A traditional dancer at the Manito Ahbee Festival, a gathering that celebrates Indigenous culture and heritage to unify, educate and inspire. Credit: Travel Manitoba/cc by 2.0

By Rose Delaney
LONDON, Nov 6 2016 (IPS)

The history of Canada’s indigenous population has been, for the most part, kept in the shadows.  According to leading expert on indigenous justice Lisa Monchalin, the consequences of colonialism and dispossession on native communities have been “glossed over”, unacknowledged and dismissed by the “settled” population.

At the launch of her new book “The Colonial Problem: An Indigenous Perspective on Crime and Injustice in Canada” earlier this month at University College London, Monchalin emphasised the impact colonial legacies have left on indigenous peoples in modern-day Canada.

During colonial times, she explained, the native population was compelled to become dependent on a foreign system which paid little heed to their own distinct culture and customs. European settlers suppressed the rights of the indigenous groups, rapidly establishing a European hierarchical structure which considered them nothing more than an “Indian problem”.

The colonial solution to the Indigenous “problem” was nothing short of deadly. As a direct result of European settlement, the native population became a vanishing race with an estimated 80 to 90 percent dying from diseases brought from Europe. In the 1700s, blankets infected with smallpox were distributed as a means of eradicating Indigenous peoples.

Those who did not die of disease were forcefully displaced. Many were pushed onto smaller parcels of land, obliged to culturally assimilate and abandon their traditions or left to die off in territories with few resources.

In many ways, Monchalin said, “colonisation can also be drawn back to the prevalence of violence against indigenous communities through the centuries, including acts of gender-based violence”.

Before colonisation, traditional native societies prided themselves on being matriarchal, honouring and valuing the “sacred” nature of women within their community. Women were granted a strong voice through positions of leadership and power and there was an equitable division of labor. “Acts of sexual violence were a rarity before European contact,” Monchalin said.

Under the European system of governance, native women were forcibly dispossessed of their agency. They could no longer be considered valiant leaders, rather, their colonisers wanted to enforce the message that they were little more than subordinates to the male members of the community. Under colonial rule, only men were accepted to speak on behalf of their communities.

The colonisers began to formulate the image of the native woman as an “exotic other”.  They referred to indigenous women as “squaws”, the female version of a savage. They described them as having “no human face, lustful and immoral”, Monchalin explained.

These ingrained colonial perspectives not only converted the native female identity into a sexualised commodity, it also led to the widespread sexual objectification of native women, with acts of sexual violence committed justified by the fact that these women were “human in form only”.

The subordination and oppression of native women rooted in colonial times is still prevalent today. Sexualized and romanticized constructions of the “erotic” indigenous women have resulted in widespread reports of sexual harassment and violations across the country.

“In Canada, 87 percent of indigenous women will experience physical violence in her lifetime. One in three of these women will be raped,” she said.

Indigenous women continue to be victimized by the persisting structures of a dehumanizing colonial system which stripped them of their agency and considered them “lesser being”. This came to the fore in 2014 when 1,181 cases of missing native women between 1980-2012 were made public. The crisis was largely dismissed and a truth inquiry only established last year. Police brutality conducted against indigenous women has also been reported across the country.

Many believe that the historical legacy of Euro-centric suppression contributes to the ongoing issues of injustice and inequality demonstrated towards indigenous peoples. In 1873, one of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s (RCMP) main objective was to address the “indigenous problem”, the goal being the “silent surrender” of the native people.

This led to the creation of “residential schools”, government-funded schools responsible for educating aboriginal children in Canada. The Canadian government developed a policy called “aggressive assimilation”. They believed that a church-run, industrial boarding school was the best way to prepare them for life in mainstream society and ultimately, abandon their “savage” traditions.

However, this government initiative took a turn for the worse. Native children were subjected to violence and abuse. Sexual abuse was found to reach epidemic levels within the schools and some children were even reported to have been used for “nutritional experiments”. After over a century of “state-sponsored violence”, the last residential school closed in 1996.

The need to suppress, silence and condemn a people based on their ethnicity has led to state-induced violence and mistreatment of native peoples by state authority to the present day. Systemic issues of racism and discrimination “legitimize” acts of police brutality and unjust incarceration of indigenous peoples. In fact, there’s a clear Indigenous overrepresentation in the Canadian prison system, with roughly 4.3 percent of the total population incarcerated.

The legacy of colonial injustice persists today for aboriginal peoples in Canada subjected to abuse, violence, and prejudice daily. Seven generations of residential school victims, deep-rooted female exploitation, state-induced violence, and unlawful incarceration, amongst a host of other atrocities, has led to a build-up of intergenerational trauma within indigenous communities across the country, she said.

