THE STANDING SENATE COMMITTEE ON ABORIGINAL PEOPLES
EVIDENCE
OTTAWA, Wednesday, May 3, 2017
The Standing Senate Committee on Aboriginal Peoples met this day at 6:45 p.m. to study the new relationship between Canada and First Nations, Inuit and Metis peoples.
Senator Lillian Eva Dyck (Chair) in the chair.
Bonjour, tanisi, good evening. I would like to welcome all honourable senators and members of the public who are watching this meeting of the Standing Senate Committee on Aboriginal Peoples either here in the room or listening via the web.
I would like to acknowledge, for the sake of reconciliation, that we are meeting on the traditional unceded lands of the Algonquin peoples.
My name is Lillian Dyck, and I have the privilege and honour of chairing this committee. I would now invite my fellow senators to introduce themselves, starting on my left.
Senator Lovelace Nicholas: Sandra Lovelace Nicholas, New Brunswick.
Senator Watt: Charlie Watt, Quebec.
Senator Christmas: Daniel Christmas, Nova Scotia.
Senator Pate: Kim Pate, Ontario.
Senator Tobias Enverga: Tobias Enverga, Ontario.
Senator Oh: Victor Oh, Ontario.
Senator Doyle: Norman Doyle, Newfoundland and Labrador.
Senator Tannas: Scott Tannas, Alberta.
The Chair: We have just been joined now by Senator Yonah Martin from B.C.
Today, we are continuing phase 1 of our new study on what a new relationship between the government and First Nations, Inuit and Metis peoples of Canada could look like.
We are looking at the Prairie region of the country, and we are happy to welcome Professor Emeritus John Milloy from Trent University and Professor James Daschuk from the Faculty of Kinesiology and Health Studies, University of Regina. Welcome, gentlemen. You have the floor.
After your presentations, we will have questions from the senators, in one or two rounds. You may proceed.
James Daschuk, Associate Professor, Faculty of Kinesiology and Health Studies, University of Regina: Senators, I would like to thank you for this invitation and opportunity to share my research with you. I am an historian and have been working in the field of population health since my joining the faculty at University of Regina in 2008.
As background, a principle that has guided my work is that the efficacy of public policy can be judged ultimately on the effect it has on people's health in the population of those affected. If a policy is successful, it will improve people's lives; if not, then the opposite is true. So, politics and biology, in this case health, can never really be isolated from one another.
In my time with you this evening I will describe the relationship between Canadian government policy as we professionals know it or Indian policy as it was then known, and its impact on indigenous communities on the Prairies. While the events I will present tonight occurred at the outset of the relationship between Canada and the First Nations in the region, they continue to resonate even in 2017.
Two concepts are critical to understanding the story I'm about to tell you. First, maybe 100 years before Canadians arrived with their flag in the west, First Nations communities had experienced acute, traumatic and terrible epidemic diseases that were brought by Europeans. These diseases, the most severe of which was smallpox and what we would call virgin soil epidemics, were so deadly that potentially 80 per cent of communities would die in the span of three weeks. As we know, First Nations cultures transfer their information orally with words rather than with written statements, so imagine the impact of losing in the span of three weeks 80 per cent of your elders, 80 per cent of your knowledge-keepers and 80 per cent of your hunters. It's hard to fathom.
Also, after that sort of apocalyptic event, those who had the dubious luck to survive had just survived the most deadly disease in human history. Many accounts show that survivors were so sick after their infection with smallpox that they starved to death because they couldn't get to food.
Second, and I don't know if “fortunately” is the word, the number of these outbreaks was very few indeed. There were probably three or for four at the most. In the decades between these epidemics, First Nations people on the plains, people who hunted bison, were actually in very good shape. In fact, American physical anthropologists have described First Nations bison hunters in the west as the tallest population in the world, a consequence of the high quality of their high protein, low fat diet for millennia.
While the herds were in decline when the numbered treaties were being completed, indigenous leaders didn't have to sign the treaties because they were starving. They recognized that basically the Canadians were coming and each side in the treaty negotiation, from my perspective, represented their own communities with force and probably with goodwill during those negotiations.
During the negotiations, though, what we would call food security in 2017 was an issue. The person who articulated that best was a Plains Cree chief called Chief Beardy. What he said during the negotiations with Commissioner Alexander Morris was that if he let the white people into his territory, he was very concerned about the future of the bison; if we let the folks in to set up farms, he knew the bison would eventually disappear.
Using Chief Beardy's terminology, he actually told Alexander Morris, the representative of the Queen, that he didn't want his people to die like dogs. The force of that discussion, which is written down in Alexander Morris's treaties of Canada, actually got what is known as the famine and pestilence clause included in the terms of the treaty. I won't be one of those guys who reads an entire treaty, but I will read some key words from this famine and pestilence clause:
… a general famine, the Queen … Her Indian Agent or Agents, will grant to the Indians assistance … necessary and sufficient to relieve the Indians from the calamity that shall have befallen them.
Chief Beardy knew that changes were about to come. One of the things he recognized was that the key to a successful future was the conversion from hunting to agriculture. He knew that, and probably all the other negotiators knew that too.
One thing that puts this into sharp perspective is that in making that decision, he and the other chiefs were taking a big chance. If you think about it, a pound of bison meat probably has twice the nutritional value of a pound of flour or a pound of grain. If that conversion were to be successful, it had to actually work completely well. First Nations leaders knew that, and that's why they negotiated extra assistance with regard to establishing agriculture, and agriculture assistance was included also in the terms of Treaty 6.
What no one foresaw in the aftermath of those negotiations was that within 18 months the bison would be gone forever. By the spring of 1878, like I said, the bison were gone for good and widespread hunger was being reported across the plains. In April, the Indian Agent Dickieson wrote to his superiors that “the Indians were very poorly off, starving in fact.”
This was the beginning of a true famine. I know it's hard for us in Canada to think about famine, but that's what it was. Members of the North-West Mounted Police, who had been sent a few years earlier as advocates of the First Nations people, and a small number of Canadian officials actually did their best as this famine broke out to mitigate hunger.
By winter, though, starvation was so common that it was no longer news. In my research I've looked at the Saskatchewan Herald newspaper in Battleford, which was the first settler newspaper, if you will. On December 16, 1878, the Herald newspaper ran the following story in the lost and found section. This wasn't news, but here is the quote:
Found: Where the Indians starved to death, about the 1st of October, a white mare. The owner can have the same by proving property and paying expenses.
People were starving to death in the fall of 1878 because the bison had disappeared.
The tenor of Canada's response to the famine changed in the fall of 1878. As most of the people in this room will know, in the fall of 1878, John A. Macdonald was returned to power under the platform of the National Policy, wherein he promised to build a railway as quickly as possible.
Something we might not all be familiar with is that from his return to power in 1878 until 1888, John A. Macdonald served as superintendent general of Indian Affairs. He was the de facto minister of Indian Affairs during the decade that was probably the most critical in the relationship between First Nations people and Canada.
Even today, Macdonald is the longest serving Minister of Indian Affairs in Canadian history. As our colleague J. R. Miller said:
For good or ill, Macdonald was an architect of Canadian Indian Policy. … would last largely unaltered until the middle of the twentieth century.
Because Macdonald's primary motivation was the construction of the railway, everything he did was with that in mind. In his response to the famine essentially what he did was: By 1879, really as soon as he took power, only bands that had taken on to treaty or had signed on to treaty, were provided with food relief. I suppose the rationale was if you're not a treaty Indian, you're not our responsibility.
During 1879 a number of communities like Moosomin, Thunderchild and Little Pine that all adhered to treaty in exchange for food during that first year. As I said, the starvation continued and before Christmas in 1879 the newspaper reported that “Over 25 had died of actual starvation at the camp at Blackfoot Crossing” in the Siksika reserve. People are actually dropping dead from starvation at this time.
By 1882, the railway project was advancing into the western plains, essentially southwestern Saskatchewan, and Prime Minister Macdonald stated in Parliament that all “Indians” in the territory of Assiniboia south of the proposed railway track would be removed by force, if necessary. I apologize for using the old term, but I was quoting him.
The officials never had to use guns. What they did was they used food as a weapon. Within a year, almost 5,000 people were driven from the Cypress Hills as the police were given strict orders that only those heading to their appointed reserves would be provided with rations. That was a very strong rationale and rule.
Among the last of the holdouts was the chief whose English name was Big Bear. He put his mark on treaty and was provided with food for his starving people in December of 1882. As a sign of the changing relationship between First Nations people and the North-West Mounted Police, Fort Walsh, which had been the centre for humanitarian aid during this famine, was ordered to be dismantled and rebuilt at Maple Creek in order to protect the railway.
There is no question in my mind through my research that food was used to compel First Nations people to their reserves and basically off the land. What is more unsettling to me is that hunger became institutionalized once people under the supervision of dominion officials were put on reserves. Indian department officials were ordered to abide by very strict rules of food distribution.
Hudson's Bay old-timer Lawrence Clarke, who I think had been at many of the treaty negotiations, wrote:
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 are barefooted. . . . Should sickness break out among them in their present weakly state, the fatality will be dreadful.
On reserves, distribution of rations was so tightly controlled that food rotted in government warehouses in communities where people were still going hungry. The predicament is illustrated in a letter from a farm instructor at Touchwood Hills to his superiors in 1880 as the pork he had was:
Both musty and rusty and totally unfit for use, although we are giving it out to the Indians, in the absence of anything better, but we can't use it ourselves.
This is the days before electricity and refrigeration, so all of the meat provided on reserves was salted meat: bacon, salt pork and so on.
Later, Agency Inspector T. P. Wadsworth reported on the condition of one of the ration houses by saying that:
The bacon wasted very much by the heat last summer. . . for in turning it over where I took stock last November, there was as much as half an inch of congealed grease on the mud floor of the storehouse.
This meant that over the course of the summer that bacon or salt pork had gotten so warm that the fat had dripped on the floor, and Wadsworth's concern was that the warehouse was actually in bad shape because of that.
In his role as Superintendent General of Indian Affairs, Prime Minister Macdonald actually praised Indian agents such as Agent Anderson for his initiative in dealing with the problem of salt pork by re-curing it and distributing flour that was, according to Macdonald, “a little musty.”
As officials distributed spoiled food to the hungry and the increasingly immune-suppressed reserve population, there are many references to basically desperate people eating animals that had died of disease. One example is a reference to scrofula, the first stages of tuberculosis, in the Saskatchewan Herald of April 1881.
There is a strong scrofulous taint amongst many bands of Plains Indians, . . . the disease broke out in this case, the afflicted ones had been eating the flesh of horses that had died of the scab or mange, and it is almost impossible that they could do so without taking into their systems the germs of disease.
Even in 1881 people knew that if you ate a sick animal you were probably going to be sick yourself.
Rather than apologize for conditions on reserve, Mr. Macdonald defended his policies in Parliament. This is a quote from Hansard in 1880:
In some instances, perhaps, the Indians have been fed when they might not have been in extreme position of hunger or starvation, . . . it is by being rigid, even stingy, in the distribution of food and requires absolute proof of starvation before distributing it.
