Chapter 11. First Nations from Indian Act to Idle No More
Chapter 11. First Nations from Indian Act to Idle No More
11.13 Summary
The thrust of Canadian policy as regards Indigenous people was, from 1867 on, assimilation. John A. Macdonald said that “the great aim of our legislation has been to do away with the tribal system and assimilate the Indian people in all respects with the inhabitants of the Dominion, as speedily as they are fit for the change.”[1] There were several obstacles to this project, one of which was the racism deeply embedded in Canadian society and laws that implied that Indians would never be “fit” for inclusion. Another obstacle was the resistance mounted by Indigenous peoples to assimilationist institutions and laws.
To be sure, Canadian efforts on this front were also clumsy and largely ineffectual. Decades of promoting the benefits of relinquishing Indian Status and joining Canadian society resulted in only 250 Indigenous people taking up the offer of enfranchisement by 1920. Despite the menacing look of the laws against the potlatch and the sun dance, they were feebly enforced (with a few notable exceptions), as was the pass system.[2] Residential schools were much more efficient at crippling family relations and damaging childhoods than they were at producing new “Canadians” ready to join the mainstream economy. Leaving the business of education in the hands of parsimonious missionary religious orders meant that the absence of traditional cultural practices would not be replaced with an education of comparable value. Indigenous parents and communities who had hoped for relevant training to prepare their children for a world with narrower resources and new economic structures would be disappointed. Children themselves resisted the sham of industrial and residential schools by running away, committing acts of vandalism and arson, and by being uncooperative.
The circumstances faced by Indigenous peoples after 1867 varied by place and over time. The Métis diaspora — or at least some of it — was, culturally speaking, in a better position to integrate into the emergent Canadian systems of land ownership, commerce, and knowledge. But at the same time, the Métis lacked any kind of homeland comparable to the reserves that provided First Nations with a base of operations. That said, these reserves offered little in the way of guaranteed community prosperity. This was especially the case among relocated communities in the sub-Arctic and Arctic, Nova Scotia, the Kootenays, and along the Great Lakes (to name only a few locations where people were shunted about to make way for efficiencies, the military, hydroelectricity, and mines). Nothing flags poor conditions on reserves and across the North as much as the ubiquity of tuberculosis in Indigenous communities — TB is a symptom of poverty, inadequate housing, and poor diets. Colonial-era changes in traditional food supplies were coupled to immediate and general environmental degradation to produce conditions that favoured tuberculosis. The