History of Indian and White Relations 101 - Part I

A special for Saskboy. Saskboy points to this website in his August 7, 2008 blog entry. Saskboy has been caught before swallowing a load of Indian Industry BS, lock, stock and barrel. However, on this one, I can't really blame him much since the narrative on the site he links to has become standard fare for today's politically correct version of history. However, there is barely a single sentence in the webpage to which he links which is wholly accurate, and that's a polite statement.

It's about the Treaty Right to education and that's only a small part of the vast and ever expanding politically correct version of the history of Indian and White relations that has been written by professors in various politically correct colleges and university departments over the past thirty five years or so. There's plenty of that there on the site, so I am going to have a grand old time, as you will see.

I intend to pick this one apart, bit by bit, especially for Saskboy's deprogramming efforts, should he ever come to the realization that he, along with legions of others have been duped. I don't really expect it will work toward that end and I fully expect several leftards to pounce upon me and accuse me of racism and an assortment of other honorable badges now hung around the necks of those who speak the truth.

However, let's begin, shall we. Here are the first two sentences from the website:

"Treaty Rights in Canada are promises that were made during the signing of Treaties with First Nations from across the territory that would become Canada. These agreements were made on a Nation to Nation basis because of the implications of the Royal Proclamation of 1763 [link added], which established that the First Nations possess legal title to the land and that the only provision available to extinguish that title was through Treaties."

This one is not too bad, actually. It is true that the Royal Proclamation of 1763 did contain provisions for ensuring that Indian lands were properly surrendered to the crown rather than just trampled on and taken over by the westward rush of American settlers into Indian country (those of you of a certain age will remember all those movies about whooping Indians shooting arrows at hapless settlers in covered wagons and what not). Well, that had been going on for a long time prior to that and it had been making things difficult for King Charles III, who needed Indian allies in his struggles to hang on to his North American possessions. The colonies were restless and the French and Spanish were cunning opponents, capable of forming alliances with who ever else on the continent wanted to stick it to the British.

However, if you read the actual text of the Proclamation and understand the history and milieu in which it was issued, you will know that the version adopted by Indian groups almost two hundred and fifty years later is just a wee bit distorted. King Charles does not view the various Indian tribes all as Nations. In fact, the very concept and definition of the word "nation" was something quite different than what it is today as far as nations states possessing sovereignty are concerned.

Even though the word "nation" is used in the Proclamation, the text specifically says the lands are "reserved" for Indians for the purpose of hunting, implying that they do not belong to the Indians, but have been set aside for their exclusive use by the British Crown who is the owner. Note the way the Proclamation refers to the territory on which the Indians hunt (the use of the word We, Our, Us, etc. are expressions of the Royal We, in other words it refers to one person only, that person being King Charles III):

"And whereas it is just and reasonable, and essential to our Interest, and the Security of our Colonies, that the several Nations or Tribes of Indians with whom We are connected, and who live under our Protection, should not be molested or disturbed in the Possession of such Parts of Our Dominions and Territories as, not having been ceded to or purchased by Us, are reserved to them, or any of them, as their Hunting Grounds."

Not exactly a statement expressing a strong sense of Indian sovereignty, is it? But it gets worse.

"And We do further strictly enjoin and require all Persons whatever who have either wilfully or inadvertently seated themselves upon any Lands within the Countries above described. or upon any other Lands which, not having been ceded to or purchased by Us, are still reserved to the said Indians as aforesaid, forthwith to remove themselves from such Settlements."

Oh. Wait a minute, now. What does this mean? Just who has the right to police this edict and evict squatters. You'd think the Indians, if they are recognized as nations, would have that right, wouldn't you? If the Royal Proclamation recognized their sovereign status, why would agents of the British Crown have to do the dirty work of evicting people? Note, this is not a negotiated document. It is a statement issued by a King during the era when the Divine Right to Rule philosophy prevailed across Europe. The Indians whose protection it seeks to guarantee did not negotiate the terms of the text.

And what about this?

"And We do hereby strictly forbid, on Pain of our Displeasure, all our loving Subjects from making any Purchases or Settlements whatever, or taking Possession of any of the Lands above reserved, without our especial leave and Licence for that Purpose first obtained."