However, Canada’s federal government has begun to address the widespread neglect and failed policies felt by past generations of indigenous people.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has publicly declared his commitment to beginning a new prosperous relationship between Canada and its indigenous people. “No relationship is more important to me and to Canada than the one with First Nations, the Métis Nation, and Inuit,” he said at the assembly of First Nations in December 2015.

Canada plans to invest 8.4 billion dollars over five years, beginning in 2016–17, to improve the socio-economic conditions of Indigenous peoples and their communities and bring about transformational change.

“Through education, awareness raising and a willingness to confront and question the violent past, the people of Canada can finally celebrate Indigenous identity and ultimately, reconstruct their rich traditions that were forcibly broken down under colonialism,” Monchalin concluded.

Many of the challenges faced by the Conservative government in its relations with Canada’s aboriginal peoples may come to a head at the 200th birthday events for Sir John A. Macdonald, the country’s first prime minister, set for Jan. 11, 2015.

The emphasis in the events organised by the officially non-partisan and non-profit bicentennial commission – underwritten by Ottawa to the tune of one million dollars plus another 300,000 dollars from private donors – is on Macdonald’s record as the consummate politician, speech-maker, provider of humour and statesman who in the end forged a transcontinental nation starting in 1867 out of a string of disparate colonies in British North America.“There is denying that Macdonald built the country, but the collateral damage in building the country the way he did was the legacy of Canadian aboriginal relations.” -- James Daschuk

Commission spokesperson Arthur Milnes says there will be no “whitewash” of Macdonald’s decisions or personality (for example, his alcoholism is often discussed and is the butt of some jokes). He intends to get Canadians, who are not known to be up on their history, to start talking about their founder.

“In some ways we are still dealing with some of his negative policies towards aboriginal people,” he concedes.

But Milnes declined to comment on the interpretation that the Stephen Harper government itself will place on the Macdonald bicentennial.

Today, some First Nations’ bands in western Canada are challenging the building of oil sands energy projects and pipelines because the Harper government failed to fully consult and accommodate them as required constitutionally under a treaty that began with the royal proclamation of 1763 under the British crown.

The same government is resisting making available to a judge-led inquiry complete documentation of credible instances of physical and sexual abuse experienced by approximately 100,000 aboriginal children who were forced by law to attend church-managed residential schools from 1876 (when Macdonald set them up to reduce the “savage” in them) to 1996, when they were finally closed.

The problems faced by aboriginal peoples in Canada today – poverty, high rates of diabetes, poor nutrition, lower life expectancy and broken treaties, especially the 1876 treaties in the Canadian northwest – can be traced to Macdonald’s government, when he held the jobs of both prime minister and minister of Indian Affairs during much of the 1867 to 1891 period, argues historian James Daschuk.

He is the author of a new scholarly work, “Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation and the Loss of Aboriginal Life,” which outlines the spread of infectious diseases such as smallpox, influenza and tuberculosis in the northwest following the first contact with Europeans beginning in the 1600s and leading to the decimation of certain First Nations tribes.

Daschuk’s calling public attention to Macdonald’s starvation policies has struck a political “nerve,” says another colleague who wishes to remain nameless. Despite guarantees of food in times of famine under 1876 treaties, rations were withheld from destitute and malnourished First Nations (following the disappearance of the buffalo) from Regina to the Alberta border on the western prairies in order to force them to leave their traditional lands for selected reserves. This was done to pave the way for white settlement and the construction of the cross-country Canadian Pacific Railway.

“There is no denying that Macdonald built the country, but the collateral damage in building the country the way he did was the legacy of Canadian aboriginal relations,” Daschuk told IPS.

Daschuk is scathing in his criticism of his own “self-referential” profession that is focused more on “theory” and “deconstruction,” versus doing the hard slogging of researching the lesser-known chapters of Canadian history.

“We as citizens in Canada have not engaged in this kind of debate about what the state did on our behalf. Canadians don’t know their own history and don’t know the uglier parts of their history,” says Daschuk, an assistant professor in the faculty of kinesiology and health studies at the University of Regina.

Why did Macdonald, who as prime minister had a lot on his plate, bother with the additional job of Indian Affairs? He faced, among other things, a major railway corruption scandal which temporarily threw him out of power in one election for a single term of office and a struggle to keep the new country (still connected to the British Empire) united, despite being divided between English-speaking Protestant Ontario and French-speaking Catholic Quebec.

