In Will Ferguson’s sarcastically titled book, Why I Hate Canadians, he described how Sir John A. Macdonald’s government separated much of Western Canada into subdivisions during the late 1800s. The First Nations were given a selection of reserves to live on. Meanwhile, the Metis farmers in Saskatchewan and Manitoba were forced to redesign their farms to fit into a systemized grid.
The land itself underwent dramatic changes before the advent of the railway, when the buffalo began to vanish off the prairies. Once a primary food source for the First Nations and the Metis, the Plains bison were overhunted and had decreased in numbers since the 1870s. In Wood Mountain Uplands, Gail Paul Armstrong wrote “A turning point for the Metis in the area came in 1879-1880 when the buffalo disappeared from the plains. Many Metis families were living on the brink of starvation.”
Before the Canadian Pacific Railway was about to drive westwards through the prairies in the late 1800s, MacDonald knew he’d have broker some deals with the First Nations and the Metis as the nation expanded towards the Pacific. Ferguson wrote “After Confederation, as the railroad pushed west, it became imperative to deal with the Native people living there and several treaties were signed, some stipulating reserve lands, others not.”
The Crown said they wanted to activate a system based on peace and goodwill between the First Nations and the government. But the residential schools established after the Indian Act of 1876, proved the government’s main concern implied colonization as opposed to benevolence. The residential schools were expressly situated far from Indigenous communities to minimize contact between families and the children attending these institutions, where the Indigenous students were forced to adapt to European culture.
The North-West Rebellion of 1885 was a reaction to the Canadian government’s land division, the imposed grid system and colonial expansion. After the month and half skirmish concluded, 125 First Nations and Metis were prosecuted and eight Cree were publicly hanged. The rebellion failed long ago and the last residential school in Canada closed in 1996, but the legacy of disenfranchisement for the First Nations and the Metis peoples has prolonged to 2020.
Leyland Cecco in The Guardian in January 2020 reported that 30 per cent of inmates in Canadian prisons are Indigenous, yet the First Nations only represent five per cent of the nation’s population. The numbers of jailed Aboriginals are the highest in Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta, where First Nations inmates embody 54 per cent of the prison inhabitants on the prairies.
Ensemble – a Montreal-based NGO existing since 1996 – said the life expectancy of First Nations peoples is decreased by six years compared to the Canadian average. The rate of suicide amongst Aboriginal youth is one of the highest in the world. Also, Indigenous youth suffer from greater numbers of injuries and accidental deaths. The infant mortality rate for Indigenous Canadians is 14 per cent for live births compared to 7 per cent for non-Aboriginals. Most Aboriginals live on or below the poverty line. Also, the unemployment rate is 19.1 per cent for the First Nations, whereas the national average is much lower at 5.7 per cent.
Dr. Betty Bastien in her book, Blackfoot Ways of Knowing, said Canada’s Indigenous peoples should renounce victimization, as this is part of mindset rooted in colonialism’s legacy. Rather, Aboriginals should unearth and formulate meaningful and profound understandings of who they are by reassessing the histories of their ancestors, traditions, language and customs rather than by searching for themselves through a colonialist lens.
“It is through ancestral sacred knowledge that tribal children have a place in the universe from which to build a future for themselves. Otherwise, they will only be in reaction to the circumstances of colonialism,” Bastien determined.
