Savages, scalps and stereotypes: I combed through the Star’s historical Indigenous coverage
Les Couchi, a member of the Nipissing First Nation and retired government worker: ‘It became clear to me that the foundation of today’s racism can be found in the mainstream press of the past’
“Loaded down with bills, squaws become popular as sweethearts.”
Let that sink in for a moment. How does that make you feel?
Uncomfortable? Ashamed? Angry? Imagine seeing your grandmother or your daughter called a name like that in Canada’s largest-circulation newspaper.
Last January, I was looking for historical articles that I could use to attract readers to my Facebook page, Nipissing First Nation Voices. I purchased a three-month pass to search the online archives of the Toronto Star. I chose the paper because of its reputation for stories that brought the plight of Indigenous people to its front pages.
The results, at first, were excellent. There were stories of two amazing swimmers from my community: Liza Commanda and Betty Goulais. Commanda competed in the Canadian National Exhibition’s 10-mile race in 1932. Goulais swam across Lake Nipissing in 1956.
I also discovered two more community heroes. In the 1930s, two men from the community took the provincial Game & Fish Act and our treaty rights all the way to the Ontario Supreme Court. One of them turned out to be my grandfather. But I also found much darker material. When I entered the search word “Indian,” the archive responded with an astounding 300,000 hits.
The first article I found was from 1909 — a story about the Dokis First Nation getting a long-awaited logging rights settlement payment. Right there in the sub-head was that word — “squaw.”
I begin a methodical search, year by year. I was overwhelmed by what I found. Tens of stories quickly grew to hundreds of stories and then to thousands of stories containing racist, condescending, patronizing and outright unbelievable language — words such as warpath, red-man, red-skin, scalping and Eskimo — all in reference to Indigenous people.
I have experienced and witnessed racism and injustice toward Indigenous people in my daily life and in my career in local, provincial and federal governments. But sifting through the archive’s stories and the language used was an eye-opening experience.
For example, a group of community members upset with programs and policies were described as being “on the warpath.” This gave the public the idea that we were nothing more than a hostile and uncompromising warring people who always sought resolution through violent methods.
In a number of Second World War photos, Indigenous soldiers were highlighted as troops on the warpath against the “Japs” and Nazis, ready to “scalp the enemy.” This sent a message that our fighting men were using a barbaric practice, which was never Indigenous to begin with, and — more perplexingly — that the Canadian army somehow condoned torture.
Reading the mountain of articles, it became clear to me that the foundation of today’s racism can be found in the mainstream press of the past. In the 1930s and ’40s, language that depicted the Indigenous community as savage, unruly, drunk and lazy, reinforced the racist attitudes in the social system. Parents read these stories and shared them at the dinner table with their kids who in turn grew up and brought their prejudices into the governments and boardrooms of the 1950s and ’60s.
And so, when Indian Affairs failed to meet its commitments to Indigenous communities, the press didn’t take up the cause. Few reporters investigated the bureaucratic mess of nepotism, favouritism and corruption. Indian agents took care of themselves instead of the people they were meant to serve.
Meanwhile, Indigenous people were starving and dying from disease.
When articles did cover these conditions, government denials were printed uncritically in follow-up articles that contained little context from the reporters’ original stories.
As I examined the articles, I couldn’t help but no- tice glaring examples of further indignities that were either ignored or dismissed.
Residential schools were known for their ill treatment of students and priests were being singled out for bad behaviour, and yet, in the papers, the churches perpetuated the belief that First Nations students were ill-equipped to make it in a white man’s world.
Early stories on the high number of imprisoned Indigenous men and women should have set off alarms for the justice system, but it would be decades before we saw any of the committed social justice reporting that pressed governments for action.
Meanwhile the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women was growing in the shadows, alongside police “starlight tours” and racial profiling. And still, the stereotypes of drunken, lazy, savage Indians to blame for their own misfortune continued.
A common theme I also found was that Indigenous perspectives were repeatedly left out of stories.
As early as the 1950s, reports out of Kenora suggested the Reed Paper Co. was poisoning the Wabigoon River system. The paper mill was 130 kilometres upstream from the White Dog and Grassy Narrows First Nations, which relied on those waters to feed their communities. For decades, the government ignored the problem, and the Star printed outright denials from the government that anyone had been poisoned. Even today the river continues to make people sick while the government only recently committed serious money to cleaning up the pollution.
