Indigenous History, British History

The Week 28 Listicle

Sep 14, 2022

close-up photography of book page — Photo by Rhema Kallianpur on Unsplash

Last Monday I woke to the news that ten people had been stabbed to death by two men in the province of Saskatchewan in Western Canada (both suspects have also died since then). Media outlets in the UK quickly dubbed this a “mass stabbing”, comparing it to mass murders in the US, implicitly wondering whether Canada was following in the dangerous footsteps of its southern neighbour and adding a large dose of sensationalism to the reporting. But unlike other large-scale murders in North America in recent years, in this case almost all the victims were Indigenous: members of the James Smith Cree Nation, a small First Nations community northeast of Saskatoon.

In recent years there has been more reporting on issues related to Indigenous people in Canada than I remember in the first couple of decades I lived in the UK. The discovery of remains of Indigenous children in unmarked graves at a former residential school in British Columbia got front-page coverage last year, as did the Pope’s visit to Canada this summer, to apologise for the Catholic Church’s role in running the schools from the late nineteenth through the late twentieth century.

Some of this reporting has been substantive. But it’s irregular and it tends to treat Indigenous issues – like stories of Māori people in New Zealand and Aboriginal Australians – as stories from afar, outside the realities of contemporary and Britain and beyond its history. Maybe we should expect nothing more from mainstream media. Yet the lack of awareness among people in Britain today – and specifically white English and Scottish people of Christian descent, whose family and national histories are inextricably entwined with the colonisation of Canada – of the situation of Indigenous Canadians goes beyond the media. There are lots of reasons for this, including the fact that there is not a substantial North American Indigenous population in the UK. The overwhelming work of challenging colonial histories is done by the descendants of colonised peoples; in this case, most of the Indigenous people who still live with the legacy of the British empire everyday are far away, out of sight and too easily out of mind.

I understand this phenomenon well. When I was growing up in Canada in the 1970s and 1980s, most white Canadians I knew had an attitude similar to that of many British people today. With the exception of the largely impromptu lessons of an Indigenous history teacher in high school, I learned next to no serious history about the Inuit or First Nations and Métis people. It was only as an adult living abroad that I learned more about the history of the country I was born in, by reading and listening to the work of Indigenous people in Canada who are demanding recognition not only of their rights as the original peoples of North America, but of the lasting impacts of land theft, residential schools, and the removal of generations of Indigenous children from their parents and families. In a process orchestrated by child welfare services, now popularly known as the Sixties Scoop (though it took place over many decades in the late twentieth century), these children were usually adopted by white families, completely cut off from their communities, languages and culture.

In a twist of fate, today I share my life in London with one of those (now adult) children: my two-spirit partner, who was separated from their birth mother as a baby and in recent years has reconnected with their Cree family and home community. As I’ve witnessed this process from a distance, I’ve also begun to understand more about my own place in the complex and often violent history of settler-Indigenous relations in Canada.

When I hear the ignorance of contemporary British people about Indigenous history, I recognise my own ignorance. It’s taken me many years to learn more about the original inhabitants of what is today Canada through Indigenous writing, reporting and art. The following is a tiny sample that touches on the histories of the Cree and other Indigenous peoples from Western Canada, including on the lands that are home to the communities in mourning in and around the James Smith Cree First Nation.

1 Maria Campbell, Halfbreed

First published in 1973, Maria Campbell’s memoir Halfbreed is considered a classic of contemporary Indigenous literature. Campbell is a Métis* woman, born in northern Saskatchewan in 1940. Her book opens with a history of the Métis people’s migration west in the mid-nineteenth century, the Red River Rebellion and the subsequent hanging of the Métis leader Louis Riel, and the history of Campbell’s family, “a real mixture of Scottish, French, Cree, English and Irish”. The story of Campbell, her family and her people is one of poverty, racism and political corruption, of complex relations among different Indigenous groups and communities of farmers descended from European settlers, of Christianity and residential schools, of familial relations and friendship among different generations of women, of different forms violence, and of Campbell’s early involvement with Indigenous workers and communities as part of what in the 1960s was called the Native movement.

* For a useful explanation of what the word Métis means in the Canadian context, listen to this episode of the Unreserved podcast.

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2 Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada

Between 2008 and 2015 a commission investigated the history the church-run residential schools where thousands of Indigenous children were sent to be Christianised and stripped of their community ties and identities. The commission was founded as part of the settlement of the largest class action suit in Canada’s history, taken by Survivors of residential schools against the Canadian government. Its findings are published in a multi-volume report that includes a history of the schools, the experiences of different Indigenous communities in different regions of Canada, children who went missing from schools and were never found, unmarked burials of children at many schools, the ongoing impact of the schools on Indigenous peoples today, and recommendations for reconciliation. The executive summary – “Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future” – includes 96 calls to action.