Additionally, his army fended off two separate insurrections in the newly acquired northwest by the Métis (a separate distinct people of mixed First Nations and European ancestry) over Ottawa’s failure to follow through with promised land grants – the subject of a 2013 Supreme Court of Canada decision favouring the Métis in Manitoba.

Blair Stonechild, a historian at First Nations University in Regina and a member of the Muscowpetung Saulteaux First Nation in the province of Saskatchewan, suggests that Macdonald’s effort to erase the traditional First Nations’ cultures through residential school education amounted to “cultural genocide.” But one must not single out Macdonald from a 19th century Canada or world where the social Darwinist notion of a superior white race was widely held, he told IPS.

“Obviously, [Macdonald] was the founder of Canada and he was a hardworking person, very dedicated. Those are good points, but he was a creature of his time and he didn’t see First Nations as equal or advanced or anything. He saw them as inferior people who needed to be basically assimilated,” Stonechild says.

The shrinking of the First Nations people on the Canadian prairies – they numbered as low as 20,000 in the 1880s – seemed to fit racist theories that weaker people were bound to disappear, he adds.

Another historian, Patrice Dutil, a professor at Ryerson University, is currently compiling a series of scholarly essays on Macdonald for an upcoming book. He told IPS that he is uncomfortable making “tidy conclusions” about Canada’s first PM.

Macdonald, he explains, functioned in a nastier and laissez-faire 19th century where government did very little for its citizens while politicians mostly focused on building things like roads, canals, railways and harbours.

“Workers worked in miserable conditions, women were beaten, orphans were abused, indigenous peoples were starved, labourers worked to their deaths, Catholics were routinely disparaged, Jews were condemned. This was Canada,” explains Dutil.

Also, Dutil notes that Canada does not have a pristine record with regards to aboriginal peoples but it never went as far as the Americans did with a strategy of “extermination” during the Indian wars while pursuing an equivalent western expansion within North America.

Furthermore, University of Calgary professor emeritus and a specialist in indigenous history Donald Smith suggests that more research is required by his colleagues to obtain a fuller picture of Macdonald’s aboriginal policies before drawing any conclusion about the man.

He notes, for instance, that Macdonald supported the right to vote in federal elections for First Nations adult males with property in eastern Canada without the loss of their treaty Indian status.

“The topic is a difficult one for it demands a review of Macdonald’s Indian policy in Central and Eastern Canada as well as Western Canada [before and after 1867]. I would wager by the standards of his age, not ours, he emerges as a complex and relatively tolerant individual.”

Incidentally, First Nations people or treaty status Indians living on reserves, as they are also called, did not become full-fledged Canadian citizens with the right to vote until 1960.

Maybe the issue is about how Harper’s government is promoting a “jingoistic” and “nationalistic” interpretation for recent and upcoming anniversaries marking the Macdonald bicentennial, as well as Canadian involvement in the war of 1812 and World War I, suggests James Daschuk.

Harper himself provided in an official web site statement a listing of Macdonald’s accomplishments on Jan. 11 for the latter’s 199th birthday – that is “the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway, the founding of the North-West Mounted Police (later the Royal Canadian Mounted Police) and the defeat of the North-West Rebellion” – without mentioning the tragic back story of the first nations and Métis peoples.

Queens University historian Brian Osborne, who studies national narratives, expects that the current prime minister will put a “conservative” face on Canada’s founder. “I think Harper has a partisan political view of Sir John A because he was also a Conservative party leader.”

First Nations’ leaders are calling on the Canadian government to establish an independent commission of inquiry to investigate at least 582 missing and murdered indigenous women and girls – a wish which was not immediately granted by provincial premiers meeting last week.

While the premiers promised to revisit the issue this fall, the Manitoba government announced at the provincial premiers’ conference that there would be a national Aboriginal women’s summit slated for November.

The British Columbia government is also in the midst of its own inquiry related to a local serial killer whose victims to a great extent were indigenous women.

“There’s a crisis in our land today and it has reached epidemic proportions,” said Chief Garrison Settee of the Pimicikamak Okimawin Aboriginal community in Cross Lake, Manitoba, during the Assembly of First Nations’ (AFN) annual conference from Jul. 17 to 19. “It is alarming – it’s disheartening – that 600 missing women are still unaccounted for.”

Settee, who moved the resolution stating that indigenous women are five times more likely than their Canadian counterparts to die as a result of violence, told the 633 chiefs-in-assembly that he is speaking for “those women that do not have voices anymore” because neither the federal nor provincial governments is taking adequate action.

In their resolution, the chiefs asked Ottawa to set up a royal commission on violence against indigenous girls and women tasked with generating concrete and specific national recommendations to address the problem.

