COLONIALISM

"Colonialism is the process that results in the control of one people's territory by another."
Jim Reynolds, Canada and Colonialism An Unfinished Business

"The process [of colonialism] was rooted in a shared economic goal, belief in racial and cultural superiority, and a readiness to use force if other preferred measures, such as treaty making, did not succeed. . . Within settler colonies, the sense of entitlement led to the settler demanding access to the resources of those colonies with limited regard for the claims of the Indigenous people."
Jim Reynolds, Canada and Colonialism An Unfinished Business

"This Doctrine of Discovery was linked to a second idea: the lands being claimed were terra nullius–no mans land–and therefore open to claim. . . the indigenous people simply occupied, rather than owned land. True ownership  they claimed could come only with European –style agriculture."

Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Volume 1

"The Doctrine of Discovery was issued by Pope Alexander VI in  1493. . . The Doctrine dictated that lands not occupied by Christians could be claimed in the name of the explorers. . . Indigenous people were consistently refereed to as 'savages' by all the European empires–an undeniably racist term coined by thieving minds to justify, in both religious and legal terms, the theft of Indian lands. . . The Doctrine upheld the notion that, because Indigenous people were non-Christians, they were inferior, uncivilized and not human–and therefore their land was empty or 'terra nullius."
Chief Clarence Louie, Rez Rules

Doctrine of Discovery and Terra Nullius
https://www.ictinc.ca/blog/christopher-columbus-and-the-doctrine-of-discovery-5-things-to-know

[The Royal Proclamation of 1763 stated that Aboriginal title existed and that all land would be considered Aboriginal until ceded by treaty.]


"The Royal Proclamation of 1763 . . . places a duty upon the Crown to engage in treaty making with Indigenous Peoples and wherein King George III expressly forbade the taking of Indigenous lands without agreement and consent."
Michelle Good, Truth Telling

"The Royal Proclamation Act  of 1763 prohibited settlers from claiming land from Indigenous people unless and until it was first surrendered to the Crown."
Jim Reynolds, Canada and Colonialism An Unfinished Business

"Rather  than sending soldiers and guns to control the owners of the land the government had the missionaries who influenced the Native people to limit their movements, take up an agricultural lifestyle, and abandon their culture."
Celia Haig-Brown

"In the Colony of Upper Canada, the Darling Report of 1828 promoted what became known as the civilization and assimilation program. It recommended this program be based on establishing reserves where Indigenous peoples could be educated, converted to Christianity, and transformed into sedentary farmer, thus ending their nomadic habits."
Jim Reynolds, Canada and Colonialism An Unfinished Business

"First Nations people soon [after Confederation] became minorities on their traditional lands and were viewed as a disappearing race, an encumbrance and an obstacle to settlement and progress who would soon cease to exist."
Jim Reynolds, Canada and Colonialism An Unfinished Business

[The term 'Civilization' or 'Progress' was used to justify the conquest and dispossession of peoples native to their lands. The Civ/Sav doctrine permeates Canadian culture.]

"Aboriginal peoples . . . are still being hounded and haunted by White North America's image machine, which has persistently portrayed them in extremes as either the grotesque ignoble or noble savage. . . The Civ/Sav doctrine (Civilization/Savage) permeates Canadian culture and is obviously very powerful . . . it dichotomizes Native-White relations in terms of civilization inevitably winning over savagery. . . Aboriginal Nations fighting to save their persons, communities, cultures, and lands was propagandized as simple irrational violence of bloodthirsty savages."
Emma LaRocque, When the Other is Me Native Resistance Discourse 1850-1990

"The creation of Canada . . . was above all an act of imperialism. A nation-state annexed land inhabited by many other nations and then made them second-class citizens."
Will Ferguson, Why I Hate Canadians

"Shall we allow a few vagrants (First Nations) to prevent forever industrious settlers from settling on unoccupied land."
Amor de Cosmos

"Clearing the land now called Canada and the United States of Indians to allow for white settlement and resource development has always been at the heart of federal, provincial and state government Indigenous policy."
Chief Clarence Louie, Rez Rules