This is a long and detailed report, based on thousands of interviews with residential school Survivors. In the context of last week’s tragedy at the James Smith reserve, one of the most important findings of the report is the widespread evidence of the schools’ ongoing intergenerational impact. Intergenerational trauma is evidenced, for example, in the staggeringly high incarceration rates of Indigenous people in Canada.

A Parole board assessment of the main suspect in the murders in the James Smith community recognised earlier this year that that “there are factors from your background that may have contributed to your involvement in the criminal justice system”. Niigaann Sinclair, a professor of Indigenous studies at the University of Manitoba, said in response to the murders,

It’s not in any way a defense, it’s simply a reality that these are traumatized individuals who are taking their trauma out on others. This is a reminder of what it does when you hammer a people into poverty, when you hammer those people into situations of trauma due to racist policies and leave them absolutely absent of economy, hope, possibility – this is what this looks like.

3 Indigenous Podcasts

The CBC podcast Unreserved, hosted by Rosanna Deerchild and mentioned above, features an excellent series of discussions with Indigenous – First Nations, Métis and Inuit – commentators on issues as diverse as identity, writing, music, food, Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations, young people, elders and Aunties, history, tradition and colonialism, and much more. It discusses racism, oppression and struggle, but also highlights the celebrations and joys of Indigenous life.

Connie Walker’s podcast Missing and Murdered examines three of the countless cases of Indigenous women who have gone missing in Canada and the United States over the past several decades. Walker is a Cree journalist from Okanese First Nation in Saskatchewan. Season 2 of her podcast, Finding Cleo, investigates the story of a young Cree girl removed from the Little Pine Reserve in Saskatchewan by child services in the 1970s and adopted in the United States without her family’s knowledge. Cleo Semaganis Nicotine and her siblings were among thousands of children similarly removed from their Indigenous families as part of the Sixties Scoop (see above).

I began this post because I was struck by the lack of context provided by British media coverage of the murders in Saskatchewan. For a discussion of the way the Canadian media covered the events, listen to the latest episode of Short Cuts on Canadaland, an independent media podcast that reviews how the Canadian media covers the news, including Indigenous stories.

4 Indigiqueer Literature

Back in March I recommended Joshua Whitehead’s Jonny Appleseed and Billy-Ray Belcourt’s A History of My Brief Body as two great reads by contemporary Indigiqueer authors based in Western Canada, and antidotes to Hollywood’s flat representations of Indigenous characters in “Westerns”.

Whitehead is Oji-Cree from Peguis First Nation in Manitoba and Belcourt is from Driftpile Cree Nation in Northern Alberta. You can hear an interview the two of them did with Mitika Wilbur (Swinomish and Tulalip) and Adrienne Keene (Cherokee) on their All My Relations podcast.

5 Indigenous Harm Reduction = Reducing the Harms of Colonialism

A number of accounts of the murders in Saskatchewan last week report that drugs and substance abuse were involved. At this early stage this can only be speculation, but the TRC report (see above) names addiction as one of the harmful legacies of colonialism and the residential schools. This report provides a useful overview of the principles of decolonising drug policy and treatment and the challenges involved, as well as some examples of promising practices.

6 Seven Fallen Feathers by Tanya Talaga

Talaga’s award-winning book, subtitled “Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City”, documents the lives and deaths of seven young Indigenous people in the city of Thunder Bay, Ontario in the early twenty-first century. The students, from small northern First Nations reserves without high schools, had relocated to the city on the shores of Lake Superior in order to study. There they lived hundreds of miles from their communities and families, faced insecurity, discrimination and marginalisation, and eventually died deaths (five by drowning) that were never properly investigated. Talaga’s book not only unearths the racism endemic in Thunder Bay law enforcement and wider society; she provides a moving homage to the seven Oji-Cree and Ojibwe students, and the struggles of their families and communities for justice.

7 Buffy Sainte Marie

She needs no introduction, but since for much of her career Buffy Sainte Marie has been based in the US and has sung widely about the rights of Indigenous people in that part of North America, it’s worth mentioning that she is a Cree woman, born in 1941 on the Piapot First Nation in Saskatchewan.

This new CBC podcast on Sainte-Marie, presented by the Mohawk and Tuscarora journalist Falen Johnson, “explores how Buffy’s life and legacy is essential to understanding Indigenous resilience”.