Decades later — first at Oka, Que., and later at Ipperwash Provincial Park, near Sarnia, Ont. — Indigenous protesters set up barricades to protect land they rightly believed to be theirs. They were besieged by heavily armed police and soldiers. Both standoffs ultimately ended with bloodshed and death.
But in news coverage of all these disputes, the Indigenous perspective and oral history were repeatedly downplayed and treated as less trustworthy than the narrative of the colonizers.
What does this mean to Canadians? For one thing, it means your money was wasted.
That river continues to poison people to this day. The cleanup, which the Ontario government finally agreed to, will take roughly 10 years and at least $85 million more of your tax dollars.
By refusing to listen to Indigenous people, the government paid $13.3 million for the Ipperwash inquiry and a final settlement of $95 million to the Chippewas of Kettle and Stony Point First Nation before they gave the land back.
This could all have been avoided if Canadians — and Canadian reporters, responsible in part for crafting these narratives — paid greater heed to what Indigenous people had been saying all along.
Among all the racial slurs and offensive headlines, I did find stories of success and triumph.
I discovered that story about my maternal grandfather, Joe Commanda, and his fight against the provincial Fish & Game Act. Commanda and fellow community leader John Fisher took their opposition to the act to the Ontario Supreme Court, helping to preserve our community’s access to traditional food sources.
It was good to see my grandfather represented as a rebel and a hero.
Another story painted him as a famed Indigenous guide in the rescue of two American tourists from Philadelphia. He, along with other community members Philip and Bernie Commanda, Mike Penasse and George St. Denis, engineered the rescue.
Two stories featured my paternal grandfather, Ernest Couchie, who by 1921 was already a successful businessman serving the North as a taxidermist.
There were also stories about our legendary Chief Simon (Semo) Commanda, who lived to be 110, and Leda McLeod — a longtime education advocate who fought the local school board for representation for Indigenous students.
My own family appeared in the Star in May 1961 after my parents, who had had 11 boys in a row, gave birth to our first sister, Mary Lynn.
But growing up on a First Nation, I experienced first-hand some of the racism of the times.
In my community, many hard-working people struggled with all kinds of demons brought on by the horrors of residential school. Most of the parents had attended the residential school in Spanish, Ont. Drinking was prevalent, and it was tough to see people who were hellbent on self-destruction. I, too, fell into the world of alcoholism, but eventually, at age 21, I beat addiction.
In 1967 on New Year’s Day, the Star reported on the murder of our Chief Ted Commanda during a fight over leadership of the reserve. This was a rude awakening for the community, which had already been brought low by the cumulative and all-encompassing efforts of government intervention. The Indian Act was never meant to protect us but to destroy us. Decades of oppression, the residential schools, our isolation from the economy, poor diets, disease and total dysfunction had created a community of very little hope.
In the years following Chief Commanda’s murder, the ill-advised White Paper proposal by then-Indian Affairs Minister Jean Chrétien, which called for the total repeal of the Indian Act, would come and go. However, renewal would begin in our community as the federal government finally started to recognize that self-governance, not assimilation, was the key. And a slew of Ontario bureaucrats from the Department of Social and Family Services resigned their positions in protest over the government’s treatment of Indigenous people.
Young people started graduating in larger numbers. Today, Nipissing First Nation has college and university graduates, masters and doctorates, physicians and lawyers, all working to make our community a better place. Strong leadership has resulted in the creation of a new civic centre, a women’s shelter, a high school and an industrial park. We have settled two land claims for $124 million that have brought us a degree of independence.
After years and years of failing paternalistic practices, our community shed the anchor of the Indian agents who always worked against us. We organized bigger and stronger alliances such as the Union of Ontario Indians. And today, we have many First Nations striving and contributing to the economy.
In the press, against this backdrop of recovery, newspapers like the Toronto Star began to commit to investigative reporting on Indigenous issues, informing the public in a way that eliminated the condescending words and racial remarks of the past.
There is still much to do. We need more Indigenous people holding the pens, writing the stories and contributing to how our communities are represented in the press.
Thankfully we live in a country where a newspaper that played a part in the systemic racism now plays a part in the truth and reconciliation. Les Couchi is a retired government worker with more than three decades of experience at the local, provincial and federal level. He is a member of the Nipissing First Nation and resides in North Bay.