Decline
"A
dreadful skin disease, loathsome to look upon, broke out upon all alike. None
were spared. Men, women and children sickened, took the disease
and died in agony by hundreds, so that when the spring arrived three was
scarcely a person left of all their numbers to get it. Camp after camp, village
after village, was left desolute."
Mulks, a 100 year old
Squamish chief testimony about an epidemic that hit the coast of BC in 1782
[The
Blackfoot] were selling their Horses for a mere song, eating gophers, mice, and
for the first time have hunted Antelope and nearly killed them all off . .
. Strong men were now so weak that some of them could hardly walk. Others
who last winter were fat and hearty are mere skin and bone."
Indian Commissioner Edgar Dewdney, 1879
"On arriving there I found about 1300 Indians in a very destitute
condition, and many on the verge of starvation. Young men who were known to be
stout and hearty fellows some months ago were quite emaciated and so weak they
could hardly walk ; the old people and widows, who
with their children live on the charity of the younger and more prosperous, had
nothing, and many a pitiable tale was told of the misery they had
endured."
Lt. Gov. Edgar Dewdney, Blackfoot Crossing, July 1879
AN
ASTONISHING STATE OF THINGS AT WILLIAMS LAKE.
The natives said to be Starving AND THREATENING VIOLENCE.
Pathetic letter from an Indian Chief
"I am
an Indian chief and my people are threatened by starvation. The white men have
taken all the land and all the fish. A vast country was ours. It is all gone.
The noise of the threshing machine and the wagon has frightened the deer and
beaver. We have nothing to eat. We cannot live on the air, and we must die. My
people are sick. My young men are angry. . . A war with the white man will end
in our destruction, but death in war is not so bad as death by starvation. . .
the white man . . . has piles of wheat and herds of cattle. We have
nothing—not an acre. Another white man has enclosed the graves in which the
ashes of our fathers rest, and we may live to see
their bones turned over by his plough.! Any white man can take three hundred
and twenty acres of our land and the Indian dare not touch an acre. Her Majesty
sent me a coat, two ploughs and some turnip seed. The coat will not keep away
the hunger; the ploughs are idle and the seed is useless because we have no
land. . . THERE WILL BE TROUBLE SURE .
. . We have nothing now and here comes the cold and
snow. Maybe the white an thinks
we can live on snow. . . "
William, Chief of the Williams Lake Indians. The
British Colonist
7 November 1879
"The
Canadian government grudgingly fed the Indians over the winter of 1879-80 but
did not want to make it an ongoing commitment. By the end of the 1870s Ottawa
was already regretting the financial commitment it has assumed in the western
numbered treaties . . . [In Victorian thinking] government assistance had to be
kept to an absolute minimum . . . otherwise it would become addictive and
promote laziness . . . Liberal Opposition constantly rebuked the Macdonald
Conservatives for doing too much . . . This penny pinching ran contrary
to the Indian understanding of the treaty relationship."
Bill Waiser, A World We Have Lost
"Those
Reserve Indians are in a deplorable state of destitution, they receive from the
Indian Department just enough food to keep soul and body together, they are all but naked, many of them barefooted . . . Should
sickness break out among them in their present weakly state, the fatality will
be dreadful."
Saskatchewan Herald, Battleford, 16 August 1880 [cited in James Daschuk, Clearing the Plains Disease Politics of Starvation
and the Loss of Aboriginal Life]
"Legislators
of the day believed the remedy (for starvation) was to teach farmers to help
themselves and to adopt habits of hard work, determination and sobriety. It was
thought that if they were offered relief, the state would be rewarding
pauperism, encouraging dependence and creating a permanent class of needy . . .
a spirit of dependence would be implanted."
Sara Carter, Lost Harvests
"Neither
side was prepared for the suddenness and finality of the collapse of herds in
the late 1870s. The region-wide famine than ensued and the inability of
authorities to provide adequate food relief ["feed one day starve the
next"] sparked the widespread emergence of tuberculosis among
immune-compromised communities."
James Daschuk, Clearing the Plains Disease Politics of
Starvation and the Loss of Aboriginal Life
"It is pretty evident that the Indians have become pensioners upon
the Public Treasury."
David Mills, former Liberal Cabinet Minister, House of Common Debates, April
1882
"Government
officials
are doing all they can, by refusing food until the First Nations are on the verge of starvation, to reduce
expenses."
Sir John A. Macdonald, House of Commons Debates, 21 April 1882
"They
[Indians] are a doomed race and it is only a question of how soon they will
disappear."
Liberal MP Philippe Casgrain, House of Commons
Debates, 9 May 1883
"Mr.
