February 1966 — VOL. 47, No. 2 —
Canada's Native
People
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Canada is the homeland of the Indians
and Eskimos. They had no communication with the great centres
of developing civilization abroad. They looked no farther
than the land in which they lived for fulfilment of all their
needs. Everything they possessed came as the result of their
own labour and the ingenuity of their own devices.
These are real people, not fruits of the imagination of
strip artists, movie writers and book authors. They are not
men and women in chorus-girl costumes whose destiny it is
to entertain us, but people seeking what people everywhere
seek — home, health and happiness.
The task of adjusting their Stone Age civilization to confrontation
by the twentieth century has moved so slowly as to be called
a "national disgrace" by a national association devoted to
native welfare.
After a set-back due to the introduction of diseases from
Europe, the Indian population of about 205,000 is now increasing
at roughly twice the rate of the general population. There
are about 12,000 Eskimos in the Northwest Territories and
Northern Quebec. At the present rate of increase the Eskimo
population will double within twenty years.
The majority of these native people stand neither in one
world nor the other. They are enmeshed in the old culture
while trying to take advantage of the new way of life introduced
from abroad. They are freedom-loving people, resenting dependency.
Their economic problems are as serious as those facing the
newly emerging nations in Africa.
The facts about the need of our native people have been
brought out by the Indian-Eskimo Association of Canada. This
is a citizens' organization which came into being in 1958
as a Commission of the Canadian Association for Adult Education.
It was incorporated in 1960 with the declared purpose of ensuring
that Indians and Eskimos, and the descendants of a union between
the Indian people and Europeans, be given opportunity for
progress and fulfilment equal to that afforded other Canadians.
It believes that the native people should be able to move
into the mainstream of Canadian economic, social and political
life with dignity and without loss of identity.
Aboriginal way of life
We must not depreciate the knowledge and techniques made
use of by Canada's first people. Stone tools were at the foundation
of their native economic life, and, said Diamond Jenness in
his book The Indians of Canada (National Museum of
Canada, Queen's Printer, Ottawa, 1960): "Some of their arrowheads,
knife-blades, and animal figures rival the best work of the
pre-historic Egyptians."
The Iroquoian natives used a system of currency of wampum,
manufactured by New England coastal tribes from shells. Trees
were hardly dented by stone axes, so clearing of land for
agriculture was done by fire. The sod was turned over with
digging sticks fitted with blades of shell, and the crop was
gathered by hand and transported in baskets. Clock time, by
which today's urban life is regulated and largely dominated,
was unknown to these native people, whose only clock was the
sun, their only calendar the seasons.
Such was the material state of Canadian people when the
first settlers from across the ocean arrived. But they had
graces amid their hardships. Every tribe was founded on groups
of families closely united by ties of kinship; their religion
included the belief in protecting spirits who assisted them
in life's crises; neither rank nor wealth gave title to arrogance;
their chiefs dressed in the same way as commoners, except
at ceremonies, and ate the same food as the ordinary people.
The Canadian Indians
If life in an Indian community seems to be dull and uninspiring
it is not because the Indians are dull or uninspired. It is
because the newcomers have taken away the Indian's satisfying
way of life without replacing it.
The Indians were not pagans. The Ven. Archdeacon S.H. Middleton,
who died in 1964 after half a century of service to the Indians
in Southern Alberta, wrote in his book Indian Chiefs Ancient
and Modern (Herald, Lethbridge, 1953): "In the long ago the
Indian centred everything upon his religion and religious
observances. His religion entered into every phase of his
life: planting, harvesting, feasting, recreation, hunting,
warfare; in short, all his interests were intimately bound
up with religion."
William Wuttunee, the National Indian Council's first chief,
said: "We believed in what is known as Gitchi-Manitou, the
Great Spirit. God was in the sun, in the moon, in mother earth,
in the rain that made the grass grow. Manitou was a loving
and merciful god to us. I learned about our Heaven, known
as the 'happy hunting ground' where everyone goes whether
you are good or bad. There is no such thing as Hell and this
concept was alien to the Indian mind."
