The material wealth that grew so spectacularly during the early twentieth century was far from equally distributed. The Native people were left out almost completely. If anything their share declined as they were increasingly marginalized, a people without a future. When the century opened, those groups of Native people who lived in the southern regions of the country had already been subdued, brought under treaties, and placed on reservations as wards of the Indian Affairs Branch of the Department of the Interior. The major policy goal of the officials of that bureaucracy was the assimilation of Native peoples into white society—when they were ready. The preparation for that future involved education and agricultural or other settled employment. Education was left largely in the hands of missionaries, who also had a crucial role in the assimilation process: the replacement of traditional religious beliefs and practices by Christianity. The spirit of this policy was plain in a directive sent by the Superintendent-General of Indian Affairs to his agents in 1921: “I have... to direct you to use your utmost endeavours to dissuade the Indians from excessive indulgence in the practice of dancing. You should suppress any dances which cause waste of time, interfere with the occupations of the Indians, unsettle them for serious work, injure their health, or encourage them to sloth or idleness....”
Such traditional ceremonies as the Sun Dance, practised by some prairie tribes, were suppressed, as was the colourful and joyous gift-giving feast known as the potlatch on the north-west coast. Children were separated from their families and sent off to mission schools in utterly unfamiliar surroundings. Men were pressed to give up trapping and hunting in favour of farming, which many Native groups viewed as
On his first western tour, Lord Byng of Vimy—Governor General from 1921 to 1926—met with some of His Majesty’s Cree subjects in Edmonton. Everyone turned out for the occasion in full ceremonial style.
Women’s work. Demoralization and alienation followed. Those who drifted off the reserves into the cities rarely escaped the traps of alcohol and prostitution.
Government policies met with very limited success, though some groups made the transition to modernity. As Indian Affairs Branch budgets were always small, and subject to frequent cuts, the meagre services which Native peoples had been promised in the treaties were stretched very thin. Disease, especially tuberculosis, continued to decimate the population. Alcohol, which Native people were forbidden to buy, continued to be consumed in lethal quantities. Poverty reigned on most reserves. “The new mode of life on the Reserve,” a missionary reported at the beginning of the century, “dwelling in filthy houses, badly ventilated, has induced disease; the idle manner of living, being fed by the Government, and having little to do; the Poor clothing worn in the winter; badly cooked food, the consciousness that as a race they are fading away.” Thirty years later so sympathetic a student of the Native people as Diamond Jenness, chief anthropologist of the National Museum, predicted that they would soon disappear. “Some will endure only a few years longer,” he wrote in his classic The Indians of Canada, “others, like the Eskimo, may last for several centuries.”
With their population in steady decline, pessimism about the future of the Amerindians was well founded. Jenness’s tempered optimism about the Inuit, on the other hand, was founded on personal observation. He and Vilhjalmur Stefansson were among the first white men ever seen by the inhabitants of Coronation Gulf in the Canadian Arctic, when they arrived there in 1914 on a scientific expedition. That expedition recorded the survival of the traditional Inuit way of life, unaffected by European values. In 1928 Jenness published his moving account of the long, frigid months that he spent among those gentle northern people. His humane reminiscences, The People of the Twilight, concluded with a question whose answer he obviously feared. “Were we the harbingers of a brighter dawn, or only the messengers of ill-omen, portending disaster?”
Yet, by the 1920s there were signs that some leaders of the Native peoples were awakening to the threat their people faced. At the end of the Great War, Lieutenant F. O. Loft, an Ontario Mohawk chief who had served in the Canadian Expeditionary Force like many of his fellows, travelled to London in an attempt to bring the grievances of his people to the attention of the British government. Rebuffed, he returned home to begin organizing the League of Indians of Canada. It was frustrating and often thankless work, but it was continued in subsequent decades by men like the Reverend Edward Ahenakew, a Saskatchewan Cree and ordained Anglican clergyman, Chief Joe Taylor, also from Saskatchewan, and others. Similarly, Northwest Coast groups organized for self-protection and protest in a province where Native peoples’ lands seemed to shrink at every whim of the provincial government. Here, too, missionaries and converts to Christianity led the Native peoples’ cause. The Reverend Peter Kelly, a Methodist Haida, and Andrew Pauli, a Squamish brought up under the influence of the Oblate Fathers, were the most effective leaders of the Native Brotherhood of British Columbia. That organization’s main concern was to defend the Native peoples’ lands and fishing and hunting rights against the encroachments of white settlers, miners, and loggers.
These new organizations were signs of a resurgence of life among the Native
Peoples. But it was only a beginning, a small glimmer of light on a dark landscape of disease, deprivation, humiliation, and hostility. Earle Birney, in his 1952 radio play, The Damnation of Vancouver, put words into the mouth of his Salish chief that eloquently summed up the Native peoples’ fate:
When the strangers came to build in our village I had two sons.
One died black and gasping with smallpox.
To the other a trader sold a flintlock.
My son gave the gun’s height in otter skins.
He could shoot deer now my arrows fainted to reach.
One day he walked into the new whiskey-house Your fathers built for us.
He drank its madness, he had the gun.
He killed his cousin, my brother’s firstborn____
The strangers choked my son with a rope.
From that day there was no growing in my nation.
World History
