Colonialism and Aboriginal resistance in Canada
By Deborah Simmons
There is a myth perpetuated by Canadian nationalists that Canada’s relationship with the Aboriginal Peoples within its borders was founded more than four centuries ago in the friendly “partnership” established through the fur trade. Canadian political economist Harold Adams Innis developed this perspective in his book The Fur Trade in Canada (1930). More recently, the 1996 report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples claims that the first phase of British policy aimed to “protect” Aboriginal peoples from the encroachment of settlers. This is contrasted to the brutal wars of extermination waged against Aboriginal Peoples in the United States. However, Aboriginal Peoples mourning the impacts of more than a century of dispossession and assimilationist policies carry a very different view of Canada’s origins.
And it is not necessary to look far back in history for evidence of the racist violence on which Canada is founded. This fall marks the tenth anniversary of two armed offensives by Canadian police against Aboriginal People in Ontario and British Columbia, and fifteen years since the Canadian military was called to confront Kanien’kehake/ Mohawk protesters near Oka, Quebec.
Ten years ago in southern Ontario, more than 200 Ontario Provincial Police (OPP), including a riot squad and an elite assault force, confronted forty unarmed occupiers at Ipperwash Provincial Park who demanded the return of an historic Aboriginal burial ground in traditional Aazhoodena territory. On September 6, 1995, Dudley George was killed by police.
Ten years ago at Ts’Peten/Gustafsen Lake in northern British Columbia, more than 400 RCMP officers surrounded 18 occupiers claiming an unceded area that had been used for Sundance ceremonies. A major offensive was launched by the RCMP on September 11 in an operation involving armored personnel carriers, machine guns and other military weapons. This was the most expensive police operation in British Columbia history at an estimated cost of $5.5 million, with 77,000 rounds of ammunition fired.
Fifteen years ago last March, protesters set up a blockade at Oka, Quebec to prevent bulldozing of a historic burial ground for the expansion of a municipal golf course. Four months later, one hundred Quebec police armed with tear gas, concussion grenades and assault rifles were sent to enforce a court injunction to tear down the blockade. As the conflict escalated, two thousand military troops were called in as reinforcements. The standoff finally ended on September 26, six months after the barricade went up with the surrender of the Mohawks.
Everyday Oppression
These three conflicts are symbolic of systemic violence and injustice against Aboriginal peoples in Canada. But the contemporary Aboriginal experience of oppression in the Canadian state extends beyond high profile events such as these to countless humiliations, injustices and acts of violence that have become so normalized as to be virtually ignored by the mass media.
As Aboriginal artist and writer Stewart Steinhauer recently put it, “What if your conditions of life make suicide appear to be an attractive option? Suicide is epidemic on reserves across Canada.” Aboriginal People seeking to escape the hopelessness of reserve life face disproportionate poverty, homelessness, criminalization and police violence in Canadian cities.
Far from being a mutually beneficial partnership, Canada’s relationship with Aboriginal Peoples is founded in conflict. Since the early days of British colonialism in North America, much ink and hot air has been expended on how to deal with the intractable “Indian problem” which persists to the present day. Contemporary right wing ideologues continue to claim, as have their forbears through the generations, that the “problem” is rooted in the special status that has been accorded to Aboriginal Peoples in the Indian Act, the treaties, and the Canadian constitution. According to this perspective, the solution to the “Indian problem” is “equality” and the supremacy of individual rights – meaning the elimination of collective Aboriginal rights and the inherent right to self-government, and the assimilation of Aboriginal People as ordinary citizens.
The Far Right and the “Indian problem”
This was the position taken by the late Mel Smith, who was constitutional advisor to the British Columbia government for over thirty years until 1991. During this time the provincial government steadfastly refused to recognize Aboriginal title, despite the fact that legitimate treaties had not been negotiated in the province. Smith was contracted as a paid consultant to the Reform Party’s (anti)”Indian Task Force” before his death in 2000, the year that the Reform Party dissolved into the Canadian Reform Conservative Alliance.