What's that you say? The Indians are sovereign nations but they can't enter into contractual relationships with anyone they please. Any land sales have to be handled by the Crown? Hmmm. Not much in the way of nationhood expressed there, is there?

The next few passages express the notion that any settler or governor (and here he's referring to the governors of the various New England colonies which were still British possessions, including the newly acquired territories that were formerly under French and Spanish control) could not purchase or take land directly from the Indians but were compelled to purchase it from the Crown.

In other words, by this Proclamation, the British Crown is making it absolutely clear whose sovereign territory is being preserved for the use of Indians as their hunting grounds and it ain't the Indians'. Needless to say, for anyone who knows American history, those Governors and settlers ignored the Proclamation and went on seizing and grabbing up lands from the Indians anyway. Some thirteen years later the American Revolution occurred, with the Royal Proclamation being one of the colonists' grievances against the British king, and as we all know, poor ol' Charles lost all the lands covered by this declaration, so neither he nor his agents could enforce it anyway. But I digress.

There is one final point that needs to be made, and it's a biggie. The Royal Proclamation specifically exempted vast tracts of land within what is now Canada. The entire Hudson Bay drainage basin was exempted, not to mention most of the land east of there, under which treaties already existed.

"And We do further declare it to be Our Royal Will and Pleasure, for the present as aforesaid, to reserve under our Sovereignty, Protection, and Dominion, for the use of the said Indians, all the Lands and Territories not included within the Limits of Our said Three new Governments, or within the Limits of the Territory granted to the Hudson's Bay Company, as also all the Lands and Territories lying to the Westward of the Sources of the Rivers which fall into the Sea from the West and North West as aforesaid." [Emphasis mine]

That includes just about every river from the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains to the Red River and beyond. For the most part, this is the territory known as Rupertsland, named after the British Prince Rupert, in a Charter issued in 1670 for the establishment of the Hudson's Bay Company and its trading monopoly. Not much thought was given to Indian sovereignty then, either. Anywho, that covers 40% of what is now Canada and is precisely the territory where the Treaties numbered 1 through 10 covering most of Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta apply. The first of those treaties was negotiated in the early 1870s, some 200 years after the British King, a certain King Charles II, had granted all that land to a group of Englishmen interested in trading for furs. So, the moral of the story is, that to claim that the Royal Proclamation recognized all this great stuff about Indian rights and nationhood is pure unadulterated bunk.

Never mind that the people in the story about the lack of an adequate school facility, which Saskboy is discussing, are the James Bay Cree whose "treaty" wasn't negotiated until 1960s - one hundred years after the first mention of education in a treaty and more than 200 years after the Royal Proclamation that didn't apply to the James Bay area anyway. Well done, Saskboy. Way to pick your sources.

Of course, that hasn't stopped an entire industry from developing, devoted to spin and misrepresentation about the Proclamation. But oh well. C'est la Vie. Every generation brings with it some freshly scrubbed gullible newbies ready to believe everything an Indian says.

The Concept of Nationhood

This posting isn't going to mean much of anything unless you go read this thread on Saskboy's blog. After you've done that you can come back here and read the rest.

First of all, Peter is ascribing modern interpretations to words, events and people who lived 350 years ago when he talks about the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC). The modern concept of nationhood is newer than that. Not only that but he has a pretty sketchy view of more recent history.

Yes, the Cree stopped the telegraph line construction in 1876, and they understood there needed to be an agreement before they would allow their land to be infiltrated by Europeans. After all, they knew there had been treaties signed in Manitoba a few years earlier, and they were also well aware of what was happening to Indian land south of the Medicine Line. But a sense of territoriality and nationhood don't amount to the same thing.

On the other hand, if Peter is suggesting the Indians respected the sovereignty of other groups any more than anyone else did, he's dead wrong. Those very Cree, for example, had several generations earlier lived in the forest and, after acquiring guns and superior trade goods from the HBC, had pushed others out of that part of the prairies and further west. In fact, most of the tribes that live in Saskatchewan today are not indigenous to the territory they now occupy.