These persons, practising living in a hard environment,
essentially rural, accustomed to informal living in close-knit
families and helping-hand communities, find it difficult to
cross the bridge to the cold, impersonal, time-measured, and
essentially selfish industrial way of life. The economic base
of their natural living habits has disintegrated. Reserves
no longer provide sufficient game, and the people are restricted
so that they cannot move to more productive areas as they
did centuries ago.
The crisis did not arise in the sixteenth or seventeenth
centuries. It did not become evident until late in the nineteenth
century. It has become intolerable in the twentieth century.
When Jacques Cartier sailed up the St. Lawrence in 1535
he found Indians cultivating the land on the present site
of Montreal. The settlers came in small numbers to a vast
country, depending upon the goodwill of the natives for security.
Life was simple, and the differences between the pioneers
and the Indians were only superficial. The Indians taught
the settlers woodcraft and acted as guides and canoe-men,
while the settlers introduced new tools of agriculture and
hunting.
Whose responsibility ?
It is generally accepted in the ethics of our society that
the strong are obligated to help the weak. We, the descendants
of immigrants from far-off lands, are the stronger in this
scientific and industrialized age, and we are largely to blame
for the problems of the native people. It is we who have intruded
upon an aboriginal way of life and made it impossible; it
is we who have broken up the hunting grounds into artificial
provinces and counties and homesteads, all fenced in, and
have relegated the original owners to reserves.
"The North American Indians," said Arnold J. Toynbee in
A Study of History (Oxford University Press 1946),
"were almost continuously 'on the run' from the moment of
the arrival of the first English settlers down to the crushing
of the last Indian attempt at armed resistance in the Sioux
War of 1890, two hundred and eighty years later."
When the battles ended, we introduced a new social order
which broke down the systems of law, government, customs and
religion on which the Indian society had rested.
Long before that, in the reign of Charles II, instructions
were given to the governors of the colonies that Indians who
desired to place themselves under British protection should
be well received. In 1755 an office was established devoted
solely to the administration of Indian affairs. From that
time on, a continuing administrative organization has been
maintained for the protection and advancement of the Indian
interests. Until 1860 the Imperial Government was responsible,
but in that year the Province of Canada assumed the charge.
By special provision in the British North America Act of 1867
the new Government of Canada took jurisdiction.
There has been, then, a continuous record since 1670 of
governmental obligation, acknowledged in our own times by
the Indian Act. Under it the primary function of the government
is to administer the affairs of the Indians in a manner that
will enable them to become increasingly self-supporting and
independent members of the community.
This duty of protection and care is not discharged fully
by paternalistic measures. The Duke of Edinburgh's Study Conference
in 1962 reported: "There is a danger, already evident in certain
areas, that the social isolation of the reservations and the
supervision by Indian agents may inhibit the resourcefulness,
initiative, and individuality of the Indian people, and that,
however well intended, it could perpetuate the very situation
which it is intended to alleviate."
Some suggestions
A brief of the Ontario Division of the Indian-Eskimo Association
said in 1964: "Most of the one hundred thousand Indians of
this province are living in dire poverty. A high percentage
are unemployed and are educationally and socially unequipped
to obtain and hold a job. Little real effort has been made
to help the Indians develop new industries to replace the
declining industry of hunting and trapping. It has been easier
to give relief than to develop industries." Only six per cent
of the federal government's expenditure on Indian work is
development-oriented.
The Indians are acting to help themselves. Ten bands sent
delegates to the Western Indian Leadership Institute at Petrolia,
Ontario, in 1965 to examine and practise skills and acquire
the knowledge needed for handling band affairs. Frank A. Calder,
who was the first Indian to sit in any Canadian Parliament,
advocates either the elimination of the reserve system or
the giving to Indians of opportunity to administer their own
local affairs.
The Indian-Eskimo Association has made some suggestions.
