Up Ghost River (37 page)

The following books are helpful guides for learning about traditional knowledge and native spirituality.

On a personal note, I would like to thank:

^1.
From the Historical Development of the Indian Act, Treaties and Historical Research Centre, P.R.E. Group, Indian and Northern Affairs, August 1978.

^2.
The Seven Sacred Teachings are a way of being in the world that respects Mother Earth and all of Creation. To live with honour, the Sacred Teachings say that we should observe the animal kingdom, and understand how each species interacts, eats, hunts, plays and lives in harmony with the rest of the environment. Each animal has a teaching for us, a way of doing things that we can bring into our own lives. The wolf, for example, walks with its head down, and lives for the pack, showing us how to be humble. The wolf's virtue is humility. The other animals that embody the sacred lessons are bear (courage), eagle (love), beaver (wisdom), raven (honesty), deer (respect) and turtle (truth). The Seven Sacred Teachings are common to many First Nations peoples, although the animals differ depending on the geographic region.

^3.
Many years later, I began looking into what had happened to him. Under the Indian Act, what was illegal was “Indian participation” in any “show, exhibition, performance, stampede or pageant” in “aboriginal costume,” and encouraging any form of participation. However, it was up to the Indian Agent to decide whether or not a person had encouraged what were called “savage rites,” what encouragement entailed, and to decide on our punishment. Since Indian Agents were liberal with their interpretation of the law, it was hard to know what was legal: we assumed that being aboriginal, e.g., having long hair, was not legal. Arrests, imprisonment, threats, refusal to issue “off-reserve” travel passes, or stopping of food rations were all common punishments. The Fort Albany Indian Agent decided that my great-grandfather's activities were worthy of arrest but he left no records as to why, or at least none that I have been able to access. This is not uncommon: the Indian Agents were not obliged to keep documents, and other information was destroyed because it was considered “culturally insignificant.” No one knows the true number of arrests; however, scholars estimate that hundreds went to jail between 1884 and 1951, when the Potlatch laws
were finally repealed. For more information, see Constance Backhouse's
Colour-Coded: A Legal History of Racism in Canada, 1900–1950
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999).

^4.
Racist insults heard growing up included “savage,” “wild,” “beast.” More than a reprimand by our teachers, “half-breed” institutionalized the racism: it was the official category for Métis children until the government changed it with the 1982 Constitution Act.

^5.
Years later I found out that it wasn't just school policy, it was the mandate for all residential schools across North America. “Kill the Indian, Save the Man,” were the words of Richard Henry Pratt, a U.S. Army officer who developed the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, the first (off-reservation) Indian boarding school, whose principles and practices came to guide Canadian and American policy. The dictum “Kill the Indian, Save the Man” has come to represent the cultural genocide that took place for more than a century in the continent's residential schools.

^6.
The Trent-Severn Waterway was built to connect two of the Great Lakes, Huron and Ontario, to streamline and improve water trade and transportation. To make room, the government flooded First Nations land, beginning in 1837. Three aboriginal communities were affected: Curve Lake (Anishinaabe), Hiawatha and Mississaugas of Scugog Island. The First Nations were not consulted before it happened. In October 2012, 175 years after the first of the government-controlled floods, the federal government settled with these communities for $71 million.

^7.
In 1969, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, and his then-Minister of Indian Affairs Jean Chrétien, introduced the White Paper, which would abolish the Indian Act and dismantle the legal relationship between Canada and First Nations in favour of equality, and by implication, assimilation. Cardinal's book
The Unjust Society: The Tragedy of Canada's Indians
argued that the White Paper imposed legal equality on an unequal situation, ignoring First Nations' history of oppression and colonialism, and the desire of aboriginals to be a “red tile in the Canadian mosaic.” It was, he said, equivalent to “cultural genocide.” In his book, Cardinal argued that any solution should restore a respectful relationship between the Crown and First
Nations, with Ottawa recognizing us as a sovereign people with resource rights over our traditional lands.

^8.
Several forces gave rise to the eugenics movement: the rise of social Darwinism, scientific racism and increasing interest in genetics. Many countries, including Canada, convinced by the theories of prominent biologists such as Francis Galton and Charles Davenport, became interested in improving the intelligence and productivity of their citizenry by removing unwanted persons and persons deemed “racially inferior” from their gene pools. From 1928 to 1972, under the Sexual Sterilization Act of Alberta, the province sterilized approximately 2,800 people considered unfit for procreation, including mentally and physically challenged (“mental defectives”), persons “incapable of intelligent parenthood,” juvenile delinquents, Indians, Inuit and Métis. Aboriginals and residential school students were disproportionately targeted because these groups were more likely to be seen as mentally defective due to language and cultural differences. If a student was misbehaving, the principal, acting as the student's official guardian, could recommend the student went before the Eugenics Board, which did an interview, often lasting five to ten minutes, to decide whether or not the child should be sterilized. Often, children were not told what was happening; instead they were told they were having their appendix out, or another operation—and would not realize they were infertile until adulthood. British Columbia passed a similar law in 1933 that was repealed in 1979. The number of people sterilized in B.C. remains uncertain since the records have been destroyed. The scope and details of Alberta's law gained national exposure with the 1995 court case of Leilani Muir, who was sterilized without her consent or knowledge at Alberta's Provincial Training School for Mental Defectives in 1959. She sued the provincial government and won. Since then 850 Albertans who were sterilized have been awarded $142 million in damages.

^9.
“Then I was standing on the highest mountain of them all, and round about beneath me was the whole hoop of the world. And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being.

And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of the many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father. And I saw that it was holy …”