A couple years later Macdonald repeated basically his policy approach when he said in the House of Commons:
When the Indians are starving they have been helped, but they have been reduced to one-half and one-quarter rations; . . . we cannot allow them to die for want of food . . . are doing all they can, by refusing food until the Indians are on the verge of starvation to reduce the expense.
Later, in the aftermath of the violence in 1885, Mr. Macdonald responded to charges of improprieties with regard to food distribution where he said:
It can't be considered a fraud on the Indians because they're living on Dominion charity . . . and as the old adage says, beggars should not be choosers.
If you remember one of the terms of Treaty 6 was famine relief, humanitarian relief, and in eight years Mr. Macdonald appears to have forgotten that. I don't mean this to be a partisan attack on the Conservative Party, but throughout his tenure as Superintendent General of Indian Affairs, Mr. Macdonald was routinely criticized by the Liberals for actually spending too much money on famine relief. The criticism is probably valid for both sides.
By 1885, the Canadian Pacific Railway was complete and the region was soon to be flooded with settlers. First Nations people who entered into treaties that were the legal foundation for white settlement in the west were now under the complete control of dominion authorities who were able to cut off food at will from minor or even perceived transgression.
On February 23, 1884, for example, the Saskatchewan Herald wrote:
Poundmaker has been a trouble maker ever since his visit to the south last spring and his opposition to the Dept. has been so strong and long-continued that his band has been stricken off the ration role.
This means his entire community has been cut off food. A few weeks later the Herald reported that the Nakota, or the Eagle Hill Stonies, as they were known:
. . . were ordered back to their reserve and to have eight days rations stopped for leaving work without the instructor's permission.
That's men, women and children, not just the leaders.
The development of agriculture, seen by both sides as the key to the future, was undermined through a series of imposed measures soon after the completion of the treaties. In my research the government commitment to provide implements and other supplies to establish reserve farming was never truly fulfilled. Bureaucratic measures such as the requirement for reserves to be surveyed before assistance could be provided meant that would-be farmers, or people who wanted to farm, went hungry as they waited for survey crews to come and finish the job of surveying their reserves.
A permit system enacted by order-in-council in 1881 meant that a reserve farmer could not legally sell a turnip in town without written permission of an Indian agent. By the end of the 1880s, the “peasant farming policy” was imposed by the Indian department. It removed access to mechanical farm equipment and forced producers to harvest their crops by hand despite numerous petitions from officials that crops were rotting on the fields because they could not be removed in a timely manner.
Also, I remind you that hungry and potentially naked people have a hard time doing the work of farming.
Aside from the residential schools which Professor Milloy will probably talk about, whose establishment was overseen by Mr. Macdonald, other long-lasting policies undermined the health of the indigenous population. From 1885, there was a concerted government attack on what officials called “tribalism.” That was an attack on traditional institutions of governance and basically the way societies had functioned.
Religious practices such as the Sun Dance were outlawed, which meant that the government had such a level of power they were trying to control how people thought.
One initiative that we historians are only coming to grips with now is the so-called pass system. While it kept treaty Indians virtual prisoners on their reserve until as late as the 1950s, Mr. Macdonald and his lieutenant in the west, Edgar Dewdney, knew that it contravened the terms of the treaty and even the law. Some of you may have seen the recent film on the pass system by Alex Williams. It's very powerful.
By the 1890s, conditions had been so bad for so long on reserves that entire communities were sick with clinical tuberculosis. Physicians who came west with other settler communities and worked on contract for the Indian department reported that TB almost seemed to be a racial characteristic. Being sick was who Indians were.
In 1932, one of the top medical officials for the Canadian government, Dr. J. J. Heagarty, wrote to Dr. E. L. Stone, a very high-ranking official in the Indian department, in a memo that included the statement:
If the Indians were not confined to their reservations we should be compelled to take better care of them for our own protection.
Dr. Heagarty was telling Dr. Stone that if we let people off the reserves, they would be a threat to us.
We're all aware of the gap in health outcomes that continues to exist between indigenous Canadians and the rest of us. It has existed almost since the treaties were completed, even before there were many settlers in the region. I've been researching this topic for 30 years and what I've discovered is that First Nations people didn't lose their health in the 19th century; they had it taken away from them.
John Milloy, Professor, Trent University: I would like to start by thanking the committee for inviting me to talk about my research and specifically to talk about the context which is the Prairies, Prairie Canada.
It's not surprising that as historians, as my colleague has pointed out, we believe in the value of historical study in the consideration of contemporary issues. Understanding where we have been is a useful corrective to where we may want to go. Such study, however, is always problematic in some way.
Historical work does not exist in a quiet vacuum. Archives are sites of contestation, rather than of dreamy contemplation. People think historians run off to the archives and libraries to live this happy life, but when you get inside those buildings you realize those are political institutions controlled by the authorities that fund them. Thus, I have had an interesting time working on residential schools in archives where getting access to documents has never been easy, despite the pledge by the churches and the government to provide us at the TRC, for example, with open access to these documents.
I'm not making a special pleading here. If you talk to my colleagues who do environmental research or did war crimes research, anything to do with those hot and difficult topics, you will discover that type of historical research is an uphill slog to get documents and indeed get at the truth.
Issues of cross-cultural relations, a particular common concern for multicultural Canada, are not only the subject of study but have at times been the troubled context of historical work, including what has been known as Indian history. Charges of appropriation are not uncommon.
At the end of the introduction to my book on residential schools, I had to acknowledge that but as well to make a case for the importance of Canadians generally of a non-Aboriginal presence in what might appear to be solely Indian business. Indian business, to use the term, in fact is everybody's business and so it should be.
Let me read what I have here in part. I had been writing about a document containing the memories of a number of successful residential school graduates. This was a document, ironically, which was put together by the Department of Indian Affairs in 1965, I think it was. They asked people to give them their memories, and they were very pleased that the memories were dreadful, that they spoke of deprivation, cruelty and lack of education.
Because by 1965 the department decided it wanted to close the schools, and this was a handy document to hand out when anyone said, “Oh, they are really a good idea.” It was a departmental campaign to have them closed.
I was struck because I worried that I was trespassing on someone else's historic experience when I was doing this work, although I had been asked to do it by the Royal Commission and by the Aboriginal leadership in that organization. I was struck by the writing of one of the men. They were successful all right. If I were to disclose these names, most of you around the table would recognize them. They had become successful Canadians, journalists and educators.
He wrote:
When I was asked to do this paper, I had misgivings, for if I were to honest, I must tell of things as they were and really this is not my story but yours.
All of them did tell of things, but I was struck by the last part: “. . . really this is not my story but yours.” I thought about that and wrote the following, which I think I would like to broaden to cover not only the subject of residential schools but all the issues we have to deal with respecting Indian issues
I, too, began with misgivings, feelings of trespassing upon Aboriginal experience, but as I read through the documents in federal and church archives, it became obvious that the former student was correct. The residential school system was conceived, designed, and managed by non-Aboriginal people. It represents in bricks and lumber, classroom and curriculum, the intolerance, presumption, and pride that lay at the heart of Victorian Christianity and democracy, that passed itself off as caring social policy and persisted in the twentieth century, as thoughtless insensitivity. The system is not someone else's history, nor is it just a footnote or a paragraph, a preface or chapter, in Canadian history. It is our history, our shaping of the “new world”; it is our swallowing of the land and its First Nations peoples and spitting them out as cities and farms and hydroelectric projects and as strangers in their own land and communities.
As such, it is critical that non-Aboriginal people study and write about the schools —
And I think about all the other issues including that.
— for not to do so on the premise that it is not our story, too, is to marginalize it as we did Aboriginal people themselves, to reserve it for them as a site of suffering and grievance and to refuse to make it a site of introspection, discovery and extirpation — a site of self-knowledge from which we can understand not only who we have been as Canadians but who we must become if we are to deal justly with the Aboriginal people of the land.
I am very pleased as that is my conviction and I think the conviction of many other, “Aboriginal historians” that the Senate has taken the approach as it has to have a look at the history and what is rooted in that history that talks about the Canadian character and how that needs to be improved in the future.
This evening we look at the West, but such historical studies can be undertaken in each of Canada's regions. The nature of the relationship between the two founding cultures, indigenous and immigrant, as it evolved and the challenges faced today are both regionally specific, determined by elements of geography, resources, the nature of indigenous cultures and the historical context. It stems as well from the common national elements determined critically by ideology, the structure of the Constitution and federal policies, which together with apologies by the former prime minister make up Canada's version of a colonial state, of our continuing colonial character.
With reference to those two formal considerations, regional and national, I would like to address a number of issues connected to the history of Western Canada. Given time considerations, in the main I will restrict my remarks to the early years, as James did, the first two decades, and will not address issues related to Metis people and other issues except the ones I have time to focus on.
You can't talk about Western historical experience then or now, unless you talk about the treaties. Those great seven Western treaties are the hallmark of much of the Western past and much of the indigenous present and they hope the future.
The roots of cross-cultural history in the west were planted in a unique context. In 1867, Canada became a nation. In 1870-71, it became an empire with a vast patrimony, encompassing what had become Rupert's Land, the Hudson's Bay Company territory.
Facing the need to control that area, preserve it in the face of U.S. transcontinental designs and equip it to play an important role in state formation, and lacking the resources to do so easily Canada fell back on the tried-and-true British Imperial method with respect to the resident First Nations, treaties. In fact it became known as the Canada system, a system we maintained — and I assume there will be another night like this — until we got to British Columbia and then we decided not to recognize those principles any longer.
I turn to treaties and a number of ancillary policies. In Western Canada, Macdonald, the great Canadian architect, built a colonial system which unfortunately is in most respects still intact and still operating.
While much of the treaty discourse, particularly the Canadian rhetoric connected with it, foregrounded the Queen's benevolence of annual annuities and developmental assistance in education, the primary goal was to move First Nations aside to permit the construction of the railroad to British Columbia and the development of a profitable Western agricultural settlement, both critical aspects of Macdonald's national policy.
It seemed amazing that the railroad is now so unimportant when in the 1860s and 1870s it was critical. This building resounded with debates and concerns about finally finishing the railroad. Macdonald worried that indeed if he didn't get it done and get it done quickly, British Columbia would leave. There were politicians in British Columbia talking about annexation to the United States. It was a critical time and period, and it was within that context that he built his system.
In pursuit of that goal, the government employed the technology of extinguishment, assigning land rights to communities which were then led to bargain their land away. This is kind of ironic, but Canada was fortunate in that process in the fact that the traditional buffalo resource was quickly disappearing, undercutting the long-term resilience of First Nations. When you listen to Governor Morris negotiating with Aboriginal people, and particularly on the south Saskatchewan treaties, as it were, he is always saying, “Oh, by the way, we realize the buffalo is disappearing. The Queen wants you not to be frightened about the future. Keep poking them and reminding them that they really have no choice.”