Smith’s book Our Home or Native Land?, published in 1995, became the bible of the Federation for Individual Rights and Equality (FIRE). FIRE sprung up in the area surrounding Ipperwash Provincial Park one month after the murder of Dudley George to defend settler “rights” against Aboriginal land claims. FIRE chapters were formed in British Columbia, Saskatchewan and Manitoba under an umbrella federal organization (CAN FIRE), boasting thousands of members. (Interestingly, FIRE propaganda seems to have disappeared from the web since the dissolution of the Reform Party.)
Tom Flanagan, professor of politics at the University of Calgary and former Director of Research for the Reform Party, has gone beyond Smith to argue that special Aboriginal rights are in fact the cause of Aboriginal oppression. In an article entitled, “Why Don’t Indians Drive Taxis?”, Flanagan argued that Aboriginal People should follow the example of immigrants and take menial jobs rather than expecting “government handouts.” His book First Nations? Second Thoughts (2000) opposed the concept of Aboriginal nationhood and collective rights. Flanagan’s influence on the mainstream Right rapidly increased after publication of the book. He rose through the ranks of the Conservative Alliance to become Chief of Staff for the federal opposition party in 2002-2003. Following the creation of the new Conservative Party of Canada through the merger of the Canadian Alliance and Progressive Conservatives, Flanagan was hired as Chief National Campaign Manager for the 2004 federal election.
The anti-aboriginal state
The current anti-Aboriginal rhetoric on the right echoes the perspective outlined in the “White Paper on Indian Policy” introduced in 1969 by Minister of Indian Affairs Jean Chretien under Pierre Trudeau’s Liberal government. The White Paper, which proposed termination of Aboriginal rights, was met with outrage and militant protest by Aboriginal People across Canada, and as a result was quietly withdrawn. However, various Liberal initiatives since Jean Chretien’s election as Prime Minister are widely perceived as sneaking termination policy in through the back door.
The record of provincial NDP governments on Aboriginal issues is not much better. It was an NDP government that supported the RCMP offensive at Gustafsen Lake. And it is an NDP government in Manitoba that is now promoting a series of major new hydroelectric dams on Aboriginal lands.
The fact is, there is a grain of truth in the anti-Aboriginal ideology. Insofar as they are instruments of the Canadian state in conjunction with capitalist interests, federal and provincial governments must by nature work toward the elimination of Aboriginal rights. The persistence of Aboriginal rights has always represented a major weakness in the power of the Canadian state to rule within its territory. Aboriginal lands have always been an important obstacle to the expansion of capitalism in Canada.
Capitalist Expansion
Aboriginal land rights were established under British colonial law not because of any benevolence on the part of the Queen, but because a major rebellion led by Chief Pontiac threatened the very survival of the colonies in British North America. The Indian Territory set aside in the Royal Proclamation of 1763 was meant more to appease the Aboriginal rebels and thereby secure the colonies than to protect Aboriginal People from encroaching settlement.
The British needed Aboriginal allies not only as fur producers, but as combatants in the battles first against the French colonists, and then against the American revolutionaries. As soon as basic territorial control was established over Quebec and peace was forged with the new United States, the military alliances became unnecessary. Canadian colonists immediately began to formulate ways to get their former allies out of the way of settlement. Genocidal wars and mass relocations such as occurred in the United States were out of the question – the British colony was militarily weak, and the settler population remained a minority. Major General H.C. Darling, military secretary to the colonial Governor General, was commissioned to conduct the first formal inquiry into Indian conditions. His 1828 report established a framework for assimilationist Indian policy in Canada, in the guise of a “civilizing” mission. He recommended that Indians should be established in fixed location, educated, converted to Christianity and transformed into farmers.
The basis for the dispossession of Aboriginal lands was developed a decade later in a document that made virtually no reference to the original inhabitants of the colonies. Lord Durham was appointed High Commissioner of British North America in 1838 with a mandate to quell rebellions that had taken place in both Upper and Lower Canada. Durham’s recommendations published a year later involved establishment of a single government to rule over the two Canadas, along with a program of capitalist development based on the theory of “systematic colonization”, conceived by his collaborator, Edward Gibbon Wakefield.
