James Daschuk

Racism, Disease, and Someone Else’s Life: Canada’s History with Indigenous Peoples
  • sketch (ca. 1875) by
    NWMP surgeon R.B. Nevitt

Anyone who says – or thinks – Canada is not racist should read Bob Joseph’s short book 21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act. Every Canadian should read it, period. By quietly recounting facts from kidnapping children to banning language, Joseph shows how horrific Canadian policies against First Nations and Inuit peoples have been. Is it only in our past? Jim Daschuk, who wrote Clearing the Plains, points out that because of institutionalized racism and its effects on health, Indigenous individuals can continue to “expect a 15-year shorter life span”

Pandemics made things worse. Deadly epidemics became a fact of Indigenous life immediately after first contact with Europeans. Indigenous resurgence happened, not because of, but despite such ongoing policies. During research with Daschuk’s files, I found some surprises in the “quarantine reports” of the Government of Canada from 1893 to 1919 (RG 18, 1893-1919).

I don’t know who Inspector McGinnis of Battleford SK was. But during one of many smallpox epidemics at the beginning of the last century McGinnis wanted to deny quarantined Nêhiyaw (Cree) families sufficient food. We know that proper nutrition aids the fight against disease. Malnutrition results in more deaths. McGinnis wrote to his superiors about the Indigenous families that The worst feature of the disease [smallpox] seems to be that when we quarantine them a demand is made for food which we have to give them as they live only from day to day when at liberty. In the case of large families [this] … is expensive (dated March 7, 1904).

Reminiscent of some Chief Medical Officers today, it took a medical person to point out the obvious to the bureaucrat. On March 19, 1904 Dr. Patterson, the Dominion Officer in Winnipeg, wrote: I note what Insp. McGinnis says about the expense of rations.  This cannot be helped.  When these people are quarantined, they cannot be allowed to starve.

For those of us Canadians who have had minor troubles securing groceries during the Covid-19 pandemic it’s worth learning from this past. Only three months previous to the above report, on January 19, 1904, McGinnis was again sent a sharp rebuke. Note that despite the reprimand McGinnis was NOT removed from his post, a protection of the guilty that sadly still goes on today:

Your quarantine report dated 11th instant received and has been forwarded to the Indian Commissioner for his perusal.  The Commissioner directs me to say that you have no shade of right to burn anyone’s shack and that you have no right to use your position to do such autocratic actions and you will be good enough in future not to burn down any more shacks.

In January, in the harsh winter of northern Saskatchewan, this unnamed family was ripped away from their shelter as McGinnis’s official “response” to “other people’s lives.” This is but one example: Tanya Talaga, Charlie Angus, and Louise Skydancer Halfe, like Daschuk and Joseph, tell the stories of how in the Residential Schools, where overcrowding was accompanied by malnutrition and often, abuse, disease outbreaks turned the institutions into death traps.

During a time when governments and health officials are seeking to decide between health and safety on one side and economic concerns on the other, Canadians should avoid continuing a racist past, and look for wisdom from Indigenous thinkers. Writers such as Margaret Kovach Sakewew p’sim iskwew, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson remind us that behind the health of all communities are principles of relationality. “All my relations” is an Indigenous concept, but one from which Canadians urgently need to learn, especially in a time of plague.

Between a Good Story & Hard Facts

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from R.B. Nevitt’s A Winter at Fort Macleod

While I’m writing my book about our long western walks, sometimes I find myself caught between a good story and a set of hard facts. I’m writing about our treks through ranches on the edge of Cypress Hills in 2015. Remembering the cattle, the horses, and the land there, I’d like to tell the story I found in Peter Erasmus’s Buffalo Days and Nights. Erasmus was a Métis interpreter, guide (for the Palliser expedition, among others), hunter, trader, and diplomat (his account of the Treaty Six signing is invaluable, since he was actually hired by the Indigenous parties to the Treaty). He could speak four or five prairie languages, as well as English and French, and could read ancient Greek. Discussing the extinction of the bison/buffalo, and the problem of poaching, Erasmus notes: “True, I ate buffalo meat at Big Bear’s camp in the Cypress Hills…but it tasted a great deal like beef – so much so that I didn’t consider it polite to inquire too closely as to its source.”[i] The problem is, the story makes it sound as if the Cree were habitually enjoying food at the expense of white settlers – but the opposite was the case. 1881-82 was the time of the “hunger winter” (see Candace Savage’s A Geography of Blood). Cree, Saulteaux and Assiniboine, facing a brutal Saskatchewan cold in tents made only of thin cotton (the hides being sold or converted to food), dressed in rags, were dying, by the hundreds, of starvation and starvation-linked diseases. Meanwhile, the government in Ottawa kept cutting its relief budget. Dewdney, closer, used the famine as a tactic to try to empty the Hills of its Indigenous population. The first ranchers in the area offered their animals at cost to relieve the famine. Dewdney refused. No one knows why, but it remains a fact that he had financial links to the American company that provided meat to the Canadian government, and accepting the offer would have undercut their – and his – profits. [ii] Plus ça change…the more things change…  There’s no simple story in remembering Settlement.

[i] Peter Erasmus, Buffalo Days and Nights. Ed. Henry Thompson. Calgary: Fifth House Ltd, reprint 1999, 301.

[ii] James Daschuk, Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life. Regina: University of Regina Press, 2013, 115.