It was much more difficult to get Indians north of the Saskatchewan River in Treaty 5 and Treaty 8, for example, to sign treaties where they said, “Well, we'll just go back on the land and we'll continue to hunt and fish as we've always done. We're not so sure we're going to sign these things.” Down south it was inevitable that they were going to be signed, and so they were.
From the beginning, however, important elements of those agreements were and continue to be ignored as inconvenient and, more importantly, as not consistent with bringing tribal communities within a capitalist system.
Remember, we had two different ways of living in the world coming together. A burgeoning capitalist state was being organized on a transcontinental basis by Macdonald and his Conservative governments and Aboriginal people who lived in those places in very different ways and who had very different ideas about what the most important element of that life was then and that life is now, and that's the issue of land.
Thus, in Treaty 4, the treaty I have spent a good deal of time on, the Cree treaty down south in Assiniboine and Saulteaux, before I get myself into trouble, a living treaty and the depth of the plow were ignored. Aboriginal leaders claimed that both of those things were guaranteed in the treaty, that they had both been negotiated, that it was a living treaty. It was alive and would be renegotiated to fit changing times.
Second, they had given up because the settlers said through Morris that they wanted agriculture. They wanted the land for agriculture to bring in people to farm and they wanted the depth of a plow, 12 inches or so, where they could plant their crops. Everything else was reserved to First Nations people as far as First Nations negotiators were concerned.
In places like Saskatchewan today people shrug their shoulders, shake their heads and say, “Well, you know these Aboriginal people; they only discovered the depth of the plow after they discovered potash.”
We interviewed elders in Saskatchewan. The oral history of those Plains negotiators, going right back to the treaties and coming down to us today, was that they indeed had said to Morris that those things belonged to them. The Poorman family ran Kawacatoose reserve until recently. One Poorman after the other was asked by the chief to explain that to Morris. The next morning he came with a few of his fellows with bags and sacks of dirt and dumped it in front of them and said, “You wanted the topsoil. Here, have your men clean it up, put it in bags and off you go.” It's Indian oral tradition. How much do we believe that?
However you can look at the journal of a man called Robert Bell of the Geological Survey of Canada. Bell went on to be one of the more famous early members of the geological society. He was there in 1873, and the treaty was negotiated in 1874. He was wandering around doing his survey, looking particularly for coal, and he was arrested by a group of Cree hunters.
They said, “What the hell are you doing?” He said, “Well, I'm a surveyor, but I'm not the sort of surveyor who caused all that trouble in Manitoba with Riel and his people. I am taking the meaning of the rocks.” The Cree looked at him and said, “That's just as bad. We know what you are on about, you people and your lust for gold. Everything on the ground belongs to us.”
Poorman's brother at the negotiations said, “I hear the sound of gold rustling under my feet. Everything is money for the white man: the trees, the land and the rivers.” They were fully cognizant of what was the nature of the negotiations and laid claim to the subsurface rights and to what they called the living treaty. None of that appears in Morris' journal and none of that was recognized by the Canadian government.
As I was interviewing Richard Poorman, who died a few years ago, he said to me: “We had a treaty and all these things were in it, but a few years later they sent rough men in and that was the end of our treaty.” The rough men they meant were James' rough men of the Indian Affairs department who came and said, “You are poor. You are hungry. You are tired. You do what you are told.”
It was tragic what happened, tragic for those treaty signers, whether they were in Treaty 4 or in any of the other western treaties, because they got cut off from both the coal deposits and all the other resources that would go to the benefit of non-Aboriginal settlers and to the territory. When they got cut off, they got poor, they got hungry and they starved. They got poor, they got hungry and they starved right from that treaty on down to today. They may not be starving in Saskatchewan today, but certainly as we all know they lag far behind anybody else in terms of the West and the economic circumstances in which they lived.
There was a basic philosophic difference between the two sides when it came to the issue of land and to what went on in the treaty. Perhaps the most wonderful place in Canada is Fort Qu'Appelle where Treaty 4 was negotiated. It's absolutely beautiful. In that town there are two statues to the treaty. One was designed by the two architects who designed the legislative building in Saskatchewan. Their dad was actually at the treaty negotiations. He was a surveyor; he signed on as witness. That statute, that big thing, has written on the outside of it the first paragraph of the treaty. “We all got together and the Indians gave up all their rights.” That's their treaty, as far as the white people were concerned.
Down the block is a cemetery where there are 30-some First Nations people who died maybe of hunger during the negotiations; they died during the negotiations and they put up a statue there. It doesn't look anything like the European statue either. What is written on it doesn't look anything like the European statue either. It says on September 15, 1874, the Saulteaux, Assiniboine, Cree and the Canadian government got together and decided to share the land, period. It was not to cut it up like a pie — that piece is yours, that piece is mine, and most of it to us — but to share the land as they understood it. That issue has never been sorted in the West. It has never been sorted across the country. If we are to have reconciliation, true reconciliation in the country, I would suggest that we will need to have a resolution of land and resource issues that might take non-indigenous Canadians out of their comfort zone. Somehow or other we have to step away from the idea of property as we have understood it over the last century.
From the earliest period, all those treaty promises of assistance were not or were barely delivered. Alexander Morris, who negotiated all but one of the first seven Western treaties, painted a picture of a comfortable future for First Nation communities. That was part of his negotiating strategy. “You know, back east, there are Indians. They all live comfortably. They all have farms. They all have cows, chickens, Methodist ministers and all of the things you would want in your life. That's your future.”
Decades later in 1920, Diamond Jenness, Canada's preeminent anthropologist in the first half of the 20th century and a constant consultant for the Indian Affairs department — yes, they existed all the way back then — charged that the department throughout the country had fallen into a state of torpor. It had abandoned any progressive on-reserve policy. The Indian administration, he wrote, was a holding one, more concerned with preserving the status quo than with improving the economic and social status of the Indians or raising their living standards.
Nothing was happening on the reserves in terms of moving those people from where they were to being Canadians like all others, which was the constant rhetoric in Parliament and the raison d'être for the Department of Indian Affairs, the treaties and the Indian Act.
Dr. Thomas Robertson surveyed the reserves in the Maritimes, Central Canada and the West in 1935-36. It's a wonderful report. He went to reserve after reserve, and he pretty much said that Dr. Jenness was right that nothing was going on and there didn't appear to be any real future.
Communities in western Canada were full of people, Robertson said, who wanted to advance, who wanted to conduct agriculture and who had no way of doing so. They had no plows, no plow horses and no assistance from farm instructors. It wasn't just going to happen. It wouldn't happen not only because of torpor. It also didn't happen because there was no funding.
There was no funding during the First World War, no funding during the depression, no funding during the Second World War, so you can imagine the state that people in the Prairies and in other parts of the country were in as they got no funding.
Communities were in essence abandoned by the federal government, perhaps in part because they were no longer any threat to peace, order and good government to state formation. They could be safely ignored.
Certainly indigenous interests could find no priority in federal plans and funding over and against non-indigenous ones. As a result communities across the country were poor and powerless, at the head of every line one does not want to be at the head of — rates of disease and incarceration — and at the end of lines one does not want to be at the end of — employment and education. They scored badly on every test.
Finally, as I mentioned earlier, a number of ancillary policies were designed to solidify Canada's control of the West: the introduction of law and order in the form of territorial government and the North-West Mounted Police and, of most critical consequence, the beginning of the Indian residential school system in 1883.
In the latter case, the police and the schools were conjoined. Residential schools had been introduced in what became Ontario in the pre-Confederation period. They were designed to produce graduates who, having been separated from their parents, could be socialized and educated as white. On returning to the reserve, they would lead the developmental way forward or could be prime candidates for re-enfranchisement. In one way or the other, they are going to be useful.
From the treaty promises of education forward, the churches lobbied to have residential schools opened in the West. There was, however, a sense of Christian duty, which is what the parliamentarians always spoke about; “We have this educational system because we have a duty given us by God.” In addition there was a darker, largely private motivation that moved Macdonald to commission the famous Davin Report in 1879. Three years later, on Davin's recommendation and as the progress of the railroad was about to enter Blackfoot territory, Macdonald was moved to do three things in a budget speech in 1883. All of them are conjoined; all of them were meant to work together.
He doubled the size of the North-West Mounted Police in one year. They were entering Blackfoot territory. The Blackfoot had thousands of well-armed warriors. The armaments the warriors had were better than the armaments the North-West Mounted Police had. One Liberal member stood and said, “I visited Fort Qu'Appelle. There are five horses at Fort Qu'Appelle. There are 20 mounted police.” One rides the horse and everybody else hangs on to the tail. No horses, bad armament and “bad officers,” said the Governor General's military adviser, bad officers because they weren't British.
He doubled the size of the North-West Mounted Police in one year. He stationed them along the line of the railroad as it went into Blackfoot territory, past Regina. He provided, finally, some additional funds for rations but only along the railroad line. If you lived close to the railroad line you got some extra rations. If not, you were, as James said, left out.
Then, he funded the first three residential schools: Battleford, Qu'Appelle and High River, all of them close to that railroad. It's ironic, given the problem that we're having in Ottawa. Hector Langevin, who introduced the first Indian Act in 1869, was the man who stood in the house to introduce the fact that we were going to fund three residential schools. A few days before that Macdonald said he'd come back to make the educational announcement. Then Macdonald didn't show up, and poor Langevin had the residential school system hanging around his neck, not that he was completely innocent given the nature of the Indian Act.
Macdonald acted in that context not in response to the churches but to the commissioner of the North-West Mounted Police, James Macleod, who advised in 1878 that while the treaties were an important step forward, the government needed to provide farm instructors and Indian residential schools.
In 1879, Davin had been appointed. He went on his exploratory trip to decide whether residential schools were a good idea. He went to the United States. There he found out that senior Indian Affairs officials had determined, with the opening of their flagship school Carlisle, that children be recruited from the Sioux. Pratt was going to go off and meet Indians that he knew in the West, and the department said “No, no, no, you're going to go to the Sioux because they are our main enemy. They're the ones who oppose most western expansion. If you get those children, they will be hostages to their parents' good behaviour.”
Take them from the West and put them in Carlisle school, and if anybody fools around we've got their kids. I know; I couldn't believe it either when I found the quote.
In 1885 Governor Dewdney and Davin, who went to Regina and started the Leader, now the Leader Post, were assisting the Presbyterian church lobbying for the government support for a residential school in Regina. Remember, this is two years after and just after the rebellion. The church stressed the strategic importance of their mission work before and during the Riel rebellion. None of their Indians had rebelled, they said.
They pointed out as part of its “patriotic motive” that once the school was erected, scholars could be drawn from those reserves and their presence would be a great security for peace in the district. The Indians would regard them as hostages given to the whites and would hesitate to commit any hostile acts that might endanger their children's well-being. The petition went forward and was approved personally by Macdonald.
