Walk-a-Mile Film 4 - Targets & Heroes

The fourth film, Targets and Heroes, will draw us from a consideration of murdered and missing Indigenous women to the context of colonialism within which this story unfolds.

So, the historical context we want to focus on when discussing murdered and missing Indigenous women, which is suggested by some of the participants in the film, is that Indigenous women historically inhabited the important contact zone where Indigenous societies came into contact with les canadiens, and later, British settlers.

The important role of Indigenous women as life givers, healers and leaders manifested itself especially during the 250 years of the fur trade society. Indigenous women functioned as suppliers of food and clothing, interpreters, guides and diplomats. And, of course, as was noted above, gave birth to a new nation, the métis.

So we must be very careful, as we explore the evolution of this contact zone, to understand how this contact zone evolved.

If one of the crucial roles of Indigenous women, as Pat McGuire indicates, is to hold the society together, then when the destruction of that society becomes a colonial imperative, it also becomes an imperative to undermine the standing of those who most threaten the colonial ideological order.

Here we offer a crash course in Canadian history. We will cover a few key highlighted events, however, there is an overall narrative to which I would like to draw your attention, organizing Canadian history into two broad eras, 1) the fur trade society and 2) the colonial settler-railroad society.

Fur Trade Society

First, the fur trade society, which covers the period roughly from 1600 to 1850, although a good case could be made for ending the period with the end of the War of 1812, or the merger of the Northwest Company and Hudson’s Bay Company in 1821.

This is the era of peace and friendship treaties, of military alliances, of economic partnerships and cultural integrations, and the birth of a new nation, the métis.

In the midst of this period, we have the defeat of the French Crown in North America by the British Crown with the fall of Québec in 1759. From a European perspective, a great swath of North America is now under the control of the British Crown. This includes the Thirteen British Colonies along the Atlantic coast of North America and what was New France, stretching from the St. Lawrence valley, throughout the Great Lakes region, and down the Ohio valley. New France or Canada as it was called by les canadiens was the territory of the Indian-French fur trade society and alliances. It is not for nothing that the Americans refer to that British-French imperial conflict as the French and Indian War, whereas Canadians and Europeans call it the Seven Years War. When the Thirteen British Colonies looked across the Appalachian Mountains, what they saw was the fur trade society of the French and Indian alliances.

So, for the British colonies, when their guy won, versus the loathed papist French Crown, they were not pleased when their British Crown masters recognized the territory of that Indian-French fur trade alliance as an Indian Reserve. The British Crown, however, saw no advantage in antagonizing their new-found Indian allies or disturbing the economically successful fur trade society by having Thirteen Colonies’ settlers rushing in to take territory and disturb the peace. So the Appalachian mountains became the Proclamation Line confining the Thirteen Colonies to the Atlantic watershed.

In effect, the social, economic, military and political communities of the Indian-French fur trade alliances had held as an integrated whole, despite the retreat of the French Crown from much of North America. The British Crown simply sought to take over management of the fur trade society of those Indian-French alliances.

Royal Proclamation, 1763

So it is this reference to an Indian Reserve in the Royal Proclamation, 1763, and to the rules for acquiring Indian land by treaty with the Crown which will weigh heavily on British North Americans in the next century, when they choose to claim authority over “Indians and lands reserved for Indians”.

There is a reference to Indians as subjects in the Royal Proclamation of 1763, leading some to claim that with the British defeat of the French Crown in North America, their Indian allies became subjects of that British Crown. Indigenous Peoples dispute that claim, since they were not subjects of the French Crown but independent allies.

Treaty of Niagara 1764

However, this debate is rendered mute by the actions of the British Crown a year later at the Treaty of Niagara in 1764. This treaty, symbolized in the Covenant Chain wampum, allied many First Nations with the British, alliances which would hold through the American Revolution and the War of 1812. It is precisely here where we can assert the important principle that treaties are not done with subjects. So the Treaty of Niagara 1764 nullifies any claim that the reference to subjects in the Royal Proclamation, a year earlier, rendered Indigenous Peoples subjects of the British Crown. First Nations fought as independent allies, not as dependent subjects of the British Crown in North America.

Besides, if one reads the Royal Proclamation and understands the context, it is clear, the Proclamation is addressed to the British Crown’s colonial settlers living in its existing territories and in the newly acquired territories of New France. It is not addressed to its Indian allies. The Proclamation addresses the boundaries and governing structures of these colonial entities along with a list of do’s and don’ts addressed to those colonial settlers, especially those actions that might threaten the peace with their newly found Indian allies. In fact, it becomes clear that the reference to not disturbing its Indian subjects seems designed to intimidate the settlers with the idea that if they violate the Indians they violate the British Crown itself and should expect an appropriate response. This is the sense of the reference to Indians as subjects, which as noted, is nullified by the treaty relations undertaken with those same allies a year later.