For their part, the Canadian government simply wanted to avoid an Indian war such as what was going on south of the border, and prevent the Americans from taking over what is now Western Canada. It was mutually beneficial to enter into treaty. But when the negotiations of Treaty 6 actually began in the late summer of 1876, the Canadian government's negotiators' threat that the Indians would not be able to hold back the tide of settlement so they'd best settle with what they were being offered was the truth and the Indians knew it.

They knew that they were bargaining from an extremely weak position. Why do you think they insisted on a medicine chest, assistance in learning how to farm (actual farm instructors rather than just tools) and assistance in the time of famine and disease? Treaty Six is the only one where those items were raised during the negotiations. The Treaty Six Indians knew their livelihood was disappearing, and in fact, it was only a few short years after the treaty was negotiated that the buffalo disappeared from the Northern plains and those very same Cree fell victim to famine, saved only by the aid delivered, however miserly, by the Canadian government. You have no nation, if you can't defend it.

When I hear the oft repeated meme today that the treaties were negotiated by two nations, implying as it always does, that those nations were of equal stature, I both laugh and cry. It is a total lie. A people on the verge of starvation who knew full well that their way of life was disappearing, who had neither the means nor the knowledge to adapt to a different lifestyle without the help of some other people, were hardly in a position of strength from which to negotiate "nation to nation", no matter what the concept may have been to a nineteenth century nomadic tribe.

In the modern era, by which I mean the 1960s to the present, the idea that Indians thought of themselves as "nations" in the modern sense simply did not exist until they discovered the Royal Proclamation of 1763, in which Indians are referred to as, among other things, "nations", and that happened only after the Federal Government made thousands of dollars available to Indian Bands to research land claims so outstanding debts of the same could be settled. Having then discovered that they were "nations", the content of the Royal Proclamation subsequently became grossly over stated.

The Proclamation was an edict issued by King George III compelling his subjects in what was to become the United States of America to quit stealing Indian land. Not only did it not work, but it was one of the measures against which the rebellious young colonies revolted when they issued their famous Declaration of Independence. You can read more about it here. What the modern Indian movement will never admit, though, is that the Royal Proclamation also refers to Indians as tribes. I think you can imagine that the meme "tribe to tribe" doesn't quite have the same cachet.

I challenge Peter to find any documentation that would support that contention that Indians thought of themselves as "nations" prior to the 1970s. Tribes, perhaps. Peoples, perhaps. But not nations. In fact, the absurdity of some of the claims put forward by the Federation of Saskatchewan Indians during the 1970s and early 80s gives ample testimony to that fact.

Did you know that at one point they were demanding a place in the United Nations for each of the more than 600 Indian "nations" in Canada? Understand that each and every reserve is now called a Nation, whether there are 30 people or 350 people who belong to it. Only a tiny handful of First Nations have populations that would garner them even "city" status today, let alone the status of a nation. It's rather funny. Had the FSIN achieved this goal, the United Nations would suddenly have grown from a body that then consisted of roughly 150 real "nations" representing what was then five or six billion people world-wide, to an organization with fully 750 "nations" by adding what amounted to only 2% of Canada's population or a mere 1/6000th of the global population as it stood at that time. Such was the political sophistication of Indian leadership then. No, Peter, they did not understand the concept of nationhood, and the fact that every reserve in Saskatchewan is now referred to as a "First Nation" is proof positive that they still haven't got it.

And Some Stories...

...make you want to laugh and cry at the same time:

The fight for the soul of the AFN

"In the traditional politics of grievance, standing up for treaty rights is done by “pushing back” against the federal and provincial governments. “We need to make them understand they have no legal jurisdiction on our land,” said Bill Erasmus, the candidate from NWT.

For native leaders, the Royal Proclamation of 1763 is the bedrock of all negotiations – a deal with the British Crown that guaranteed peaceful co-existence but, according to First Nations, did not see them give up land title."

It's quite obvious these folks have neither read the Royal Proclamation, nor do they know anything about the times in which it was issued. It was, as the name implies, an proclamation, an edict, written by a king in which he refers to the lands occupied by Indians are "Our" lands. That's "Our" in the royal "we" sense. It was an order issued by a dictator. It was not a "deal" worked out with inhabitants of the land. It was basically an order to the occupants of New England and the Thirteen Colonies to stay put and quit gobbling up lands that still belonged to the English Crown.