That, however, was not the end of it. In 1899, there was an argument in the department about the status of schools and who should be allowed to go to them. Such realpolitik sentiments were repeated in the department over at least the next two decades, most authoritatively by Clifford Sifton, Laurier's Superintendent General of Indian Affairs, who declared with respect to the legal status of residential schools, their relationship to the treaties and the admissibility of non-treaty Aboriginal children, that strategic considerations were both the cause of the initiation of the schools by the Macdonald government in 1883 and remained thereafter their primary raison d'être:
It must be remembered that boarding and industrial schools were not established for the purpose of carrying out the terms of the treaty or complying with any provision of the law, but were instituted in the public interest, so that there should not grow up upon reserves an uneducated and barbarous class.
Thus, he concluded:
I do not consider that children of the halfbreeds proper . . . should be admitted to the Indian schools . . . I am decidedly of the opinion that all children, even those of mixed blood, whether legitimate or not, who live upon an Indian reserve, even if they are not annuitants, should be eligible for admission to the schools.
This became a departmental commonplace, repeated at times word for word by senior officials as you went through time. Even Duncan Campbell Scott, in 1910, justified educational expenditures with the words:
. . . without education and with neglect the Indians would produce an undesirable and often dangerous element in society.
Residential education facilitated regional pacification and as such was an essential element for newly ceded territories. It was one of the things you did besides sending in the Mounties: You built schools.
The conjoining was that it was the RCMP or the North-West Mounted Police that suggested the schools. Macdonald and Mackenzie had ignored the churches: “That's all very well and good, but we're not going to act.” However, as soon as Macleod said that we needed these things because they were important for our control of the West, Macdonald quickly acted in 1883 when it became critical to do just that.
We know the history of the schools, but one might wonder what the impact was on school funding and on federal oversight of school operations and thus the levels of care of children and the quality of education provided when Canadian control of frontier territories was consolidated. In other words, what happened to the schools when there was no threat to Canadian control of the West or the Northwest or British Columbia? Is that the reason that federal funding for the schools was so deplorably low, to the extent that conditions in those schools were dreadful?
The schools are, gone now, though their doleful impact on the lives of the survivors, their children and communities are still to be fully resolved, if ever they can be. In their place, to serve communities impoverished by departmental neglect and the psychological consequences of the schools, the department, in partnership with provincial child welfare agencies, introduced a much-flawed foster system that again privileged the removal of children from communities.
Thousands have been taken, and more are removed every month. There was no money for family reconstruction.
If you read as I did, because I don't have a life or anything better to do, every annual report of every provincial child welfare organization from 1940 to 1980 they say the same thing every year. They're not talking just about Indian children: “Give us the money, and we'll keep families together. Don't give us the funding, and we'll do what is cheapest,” and that's take children away.
You take the children of poor people. Very few people in Rosedale, not that any of you are familiar with Rosedale, have their children taken away by the psychiatrist office, the psychologist office or indeed the private school. Poor people get their children taken away. The poorest of the poor by the 1960s were First Nations children, so it's not surprising that sort of proportionately or as a ratio more Aboriginal children are in public care than any other.
Residential schools sort of disappear. They just get small and invisible. They are there in a foster system that does not guarantee children contact with their culture or their languages. Nor does it guarantee them a healthy life.
In a sense, the residential schools have just moved from residential schools to fostering and adoption. Federal concern for children, whether it be in those residential schools, whether it be in those fosters homes or generally. As we all know, given that we have a human rights decision to provide proper funding for child services this government will not provide that funding. The federal attitude toward Aboriginal children doesn't seem to have changed either.
The Chair: Thank you, gentlemen, for your overview. Some of it was quite shocking to me and some of it I had known previously.
I'll open the floor for questions from the senators.
Senator Enverga: Thank you for your presentations, professors. When I was listening to both of you, it was like going back in time, learning and visualizing the effects of colonialism among our Aboriginal people. What I heard was a tragic story, a story of oppression and mistreatment. It really affected me personally.
We are considering what we can do to create a new relationship between Canada and the First Nations as a whole, the Inuit and the Metis. What do you think we can do now to reverse the effects of colonial rulings back then? Is there anything we can do?
I know we cannot go back in history but the fact is that history is known to repeat itself. After studying everything, can you tell us how to make up for all the mistakes that were done in the past?
Mr. Milloy: I'm glad I finally get the chance to solve all the problems. I've been waiting for that for years.
There are a lot of things to recommend. Over the last decade and a half or two decades from 1990 to now, let’s say, we've had a lot of study and we have had a lot of conversation. A lot of plans have been brought forward first by the royal commission in 1996 and then by the present Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and we've acted on almost none of them. Almost none of the royal commission reports were acted upon. They just sat there like so many of the other royal commission reports we've seen over the years.
It's not that there's not a will. There's not a way to move the large institutions that govern us quickly, with concentration and with funding to address these sorts of problems.
On the other hand, because we work in the areas we do, we get asked. With respect to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission recommendations, for example, there has been movement. We're not expecting Parliament to do anything. We're not waiting for our official representatives to actually get off their whatevers to make this a priority, to plan and to focus resources on these things. There is real movement across the country even by provincial governments, provincial civil servants, to come together and ask, “How do we reconcile? What can we do at our university? What can we do in our institutions, in our department?”
I've been working with the department of child and family services in Ontario that is putting together a process by which their civil servants who deal with Aboriginal children will get an education in what these Aboriginal people are all about. They'll understand how to form joint projects with Aboriginal communities and to move forward at that grassroots level. That's one thing we can do.
There is another thing you can do. After all, you are in the Senate. You probably see the prime minister, if only at six o'clock when all those cars show up and take him away to dinner or whatever. There's no reason that you can't demand some action.
There have been great promises, there has been great rhetoric and there has been an election. I'm shocked by the fact that a government can sit by when a human rights commission says, “You must spend this money.” The government shrugs its shoulders and says, “We must but we're not going to; we're not going to make those priorities.”
There are serious difficulties which need to be addressed and are not going to be easy for us. We have been bedevilled by the fact that this economy is based on resource extraction and processing. We extract resources from where Aboriginal people live, and we have never been able to come to terms with that. Our current Prime Minister has already learned that over the pipeline issues. If you're going to take oil out of places and send it to other places, you're going to automatically repeat the problems that we saw in the 1880s and 1890s with respect to resource exploitation. There's no way around it.
There has to be a way of sitting down and asking, “How can we remake something?” I'm sorry. I’m going nowhere.
Mr. Daschuk: When you speak about a tragic story, it is a tragic story, but one of the things I tried to emphasize was that Treaty 6 was negotiated with a famine and pestilence clause. Instead of a tragic story, think about it as the laws being broken. From the royal proclamation on, the first document, from the British taking ownership basically of most of northern North America, there was recognition that indigenous people owned their land. The treaties were absolutely important in British legal tradition to having settlers move out west. Without those treaties, it would have been basically against the law for white people to move west.
Those treaties that were negotiated are the cornerstone of the society that's developed in the last 120 or 125 years out west. They were broken within 18 months of their being signed. The negotiations may have been undertaken with goodwill. There's actually a growing body of scholarship showing that the text of the treaties may have been edited at the Queen's Printer rather than out in the field, but the breaking of those treaty commitments was basically breaking the law.
There are literally hundreds of cases in the courts and in negotiations these days, but rather than fighting First Nations the first thing to do is to recognize that laws were broken. They were broken basically on behalf of the society that we live in today.
Like I said, there are hundreds of cases of injustice that First Nations people are scraping the finances together to try to take the government to court or whatever. Probably the first thing to do is to recognize that laws were broken.
Mr. Milloy: In 1878, when James Macleod was still the commissioner, the Indians came to him and said, “We're starving” and he said, “You're not starving; you're just hungry. Therefore the famine clause doesn't apply.”
Senator Oh: Thank you, professors. Your extensive study of this issue is great. It is shocking, upsetting and terrible to hear what you have told us.
With the bison disappearing and using famine and food control to slowly get rid of the Native or indigenous people, was that the government's plan? How could the bison disappear? Was the purpose to control the First Nations, the indigenous people?
Mr. Daschuk: I don't think it was a plan. In the United States a military campaign was undertaken I believe by the American general who burned down the farms of the confederacy. He knew that if you starved a population out, you could weaken them from a position of defence.
In Western Canada the dominion just didn't have the human resources, if you will, to undertake that. I don't think they actually had planned that, but through a few consequences of weather, two El Niño in a row, and a large-scale commercial buffalo hide hunt in the United States it was totally unsustainable.
Like I said, the American military was on a campaign to destroy the bison to “pacify” Native Americans and get them on to their reservations. The disappearance of the bison in Canada was collateral damage with regard to a lot of those policies though the Metis were probably unsustainably bison hunting as well.
As I said, 18 months after those treaties were negotiated nation to nation from positions of strength, one of the partners in that treaty lost their position of power. The new government under the national policy was very quick to take advantage of that situation and basically turned things like the famine and pestilence clause on its head and used it as a weapon.
Mr. Milloy: Anyone who lives in Western Canada knows that as early as 1850 the buffalo were disappearing with those pressures south of the border and those pressures in Canada.
For the Hudson's Bay Company, the buffalo wasn't worth much except a good steak. For the Americans it was worth a lot because the hide could be taken, processed and shipped to the East. One of the things the hides were used for was as belt drives for industrial machinery. You have the irony of the industrial East literally eating up this resource on the plains.
By 1850 even the whites were saying they were going. The numbers were dropping and dropping and the marketplace was the reason. They were going to end up in southwestern Alberta. That would be the last of them, and that was exactly what happened.
The Cree people who I work with moved farther and farther west. There was a bloody battle in 1870 where they got the hell kicked out of them by the Blackfoot just outside Calgary, and that was the last battle. Even the Blackfoot looked at them and said, “You're starving; you better come in and we'll share with you the last that there is.”
By 1879, they're gone. There are no buffalo they can find on Canadian territory by 1879, so this is opportune for the sort of policy of starving that James is talking about. It couldn't have worked better for the Canadian government that wanted these people out of the way.
Senator Oh: Do you have any idea the number of indigenous people that were involved? What was their population at that time? How many people died from the famine?
Mr. Milloy: How many died?
Senator Oh: Yes.
Mr. Daschuk: That question is a simple question with a very complex answer. We don't know how many people died of starvation, but probably 20,000 to 25,000 First Nations people in Saskatchewan, the territory I'm from, were around at treaty time.
By 1891, the population was infected with tuberculosis. As I said, physicians thought the entire communities were sick with TB. There was a global flu pandemic wherein people who were sick with tuberculosis got the flu and died. The year 1891 was considered, at least on the Prairies or in Saskatchewan — for the Blackfoot it happened a bit later — to be the population nadir, the bottoming out of that population. It was within 10 or 12 years of the treaties being signed.
Like I said, we're not sure of how many people died because of those policies. Many were immune suppressed and died of disease and following the dots is very difficult. Within 10 or 12 years of the bison disappearing, the First Nations population in Saskatchewan had bottomed out.
Senator Lovelace Nicholas: Thank you for your presentations. You mentioned that in essence the communities were abandoned by the federal government. Don’t you think it is still true to this day?
Mr. Milloy: Oh, yes. I don't think they ever came back. They checked out and that was pretty much it.