Québec Act, 1774

With the Québec Act, 1774, French language, law and religion, and the right to an assembly, are recognized under the British Crown. Furthermore, once again, the Thirteen Colonies are kept to the Atlantic side of the Appalachian mountains. Thus, the Québec Act becomes the final intolerable act which precipitates the American Revolution. The British Crown, through the Stamp Act, had decided to tax the Thirteen Colonies to pay for that imperial war they had won, but from which the Thirteen Colonies did not see themselves benefiting. So they rebelled. And the rest is, as they say, history! But what exactly is that history?

American Revolution, 1776-1783

For our purposes, the American Revolution shifts the boundaries of the Thirteen Colonies from the Appalachian mountains to the Mississippi river and, in the North, to the St. Lawrence and Great Lakes. In this new American territory, the fur trade society of Indian-French alliances will finally be broken but not without lingering threats of resistance lasting until the War of 1812. More important for the story of Canada, 40,000 United Empire Loyalists will move into British North America, many into what will eventually become Ontario almost a century later.

What is important to understand is that this influx of settlers represents an infusion of peoples who are not part of the fur trade society and do not identify with either of their dominant groups: First Nations, les canadiens, or the métis. They bring different ideas about their culture, economy and political ideologies.

Upper and Lower Canadas, 1791

So much so, that within barely ten years of their arrival, these British-American settlers pressure their political masters to separate themselves from their despised and distrusted French-Canadian neighbours. So, after 1791, Upper Canada will evolve as British and protestant, with commercial capitalist and republican-individualist tendencies, while Lower Canada will remain French-Canadian, catholic, and rural, with collective statist tendencies. In the meantime, the remaining fur trade society, in the regions outside these enclaves around Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence, will evolve along lines only distantly influenced, initially, by those enclaves.

War of 1812-1815

For our purposes here, I only wish to address the point that it is the fur trade society which largely defends Canada against American invasion, at least in the major land campaigns. Indigenous Peoples are crucial allies in those land campaigns by all accounts. Arguably, we in Canada would all be Americans today if not for Indigenous participation in that war.

Something to consider when we turn to look how they will be rewarded over the next 50 years for their contribution to Canadian independence. And independence is a key idea, because by virtue of that alliance, recall that Indigenous Peoples were not fighting as or to become British subjects, they were fighting to maintain their allied independence. So the idea that treaties would be interpreted as turning Indigenous Peoples into subjugated peoples of the British-Canadian Crown is a violation of the spirit of the Treaty of Niagara which helped protect Canada during the invasions of the American Revolution and the War of 1812.

So once again, just as after the defeat of the French Crown in the French and Indian War, and after the American Revolution and now the War of 1812, the socio-economic and political reality of the fur trade society alliances created and sustained the existence of Canada. However, within 50 years that fur trade society would become the target of a new colonial vision which would institutionalize itself in 1867.

Settler-Railroad Society

To understand the colonial settler-railroad society and its relationship to the fur trade society of the Indian-French alliances and later the Indian-British alliances, we need to understand the changing demographics in the period after the War of 1812 to Confederation.

Massive Immigration

Population growth in Lower Canada (later Québec) from 1824-1860 follows the natural birth rate pattern of doubling over that period, from approximately half a million to over one million. By contrast, Upper Canada (later southern Ontario) experiences an explosion of immigration, increasing ten-fold in the same period, to almost 1.5 million, surpassing the French of Lower Canada.

So here we have the second criteria of the definition of colonialism: massive immigration. And it is this massive immigrant population which will be the socio-political vehicle of the Confederation project which will see and portray the fur trade society as the primitive Other opposing its political and economic agenda. For unlike French Canadians in Lower Canada, the new immigrants in Upper Canada do not identify historically with the peoples of the fur trade society.

Confederation and Fur Trade Society Rebellions

So as we have already seen, come 1867, the new colonial order will assert a claim of exclusive and universal sovereignty over “Indians and the lands reserved for Indians”. The claims of the fur trade society and the underlying Indian-French alliances and the later Indian-British alliances will appear to no longer hold. And as a result, the fur trade society in the North-West, in the pays d’en haut (“the upper or high country”), rebels. Twice! In 1869 and in 1885 the fur trade society of the North-West rebels against the new colonial order established by the Confederation project.

It is here where the propaganda of the Confederation state will portray French half-breeds and Indian savages as obstacles to progress and civilization embodied in the new immigrant-settler, railroad society. The principles of this conflict and the targeting of the fur trade society as the primitive Other will be articulated in the Indian Act of 1876 and the residential schools policy beginning in the 1880s. All undertaken for the purpose of the economic and political exploitation of Indians and, especially, the lands reserved for Indians.

The ethos of subjugation embodied in the Indian Act will be the reward for the independent Indigenous allies who helped defend the independence of Canada in two military conflicts which threatened Canada’s independent existence.

Third Fur Trade Society Rebellion

In 1969, as we’ve seen, the government of prime minister Pierre Trudeau and Indian Affairs minister Jean Chrétien launched a White Paper laying out a plan to assimilate Indians into the Canadian mainstream and extinguish their rights as independent constitutional actors in Canada. The backlash would ultimately lead to the recognition and affirmation of the “existing aboriginal and treaty rights” of Aboriginal peoples.