It asks for establishment of an Economic Development Agency,
charged with administering a fund of $25 million, and the
establishment of an Economic Advisory Council composed largely
of Indian representatives. It wrote to the Prime Minister
in April 1965 recommending that the Indian Affairs Branch
be constituted a full department. It suggests that technical,
professional and management personnel be supplied in the early
phases of approved new business enterprises, and that training
programmes be provided to prepare Indians to take over these
duties when qualified; that companies be encouraged to locate,
with the agreement of Indian band councils, new industrial
plants in or near reserve communities to provide employment
opportunities to Indians; that the Economic Development Fund
provide assistance to on-job training programmes in these
plants, and that plans be expanded for the employment of Indians
who do not live on reserves.
In January 1966 the Government of Ontario announced its
plan for raising the living standards of Indians within its
jurisdiction. By agreement with the Federal Government, which
is constitutionally accountable for Indian affairs, it seeks
to take over responsibility for education, housing, employment,
law enforcement, health, recreation, and economic development.
Other provinces are expected to follow this lead.
Eskimos: the forgotten people
The Eskimos are a hardy, resourceful people, cheerful even
in the extreme adversity that has dogged their lives. They
called themselves "Inuit" — the only strong and true
men. No other race, having so little to work with, has accomplished
so much.
People who lived in the Arctic before the invasion of highly-gadgeted
outsiders had to do everything for themselves. They needed
detailed knowledge of their environment, its animals, plants,
and other natural products, its dangers and its potentialities.
But they were not savages. William S. Carlson, President
of the State University of New York, spent a winter of his
youth with an Eskimo family of five. He found their honesty,
sincerity, and coolness in the face of danger noteworthy.
They had "a refinement of body, manners and mind. They loved
one another in a helpful, tender, but not sentimental way.
I learned that it is the civilized man who could emulate the
so-called savage to advantage." And Vilhjalmur Stefansson,
Canadian-born explorer, said: "On the basis of my years with
the Stone Age Eskimos I feel that the chief factor in their
happiness was that they were living according to the Golden
Rule."
The country of the Eskimos is "underdeveloped" today, with
problems somewhat like those of underdeveloped countries abroad,
but it has a significant difference: it is an integral part
of an affluent and comfortably-living nation. There are no
insurmountable barriers of land, climate, or culture to excuse
our not helping the Eskimo to adjust to the new world we are
making.
Farley Mowat calls upon Canadians in his book The Desperate
People (Little, Brown & Co., Toronto, 1959) to "resolutely
set ourselves to expunge a damning reflection upon our own
pretensions to humanity, and ... commit ourselves unequivocally
to make amends".
Canada was quick to throw the paraphernalia of law over
the Arctic; her voice has often been raised to champion the
cause of underprivileged people in other lands; she has subsidized
exploration for Arctic minerals; but the reality of her own
northland native people has remained obscure until recent
years.
It was in 1954 that the Minister of Northern Affairs and
National Resources told the press: "Canada is now turning
in earnest to the development of its northland."
Today's plans
What is being done to bring our 12,000 Eskimos into the
twentieth century?
The Government of Canada, reports Canada Year Book, is helping
the Eskimo people through the adjustment period by providing
education, family welfare services and technical training:
the same services as those available to people in the rest
of Canada.
Many of the older generation of Eskimos will never be able
to fit into the structure of wage employment, but the younger
people take readily to the mechanical arts. For government
departments they work at a variety of occupations, and as
employees in defence establishments and private companies.
A growing number are being trained and are working as teachers'
aides. Women work as interpreters, waitresses, nursing assistants,
clerks and airline stewardesses. But three-quarters of the
Eskimo population live in the harsh land outside the main
centres of economic and government activity.
Planning is needed not only to develop the rich material
resources of the north, but also to provide the maximum development
of the native people, wherever they may be.
The Manchester Guardian paid tribute to the federal
government's loan fund designed to help Eskimos to establish
co-operatives dealing in fishing, boat building, lumbering,
and arts and crafts. In October 1965 the Minister of the Department
of Northern Affairs announced a programme to build 1,600 houses,
extending throughout the Arctic in the next few years, to
be rented by Eskimos according to their ability to pay, or
purchased with the assistance of capital grants. A start has
been made in creating small local industries in some sections
of the north, befitting the talents of the people and the
materials at hand, thus associating the Eskimos with their
own advancement.