Some of you are old like me and remember John Munro, who was Minister of Indian Affairs. He was sort of a street fighter. Believe it or not, in 1980 he published a report in the Department of Indian Affairs called Indian Conditions: A Survey. It is the most honest bit that I've ever seen come out of the department.
He says everything has gone to hell in a handbasket. When you look at Indian populations across the country, from economics, social and health standpoints, it's all horrible. Then he says it's our fault. It's the fault of the federal government, and he says there doesn't seem to be any sign that things are going to get better in terms of government policy, funding, et cetera, and attacking these particular issues.
By 1980, maybe it has gone past resolution. Maybe communities are in such bad shape that to talk about a fix, and certainly not a quick fix, is really pipe dreaming.
Senator Lovelace Nicholas: Do you believe that Sir John A. Macdonald would be disappointed to know that we survived?
Mr. Milloy: To know that what, that they survived?
Senator Lovelace Nicholas: Do you believe that Sir John A. Macdonald would be disappointed to know that we've survived this cultural genocide?
Mr. Milloy: I think he would be pretty pleased with what he did. He built the railroad. There are these great achievements. I don't want to throw Canada out with the bathwater, although it needs whatever. Who knows?
Senator McPhedran: Thank you both for the additional compelling information and strongly moving factual presentation about the extent of human suffering.
I'd like to focus on some of the references made to the taking of children and the linkage of the vulnerability that allows the taking of children to poverty. I’d like to link that, in turn, to the status of women in the indigenous populations at that time.
It's partly because one of the very active committee considerations we are in the midst of is Bill S-3 with the intention of clearing up the residual so-called gender discrimination in the Indian Act. We have yet to see whether it can actually be achieved. In fact what we're really talking about is sex discrimination, discrimination against indigenous women on the basis of their sex, and the perpetuation of that policy despite numerous amendments that have taken place since my esteemed colleague challenged Canada in the international human rights arena and won.
My question, though, is to ask both of you if you have any thoughts on some of the historical information that you may have come across or be aware of that zeros in more closely on this aspect of the campaign against indigenous peoples to the sex-based discrimination geared to and directed against the women.
Mr. Milloy: In 1869, but more importantly in 1876 in terms of the first full Indian Act, if you step back and have a look at it you will see that First Nation communities across the country were remade as Victorian communities. The women are women and therefore carry no place in the plans that the department have for those communities in the future.
Men take the political positions and the important economic positions; women disappear, as it were, in terms of that act. Tribes that had been tribes made up of bands now become municipalities. People are subject to those boundaries.
You live on a reserve. You are no longer part of the Plains Cree Nation; you are Kawacatoose and that's it. If you move from the Kawacatoose band to Gordon’s band, you are trespasser. Men don’t have rights there; women don't have rights there. The women marry and therefore follow their husbands and their band identification. The whole thing just becomes European.
While there are advances, as we know, with respect to women's rights outside of reserves, in those reserves there was no movement at all until the 1970s, when the first attempt to end gender discrimination was made. Before that there was nothing. No progress was being made in those communities.
Ironically, however, although the department never challenges the legal position of women, after the Second World War departmental policy was largely feminized, which is quite interesting. We drift away from the authority of the churches as a society, and we drift into the arms of social scientists. It's like that television show “Corner Gas” where they spit when they hear the name of the town down the road. I’m tempted to spit when I have to use the words “social scientists”. We're then captured by social science. We move the church out and move the social workers in.
What is interesting about it is that in those days the department was run by ex-soldiers. They refer to it as Colonel Jones' lost brigade, because it’s the Department of Indian Affairs. They hire a series of female social workers. The idea is that they will work with non-Aboriginal women in communities: the minister's wife, the nurse, whoever it is. Those women will energize the communities to achieve the sorts of goals the department never achieved for itself, which is clean houses, a work ethic, and children who go to school all the time and are raised in a proper fashion.
Those organizations, the women's committees which the department helps fund right across the country, become political organizations after a while. First of all, they want sewing machines. Then they want true political reform when we get to the late 1960s and early 1970s. In an odd way, that departmental activity energizes forces in Aboriginal communities, which are women's movements for real political reform.
I don't know if that's the answer you want, but that's what happened. It's quite odd that you have what I call the feminization of the department.
A problem with all those women is that they are garrulous, according to the department that keeps saying: “Just the facts, ma'am. Stop writing about all this interesting stuff you find in Indian communities.”
Senator McPhedran: Interestingly enough, that is a pattern that women follow all over the world. You achieve a modicum of economic capacity and it typically leads to demand for gender equality, sex equality.
Mr. Milloy: That certainly was the pattern in Australia among Aboriginal women who had household goals they wanted to achieve in their communities. At one point they realized those goals were not going to be met unless they took political action, unless they moved into the political sphere.
That seems to happen in Canada with respect to the Women's Institute. The department, at one point tried to merge the women's organizations on reserves with the Women's Institute, and it didn't come off. It is a women's institute type of organization which after a while becomes useful politically.
I was researching and the white paper came along. I was looking at papers in that era. There were very strongly worded letters from these women's organizations about the political agenda they wanted to see followed. Sewing machines had drifted into the past.
Mr. Daschuk: My research focused on the 19th century. Rather than struggling for women's rights, this is a marginalized group, and women being the most marginalized.
I was telling you about the distribution of rations. In 1885, there were a lot of parliamentary and Senate committees discussing the violence that erupted. One of the things discussed in Parliament was that several employees of the Indian department were actually fired for basically exchanging food for sex. They were taking advantage of their position.
I remember 15 or 20 years ago when I was reading about this that I was having a hard time wrapping my head around it. On the news, UN aid workers in Africa were basically going through that same scandal.
The lesson to be learned, then, is that if you have absolute power over a population there will be a certain percentage of people who will be taking advantage of that.
It is the same situation with settlers arriving and sexually transmitted diseases. I know there is a lot of correspondence about “prostitution,” but those women were probably just trying to survive in an analogous situation that is probably going on in the present.
Senator Pate: I thank both of you very much for your presentations. Your last comments provided the perfect segue into what I want to ask about, which is the link between the historical situation that both of you have spoken about and the current situation of mass incarceration of indigenous peoples, particularly Indian women and more particularly girls.
You probably know the statistics now are that 36 per cent of women in federal prisons are indigenous; 43 per cent of girls in youth custody are indigenous. Could you comment on that?
Also, I'm told by historians that some of the first indigenous women jailed in the Prison for Women in Kingston were jailed for not getting medical attention when they had children. It was not because anything happened to their children, but because it was the only way to punish them for going out in the bush and not registering their children for the purposes of the Indian Act.
I'm wondering if you know of any other historical documents that point to some of those sorts of issues, if you have any comments as well on the historical significance, and how you might see some of the wording in the treaties being used to pull some strategies for the type of action that you rightly have suggested needs to happen.
Mr. Daschuk: I teach Health Studies at the University of Regina, and we deal with the social determinants of health. I was talking about a criminologist colleague who teaches Justice Studies, and he said that the social determinants of crime are essentially the same as the social determinants of health. When you have all of those factors declining then you're going to get into that situation. The things that make us sick are the things that probably drive people into prisons.
One of the things that drove in my research was looking at the origins of the gap. They all know about the gaps, like five to eight years in life expectancy. First Nations people lead shorter and sicker lives than the rest of us.
When I looked back and tried to find the origin of that gap, I was pretty shocked to discover that that gap was created on behalf of the settlers by the government. People had their health taken away from them before there were many settlers out west to speak of, maybe a few hundred. After the completion of the railways the land was flooded with settlers.
That's one aspect of it. I know I sound like a gender studies person, but as that patriarchal society was imposed on people the position of women was more and more weakened even though in traditional times they had a very strong position.
Mr. Milloy: The reason is police. I worked for Justice Sinclair, Senator Sinclair, when he ran his commission on First Nations people in the criminal justice system in Manitoba. I was contracted to provide a simple answer to a simple question: How many people of Native ancestry were in Manitoba jails prior to 1950?
It's because I'm brilliant of course that I wrote back in a week and said “None”. There were two guys but we think maybe they were black and not Aboriginal. “Send me my cheque; I want to go on to something else.” They wrote back and said, “No. Now you have to tell us why,” and my answer was, “The police.”
Prior to 1950 most of these communities lived in relative isolation from everybody including the police. They had no atomized roads and few telephone lines. They continued to be self-governing, self-regulating communities, particularly in the West, for a long period of time. Then we got the roads, the telecommunications systems and fancy police cars. As well, people began to move into the cities where they were under surveillance, whether they were Aboriginal or non-Aboriginal. Along with the poverty that was driving them into these places, you would therefore expect them to be arrested and incarcerated at some point.
I'm doing research on the fostering and adoption system in the Sixties Scoop, and one of the things I ran across recently was that women in Winnipeg were regularly given what were called “red tickets.” I absolutely had no idea what they were so I got in touch with an old RCMP fellow, who got in touch with some people in Manitoba. Red tickets were tickets the police gave you that said: “You better leave town because if we see you again we will arrest you.” These were given to women who were suspected of being on the streets for nefarious purposes, for sexual purposes. Therefore they were thrown out of town. They were expected to catch the bus somewhere. I think Toronto did that a few years ago by trying to get poor people to move to Hamilton. It's a different kind of pass system.
Part of it is no doubt an endemic patriarchal system of discrimination against women, whether Aboriginal or non-Aboriginal women. There is a wonderful article by an anthropologist which points out that traditionally there was equality between the sexes in indigenous communities.
That didn't mean that anybody, male or female, could be president of the Bank of Nova Scotia. A woman called Leacock in her famous article wrote that women were autonomous in the spheres of responsibility they had. Nobody told the women what to do about child raising, food production, and a whole series of things, and similarly with the men. It is interesting that breaks down, not with the coming of ideological discrimination but with the coming of a capitalist system.
On the Prairies, for example, you shot a buffalo and that buffalo automatically belonged to your wife. Then she was the one that determined how it was used, how it was distributed, what was done with the hide, et cetera and so forth.
In the 1830s, when you put steamboats on the Missouri River, you were able to hunt buffalo en masse and ship those skins back to the United States. Suddenly those hides become the property in Plains communities of the men.
Multiple marriages grow larger. People say, “My God, they are even marrying 12-year-old girls. Why are they doing that?” The tents of the rich people in the community are larger than those of anyone else. You always know where the chief is. He is living in the biggest teepee and has the most wives. The little factories producing hides were owned by the men, no longer the women.
The poison of the European capitalist system seeps into these communities. Gender discrimination comes a long time before the Indian Act shows up in the way in which the economic system reforms societies. These forces did it to us, to the people throughout the empire. Thank God capitalism went away last Friday, right?
Senator Pate: Are there additional strategies for action?
Mr. Milloy: On additional strategies for action, I guess that's one of the answers I don't have.
Mr. Daschuk: We can only hope that the inquiry into missing and murdered indigenous women will achieve its goals. Knowing the truth is the first step to a true and viable response to things. We are on that path and hopefully we can pursue that.
