James Daschuk, 2013
A couple of years ago I was led to this book through Candace Savage’s A Geography of Blood. After the emotionally draining experience of reading these two takes on the same tragedy, I had to turn away for a while to more cheerful reading or at least to horrors that happened farther from home. Spending time in Eastend in southwestern Saskatchewan — the area where the worst of the events chronicled by Savage occurred—made me turn to Daschuk’s book again.
Both of these books make clear that the starvation to death of native people, many of them children, was the result of deliberate policy implemented by the government of John A. Macdonald. Our National Dream of building the railway and settling the west takes on a nightmarish aspect when you know this. Macdonald’s goal was to clear the plains of their original inhabitants by barely keeping them alive until they died out.
Daschuk chronicles the history of the effects of European contact on the health and mortality of the aboriginal population. (I know the words Indian, aboriginal, indigenous, native and First Nations are not exactly the same but to avoid hair splitting and repetition I use them interchangeably.) At first the rate of contact was slow and relatively benign.
The rate of contact speeded up and the negative effects proliferated after the Hudson’s Bay Company sold Rupert’s Land to the young Dominion of Canada in 1870. There had always been cycles of plenty and scarcity, and the HBC had carried many natives through the times of privation by extending them credit. Once this vast area was taken over by Canada, First Nations people were in a much more difficult position.
Buffalo and other game animals dwindled or disappeared at the same time that bovine tuberculosis was brought north by the cattle that were supposed to replace the buffalo. Although the cattle themselves showed no symptoms of the disease, it proved deadly to many of the Indians who ate the beef. Starving and tubercular natives, including and particularly children, had no immunity to white communicable diseases such as small pox and measles. The most haunting photograph in the book is of Crowfoot and his family. Within two years of the picture being taken, all of the eight children in the photograph were dead.
Indians were supposed to work for food but there was little work to be had. Indians became so desperate they were willing to trade their wives and daughters—and the wives and daughters were in many cases willing to be traded to save their families– for food. Indians were then sneered at for their promiscuity. Of course the question is who were they being promiscuous with. There were few white women on the prairies at this time, and most of the many white men suffering from venereal diseases probably did not get them from each other.
Having travelled at least briefly in about 40 countries I have observed petty officials and ordinary citizens conducting business under the table to a greater or lesser extent. What strikes me when I get back home is how much space there is, how polite most people are, and the lack of any obvious fraud or corruption on the part of public officials.
This was certainly not the case in the early years of our dominion. Many government officials owned shares in the companies that provided rotten or rancid meat to starving natives. Most of the officials of the Department of Indian Affairs in particular saw their jobs as a ride on the gravy train. Indian agents were among the worst offenders. A few doctors were notable exceptions in actually caring about the people they were supposed to serve.
Many slimy white people saw themselves as morally superior to the First Nations people they wanted to eliminate.
Throughout history kingdoms have flourished and then fallen; one people or tribe has subjugated another and taken over their territory. What happened in the Canadian west was just ordinary history in this sense. What makes this particular subjugation extraordinary is that we as Canadians must still deal with the aftereffects.
The pass system and the residential school system attempted to finish off the job that John A. Macdonald started. Although these systems are no longer in place their effects are felt through succeeding generations. Daschuk makes it clear that health outcomes for indigenous Canadians are still seriously substandard. Last year the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal ruled that the federal government discriminates against First Nations children in the level and quality of services.
I don’t remember being taught anything about this clearing of the plains in school. My father finished Grade 8 and my mother Grade 10 and then continued to educate themselves all their lives. I do remember discussing what were then referred to as the North West Rebellions in the home setting and that my mother in particular was sympathetic to Louis Riel. She had a natural tendency to sympathize with the underdog–she saw herself as an underdog—and three of her uncles had married native women.
The work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the establishment of the inquiry into missing and murdered aboriginal girls and women are certainly positive developments in the present. It is clear, however, that racism still flourishes in our country. As I began to write this a young First Nations man was shot to death by a farmer in the Battleford area. The racist response to this incident on social media was almost as shocking as the killing itself.
In what may be his last major project, Gord Downie of the Tragically Hip has released a graphic novel and recording called Secret Path about a First Nations boy named Chanie Wenjack who died of cold and starvation in 1966 while trying to get home after escaping a residential school. In Downie’s words, “’We are not the country we thought we were.’”
Clearing the Plains is a book that any Canadian with a thinking mind and a caring heart should read.