In
Cutknife, in West Central Saskatchewan, a museum and campground are
laid out like an early settler town honouring homesteaders of more
than a century ago. There is no mention of the historic site 17 km
North of Cutknife, overlooking the Battle River. There, a
deserted building and some attractive but sparse signage are
connected by weedy, unkempt walkways. Here you can find the graves
of Chief Poundmaker and one of the warriors who fought for their
people and their land in 1885.
In
March of that year, Chief Poundmaker with others approached the Fort
at Battleford begging for food for their families. The buffalo had
been relentlessly slaughtered, their hunting grounds privatized and
parcelled out to homesteaders and their people were starving to
death. Their request was refused.
Several
weeks later, a group of young men raided the Fort supplies and
invaded some homes of settlers – killing no one. Lt Col. Otter at
Battleford gathered a militia with guns, ammunition and the early
version of an machine gun, the “Gatling gun” to attack the
Indians.
Chief
Poundmaker's tribe was out-numbered and out-armed but they knew the
land. Although the army surprised the Cree by attacking in the early
morning, the soldiers were in retreat six hours later. Chief
Poundmaker prevented his warriors from following the soldiers and
thus a wholesale slaughter.
For defending his starving people and showing mercy, the Chief was sentenced to three years in
Stony Mountain Prison. After his release, he walked to visit Chief
Crowfoot in Alberta – where he died a year later at the age of 44.
Nothing
about this story is fair. Nothing is just. The children of children
of children of settlers now repeat a mantra of pride in the land -
“our farm” through five generations, The children of children of
children of the Cree are crowded onto a tract of land – beautiful,
but far from enough land to sustain a community even if all could
enter today's deformed notion of an economy.
The
Truth and Reconciliation Commission is only a part of the way back
for the settler and First Nation relationship. They offer a
debriefing to those who suffered under the residential school system
but do nothing to alter the settler sense of entitlement.
For
thousands of years, people lived on this land and did not deplete its
resources. While entire civilizations in Europe and Asia razed their
forests, polluted the atmosphere and dirtied their rivers, the people
of Turtle Island maintained stewardship and sustainability. The
settlers called them “savages” but the land they claimed from them
was still virgin.
The
Conservative government's last onslaught on Indigenous populations
has been to cut funding for housing on reserves; having never
provided adequate housing for those from whom the land was stolen,
the next step is privatization of the reserves.
Overlooking
a vast valley of rich river bottom, Poundmaker's legacy is uncertain.
The settler populations have polluted it with pesticides and
herbicides, and cut down its trees. Mother Earth is being attacked,
her blood and bones extracted, the excrement discharged into the
atmosphere. On a continent where much was “commons” as recent as
one hundred and fifty years ago, today, even our water is threatened.
A
sad state of misplaced values.