Mr. Milloy: Professor Marlene Castellano, a leading thinker in Aboriginal communities with whom I worked at Trent for many years, was approached by a Journal of Women’s Studies to write an article. She said that we don't need equality in Indian country for women, that we need help for our men. That was always her position: “It's the men who are crippled. It is the men who have been badly damaged. It is the men who act out their pain.” “After all,” she said, “we are still doing as women in 1990s, 2000s or whatever always did. We have babies. We raise children. We feed our families. It's the men who lost their jobs.”
Senator Christmas: First, I thank both of you, Professor Daschuk and Professor Milloy, for your work in putting together the publications and the research. I fully agree with you that knowing the truth certainly makes all the difference. I appreciate, as do probably a lot of indigenous people, the life work you have done in this research and publishing the work that you have.
As you've mentioned, one of the great values is in knowing the truth. Putting the modern day situation, the situation where we find ourselves in 2017, in the historical context of what happened in the 19th century is extremely valuable because it answers a lot of questions of why we have the situation we have today.
Another comment is that your testimonies this evening are remarkably familiar. I'm from the East Coast, from Nova Scotia. The same pattern happened there: the treaties, the dispossession of lands, disease and starvation, and then assimilation. It's the very same pattern.
In Newfoundland we lost a whole traditional population there, the Beothuks. In the early 1900s in Nova Scotia, Indian Commissioner Joseph Howe did a survey and found 1,100 Mi'kmaq after the period of disease and starvation. He made the prediction that the Mi'kmaq in Nova Scotia would be extinct in a few more years.
I am going to try to ask what others have tried to ask you. As we are approaching the 150th anniversary of Canada's founding we as a Senate committee have been tasked to do a study and make some recommendations on how to re-establish a nation-to-nation relationship between the Crown and the indigenous people of the country. As you can appreciate, that's a huge challenge.
I would appreciate at least your making an effort. If you had a private audience with the Prime Minister what would you tell him about how to go forward today?
Mr. Daschuk: There are a couple of things, I guess. You mentioned that these things are very familiar. One of the things I take seriously is speaking to the public and sharing my knowledge with the public. Often I'll be giving my presentation to, for lack of a better term, a biracial crowd and I’ll notice the brown faces are nodding like they know and essentially everyone else is shocked.
I once gave a presentation in Alberta to a lawyer who works in the oil industry. After my presentation and showing him the map of the consequences of that starvation policy, he was literally as white as a ghost. He looked like he had been kicked in the guts. I had spoken to him before. I asked him if he was okay.
It turned out that the man was from Kindersley, which is right in the area that was depopulated. He grew up on a century farm. He had a totally idyllic childhood. He used to go around on his farm and pick up artifacts. He would see stone rings around. It was the greatest thing ever as a child.
Maybe it was a fluke, but as I showed him that map only then did he realize the people a couple hundred miles away or their ancestors were the people who left those artifacts on the land his people had profited from. It was a real shock to him.
We've said this before. Finding out the truth, as tough as it is, and getting into that deep and ugly truth is probably the first step in recognition of the issue. I don't quote Gord Downie of The Tragically Hip very often, but he said that Canadians have been taught to look away for so long it's what we do. If we can show even the ugly truths in a way that people can understand, that's part of our role as historians.
With regard to Prime Minister Trudeau, I found it really interesting maybe a year and a half ago when Prime Minister Trudeau accepted all of the 94 calls to action. That's a lot of calls to action. He also accepted in principle the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. I guess maybe someone with a binder went into his office and talked to him about how much that's going to cost: “We have been running a country for 149 years one way and it will be hard to turn that ship around overnight.” So we have a made-in-Canada solution to the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
This is something to think about as we approach Canada 150. I have given a couple of talks on this. I'm sure everyone is familiar with Dr. CindyBlackstock. The financial amount she has spoken of to redress some of these issues is potentially $500 million or so, which is about the same amount of money we will be spending on fireworks and hot dogs for Canada 150. It's an opportunity lost to say we're not going to have a party; we're just going to deal with this festering wound in our society. I wish it would happen.
Mr. Milloy: I appreciate his taking me into his office and having a chat with me. What I'm going to suggest may sound stupid, but that's what we do in universities sometimes or a lot of times.
We have been very successful in building Canada. There is no doubt about it. It really worked. From Macdonald forward we have managed to populate the country, to provide an amazing standard of living for Canadians, and so on and so forth.
It's about time we stopped doing that, I would say to him, because what we have done is created in our part of North America a European country. For example, there is Hamilton with its pollution, overpopulation and skyrocketing real estate costs. We are doing a really good job of it, so please shut up and listen.
I remember working at Trent University with an elder, my favourite elder, Fred Wheatley. He has given me some Aboriginal wisdom. He said, “You know, you Europeans, you Canadians, you don't leave any spaces between your words, do you? You just keep on talking and talking, and nobody else can respond to you.”
Let's keep building Canada as we have for the last 150 years. We know where we are going. Rather than more pollution, more problematic consequences of resource exploitation, increasing urban poverty and decay, and all the kind of stuff that we are really good at, let's try to sit down finally with First Nations people who hadn’t produced any of that when we got here. Let’s talk about what a future Canada can look like, what sorts of changes come from an Aboriginal way of knowing and doing what we could benefit from, what could be taken and made part of a new Canadian character, part of a new Canadian country.
Being a capitalist country is easy. Donald Trump can do it. That's pretty sad. Actually striking out in some new sort of direction, as fuzzy-headed and academic as that may sound, is something that the Prime Minister may want to consider. There are lots of First Nations people around the country who could sit down with him and say these are the things we need to be concerned about and these are the ways we may want to approach those things. Would he listen? Maybe, before the next election comes.
Senator Christmas: Thank you very much. I appreciate the answers.
Mr. Daschuk: John, do you remember the Treaty 4 chief who told the treaty commissioners, “We can't eat words. We can't eat your promises?”
Mr. Milloy: LittlechildI think, but I am not sure.
Mr. Daschuk: Anyhow, that situation has been going on for quite a long time.
The Chair: I'm sorry I have to follow up with a question.
Professor Milloy, you were talking about listening to what Aboriginal people might say to contribute to a different future for the country. Would there be certain segments of the Aboriginal population that you think we should contact, or are there certain people that you have in mind?
Could you give us a little more hint? In fact our committee is headed in that direction, so I'd be curious to see what sort of hint you could give us as to how we might go about that.
Mr. Milloy: I want to get home safely tomorrow, so I'm not sure I want to answer that question.
The Chair: Could you just give us a hint?
Mr. Milloy: That's one of the problems. How does one become an accepted representative of indigenous people in the country and therefore able to stand up and represent indigenous people?
I would suggest, therefore, that we don't ask those people and that we ask the elders in communities, the people who are not politicians, the people who are in fact connected to some traditional ideas and traditional ways of knowing and doing. Those are the people we could speak to.
I listened to survivors in the residential school hearings for so long that I'm amazed at the levels of wisdom that exist in those old minds, maybe because of the bad experiences of the last 60, 70 or 80 years that they have lived.
The Chair: Professor Daschuk, would you like to add to that?
Mr. Daschuk: Taking a different or parallel course, there are a lot of young, educated people. I work in Regina, home of First Nations University. I know there are a lot of young people who are true to their traditions and roots and educated with MBAs, business degrees and legal degrees. They are invigorating the scene in Saskatchewan and probably throughout the country. The young people are probably worth listening to as well.
The Chair: That's very good advice.
Senator Watt: It was quite interesting to hear what you have to say concerning our people and what they have gone through over time in the past. There are a lot of different experiences and sad stories that go with it. It doesn't make anybody feel comfort.
I would like to do the same as the person who spoke before me in terms of trying to get an answer from you. What is the next course of action that has to be taken around that area? I don't believe the Government of Canada is going to give us an answer, now or later.
A big part of responsibility sits within us as Aboriginal groups. I think it's time for Aboriginal groups across the country, collectively, to voice their opinions publicly; to assemble themselves to discuss their own issues and experiences; and to have people like you helping them to address the proper information that needs to go out. I think this is where we need to go.
You should read the speech that came out not too long ago on February 15, 2017, called Investing in Canada's Future: The Next 150 Years, written by the Minister of Justice and Attorney General of Canada who happens to be an Aboriginal person. She's basically highlighting what the government can do and what the government cannot do. She is highlighting the fact that the Government of Canada is not in a position anymore to be the obstacle. By saying that, the fact that she made that statement, there is hope that we can attach on to.
Our people, whether it's the First Nations, the Metis or the Inuit, need to get together in one room by themselves. At some point down the road the three groups have to meet enough times collectively under section 35 of the Constitution Act which allows them to assemble to discuss their future. This is what needs to be done.
At the same time, the general public of Canada would be educated if a communication system were put in place in a proper fashion for the public to follow what is happening.
I'm looking for solutions. I've been in the Senate for over 30 years. Year after year I hear the same thing being talked about. It's a vicious circle that we're going through. We have to put a stop to that. We should become a bit more concrete in terms of what we are looking for, highlight it properly and make sure that the information gets to the right people.
If self-determination is going to work, we need a structure. The Government of Canada at this moment is not clear in terms of what kind of structure they are going to establish to help us get to the point where we want to go.
I'm very doubtful in the sense of waiting for the government. I think we are going to wait for a long time. The first thing, as I said, is that we need to assemble. We need to start rolling up our sleeves and begin making a plan, what the next plan is going to be. How are we going to deal with it?
If we need to, we might have to take it to the Supreme Court of Canada. Knowing the fact that there have been proper rulings by the Supreme Court of Canada, I think we should take advantage of them.
The other factor we should also take advantage of is the fact that the Prime Minister himself has opened a possibility, a hope for the Aboriginal people in the country. By way of getting the message across to him, that is a very possible way, but we have to become constructive. If we are not constructive and if we don't focus on what we need to establish, we're not going to get to where we want to go.
What is your opinion on this issue?
Mr. Daschuk: I agree with you about waiting for the government. One of the things I've been trying to do is to share my research with as many people in the public as possible to get voters to push the government, to actually motivate the 94 or 95 per cent of us in Canada who aren't indigenous to recognize the justice issues that are at play. That's a big deal because if we can get those voters to push our governments that's when people in power will respond.
I also agree with you about the courts. It's very interesting that since 1982 indigenous people have been winning in the courts. While the elected officials may or may not be responding to the issues, the courts are in a vast majority of times finding First Nations people in the right.
It takes forever to go through the court system, in fact a generation and a lot of cash for sure. My adviser for my masters in Ph.D was D. N. Sprague who worked with the Manitoba Metis Federation. He was basically their historical consultant on their claim for the river lots in the city of Winnipeg. When I showed up as a snot-nosed masters students 25 years ago or so, Mr. Sprague told me that this would be in the courts forever. In 2013, the Supreme Court found in favour of the Manitoba Metis Federation.
Unless there's a shift, it's going to take time and it's going to take resources. We've been finding there's a trend for indigenous people and their claims for justice to have been in the right. That's a cause for hope. It is a cause for long-term hope, I guess.