"Settler colonialism involves displacing Indigenous peoples from their land and replacing them with expatriate settlers. Its underlying impulse is to eliminate Indigenous peoples  from ownership of valuable resources, particularly land and to elevate settler families as legitimate and therefore entitled to land. Settler women's reproductive labour was central to the process of repopulating what were once Indigenous lands in Canada. Residential schools and other strategies, including restricting the franchise to settlers, also eliminated the power and cultures of Indigenous peoples. . . Settler women were complicit in the dispossession of Indigenous land."
Sara Carter, Ours By Every Law of Right and Justice Women and the Vote in the Prairie Provinces

"Colonialism is the invasion and occupation of other lands for the purpose of settlement and/or acquiring resources."
Gord Hill, The 500 Years of Indigenous Resistance Comic Book

"Land is literally at the heart of the colonial objective. . . Colonial Indian policy was similar throughout the Americas: (1) acquire Indigenous lands and resources. . . and (2)  get rid of the Indian problem through either elimination or assimilation."
Pamela Palmater, The 500 Years of Indigenous Resistance Comic Book

[Superintendent General of Indian Affairs Hon. Frank Oliver portrayed as a bandit for the way he handled a reserve surrender. "[Oliver] was a blatant racist . . . He regarded First Nations as an inferior race, who had no place in the new society taking place on the western plain."

Bill Waiser and Jennie Hansen, Cheated The Laurier Liberals and the Theft of First Nations Reserve Land.]

"Canada's First Nations had a treaty right to reserves, a solemn promise by Indian Commissioner Alexander Morris that they were 'inviolate so long as the grass grows and the sun shines.' But the Laurier government broke this treaty promise by embarking on a concerted campaign to take away reserve land. Twenty-one percent of prairie reserves  (one in five acres) was surrendered  between 1896 and 1911. . . So much for the honor of Canada."
Bill Waiser and Jennie Hansen, Cheated The Laurier Liberals and the Theft of First Nations Reserve Land.

"The interests of the people must come first [when discussing the surrender of Indian reserve lands] and if it becomes a question between the Indians and the whites, the interests of the whites will have to be provided for."
Frank Oliver, House of Commons Debates, 30 March 1906

[In 1911 Prime Minister Laurier passed legislation making it possible to legally remove the residents from an Indian reserve without their consent when they lived wholly or partly within an incorporated town. Despite their objections, each member of the Songhees reserve was given new land at nearby Esquimalt and paid $10,000.]

[In 1930 eight acres of a disputed Kitsilano Reserve were alienated for the present Burrard Street Bridge and in 1934 four acres were alienated for the Seaforth Armouries.]

"A white man, long ago, spoke to an Indian sitting on the large end of a log. 'Please, sit over!' he said. The Indian saw no harm in it; he move a bit and allowed the stranger to sit on the log beside him. The newcomer repeated, 'Sit over!' So he did. But it was not enough. 'Sit over, sit over!' The Indian before long found himself at the small end of the log. The white man declared, 'The log now is my own!'"
Marius Barbeau, "Our Indians – Their Disappearance", Queen's Quarterly, 1931

"Life has indeed been made 'easier' for them [Indians] since the introduction of the rifle, the steel axe and the iron pot, not to speak of clothing, castile soap and a decent language! Formerly they idled away their existence in squalor and crass ignorance. Their idiom was  a mere growl from the throat Their tools were of stone and antler, and their artifacts fit only for a bonfire. Their companions were the animals of the forest or the prairies. Their dwellings were huts and movable tents, where they froze in winter and starved between seasons. In a word, they were uncivilized; they were savage men of the wilds with unaccountable ways of their own; they were heathens, the true wards of Satan, with no knowledge of God and his favourite son, the white man."
Marius Barbeau, Our Indians, Queen's Quarterly, 1931

"The Canadian government pursued this policy of cultural genocide [assimilation] because it wished to divest itself of its legal and financial obligations to Aboriginal people and gain control over their land and resources."

Truth and Reconciliation Report, 2007.

"We have no history of colonialism."
Stephen Harper

An Indigenous Perspective:

In Cree artist Kent Monkman’s The Subjugation of Truth Chief Poundmaker and Chief Big Bear are placed in the foreground losing their lands as settler leaders including John A. Macdonald take away their future. The primary figures are Indigenous leaders whose land is being stolen, not the former prime minister who engineered its theft. [2016]

https://www.kentmonkman.com/painting/2017/1/9/the-subjugation-of-truth-1