Clearing the Plains: Apology doesn't Cut it.

My knowledge of Canadian-Indigenous history was limited largely to school textbooks where the settlers “conquered” the land and made treaties with the Indians. Social relationships across the racial boundary were limited. There were no Indigenous kids in my primary school. My aunt and uncle hired their neighbours, a poverty-stricken Metis family for house work and animal/field work. She said that the man was hardworking and that the woman tanned hides. Their children rode on our school bus and mostly kept to themselves.

When we entered grade eight, the residential school kids came into our schools. Mostly they seemed a lot like us; every summer we became “drug-store Indians” so our skin colour was close to theirs. There was a boy whose first name was “Doctor” who was on the track team and always won the regionals. I developed a limited friendship with Amabelle Bear in grade nine, limited because the residential school forbade contact except in school!

Grade nine was the year that our father discovered that his hired hands (who were Cree from Camperville) had to cash their cheques through the Indian agent, who claimed 20%. He told us that he didn’t know of “a good Indian agent – they were all cheats and drunks.”
(He "banked" for them after that.)

That was the 1950’s.

Colonialism became a topic of conversation in the 1960’s; we settler kids recognized the role that our ancestors had played – “claiming the land” that was not ours. The prairies were the “commons” of aboriginal people just as the highlands had been the “commons” of Scotland.  Our ancestors, having been ousted from the commons in the British Isles (UK) came to North America did not recognize that they were repeating the abuse.

The Dewar family were sheep herders in the 1700’s when the industrial age began. The lords of the land claimed the commons for their private use and shut out the peasants in a series of events referred collectively as the “closures”.  The Dewars immigrated to Eastern Ontario but discovered that the land, the soil and the climate forced them to spread out – the lower farm productivity meant that each person needed more land than in Scotland. My grandfather was drawn west to claim a quarter-section (160 acres) near Dauphin, Manitoba in 1885 and work it as a homestead. He lived in a sod house in summer and a dirt hole in the winter. The second summer he went back to Ontario and eloped with his sweetheart – she spent the first winter of her married life in a 12 x 8 hole in the ground with her husband and her bachelor brother-in-law.

The Dewars worked for their survival in those days – they really did have to raise their own food and go hungry if they were unsuccessful – but most of the skills they needed were adaptable from their European peasant traditions. Little did they know that as they struggled to adapt old world skills to the prairies the First Nations peoples were forced into an agricultural model and starved onto the worst available land with no previous survival skills for an agrarian lifestyle. They had been successful nomads, hunters and gatherers for centuries.

About the same time that he discovered the Indian Agent cheque-cashing scam, dad discovered the Peasantry Act of the 1890’s. The Peasantry Act confiscated machinery that was more progressive on the theory that the Indians (sic) needed to progress through each step of agrarian development – they needed to start as peasants with only hand tools. Somehow Dad conveyed his indignation over the Metis and Cree along the Red River in Manitoba being forced to surrender their tools.

None of these egregious incidents prepared me for “Clearing the Plains”.

“Clearing the Plains” is not for the faint-hearted person, white, Indigenous or immigrant. It describes almost two centuries of crass disregard for the very people who helped settlers survive; it describes deliberate policies of starvation promulgated by the federal government under John A. MacDonald. It describes horrendous suffering – and, at times, great empathy. This is a tale of a planned and enacted genocide over more than a century. 

I say to Prime Minister Harper in his “apology” to First Nations peoples: “Mr Harper, 'Sorry' doesn’t cut it!”