Sorry. Not even close and certainly no cigar.

The Trouble With Aboriginal Rights

First of all, only a small portion of the people on the planet can claim to have aboriginal rights and some of them are not, in fact, the original occupants of the land upon which they may stake their claim. Why should a handful of people have special rights that the vast majority of the people on this planet do not enjoy?

Secondly, it seems to be based solely on where these people happened to be when European explorers and settlers stumbled upon them. Europeans are far from being the first peoples to expand their territory, invade others, push them aside and take control. A short cruise through a general world history book will reveal many, many invasions by foreigners and subsequent development of empires, especially in Asia and the Middle East. So why don't any of the peoples that were suppressed and conquered by these various and sundry conquistadors and empire builders get to stake an aboriginal rights claim? Is it only when white folks do this stuff that it can form the basis of legitimate grievance? Shall we take this a step further and call this race based law?

Truth be told, the origin of the doctrine of aboriginal rights rests in the words of Medieval Popes and Catholic theologians, Pope Innocent IV and one Francisco de Vitoria being among the most important. These were people with a conscience, driven by Christian sensibility - notions of justice and charity and what not - who wanted to secure the protection of the vulnerable peoples living in a simple existence, many of whom possessed only the most primitive of technologies, that Spanish and Portuguese explorers were discovering. In other words, the idea underpinning the entire aboriginal rights agenda is based on what might be considered patronizing today.

Be that as it may, the idea came to permeate the thinking of virtually all European colonial administrations to one degree or another and can been seen expressed in the Royal Proclamation of 1763, in the British insistence that treaties be signed with these sorts of peoples throughout their empire and was central to the gradual emergence of the notion that Indians needed to be wards of the state, as expressed in repeated passing of legislation in Upper Canada during the mid-1800s.

More Good News

FSIN gravy train may be coming to an end:

Premier Brad Wall calls out problems in the FSIN and SIGA

""There's always accountability issues in every organization, but there seems to be a lot when it comes to the FSIN.""

[--]

"Wall went on to make the groundbreaking proclamation that his government is considering dealing directly with the First Nations themselves, rather than continue to go through the FSIN.

He said he wants proof that SIGA's proceeds are actually getting to the communities they are meant to help."

Good luck with that, Mr. Premier.

The Indian Industry was born in this province. Maybe it should die here, too. The sooner the better.

Two More Documents From the Tea Party Raaaaaacism File

Courtesy of Flopping Aces.

Abraham Lincoln must be rolling in his grave. The Emancipation Proclamation was issued on January 1, 1863. The British Parliament's Slave Trade Bill, which prohibited British vessels engaging in the slave trade, received the Royal Assent on 25 March 1807 and on 1 August 1834 slavery was abolish throughout the British Empire. How many more centuries will it take for race huckstering hate mongers like Al Sharpton to go out of business? If you want to rail against slavery, then direct your anger to where it is really needed.

History of Indian and White Relations 101 - Part III

A couple of weeks ago I posted a rant about the content of a link from Saskboy's blog, which he had swallowed as gospel truth, lock, stock and barrel. I published two parts, the first one here and the second one here. My issue with Saskboy can frequently be boiled down to his naivete. Poor Saskboy. Unbeknownst to him, he had hit upon a subject that I have devoted my entire life to - the study of the history of Indian and White relations in Canada. But God bless the young trooper - that didn't stop him from arguing with me and pretending to know more than he does.

I finished Part II with a short discussion about the taxation issue, in response to this passage from the website Saskboy links to:

"Another area of Treaty right is taxation. "Personal property on a reserve, including income, is not subject to taxation, either federal or provincial. This is an affirmation of oral promises made at the signing of the Treaties that the reserves shall be tax-free" (Brizinski, 1993: p. 188)."

