Idle No More
Tisdale - Thursday, January 17, 2013
by:Timothy W. Shire
Out here on the great western plains of North America the wind drives the dull winter clouds over a snow covered land, a land that my family has only lived on since 1913, a mere hundred years since my grand father came to make his home north of the White Bear reserve in south eastern Saskatchewan. He married Edith McVicar, daughter of Andrew McVicar from Kelso on November, thirteen, 1916 in Moosomin.
My Grandfather "Bob" and his bride had a modest homestead west of Kelso where he lived until his death when I was four years old. In the picture below we see him driving a team of horses at Fair House farm in Churchinford in 1912 before he went to join his brothers in Canada, he was twenty-three at the time. He travelled across the Atlantic aboard the Ascania arriving in Portland, Maine then making his way to Canada and on to Saskatchewan.
We Canadians all have our pioneer stories, some much more recent then others, but all of us came here from somewhere else. Each part of our family made their way here one way or another, the McVicars through Ontario and Manitoba, my mothers family settled in Ontario, moved to Manitoba then south of Moosomin, Saskatchewan, my wife's family came from Russia to North Dakota then came north to settle near Piapot Saskatchewan. We all came here to build a future in this really vast land which even today, is sparsely populated, where I have flown my airplane at 150 miles an hour for hour straight hours from the Yukon, to an island off the B.C. coast and during that time, I did not fly over any people, much of Canada is totally empty.
Well, as my great grandfather discovered, Canada was far from empty and if you lived in a pre-industrial hunting and gathering culture, it takes thousands of square miles of country to support humans and this land was indeed occupied when the explorers swept out onto the great plains from Hudson's Bay. Huddled around the bay were the Cree, a friendly pretty easy going people who did not see the Europeans as a threat simply because without their assistance the new comers who not survive. Heading south and west the land was being used by the people whom the French traders called "Saulteaux" and are known today as Ojibwa and many call themselves Anicinabe. Beyond them were other versions of Cree, some of whom had adapted to the open plains. To the North and north west were the Dene, who consist of several dozen tribes speaking the related versions of the Dene language.
Canada was not in the process of being conquered, the development of Rupert's land was a business venture, licences by the King to the Hudson's Bay Company. Business is business and in the 1700s it was decided to make a deal with the people who occupied the vast reaches of woodlands, plains and mountains. No need to take anything, the people living on the land were business people too and a deal could be made. It was clear from the very first contact, that the trading visitors lived very differently and really had little interest in doing the hunting and trapping for themselves. If anything, they were farmers and in this part of North America there were only two groups of people who were involved in agriculture, the Mandan in southern North Dakota and some of the Five Nations people along the St. Lawrence. Everyone else were nomadic people depending on the abundant population of wild life to maintain themselves.
So it was that when it came time for more than traders coming to settle on the land, the British government sent out officials to work out a deal. You have to understand that this was the eighteenth century and Britain was essential being governed by a business class of people. The prime ministers and their cabinet ministers were known for their business management and were following this same pattern in other parts of the world. Wars were not good for profits and one could always work out some accommodation.
The leaders of the people were not unified in their belief that welcoming a bunch of farmers to their land was a good idea and they were even more disturbed when steel rails chopped across the country side ready to move thousands of people while damming up streams and building bridges. But, the negotiators assured the leaders that things would be fine, not just now in the eighteenth century, but for all time to come. As long as the sun shines, the grass grows and rivers flow, the King and his successors to the throne of England, Scotland and Wales would live up to the bargain. No taxes, education, medical care, some money for guns and blankets and land that would be forever their own.
This is not some fairy tale, this is what happened in a very simple form. The odd thing is that the successive governments of Canada have not accepted the terms of the deals, and time after time have made small incremental changes assuming that one day the people would assimilate, intermarry, become like the people who moved here. The problem with that little idea is that the culture and history of the settlers dates back only four, perhaps six centuries, whereas the culture of the people already in place has a cultural heritage that goes back at least ten thousand years, perhaps more. Old cultures do not modify themselves and assimilate to more recent one, it’s the other way around. The churches and the government tried regulation, religious conversion and then most dramatically, the forceable deculturalisation of the children in church run schools. The cultural practices of the West Coast people were outlawed, the people were denied voting rights and treated by government agencies as though they were children.
Do not think for a minute that the disgusting situations on reservations where housing, violence, poverty and unemployment are chronic problems, do not think for a minute that those problems were all created by the lack of government. In many cases they were created as a result of government, both federal and band government. The condition of Canada's First Nations people is not something that can be improved by identifying the historical consequences, for indeed, there is more than enough blame to go around. Though Canada's federal government has disregarded the terms of the treaties and some provincial governments have made the First Nations People their adversary, the First Nations people themselves have been utterly and completely to damn complacent and unwilling to demand in the strongest terms, a just treatment of their people as individuals and their land.
Paul Martin had set about a programme and plan to improve the services to reserves and their people it was a patch up of the way thing have been going. Most of us have condemned Stephen Harper for simply turning his government's back on improving things and set to work accelerating the process of extinguishing treaty rights at all levels. Perhaps we have been wrong, it just may be that Mr. Harpers's bold ignorance toward treaty rights and developing a real working progress to improving the lives of Canada's aboriginal peoples is the right thing to do. By his inaction and basic nastiness, the aboriginal people of Canada have come to realize that its now no longer acceptable to let the status quo exist, its time to bring first to the people of Canada and then to their politicians, both band and federal, the need to work out a real deal. A deal that will stand for as long as the grass grows, the sun shines and the rivers flow.
Now if you want to pursue the American way of doing things fine, but its to late for that. The decision was made two centuries ago not to use conquest and kill of the people of North America. The decision was to make a deal. If there is anything that we understand, it is contractual agreements, and breaking a contract is the root of lawlessness and the destruction of the rule of law in a society. The second thing is that since 1867, Canada has been steadily extracting wealth from this country. Untold beyond anyones means to estimate what has been produced in terms of mineral wealth, agricultural products, rent, wood, water and the lives of all generations of settlers who have brought us to this moment in time. We Canadians can not afford not to service our debt to the aboriginal people of Canada and when we get around to treating the nations, who made the deals with our governments, with respect, we will discover what even more riches in harmony, cultural enrichment and preservation of our honour and their honour, will afford us.
One last thing must be said. The world is watching. Not only must we as a nation deal with the First Nations with honour and fairness, but even more, we must make sure that the rest of the world knows that we are doing just that. Idle No More is receiving support globally and the honour of our country and its future in the world, depends on how our government conducts itself. If violence is used to break up road blocks, or attack demonstrators, they will see it in Russia, Kenya, Melbourne, Hong Kong, Mumbai and Capetown.
Idle No More is a huge challenge, not just for government and the aboriginal people, but for all Canadians. Don't act like you are from Alberta whining about impeding traffic is crossing the line, or indulge in other racial comments, or even comments that might be considered racial. This is a time when everything counts and it is the individual, not the leaders who will quote and condemn, so think about this problem and do your part to see that we are Idle No More when it comes to the plight of our fellow man, woman and child.