MILLS (Liberal): The Indians have become pensioners upon the Public Treasury,
that they are doing little or nothing for themselves. Now, I believe a
barbarous population like the Indians may very easily be made wholly dependent
upon the Government. . .
Sir JOHN A. MACDONALD
(Conservative): When the Indians are starving they
have been helped, but they have been reduced to one-half and one-quarter
rations . . . It is true that Indians so long as the
are fed will not work. . . . I am sure that the agents
are doing all they can, by refusing food until the Indians are on the verge of
starvation, to reduce the expense."
House
of Commons Debates,
April 27, 1883
"The
cause of the discontent [in 1885] is no secret to any person living in the
North-West. Promises made when the Indians were strong and the whites weak are
not carried out now that the whites have become strong and the Indians
weak."
Frank Oliver, Edmonton Bulletin, 14 June 1884
"After the disappearance of the buffalo, the bacon and the cakes
made with some of the bad flour did not satisfy the appetite of the Indians. I
saw the gaunt children dying of hunger, coming to my place to be instructed.
Although it was thirty to forty degrees below zero their bodies were scarcely
covered with torn rags. These poor children came to catechism and to school. It
was a pity to see them. The hope of having a little morsel of dry cake was the
incentive which drove them to this cruel exposure each day, more, no doubt,
than the desire of educating themselves. The privation made many die."
Father Cochin, Reminiscences: A Veteran Missionary of Cree Indians and a
Prisoner in Poundmaker's Camp
"We
are training the Indians to look to us for aid . . . [and] teaching them to
rely on us for everything."
Edward Blake, Liberal Party leader, House of Commons, 1885
"In
1889, the federal government imposed the Peasant Farming Policy, which was
nothing more than a series of limitations for Indigenous farmers, implemented
to placate the non-Indigenous settlers. Indigenous farmers were ordered to
cease producing wheat and to grow root vegetables and other grains only. They
were also prevented from using modern farming equipment and required to make
any implements they needed themselves. They could only seed by hand, harvest
with scythes, bind by hand, thresh with flails, and grind grain with hand
mills. This policy was in place until 1900."
Michelle Good, Truth Telling
"A
few years hence there will be no Indians. They will exist for posterity only in
waxwork figures and in a few scant pages of history. However, brave and game
they might be, there is nothing for them in the end but death."
Emily Murphy, 1910 [cited in Sarah Carter, Ours by Every Law of Right and
Justice, p.146]
"The
[Native] race is one which is liable to disappear. It was not apparently made
for the conditions under which we live in this modern world, and fades away,
more or less under the influence of modern civilization."
Walter Scott, Premier of Saskatchewan, 1905
"The
Blackfeet were a proud, warlike and, as conditions then were, a numerous people
[nearly 5,000]. They had been kings in their own right in their own
country. Suddenly and without warning, they were plunged into the
miseries of utter poverty. It was a testing time both for the Government of
Canada and the Indians . . . The terms of the treaty did not take account of
the sudden and overwhelming tragedy . . . Canada's occupation of the West is
one of which Canadians may well be proud, both to meaning, method and
achievement."
Hon. Frank Oliver, The Blackfoot Indian Treaty, Maclean's Magazine, 15
March 1931
At
a time when the First Nations population had dropped to 108,000 and many people
thought they would not survive, Duncan Campbell Scott, Deputy Superintendent of
the Dept. of Indian Affairs issued a report giving the false impression
that First Nations were prospering. The cartoonist likely drew this
sarcastic cartoon in response to his report.
In 2006: "Phil
Fontaine, the national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, warned of the
contemporary realities of TB: “In Canada, rates of infection are 10 times
higher on Native reserves. In some northern communities, up to half of
the population is infected. This is simply unbelievable and unacceptable
in any community in Canada in the 21st century.” [The alarm
bells are still being ignored.]
Jane Whalen, A Century of Neglect: Epidemic Tuberculosis in Native
Communities
“The
land was stolen from underneath us. . . . And it is
the loss of the land that has been the precise cause of our impoverishment . . . . Indigenous peoples control only 0.2 per cent
of the land and the settlers 99.8 per cent. With this distribution of the land,
you don’t have to have a doctorate in economics to understand who will be poor
and who will be rich. . . . When we speak about
reclaiming a measure of control over our lands, we obviously don’t mean
throwing Canadians off it and sending them back to the countries they came from. . . . There is room on this land for all of us and there
must also be, after centuries of struggle, room for justice for Indigenous
peoples. That is all that we ask. And we will settle for nothing less.”
Arthur Manuel, Unsettling Canada: A National Wake-Up Call