Mr. Milloy: I certainly agree that the court is often efficacious as well as expensive. That certainly is a route to go. It's a standard Canadian political route. Confederation was made and remade in the judicial committee of the Privy Council in Great Britain and then in our Supreme Court, with provinces and the federal government pushing and shoving each other over areas of jurisdiction, et cetera.
I agree that the three groups should get together in council and come up with ideas, plans and direction. Where I think we need to have further action is to realize our political activity. We've had non-traditional political activity since the turn of the century, since the early 1900s. Aboriginal political associations of one sort or the other were founded across cultural lines such as the Alberta Indian Association, an Indian association open both to Blackfoot and Cree. Quite amazingly we’ve had these organizations come together. Finally, we had a national organization, the Assembly of First Nations, and then other national organizations as well.
I'm going to say something I hope you don't think is insulting. If you look at the history of these organizations, they are what I call “begging-bowl organizations.” They are like the Charles Dickens workhouse thing: You go up and say, “Please, sir, can I have some more” or “Please, sir, can I have anything?”
The traditional answer to First Nations, Inuit or Metis people is: “No, you don't have any priority. The problem with you is that you can't operate the democratic system. You can't turn the wheels. That's because you're economically irrelevant. You can down tools as they did in the Winnipeg general strike in 1919, but when you down tools nobody is going to notice.”
We are now harvesting apples, blueberries and sugar beets by machines. We don't need you anymore. We don't need Aboriginal people, First Nations people or indigenous people anywhere in terms of the economy. Whereas working class people were able to bring pressure to the political system in their own interests, whereas women were able to bring political pressure in their interests, indigenous people can't. They have ended up with these organizations.
You don't have any demographic relevance within the democratic system. How many members of Parliament can you elect? Not all that many, surely, but there is, as I think what James mentioned earlier on, a real hope in the fact that increasingly we have university-educated First Nations men and women who have a loyalty to their culture and have a dedicated interest not only in being the president of the Bank of Nova Scotia but in bringing social and economic justice to their communities. What they need to do is to run for Parliament. Parliament is not a begging-bowl organization.
If we look at other political systems, the Maori in New Zealand were able to get themselves guaranteed seats in their parliament. If we look at the black caucus in the United States, these are powerful blocs. We have had so many minority governments in this country in the last how many years that a few indigenous votes would have carried one hell of a lot of weight in terms of determining that Aboriginal, indigenous priorities are actually met. At some point, with power in the chamber, you can move governments in your direction. That's the real politics of Canadian democracy. It's not fair unless there’s a lot of you and there isn't.
I will vote for Perry Bellegarde, who is as talented as you can possibly get and extremely well educated, for prime minister, thank you very much. These people should get into politics, should enter Parliament and should push those levers in the favour of their people, particularly after your three groups get together and say, “Captain, this is the direction we want to go.”
Senator Watt: That was quite interesting. I think I made a bit of headway on that question. I didn't get the whole, complete answer.
Mr. Milloy: The problem is as university professors we give exams. You give the answers. Let me tell you you're wrong and you'll have to take another course.
Mr. Daschuk: This might be more depressing than uplifting or an answer to your question. Professor Milloy talks about the demographic irrelevance of First Nations people. I live in Saskatchewan, and the provincial demographic future indicates that by 2050 one-half of the population of the province will be either First Nations, Metis or descended.
I've spoken of the social determinants of health and the social determinants of crime. In some of my presentations I have said humanity aside, if we don't deal with these issues and if we don't bridge those huge gaps, we're going to go bankrupt from building prisons and hospitals. In Saskatchewan, Manitoba and elsewhere we're at a borderline unsustainable level unless we truly deal with these issues.
Like you said, it's getting First Nations people politically motivated. Even in the last election there was a big push on reserves in Saskatchewan, and there were quite a few ridings that were decided on that.
People have been disempowered, if that's the word, for so many generations that they have power at the ballot box might be an approach to take, like the door is open.
Senator Martin: Wow, where do I begin? First of all, I apologize for leaving right after your presentations but interestingly I had a group of youth council members with their chief and councillor. I don't know the name of the band. When I showed them the seat where the prime minister sits during the throne speech, you should have seen them jump to go and sit in that seat.
You're right, senator. Senator Watt, I have such respect for you and for those that have been here. I'm trying to imagine the kinds of studies that have taken place in this room by this committee. I'm not a regular member, but sometimes when I come on occasion I feel that we're talking about the same things.
Today has been different. In your presentations and in your answers I actually feel like there are some clear examples and a road map forward. Professor Daschuk, I think you've answered my question, but how much of the research that you've shared with us today do the young indigenous people and the community know about? What I have extracted from your presentation is that you were the tallest people in the world and how important it is to know that is the beginning and at the core of who you are. You went into these discussions from a position of strength and goodwill. I think that's exactly what should happen in this examination of the new relationships.
I see a lot of hope in what you have shared. It's very tragic and I was quite emotional listening to you and your responses. In leaving and returning and in seeing those youth I feel that's where the hope is. The future is in your input and that of others, and perhaps the Senate committee will be the place to bring those parties together to begin the design of what will happen for the future. I know that the Senate can be that facilitator. It has done so in other studies.
I would like to go back to the question of how widely known is this information. I think it's very important to know the history.
Mr. Daschuk: As I said, I find it very important to speak to kids. Really where the change is going to come is not with us. It's going to be coming with the young people.
I've spoken to more than 25 classes of high school kids in Regina and in First Nations schools. Interestingly, the Saskatchewan School Boards Association and the Ministry of Education in Saskatchewan have not only mandated treaty education and residential school education, but they've asked me for input of even this harsh story into the curriculum.
Some school boards are a little ahead of other school boards. I think that's the way things work, but a lot of teachers are very involved. I've just spoken to 50 or 60 school teachers in the Prairie South School Division from Moose Jaw. A lot of them were very surprised but very motivated, especially the young ones. They are using their teaching for social justice and are acknowledging that teaching is an aspect of social justice. It's a generational change, but a lot of these relationships have gone on for almost 150 years so it could take a decade or two to change. In Saskatchewan, where I have experience at least, the educational authorities are on this topic and are dealing with it seriously.
Senator Martin: I think that is critical. Professor Milloy, you talked about the importance of political engagement, involvement and impact that the indigenous people could have and should have, and that it will create long-lasting change. I think that will be important. We've seen that more recently as well.
Senator Christmas talked about the Beothuks. I taught a novel about them when I was a high school teacher. It was so effectively written that my students were mesmerized by the novel. It was written by Kevin Major, I believe. Literature is another place where more indigenous writers and journalists are creating the kinds of text that would also inform. Again, that will take a generation.
What you've shared with us today by taking us back to the beginning was very important. Thank you for the work you're doing.
Senator Tannas: I'm going to try and be brief because we're almost out of time. Thank you for being here. I want to tell you that I hated almost every moment of it, listening to what you had to say. I don't want to say I was the architect of this study.
The Chair: You were.
Senator Tannas: It’s not a good to say at this moment that you are the architect of something, but the fact is that we are embarking on a forward-looking project. I did not want to have a backward-looking section, but the contributions that you've made and that others have made before you have been incredibly important. I don't know how many meetings we will have had on the backward-looking section, but if we hadn't had it I don't believe we would have found what I think we will find in the future. I want to say thank you. It has been humbling to be here and to listen to the stories.
I want to ask you a question. It's clear to me and I think it's clear to most people that things will change. If we look at the last 150 years and say that Aboriginal people have not got their fair share of prosperity and happiness, I hope for the next 150 years we work to give them more than their fair share in order to try and somehow level out the cosmic balance of this.
I believe we have an opportunity to help build the momentum that will lead to a financial mechanism. It will help to allow the determination and governance and all of those things to take place because a financial mechanism that will be there to make it happen.
When that financial mechanism is established, who should get it? Should it go to individuals and then allow individuals within all the various cultures to help re-form what would be the right government? You've talked about how there were societies where women had a far bigger and more important role. That has all been blown up. You've talked about the governmental organizations that are dysfunctional because they've been set up to beg.
If we are lucky enough and smart enough and brave enough to get to a financial mechanism, should we give it to the same crowd? Should we give it to individuals and allow them to do it? Should we somehow give it to the Department of Indian Affairs and let them hand it out? How should we attack this, from your point of view?
Mr. Daschuk: That's a good question. From my personal perspective, I'm a historian because I have no other skills. For a viable future there has to be a means to generate wealth. That's probably, dare we say it, capitalistic wealth. There has to be a way. Possibly one of the things that have been changing in the last few years, maybe few decades, is indigenous partnerships with capitalist development.
I know there's an argument to be made against sustainable development. Is development sustainable? I'm not sure, but literally for generations capitalism has been something done to indigenous people. They haven't been active participants in that system.
That could be one of the things, rather than just handing it over like candy. The implication is handing it over to whomever you give it to. Maybe this is giving the opportunity to develop wealth within the communities, possibly profit sharing. I know in Saskatchewan our provincial government found that not viable in the recent election.
The economic development is taking place in northern Saskatchewan and perhaps the people there should have a say or at least a share in how that wealth is being distributed. That's just my own personal opinion.
Mr. Milloy: I can't remember where I found it a little while ago. I think it was Sir John A. Macdonald who said in Parliament at one point: “Do you realize that we forgot to pay the Robinson Treaty people the money we said we would pay them?” They had a rider in the treaty that the group would be paid in lockstep with economic development in the area, and Sir John A. said, “We forgot to do that.”
Of course they forgot right down to this very day to do that. Every once in a while the tribal association comes up with a figure of what's owed. They could buy Canada back very easily.
When we get the three together, I think the three can tell us what is the answer to your question. Part of the revitalization that has been going on for a while in Aboriginal communities is for them to be allowed to reformulate who they are as communities. We're not a band resident on Kawacatoose reserve. We are the Plains Cree nation. You made a treaty with the nation. What that nation should look like should be determined by these people. Then I think your financial formula is quite simple.
I don’t know if we still do this, but at some point we decided we decided that we were to pledge X amount of GNP or whatever it is to foreign aid. We need to say it's no longer a choice whether you fund Aboriginal child welfare. The fact is you turn it over every year to our partners in the founding of the country. You have to be serious about it. I apologize to everyone in the room whom I am going to insult. This country is not about French and English. This country is about European immigrants, Asian immigrants, people who come from other parts of the world, First Nations, Metis and Inuit people. That's the partnership.
We owe that side of the partnership a guaranteed wage, a rent for the land we've taken. There is no way that Saskatchewan is giving you Saskatchewan back, but it should be and Canada should be paying an annual guarantee to amount to these communities to allow them to determine how they revitalize, how they relate to the capitalist world, what they do in terms of gender relations in their communities and on and on: everything we're allowed to do in our communities.
When Aboriginal people were asking in the early 1970s to be allowed to run their own school boards, the government would, “How could that be?” We were all running our own school boards and had been forever.
I remember going to the Nisga'a celebration of Nisga'a self-government held at the University of British Columbia. What a salmon dinner we got, and the lead civil servant stood up because it was five or ten years down the road and said, “Here is what we've accomplished.”