I see this as the third rebellion of the fur trade society, whose descendants, looking back upon their heritage and patrimony, claim their historic rights of self-determination against the Confederation claim of universal and exclusive sovereignty and the colonial assumption of extinguishing Aboriginal and treaty rights and ceding and surrendering Indigenous traditional territories.

So we might say, once again, the Spirit Animals are affirmed and invoked, and the fur trade society re-connects with the spirits and ancestors who guided and animated its multi-generational existence as expressed in the spiritual vision of the peace and friendship treaties symbolized in their doodem doodles.

So I will suggest that it is in the conflict between the fur trade society and the new social, cultural, economic and political order of the Confederation society that the three criteria of colonialism can be easily identified.

And it is in this context, that we can appreciate the long historical dehumanization of the primitive Other as the obstacle to civilization and progress, and how the propaganda of the Confederation state contributed to the targeting of Indigenous women who are located in the contact zone of the fur trade society with colonial settlers in general, but in particular, with the late nineteenth century British colonial order of Confederation.

So recall the textbook criteria of colonialism:

• claim political control over another country
• introduce settlers
• exploit economically

These three criteria are virtually identical to what is celebrated by the Canadian state every year on Canada Day. The colonial state claims universal and exclusive authority (over Indians and lands reserved for Indians), mass immigration is portrayed as the very definition of what it is to be Canadian, all for the purposes of that railroad vision of the country as delivering furs, timber, wheat and now oil, to a hungry global capitalist marketplace.

There is an abundance of evidence which can be called upon to demonstrate the colonial ideology which targeted French half-breeds and lazy Indians as unfit to participate in a modern, civilized society and having no right to obstruct white settlers and the economic and political progress which they and the Confederation state claimed for themselves.

It is in the vortex of this propaganda that Indigenous women become the contact zone of the primitive Other that threatens the colonial patriarchal economic and political order that Confederation sought to establish and seeks to maintain. Disappearing Indigenous rights, becomes the project to disappear Indigenous Peoples from the lands which still bear their names.

From Québec, to Ontario, to Manitoba, to Saskatchewan. From Ottawa, to Toronto, to Winnipeg, to Saskatoon. To the name of the country itself, the mark which Jacques Cartier put on maps and which les canadiens took as their identity to distinguish themselves from their overseas forebears. These names mark off the territory of the fur trade society, and the descendants who still carry those distant memories in their language and attitudes, in their practices and institutions, and in the Spirits which they affirm and invoke to this day.

So is the Constitution of 1982, Section 35 (1), in fact, the third rebellion of the fur trade society against the colonial order which claimed a universal and exclusive sovereignty in 1867? And is this a contradiction in the founding story of Canada which can not be ignored but must be addressed in order for Canada to reconcile its past, its present and its future?

What would Canada look like culturally, socially, economically and politically if it truly recognized the existing aboriginal and treaty rights of Aboriginal Peoples? If the descendants of the fur trade society realized the expression of their historic rights to self-determination in Canada, how would Canada be different?

So how do we tell our story if it carries two morally and rationally incompatible founding stories within itself? And how are we to understand the historical concepts of targets and heroes with this structure of incompatible narratives?

So what is our story?

Is it a “nation dream” or is it a “cultural genocide”?

I don’t think we can have both, except in some kind of pathological vision of disturbed and distorted memory and twisted and tortured rationalizations.

And as for the term “cultural genocide”, I find it a somewhat academic expression in that it fails to convey the full moral and emotional sensibility of what it is meant to convey. Recall what it is referring to. The Canadian colonial state takes very young children away from their families and communities for the purpose of destroying their attachment to their languages and their cultural practices, for the purpose of destroying their attachment to their families and their communities, for the purpose of destroying their attachment to the economic self-sufficiency of those communities, and for the purpose of destroying their attachment to the political decision-making, to the self-determination and self-governing capacities of those communities.

Within our historic lexicon, we do have a word which does carry the moral and emotional historic weight of what this project of the Canadian church and state and the society at large entailed. That word is “fascism”. The Canadian state and Canadian society simply have no right or reason to shrink from the meaning of this word and its appropriate application to the regime of the Indian act and the residential schools system which it spawned.

I offer three criteria for a working definition of fascism:

• an authoritarian form of governance
• militarized commerce
• an ethos of subjugation

The Indian Act gave the minister of Indian Affairs, and their surrogates, Indian agents on reserves, in effect, authoritarian control over Indians and the lands reserved for Indians. Regarding militarized commerce, Macdonald celebrated that railroad that delivered wood and wheat, but also delivered troops to the battle of Batoche in the second fur trade rebellion, and thus helped to militarily protect the commercial and political project the railroad embodied. Finally, the century of residential schools was built on an ethos of “killing the Indian in the child”, a subjugation of children, of a people, and of a way of life, before the righteous path of progress and civilization.

So the Confederation democracy was built on a fascist foundation. And so when Canada claimed to be defending democracy against fascism overseas in World War II, it was still running a fascist operation out the back door on the backs of the descendants of the fur trade society.

This may go a long way to explain why Canadians suffer from a pathological failure to understand the true story of who they are and how they got to their here and now.