Nations were forced into living a sedentary life. The disappearance of the bison was, Daschuk claims, “the single greatest environmental catastrophe to strike human populations on the plains.” Which brings us to part two of the scenario (and the real importance of Clearing the Plains), the role of government in exploiting and exacerbating the dire situation of the Plains people. The new Dominion of Canada got hold of the Prairie West (or Rupert’s Land, as it was then called) at about the same time that the buffalo disappeared. Seeing that the local inhabitants were suffering mightily from famine and disease, the government took the opportunity to pressure them into accepting treaties, surrendering control of their traditional lands and relocating their homes. Daschuk documents how in the face of widespread misery and privation, government agents withdrew medical services and denied food rations as a matter of public policy. It was not that federal officials did not know what was happening, or about to happen. Daschuk reports that the deputy minister of the interior in Ottawa warned that “to the Indians extermination of the buffalo means starvation and death.” According to another official, the government was “sleeping on a volcano.” Yet John A. Macdonald’s administration, in the name of economy, routinely failed to fulfill promises that it had made to provide food relief and health care. In 1885 the volcano erupted when desperate First Nations groups joined dissident Metis, led by Louis Riel, in armed resistance against the Canadian government. Daschuk suggests that much of the violence on the part of Cree and Assiniboine warriors was aimed at settling scores with government officials, who had been abusing First Nations women and were most zealous in denying food to hungry families. In the end Ottawa prevailed in the fighting and, along with Riel,
eight First Nations men were hanged for treason—an example, said Macdonald, “to convince the Red Man that the White Man governs.” The Canadian Pacific Railway played its role in pacifying the indigenous population. Hailed as a “national dream” by some historians for its role in uniting the young nation, the CPR was a nightmare for the First Nations, facilitating, as it did, a variety of new infections. Measles, influenza, whooping cough and tuberculosis combined with famine to create a medical crisis that had never been seen in the region before. In the Cypress Hills area of Saskatchewan, the government forcibly removed First Nations to stop them from disrupting construction of the railway and to clear the land for settlement by outsiders. “In doing so,” Daschuk says, “the Canadian government accomplished the ethnic cleansing of southwestern Saskatchewan of its indigenous population.” Earlier disease outbreaks, while devastating, had been organic events brought about by contact with people who had no natural immunity. The subjugation of the Plains people in the 1880s and after was the result of planned government policy. The North-West Mounted Police were drawn into this conspiracy against the First Nations people. Initially the Mounties were the protectors of the indigenous population from exploitation by whiskey peddlers. Indeed, this is why the force was created. But in 1884 the NWMP came under the control of the Department of Indian Affairs, and its mission became not protection but the enforcement of oppressive government policy. According to Daschuk, this was a turning point in relations with the Aboriginals. “Once regarded as the saviours of the indigenous population of the west,” he concludes, “the police became the ambivalent agents of their subjugation.” Not surprisingly, officials took advantage of the situation to enrich
themselves. One senior official in charge of implementing the government policies was Edgar Dewdney, Indian commissioner of the NorthWest Territories and later lieutenant governor there. Dewdney routinely withheld rations from recalcitrant First Nations, using hunger as a weapon to bring them into line. At the same time he was accepting financial payments from the I.G. Baker Company, based in Montana, the largest supplier in the West of foodstuffs and other supplies to the Canadian government. Daschuk recounts other Indian agents trading food for sex with Native girls and women. Macdonald was under constant pressure from the Liberal opposition to cut costs any way he could. It was easier to doom the Plains people to what was considered to be their inevitable fate than it was to do something about it. Instead it became conventional wisdom that the indigenous people were inherently vulnerable to diseases such as tuberculosis, that they were doomed to die out because of their own weakness—regrettable, perhaps, but a fact about which nothing could be done. Daschuk draws a direct line between the past and the inequalities of the present. “In the collective experience of subjugation, hunger, sickness, and death is the origin of the chasm that exists even today between health conditions of mainstream Canadians and western Canada’s First Nations populations,” he concludes. “The effects of the state-sponsored attack on indigenous communities that began in the 1880s haunt us as a nation still.”
Daniel Francis is a writer and historian who lives in North Vancouver. He is the author of two dozen books, among them Seeing Reds: The Red Scare of 1918– 1919, Canada’s First War on Terror (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2010). Read more of his work at geist.com and danielfrancis.ca. National Dreams 55