Canada’s Evolving Policy towards Aboriginal Peoples

The signing of the seven numbered treaties in the west ushered in a long period in which the aboriginal peoples were treated by the Canadian government as objects to be administered towards an assimilative conclusion. Although many of the policies developed by the new Department of Indian Affairs after 1880 were formulated principally to implement the terms of those treaties, especially following the final collapse of the buffalo economy, in many instances the same policies were applied to status Indian groups – and to a lesser extent to non-status and Metis groups as well, not to mention Inuit as circumstances entailed – throughout the country. Many of these policies were embodied in the omnibus legislation known as the Indian Act, first codified in 1876, frequently amended since, and still on the books in the late 1990s. In general, the array of policies developed in the 1880s and beyond for the administration and attempted assimilation of aboriginal peoples is often known collectively as “the policy of the Bible and the plough.”

The heart of this policy thrust was the campaign to assimilate First Nations by a variety of mechanisms. Perhaps the most important was a perverse educational policy, but also significant were efforts to crush indigenous cultural practices, to reshape the economic foundations of western peoples especially, and to impose Euro-Canadian notions of governance on aboriginal communities across the country. West of Ontario, the locus for much of this campaign was the reserves that in due time were portioned out in compliance with the numbered treaties of the 1870s. Many of the aboriginal groups expected the reserves to operate as refuges in which they could adapt to Euro-Canadian economic ways while maintaining familiar hunting and gathering practices. Two unconnected developments rendered that hope illusory. In the first place, the collapse of the buffalo economy was rapid and total, the shaggy beasts almost completely disappearing by 1879 and leaving Plains peoples destitute and requiring rapid changeover, rather than gradual adjustment, to sedentary agriculture on the reserves. Unfortunately, the policies pursued by the Department of Indian Affairs made adjustment to sedentary agriculture difficult. The department insisted upon a centralized and paternalistic administration of reserve affairs, leaving native peoples little scope for initiative or risk-taking. In particular, a bizarre set of agricultural policies known as “peasant farming,” which are treated below in Eldon Yellow-horn’s section on the Plains Algonquians, actively discouraged self-reliance and advance towards commercial farming. These policies compelled reserve farmers to sow and harvest their crops by hand, attempted to control their access to markets, and prevented their availing themselves of working capital through a variety of clauses of the Indian Act. The result by the mid- and late 1890s was that western reserve farmers were abandoning the attempt to make the transition to large-scale, sedentary agriculture.

This abortive phase of attempted economic adjustment was followed by a systematic and prolonged effort to erode the land base of western reserves. Since the collapse of native farming efforts in the face of the peasant farming policy occurred just as heavy European immigration was beginning after 1896, a demand arose to acquire “unused” or “surplus”’ reserve lands by securing surrenders from the bands and making these lands available for non-native development. During the first Aboriginals: decade of the twentieth century a series of manoeuvres, many of them ethically dubious if not plainly illegal, were connived at by officers of the Department of Indian Affairs to alienate reserve lands. This campaign to take over reserve lands was continued in different form during World War I, when the Greater Production Scheme gave the department the power to control reserves in the interest of producing more foodstuffs for the war effort. The result of these assaults on western reserves was that, when native populations began to increase in the late 1920s or 1930s, the reserves were inadequate to support them. What ensued, beginning in the 1950s and 1960s and continuing during the remainder of the century, was a heavy migration to western cities.

Indian Affairs officials in the late nineteenth century could not imagine the difficulties their farming and land policies would create because they expected that the great Victorian solvent, education, would produce generations of Indians who would be independent. During the 1880s Indian Affairs educational policy veered increasingly towards reliance on residential schools, principally because these custodial institutions were believed to be more effective in assimilating children. This system of schools, which would persist until the late 1960s, grew by the 1920s to a total of eighty institutions, which were operated in uneasy partnership by Indian Affairs and a variety of Christian missionary bodies. Although residential schooling never reached more than a minority of status Indian children, and far tinier minorities of non-status and Metis ones, they did enormous damage to those who did experience them. (Joan

A. Lovisek points out that few James Bay Cree received any form of schooling before 1950, but Patrick Moore stresses the adverse impact that residential schools had on the Dene.) Underfunding and excessive reliance on missionary staffs resulted in the schools’ failure to provide rudimentary academic instruction effectively and problems such as excessive workloads for students, poor diet, and inadequate care by overworked staff. Physical punishment was common in most schools, and in some both sexual and physical abuse were frequently found. The residential schools also harmed children psychologically because in institutional settings their inadequate staffs did not provide emotional nourishment for the young people. Indeed, the entire school system, which was predicated on the racist assumption that aboriginal identity should be replaced with Euro-Canadian, denigrated native culture and identity.

In that respect residential schooling ran parallel to other efforts to reshape native peoples’ spiritual practices and political behaviour. Beginning in 1885, expanding in 1894, and continuing with varying intensity until 1951, the Indian Act discountenanced social and religious practices of both west coast and prairies First Nations. In the case of some of the northwest coast peoples, the prohibited practice was the potlatch, a ceremonial that was related, as Alan McMillan explains in the section on Wakashans, to almost every aspect of the social and political life of the community. The objection to the potlatch was the same as that directed towards summertime dance ceremonials on the prairies: by encouraging practices such as giving away property that were antithetical to the possessive, individualist ethos of Euro-Canadian society, these social and spiritual practices deterred the replacement of aboriginal values and identity with European ones. The campaigns against the potlatch, the sun dance, and the thirst dance were intermittent and of varying intensity and success, as Patrick Moore notes, but even though they did not succeed in eliminating these aboriginal ceremonials they did reinforce the notion that Euro-Canadian society considered native ways inferior.

Precisely the same message was conveyed by the lengthy effort that the Department of Indian Affairs made to refashion native political practices. Unlike the provisions against the potlatch and prairie dances, the assault on aboriginal governance was carried out across the country. Here the target was distinctive aboriginal political practices, such as leadership by hereditary chiefs, or even, in the case of Iroquoians such as the Mohawk, the powerful influence of clan mothers in selecting new male chiefs from particular lineages. Gradually from 1869, and more aggressively after the middle of the 1880s, Ottawa tried to encourage or force bands to adopt elective chieftains and councils. While hereditary leaders, or “life chiefs” as the Indian Act called them, were still ostensibly permitted, Indian Affairs assumed sweeping powers to depose them on vague grounds such as “immorality” or “incompetency.” The reality that lay behind this assault on indigenous traditions of governance was an assumption that the destruction of old-style leadership would result in native communities that were more amenable to Indian Affairs policies in other areas such as education, spiritual practices, and economic development. Not surprisingly, many aboriginal communities rejected attempts to impose Euro-Canadian elective institutions, and some of the resistance efforts, such as at Akwesasne around the turn of the century or on the Six Nations reserve along the Grand River in Ontario in the 1920s, reached impressive proportions. At Akwesasne, the Mohawk resisted to the point of using firearms, and their Mohawk kin on the Grand River took their efforts to repel Ottawa’s attempts to interfere with them politically to the League of Nations. Although the campaign at Geneva failed, the Mohawk would persist throughout the rest of the century with their position that they were not subject to Canada.