THE INDIANS OF CANADA
By HONOR GROOVE Ottawa
AT the recent launching of the largest warship ever built in Canada there appeared, among other notables, a small group of men with higher cheekbones and narrower mouths than the rest, who wore, in addition to the conventional attire of civilised Western man, towering head-dresses of eagle feathers. They were the chiefs of the Micmac tribe, the East Coast Indians of Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, after whom the new Tribal Class destroyer was named. It is unlikely that English newspapers, in these paper- starved days, carried their pictures, which might have reminded their readers of a problem little recognised outside this Dominion.
Yet of the 400,000 Redmen of the North American continent, some 120,000 live in Canada. They do not constitute a homogeneous nation ; indeed, they differ among themselves in language, in customs, and in abilities, as widely as a Tyneside shipwright from an Albanian mountaineer. At one extreme we see such groups as the Quebec Iroquois of Coughnawaga, famed for their skill and hardi- hood as structural steelworkers, who built not only the Quebec Bridge across their native St. Lawrence, but the Empire State Building of New York and the Golden Gate Bridge of San Fran- cisco. At the other are the Indians of the remote northern lands, whose way of life, since the white man came, has altered only by the use of an occasional steel knife. And between these are pros- perous or struggling groups of farmers and fishermen, trappers and hunters, living much as do their white competitors, small urban communities, and tiny groups of old people living on annuities and the sale of tourist novelties of birch-bark and leather.
This is not a dying race. The first impact of white dominance was, of course, disastrous. European epidemics and European fire- water killed more than gun or tanahawk ; European settlers exter- minated the buffalo, fenced the prairies, and decimated fur-bearing game. Forty years ago there were in all Canada fewer than mo,000 Indians of all tribes, and—allowing for improvement in registration —there had been no important increase in this figure up to 1925. Since then, however, the census records have shown a steady rise. In 1935 there were 112,500 Indians; in 1939, over i 18,000—a natural rate of increase at least equal to that of Canada as a whole. The Canadian Indians appear, ethnologically speaking, to have turned the corner.
This does not, of course, mean that their problems have been solved. They exemplify the usual conundrum posed by the con- tact of two utterly dissimilar ways of life ; tribal versus individualist, static versus dynamic, primitive versus sophisticated. Such clashes may be resolved by the Herrenvolk way of extermination or sub- jection ; by the museum attitude of segregation and tutelage ; or by assimilation. Canada early outgrew the historically almost universal first phase, had already outgrown it, indeed, when the Indian wars were still raging south of the border. In 186o the Indian Act, an Imperial enactment now administered by the Dominion's Bureau of Indian Affairs, established the Indians as protected minor wards of the State, having special privileges and disabilities. An unen- franchised Indian does not vote ; does not pay direct taxes, Dominion or provincial ; cannot sell or mortgage his land ; cannot borrow from a bank or give a valid note of hand ; may not buy or drink liquor and is subject to numbers of special regulations and minor pro- hibitions, all protective in intention. He benefits by certain treaty annuities from the Government and from special services, medical, educational and others. (In Quebec, up to this year, only the Indians had compulsory education.) Any Indian can become en- franchised if.he so chooses, with little more trouble than is encoun- tered in getting a passport ; he then loses both privileges and disabilities, becoming a full Canadian citizen, and this process could theoretically continue until assimilation has become as complete as—say—that of the Celts in Great Britain. Enfranchisements, however, are actually few. Some red tape is involved ; surrender of communal rights and of the advantages of State relief, and liability to taxation, bulk larger to the average Indian than do the appurten- ances of citizenship. Individual Indians have had distinguished careers in the Army and the professions, but they remain excep- tional ; tribalism is still the rule.
Indian relations are not perfect. The buffalo will never return to the plains nor the game to the denuded timber lands ; it is uphill work to turn the nomads of the north and west into settled agri- culturists and fur-farmers, and they do not all relish the change, however conscientiously aided by schools, experimental farms, advisers and Government supplies of seeds and tools. In remote areas reservation boundaries have sometimes been vague, and a sense of injustice has followed their definition. The fishing Indians of the West have a well-founded grievance—the grievance of the small-scale man everywhere—against the big canning companies. In these war years, military authorities have requisitioned Indian lands, as they have done others, and the dispossessed Indians have inevitably accused the guardian Bureau of slackness in defence of their interests. Indians are subject to compulsory military service— since, though not Canadians, they remain subjects of the Crown— and this they regard as a grievance the more acute since their record of voluntary enlistment is above the Canadian average. The Indian, too, shares the grievance of poverty with his white neighbours ; the squalor of slums, the burden of depression or of a high cost of living, the scourge of prairie drought ; and his specific discontents, thus reinforced by those of the submerged tenth in general, are exacerbated by the feeling that among warring pressure-groups the voteless Indian is heavily handicapped.
One can fairly say, however, that there is no race hatred in Canada- between red and white, nothing corresponding to the American negro problem. There is resentment, but no more than arises between other components of the Canadian melting-pot. There is friction, but no more acute than that between other group interests in a world of imperfect social justice. There are shortcomings of administration, deficient educational, housing and medical services, as there are for many white communities in this unevenly developed land. But these are being gradually overcome. The Indian schools, even in wartime, are being improved (incidentally as much is spent on an Indian' child, between seven and sixteen, as on an English elementary school child) the battle against tuberculosis is, however slowly, going forward, infant mortality is falling. The Indian, though voteless as a Canadian, is a democratically self-governing member of his tribe. The time may, perhaps, be approaching when the Indians of the settled lands at least, thus trained and educated, may be enfranchised en bloc, and the tribe may retain only that sentimental loyalty which unites a Scottish clan.
Six years ago a distinguished Iroquois, broadcasting to the people of Canada, spoke thus : " That which has been is no more. . . . The dead ashes of the council-fire have long been scattered. . . . Your towns and skyscrapers stand where once our rude villages and cornfields stood'. . . Because some cannot forget our ancient glories, their paths are not easy. They are as wanderers between two worlds, one lost, the other not yet ready to receive them. . . . You must accept us not as Indians but as Canadians, whose ideals are the same as yours—the building of a united Canada free from sectionalism and the prejudices of race and creed—a Canada founded on the British principles of truth, justice and loyalty.'
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