According to Wakefield’s theory, stability and economic development must derive from the deliberate creation of a capitalist class, capitalist landed property – involving the commodification of the land – and the recruitment of a landless (or commodified) labour force. Aboriginal People were clearly not yet an appropriate mass labour force precisely because of their ongoing connection with the land: their resistance to settlement along with their ability to escape wage labour and subsist independently on country food. The priority was thus to push Aboriginal People aside so that arable lands could be sold to capitalist agriculturalists. At the same time, Canada was to launch a major campaign to recruit immigrant labourers from Europe. This would pave the way for the Canadian wheat boom at the turn of the century.
Assimilation and Resistance
Of course, the expansion of agricultural capitalism did require the displacement and impoverishment of Aboriginal Peoples from arable lands. It thus became more urgent than ever to find ways to eliminate Aboriginal resistance, and assimilation was seen as the most efficient and cost-effective solution.
The first legislation explicitly aiming toward assimilation was the Civilization of Indian Tribes Act of 1857. This was the precursor to a dizzying series of acts and amendments specifically relating to Indians that followed the establishment of the Dominion of Canada in 1867, beginning with the 1869 Act for the Gradual Enfranchisement of Indians and the Better Management of Indian Affairs and the first Indian Act of 1876, which consolidated all previous legislation. The current version of the Indian Act (1985) removes some of the most offensive aspects of earlier versions, but preserves the original framework. The Act remains essentially contradictory in that it must recognize Indian status, while at the same time aiming to eliminate the existence of Indians.
The contradictory nature of the Indian Act is the outcome of ongoing Aboriginal resistance to dispossession and assimilation. The purchase of Rupert’s Land from the Hudson’s Bay Company by the Dominion of Canada in 1869 precipitated the first Riel Rebellion. This forced the new state to establish a new province of Manitoba, and to negotiate the first of the numbered treaties. Enfranchisement policy, which provided for educated individuals to acquire private property separate from reserve lands in return for relinquishing Indian status, was a dismal failure, as were a number of policies forbidding traditional practices such as the potlatch and the sundance. The residential school system, which aimed to forge generations of children into assimilated and disciplined workers by eradicating their culture and identity, failed on its own terms. Those who survived the brutality of the schools often continued to resist assimilation despite the trauma of not knowing their language or the skills necessary for survival once they returned to their home communities.
Treaties and Capitalist Development
The negotiation of numbered treaties extinguishing Aboriginal land title followed the trajectory of capitalist development in Canada, starting principally with the expansion of wheat farming in the 1870s, followed by mineral and petroleum extraction at the turn of the 20th century. Recent research has demolished the myth that the Canadian state initiated the treaties out of the goodness of its heart. Settlers faced the constant threat of violence from Aboriginal peoples whose lands they were encroaching upon, and only treaties could ensure some level of stability and security. Aboriginal negotiators were notoriously obstinate, and government officials complained of their “extravagant demands.” Often they were able to obtain more than they were originally offered by the government. Compromise in negotiations was a reflection of the weakness of the Canadian state, which remained unable to rely on military might in establishing sovereignty.
Some Aboriginal groups resisted concluding treaties, and those who accepted them demanded guarantees of subsistence harvesting rights, as well as compensation for extinguished title including monetary payments, agricultural implements and food. This was crucial, given that expanded settlement had led to the depletion of the wildlife on which Aboriginal People had depended for subsistence. The state made every attempt to violate its treaty obligations, using its control over food supplies as a weapon. And a policy of “sheer compulsion” was briefly adopted on the prairies in 1884, using an expanded Mounted Police (MP) force. However, this use of force was met with threats of a massacre of MPs, along with numerous physical attacks against authoritarian Indian agents. The following year the second Riel Rebellion erupted bringing together Métis, Aboriginal and white settler interests in the mid-West, and posing a new threat to the expansion of the state. It was clear that force would be required to create stability and reassure capitalist interests, and a military buildup had been prepared to crush the rebellion.
Despite this defeat, the persistent threat of rebellion prevented the state from establishing control on its own terms. As a result of ongoing resistance, Aboriginal lands have remained a bulwark against unfettered capitalist expansion into the present. Rebellions such as those at Oka, Ipperwash and Gustafsen Lake have served warning to the Canadian state that Aboriginal rights will not be eliminated without resistance. Clearly, movements in opposition to Canadian imperialism must centrally involve solidarity with Aboriginal Peoples in their struggle for land rights and self-determination.
