Reservation in Oklahoma, where she is “given” a 3-year old child that is a physical and mental wreck after suffering unspecified but obviously serious abuse. The young woman who gives her away had informal custody of the child when her sister, the mother, was unable to take care of the child. To save the young child from further abuse, in desperation she gives her up to a passing young white girl, Taylor. The book describes the strong bond that develops between the mother, Taylor, and her young child, Turtle. She adopts the name Turtle because she holds onto Taylor with a grip as tight as that of a turtle. She has found her safe harbour and won’t let go.

Pigs in Heaven continues the story of Taylor and Turtle 3 years later. I do not want to give away the plot. I hate reading reviews that do that. The book involves various ethical issues that arise out of the relationship of adoptive mother and child.

One of the characters in the book is a Native American woman with the ominous name of Annawake Fourkiller. Ominous name or not, Fourkiller, is smart and not without empathy. As she says, “I want to do the best for the most people.” That is a simple, but noble goal. Unfortunately life is not always simple, for she has a problem. It is a complicated problem. She thinks that like Shakespeare said, “I have to be cruel in order to be kind.”

The problem arises out of the deep gulf between Native American and American world views. Jax (named after the beer), Taylor’s loveable rogue boyfriend, a member of a band called appropriately, Irascible Children, explains the American ethos this way: “I heard the usual American thing. If you’re industrious and have clean thoughts you will grow up to be vice president of Motorola.” Annawake astutely diagnoses Jax’s attitude as typically American–individualistic. “Do right by yourself,” she says.

She contrasts that view with her own arising out of her Cherokee heritage. She said, “I had a hundred and one childhood myths and they all added more or less up to ‘Do right by your people.” She asks Jax if that is so bad. It’s clearly not bad, but its not the same as Jax’s myth. And there arises the conflict. It is a fascinating conflict. Annawake Fourkiller says “Some people say religion is finding yourself, and some people say it’s losing yourself in a crowd.”Jax can’t understand how that is possible. She says you lose yourself in a crowd at a dance. “Not like American Bandstand, not recreational dancing, it’s ceremonial. A group thing. It’s church for us.”

Of course part of the problem is Taylor. She is impetuous; she is a rebel. We knew that from the first book. We know that more deeply after reading the second. As her mother, Alice, says, “She’s independent as a hog on ice.” The relationship between Taylor and her mother also informs this book. Two tenacious mother/daughter relationships. As Alice says, “When you are given a brilliant child, you polish her and let her shine. The universe makes allowances.”But it also delivers powerful challenges.

At the end (which I don’t want to give away) the characters get a rare chance–“one of those rare chances life gives us to try and be the very best we are.” The book is about what they do with those chances. This is a wonderful book. I recommend it to one and all. Kingsolver is a great novelist. I am not sure she has got all the credit she deserves.

Children that Don’t Come Back        

Fat Opinions, Indigenous Issues

 

The stories of Canada’s colonial history keep popping up and invariably it seems, they reveal horrendous treatment of Indigenous People in Canada by the dominant society. The latest that I heard about was the story of the Atikamekw First Nation in remote northern Quebec near Wemotaci. The story was shown on CBC National News.

In the 1970s children who needed medical attention in that First Nations Community had to be taken off reserve to southern hospitals a 100 km. away or more. Unfortunately a number of these children were taken away “never to return again.”

Alice Petugauy was a mother of 15 children. She said she was able to take care of all of her children except one—a daughter Diane. Diane had pneumonia and had to get health care that was not available in their community. She was taken away to the hospital but did not return. When her mother inquired of the authorities what happened to her daughter she was told, “Don’t worry about it. You have other children.”

Alice Petugauy was not satisfied with this response and made further inquiries. It took her a long time to get more information. Eventually, years later, she learned that according to provincial records Diane  had been “abandoned.” Of course this was not true. Alice learned that she had signed a document that gave up custody of her child. At the time she signed, the document had been translated into her language by a local priest, because she could not read French. She thought she was consenting to health treatment for her daughter. She was actually saying good-bye to her daughter.

A local social worker, Diane Beliveau, said that it was common in the Atikamekw community for children to be apprehended by Child Protection Services without good reason. Little or not evidence was needed to justify the apprehension. Authorities were predisposed to apprehend.

Many of these children never returned but surprisingly Diane did. She returned as an adult many years later and was reunited with her family including her twin brother. However, by then she could not speak the Atikamekw language and had lost the culture completely. As she said, “Something is missing in me. Something I have lost and will never be able to get back.”

I know that some Canadians are getting tired of hearing apologies from their Prime Minister. They want the Prime Minister to be more like George W. Bush who said, “I am not an apologizing kind of guy.” However, the actions of provincial authorities and all who acquiesced in such actions are despicable. The cultural leaders of the colonizing people—us white guys—have a lot to answer for. Will one more apology be needed? What is much more likely is that many more apologies will be needed.

I know that many white guys feel no personal responsibility. They did not do it. yet us ‘white guys’ are the people who have benefited from this system of white suppression of indigenous people.  We are privileged because of that system. At the very least we should make it clear that we object to that system and we are sorry that others who were not so fortunate as we were suffered as a result of that system.