It was the most boring speech you ever heard in your whole, entire life. They had bylaws. Can you imagine that? They had self-government. They had bylaws for garbage disposal and for education committees. There's no great mystery here. It simply needs to be funded and for these people to be allowed to do what we've been doing ourselves. We've determined what our community should look like. That's where the tax should come in.
Senator Tannas: What about the 55 per cent of people who don't live where their people live anymore?
Mr. Milloy: That's difficult. If you look at the royal commission report of 1996 they had all kinds of trouble with that. They simply couldn't come up with an easy answer to that.
Senator Watt: There is an easy answer to that. We have done it on the part of the Aboriginal communities. It could be easily applied to the First Nations and the Metis also. We have done it on the Inuit side. We have control of our own school board. We don't even allow the minister to have a disallowing power in the language of instruction. Those are the types of things that we were able to negotiate.
These things are not impossible. It's just a matter of getting the government moving. When you do that and you take advantage while the door is still open, that's what you have to do. If you have to use the leverage of the courts from time to time, that's also necessary.
The Chair: Senators, we are at the end of round one. We have a few questioners for second round. We are out of time, but we will continue because I believe there are probably some burning questions we don't want to ignore and we have at our disposal two amazing witnesses. I don't want to conclude early.
Senator Lovelace Nicholas: I want to go back to the residential schools. The government knew what was going on in these schools and did nothing. It took us decades to get an apology from the government for the mistreatment at the residential schools. It took us decades to get an inquiry for missing and murdered indigenous women.
My question is: Why was the church allowed to get away with their involvement in all of this?
Mr. Milloy: Why was the church allowed to get away with what it did? At one point the church was a powerful force in the country. Duncan Campbell Scott, who as you know was head of the Indian Affairs Department for many years, wrote at one point: “These churches are residential school mad; I wish we could do something about them.” They kept multiplying the number of residential schools. They did so because the local Catholic organization, for example, would show up in the minister's office with the bishop in tow or a cardinal in tow, and a couple of members of Parliament, and they would say, “There's an election coming; we want a residential school,” and they would get a residential school. What the churches got away with was mind boggling.
I found a letter I found from Tommy Douglas to the minister of Indian affairs saying, “First Nations children are running away from Brandon Residential School and I fear that some will die in the wintertime. They'll be frozen to death. You need to do something about it.” The letter was sent to the headquarters of the Methodist Church residential school organization. I couldn't believe it. The head of the organization wrote to the minister of Indian affairs and said, “You tell that Tommy Douglas to mind his own goddamn business. He's supposed to be governing Saskatchewan, not becoming involved with Indians.” Now hold it here a second, that's a premier of a province. Of course the department did nothing about any of this. They knew it and they just skated by it.
When I was doing the residential school research for the royal commission in the early 1990s, sitting over at archives and over in Indian affairs locked up, Bosnia and all of that was going on at the same time. That's the feeling I got reading the newspapers, reading the department documents. Everybody knows this is bad. The department knows it's bad. The churches know what the hell is going on. Nobody can figure out how to get the hell out of it.
It took from 1948 when we said we were closing the schools to 1996 to get out of it. All through that period those children were taken. Those children were abused. Those children were not educated, and so on and so forth. By the survivors, God bless them, the churches were given a free pass in terms of the settlement agreement. They got off scot-free. Lawyers were called off.
I remember tons of survivors being at a residential school conference in Vancouver. There was a woman guest speaker from Ireland. She had been taken away from her mother as a child by the Catholic Church and put into an orphanage because her mother was a single woman. These people sued the Irish government and the Catholic Church and within six months they had a solution. As you say, it took years and years and years here. She's standing there and she says to the audience, “I know it's different in Ireland and that's why we got the settlement so quickly. After all, we're all Irish together,” i.e. there is a division here between you indigenous people and these white people. “We were all Irish together.” She was black. You could see the First Nations people looking at each other, “What does she mean we were all Irish?” She was. Her father was a Nigerian medical student who impregnated her mother, and so on and so forth. It happened quickly and the churches were forced to pay.
The Catholic Church, for example, was supposed to open its documentary repositories and to pay I think $25 million. They paid I think $1 million to the Aboriginal Healing Foundation and have never paid another cent. They didn't open their archives fully. We never could get into them. It was one excuse after the other. The churches are still getting away with it, the Catholic Church anyway.
Senator Lovelace Nicholas: In order for us to get into the archives again we have to go to court.
Mr. Milloy: Yes. I'm Catholic and I was raised a Catholic. I went to Catholic high school here. I went to Catholic college and university here. It's a rabbit warren of an organization.
I was asked by Senator Sinclair if I would go to see the papal legate here because we wanted to go perhaps to the pope and have a visit of the TRC with the pope. I called them up, and ironically the priest I talked to had been a high school instructor of mine. He said, “Why do you want to speak to the papal legate?” I said because maybe we want to speak to the pope. He said, “Well, why would the pope have anything to do with this?” I said because the pope is head of the Catholic Church. “No, he's not,” he said. I said, “There are thousands upon thousands of indigenous Catholics who think he is.”
I got calls from lawyers. “We want to sue the Catholic Church. Who are we supposed to sue? Is it the oblates? Is it the nuns? Is it the pope himself?” It went on and on. It's a scandal; it has been and continues to be.
Senator Pate: I have an observation and a request of you if that's okay. It's not exactly a question.
On Monday an inquest will start in Saskatoon, we hope finally, into the death of an indigenous woman who was directly impacted by residential schools, the child welfare system, lack of mental health supports resulting in addictions, on and on; a story we have all heard.
Interestingly, one of the things we are trying to raise is the fact that the health issues which likely killed her were health issues that, had they been managed in the community, would not have been life-threatening health issues. Her brother made an observation that struck me as you've been talking and based on some testimony at another committee I was at today. He made the observation that there was never any end of resources to impose restrictions, not just to jail her but to segregate her, to isolate her, to transfer her and to punish her, but the minute there was a request for resources for her diabetes and for her growing heart condition as a result of the diabetes there was virtually no support for her.
In the North alone there is a new prison going in funded to the tune of $65 million. The new one for women in the Northwest Territories will cost more than $1 million per bed to just build and then probably another $500,000 a year to operate. That's an observation of huge amounts of money being expended on a routine basis and exponentially increasing without seemingly any question that those resources are needed.
You pointed out Cindy Blackstock's situation. You compared it to the Canada birthday and I know Cindy has done that as well. Would you please, as your public education, start to include that costing of how quickly resources are put in place? You mentioned policing but I would include incarceration and all the very restrictive ways that are actually further entrenching and exacerbating pre-existing discrimination, the legacy and the historical stories that we've heard about.
In addition to the missing and murdered women, it's something that often is seen as less palatable but is very clear, particularly when you look at indigenous women and girls in our system.
It's a request. I thank you, with the indulgence of the chair and the committee, if we could include that as part of education that is so effectively being imparted as evidenced by the impact on committee members.
Mr. Daschuk: Someone once told me it's a lot easier to build a fence at the top of the cliff than build a hospital at the bottom, but the way our system functions is at the bottom of a cliff. I don't know how many parties have been elected on a law and order platforms. It's not the health care system; it's actually the medical system. Let's get real. The medical system is the priority. That's a monster that eats money. We are rarely in a position as public officials or as governments to go upstream and deal with the problems before they require a prison or a hospital.
This is well-known in population health. If you spend one dollar upstream you are probably saving ten downstream with regard to the prisons and the hospitals. With the way our system is set up it's geared the other way for the prisons and the hospitals. It's a shame. Actually there have been business cases made for this. Humanity aside, it's cheaper to feed a child and provide a proper education than to incarcerate them or deal with their hospitalization later in life. That's a great point. Thank you.
Senator Watt: John Milloy, you have mentioned that we should not be putting ourselves in the position of asking for handouts from the government. I strongly agree with you on that, but we need to find alternative ways of getting the money in the hands of the First Nations if they are going to make ends meet, if there is a possibility of sitting down and establishing a negotiating table. If their own funding does not from the government or is not a handout, what would be your recommendations on how to do the international fundraising? That's one issue.
The other issue you brought up was harnessing the industries to go into some form of partnership or intent to go into partnership down the road. Perhaps we can hook them on to the fact that they may be prepared to give us help. We are going to need money. Without money you can do very little work. Money is the key in today's life.
What would be your recommendations? How do we go about harnessing the industries? I would imagine something needs to be developed. What are the mechanics of it? How do we legitimize the instrument we need to establish?
I understand that we definitely have to stay away from asking for money from the government, if we're to have credibility. From all the indications I'm hearing, they are about to do something to open the doors but not necessarily do it for us. In other words, they're not going to clean up the mess they have made.
Mr. Milloy: Not to cause more problems, but one the problems is simply that if you don't have access to resources, corporations are not terribly interested in you. If communities in Saskatchewan had access rights to potash they would be crazy to go to the federal government. They just go to the local corporation and say, “We'll give you a deal here on a co-development contract with jobs for our people and a fair share of the profits to be made.”
The problem is that across the country we don't have that type of access to those sorts of resources. It's made worse by the fact that the federal government does not have access to that either.
The St. Catharines Milling case in this province turned over all land and resources as the Constitution said, although I disagree with the agreement, to the control of the provincial government. We allowed that to happen in British Columbia when we negotiated British Columbia's entry into Confederation in 1870-71. For some reason when we passed the natural resources transfer acts in the 1930s we gave up the federal control of land and resources in the Prairies that we had, with the argument that the federal government had to sponsor immigration and development and therefore should control the land. In the 1930s, given the constant political lobbying of provincial governments out west, we gave them up. In fact, the federal government is land poor. It has few resources to access in terms of real resources that corporations would want to partner them on.
In Australia there have been some landmark corporate deals because that's what they went after. They went after access to resources. Once they got access to resources after the 1990 decision in Australia that there was an Aboriginal land right to all of Australia, it was not extinguished. They took that and they bargained for resource access. They did the same thing in New Zealand. Then corporations came banging on the door and there were jobs and profits to be shared and community structures to be financed, et cetera and so forth.
The trick is having any sort of access. The trick is beginning with the land.
Mr. Daschuk: That's a good point. Another thing is perhaps finding examples across the country. I'm thinking of Chief Louie in a community around Osoyoos, British Columbia, where he has as full employment as people are able to work in that community. He is a very outspoken chief talking about per diem collectors, nation building and that kind of thing.
Membertou in Nova Scotia is an example of economic development that has been very successful. There are the Meadow Lake Tribal Council in Saskatchewan and the Cree of James Bay. Speaking to those business leaders and community leaders to find out what has worked in the past, working with whatever resource base they have, and then working out the deals could be a starting point. There are communities that are doing very well.
The Chair: Thank you very much, Professor Milloy and Professor Daschuk, for your presentations to the committee tonight. I warned you that you would have questions from all sorts of areas and you have provided us with some incredible answers.
Thank you, on behalf of the committee, for sharing your expertise and some of your words of wisdom for the future. With that, the meeting is adjourned.
(The committee adjourned.)