The chiefs, moreover, are lobbying for a national, integrated Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and police task force on missing and murdered indigenous women and girls. The aim is to coordinate the activities of a variety of police departments, as well as First Nations’ and government officials.

Aboriginal women were among those killed and missing on Highway 16, which runs from Manitoba to the Pacific Ocean through Northern B.C. and is known as the “Highway of Tears”, according to a Native Women’s Association of Canada briefing paper this year. The organisation’s research formed the basis of the resolution passed by chiefs during the AFN conference.

Indigenous women, too, accounted for many of the 60 missing residents of the Downtown East Side of Vancouver, which is Canada’s poorest neighbourhood, notes the paper.

Roughly half of the Vancouver victims were linked to convicted serial killer Robert Pickton, a B.C.-based pig farmer who kidnapped, sexually assaulted and killed women over several years and buried them on his property. Pickton’s brutal crimes trained a spotlight on the plight of the most vulnerable women in the country.

At the Aboriginal conference, another delegate argued that the federal government’s funding cuts to communities struggling to provide shelter, education and health care initiated the predicament of indigenous women. As a chief, he said he is hard-pressed to offer the necessary resources for his people, including young women, and they end up in cities as a result.

In reaction to the AFN’s request for the creation of a joint police task force, including government and First Nations’ officials, to probe missing and murdered Aboriginal women and girls, Sgt. Julie Gagnon, an RCMP media relations officer, pointed to the many initiatives already in place or underway to respond to crimes against indigenous people.

Last December, for example, the RCMP and AFN signed an agreement to collaborate on issues related to missing and murdered Aboriginal people, including the ability to resolve historical and contemporary cases and enhance crime prevention initiatives and communication with victims, families and communities.

The RCMP is already leading, or involved in, a number of joint task forces with other provincial and municipal police forces addressing the issue of missing and murdered Aboriginal women, Gagnon wrote in an email to IPS.

“These task forces, while spread across the country, work collaboratively to address this important issue, and are also developing best practices relating to information sharing, file management, file coordination and disclosure that can be shared with other investigative units or implemented in similar initiatives across the country,” she noted.

RCMP officers from each province and territory regularly meet to discuss operational issues of “national significance” such as this one, she added.

What is more, the Mounties are creating the National Centre for Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains within the Canadian Police Centre for Missing and Exploited Children. It is an effort to provide police, medical examiners and chief coroners with more detailed information on these cases across jurisdictions.

An experienced Aboriginal police officer working in the centre will ensure a focus on indigenous people who have disappeared. The database will launch in 2013.

As well, a national public website containing information on missing persons and unidentified remains cases, which will allow the public to offer tips on missing persons and unidentified remains, is slated for debut later in 2012.

To help capture pertinent data on missing persons and unidentified remains cases which can be shared across jurisdictions, changes were made last year to the Canadian Police Information Centre allowing for extended description fields, skeletal inventory, biological and cultural affinity.

Julie Di Mambro, press secretary for Rob Nicholson, the justice minister and attorney general of Canada, said that the federal government “attaches great importance and urgency” to the matter of missing and murdered Aboriginal women.

Canada dedicated an overall 25-million-dollar investment between 2010 and 2015 to this initiative, Di Mambro wrote in an email.

In addition to funding the new RCMP undertakings, the money will be channeled toward the development of school and community pilot projects aimed at diminishing young Aboriginal women’s “vulnerability to violence”; ensuring victim services are culturally appropriate for indigenous people; developing a comprehensive list of best practices to help communities, law enforcement and justice partners in future work; collaborating with Aboriginal communities to develop local safety plans; and creating public awareness materials to help end “cycles of violence” affecting communities.

However, government dollars and promises did not dissuade First Nations’ chiefs from approving their resolution.

The ruling includes other notable elements like designating Oct. 4 as an annual national day of remembrance for the women; selecting Oct. 18, 2012 as a national day of action on behalf of these women including national and regional activities; urging broader AFN support of the UN’s Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women inquiry procedure regarding disappearances and murders of Aboriginal women and girls; and advocating that the AFN convene a national forum and special chiefs’ assembly on justice and community safety.

What is not lost on some observers is that the violence facing native women also has internal dimensions.

Maureen Chapman, the hereditary Chief of Skawahlook First Nation in B.C.’s Fraser Valley, recalled hallway conversations during the annual meeting with women leaders “who are struggling to try to get their voices heard, who are ganged up on when they try to speak up” within their communities.

Describing the behaviour as “lateral violence within our organisations”, she advised male delegates supporting the anti-violence resolution to speak to their male counterparts because “they’ve stopped listening” to women voicing similar grievances.