First of all, since I have not read her book, and since the phrasing of the text on the website doesn't make it clear, I do not know if the passage quoted above is word for word from her book "Knots in a String: An Introduction to Native Studies in Canada", or if the creator of the website merely uses Brizinski as a source and attributes the idea expressed in the passage to her. Although, the use of quotation marks around the two sentences immediately prior to the citation data in brackets does suggest that those words are a direct quotation. If that is the case, then I also have an issue with Brizinski's knowledge of history. But that's typical of the academic wing of the Indian Industry. While the very essence of a historians' work, by definition, is the examination of original documents and an interpretation of them in the context of a thorough knowledge of the era under study. But this isn't considered necessary in the Indian Industry's world view. Oral history, several generations removed from the events in question are of equal or superior value in piecing together what really happened generations ago.

So what's wrong with the bolded part of the quote? To begin with, the passage attributed to Brizinski, viz - "This is an affirmation of oral promises made at the signing of the Treaties that the reserves shall be tax-free" - taken together with the whole tone and context of the language use on the website, implies that the tax exemption is a Treaty right applicable to all Treaties negotiated between various Indian groups and the Canadian government (or British Crown, if you're a purest) and that is unmitigated balderdash.

It is true that oral statements regarding taxation were made by the Canadian government's negotiator during the negotiation of Treaty 8 in what is now northern Alberta and parts of adjacent territories. It is also true that the statements were made in response to concerns raised by the Indians present at the negotiations. But that is the only Treaty from that era at which the subject of taxation was raised during negotiations, so why is the plural "Treaties" used in the Brizinski citation? This is typical of the Indian Industry - taking a tiny slice of historical fact about a very specific and unique event and extrapolating it across a broad swath of other events that happened both before and after in which the specific milieu did not exist.

But more to the point, why would the subject of taxation even be raised by Indians in northwestern regions of the then North West Territories, who lived on lands that were remote and, for the most part, heavily wooded and unsuited for settlement by agricultural enterprise or any other mode of permanent settlement?

One of the best explorations of this question is found in a paper by Wendy Aasen delivered at a conference commemorating the centennial of the signing of Treaty Eight. I have the proceedings of that conference. It was published in the premier issue of Lobstick: An Interdisciplinary Journal, which, much to my surprise, is also published on the net, so you can read it yourself. Although she deals with the exemption from military service, which was also an issue raised and a promise made during the negotiations, the answer she gives applies equally to the taxation issue. To put it simply, the Indians were well aware of what was happening in the world at the very end of the 19th century, as she states:

"The world at the turn of the century (which had experienced relative peace for approximately 40 years) was becoming increasingly unstable. This instability was accompanied by uprisings in the colonies and in rising tensions between world powers."

This included concerns in Canada's government about the possibility of an Anglo-American war and other problems that could play out right in their back yard. In essence, the Indians wanted no part in someone else's war, including paying for it.

With respect to the issue of taxation, from the Treaty Commissioners' report as quoted in Aasen:

"There was expressed at every point, the fear that the making of the treaty would be followed by the curtailment of hunting and fishing privileges and many were impressed with the notion that the treaty would lead to taxation and enforced military service...

We assured them that the treaty would not lead to any forced interference with their mode of life that it did not open the way to the imposition of any tax, and there was no fear of enforced military service."

Aasen also describes how and why Indian people living as far north as Lessor Slave Lake would have knowledge of world affairs and why it mattered to them. Their way of life, which was largely living off the land and trading (bartering) furs, rather than cash, could be disrupted. The Spanish American war had raised the value of furs to an all time high. At the end of the 19th century, in this corner of the world at least, trapping was good business.

But the answer to a companion question is also necessary. Why did the Canadian government promise not to tax or conscript them? What were their motives? The answer is quite simple and the number of journal articles and books devoted to this is by now legion. Since the 1840s Indian land was considered non-taxable because it was crown land (a throwback to the Royal Proclamation and to the Hudson's Bay Company Charter). It did not belong to Indians. The British North America Act, which created Canada in 1867 states that:

"No lands or property belonging to Canada or any province shall be liable to taxation."

Moreover, Indians themselves were considered wards of the state, hence, not liable for enforced military service, or, by extension, taxaton. The notion that the tax exempt status of Indians derived from a treaty negotiated in 1889 in which the Indians were recognized as sovereign peoples is - to put it bluntly - pure unadulterated nonsense.