Education is crucial. The Eskimos are moving from a stone
age culture to the machine age in a generation. Schools are
being established for them in key centres from Fort Smith,
on the Alberta border,to Grise Fiord, 800 miles from the North
Pole on Ellesmere Island, and travelling libraries carry books
into some of the out-of-the-way places where they live. Residences
at Fort Simpson and Yellowknife accommodate Eskimo children
who are continuing their studies in higher grades. Courses
in carpentry, building construction, electronics, automobile
and diesel mechanics, and other occupations, are offered at
some central points.
While other native people in the Americas have been swept
out of their ritualistic tribal arts into production for the
tourist trade, the geographical remoteness of the Eskimo has
protected him, and today his art in native stone and ivory
is of world-wide renown.
Market research across southern Canada and in the United
States has revealed a substantial outlet for Eskimo crafts,
and though the carving industry can never of itself solve
the economic problems of the Arctic, it has provided an interim
answer for a lot of people. Moreover, it has brought home
to other Canadians the existence and the capabilities of their
Arctic fellow-citizens.
Among other products of the Eskimos are seal-skin prints,
slippers fashioned from tanned muskrat and Arctic hare (one
pair won second prize at an international shoe show in New
York), and graphics which have been given display in the permanent
collections of the National Gallery of Canada and the Museum
of Modern Art in New York.
The co-operatives
Stefansson brought back this lesson from the Arctic: "Perhaps
we could live as happily in a metropolis as in a fishing village
if only we could substitute the ideals of co-operation for
those of competition." In their co-operatives the Eskimos
carry forward their traditional custom of pooled labour and
shared harvests.
More than 500 Eskimos — nearly one out of every five
Eskimo families — are members of co-operatives. During
1963 nineteen co-operatives were active, with a total business
turnover of close to a million dollars. Of this amount, more
than $250,000 was derived from the sale of sculpture, prints
and handicrafts. The balance came from char and salmon fisheries,
the operation of retail stores and tourist camps, logging,
boat building and marketing furs.
The best known in the Northwest Territories is the West
Baffin Eskimo Co-operative, at Cape Dorset. From a modest
start in 1959 and considerable help in the early stages from
the Northern Affairs Department the men and women of this
gifted community, within two years, were producing graphic
art, sculpture and fine crafts to a value exceeding $200,000.
In the east, co-operatives started with credits from the Eskimo
Loan Fund are now owned by the local people. In 1963 the first
conference of Arctic co-operatives brought together Eskimos
from as far west as Aklavik and as far north as Grise Fiord.
Into tomorrow
It is not unreasonable, in view of their background, that
Indians and Eskimos should be convinced that in changing over
to new ways they are giving up something valuable.
But when offered reasonable opportunity, kindly advice,
understanding tolerance, and practical help, all our native
people have shown their willingness and desire and ability
to make the change.
The issue for tomorrow is this: we newcomers took the land
of the native people. Whether it was a good thing or not;
whether it was inevitable in the march of history or not:
these are irrelevant. We took their land, disrupted their
way of life, ruined their way of livelihood, and undermined
their culture. We are challenged to discharge our obligation
to them.
What is needed is not primarily entreaty, urging, or exhortation,
but understanding help. Over and over again in the course
of the world's history, says Jenness in his book, great social
and economic advances have been made when two peoples who
had marched on separate roads came together. The anniversary
of confederation offers an opportunity to enlarge and intensify
and hasten our effort to raise the level of life of Canada's
native people to that of the general Canadian standard.
The guiding principle in dealing with both Eskimos and Indians
is expressed perceptively by Irene Baird in her poem "Keep
Your Own Things", addressed to the Eskimos. It was published
in North, a magazine of the Department of Northern
Affairs and National Resources, in the March-April issue 1964.
These are the opening lines:
Inuit You who call yourselves The People Keep your own things!
Use our things if you will Use them as you must But only just
As they serve ends Between friends We face you and you us
Over a deep gulf of time Over arctic spaces moon-lonely We
are like strangers meeting after A hard journey With everything
to learn From one another If only how to live and die A little
better
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