Sir John A. Macdonald’s complicated history
ORIGINAL OWNERS OF THE SOIL, OF WHICH THEY HAVE BEEN DISPOSSESSED.
Canada is experiencing another spasm of controversy over the legacy of its first prime minister, John A. Macdonald. Victoria city council in B.C. has removed his statue from the steps of city hall while in Regina a Macdonald monument has been vandalized. He is being vilified for personally setting in motion all of the most damaging elements of Canadian Indigenous policy. But he was also a politician of his times, a man whose nationalistic feelings undoubtedly laid the foundations of modern Canada. Tristin Hopper gives a brief accounting of Macdonald’s policy on Canada’s First Nations set against the backdrop of the day.
‘Ihave reason to believe that the agents as a whole … are doing all they can, by refusing food until the Indians are on the verge of starvation, to reduce the expense,” Macdonald told the House of Commons in 1882.
It’s one of the most damning quotations ever attributed to Macdonald. And yet, in the parliament record it’s immediately followed by an even more damning comment as the Liberal opposition benches accuse Macdonald of not starving Indians enough.
“No doubt the Indians will bear a great degree of starvation before they will work, and so long as they are certain the Government will come to their aid they will not do much for themselves,” said David Mills, who had served as minister of the interior under the Liberal government of Alexander Mackenzie.
This was clearly an Ottawa that had no time for the rights and culture of what they would have called “savage” nations. But even in that context Macdonald would be criticized for going too far.
“Macdonald basically had Indigenous people locked down so tightly that they became irrelevant after 1885,” said James Daschuk, the author of the bestseller Clearing the Plains, from which many of the primary sources quoted in this article were obtained.
When Macdonald took office for the second and last time in 1878, the plains were in the grip of what is still one of the worst human disasters in Canadian history.
The sudden disappearance of the bison, caused largely by American overhunting, had robbed Plains First Nations of their primary source of food, clothing and shelter. Suddenly, all across the prairies were scenes reminiscent of the Irish Potato Famine only 30 years prior.
Around what is now Calgary, Blackfoot had been reduced to eating grass. White travellers described coming across landscapes of up to 1,000 Indigenous so starved that they had trouble walking.
Macdonald did not cause the famine. Nor did he draft the Indian Act or most of the West’s treaties, which had been created under the prior Liberal government.
But Macdonald would capitalize on prairies wracked with famine. His Conservatives had returned to office with an ambitious “National Policy” that included quickly driving a railroad to the Pacific.
To do this, Macdonald effectively gave himself near-autocratic control of the prairies, including supervision of Indian affairs and the Northwest Mounted Police.
In government archives, Daschuk found ample primary evidence showing that Macdonald’s Indian agents explicitly withheld food in order to drive bands onto reserve and out of the way of the railroad. A Liberal MP at the time even called it “a policy of submission shaped by a policy of starvation.”
But the hunger did not stop under government care. In some cases, it got worse. Reserves were equipped with meagre agricultural equipment and relocated natives were expected to immediately grow enough food to sustain themselves.
The policy was an almost total failure, and when reserves inevitably began to tip back into famine, Indian agents kept rations low enough to ensure constant hunger and discourage the expectation of “gratuitous assistance” from Ottawa.
The squalid conditions ensured that Macdonald spent much of the 1880s overseeing near-constant famines and epidemics on federally controlled reserves. In only five years between 1880 and 1885, the population of Plains First Nations dropped from 32,000 to 20,000, according to analysis by the Cree-Saulteaux academic Blair Stonechild.
Indian agents had near-dictatorial powers over their charges. Federal policy had placed natives under the sway of “low and unprincipled characters,” Cree writer Robert Steinhauer wrote in 1886.
The pattern of irresponsible or sadistic leadership would continue in Canada’s Indian Residential Schools, which Macdonald introduced as a nationwide program of assimilation in 1883.
“When the school is on the reserve, the child lives with his parents who are savages; he is surrounded by savages … He is simply a savage who can read and write,” Macdonald told the House of Commons.
In the downtowns of Kingston or Montreal, Canadians remained relatively oblivious to the harsh realities of Macdonald’s policies, and largely assumed that the humane assimilation of natives into white society was going ahead as planned.
It was only in the wake of Louis Riel’s 1885 North-West Rebellion, that stories began to trickle east of starvation and suffering.
“In the (United States) the Indian was the prey of the frontiersman and the cattle driver, in Canada he has been the prey of the government,” Liberal MP Malcolm Cameron told the House of Commons in 1886.
Macdonald’s staunchest defenders do not deny that he embodied a belief system that would today be called white nationalism. Among white society in the Victoria-era British Empire, it was a mainstream belief that it was a morally righteous thing to supplant Indigenous nations with European civilization. Even the Victorian equivalent of a social justice campaigner would have wanted Christ, assimilation and “uplift” for Indigenous peoples, not a retention of their existing culture.
In one way Macdonald was oddly more progressive on Indigenous policy than his contemporaries.
On the eve of the North-West Rebellion, he had proposed a measure that would extend voting rights to Canadian Indigenous — a measure that Canada wouldn’t actually adopt until 1960. “I hope to see some day the Indian race represented by one of themselves on the floor of the House of Commons,” he wrote in a letter to friend Peter Jones, a Mississauga Ojibwa chief.
Liberal MP David Mills ridiculed the bill by saying that it would allow Indians to “go from a scalping party to the polls.”
In a particularly remarkable quote from 1880, Macdonald did something that would be quite familiar to the Canadians of 2018: He disparaged his forebears for the awful plight of Canada’s first peoples.
“We must remember that they are the original owners of the soil, of which they have been dispossessed by the covetousness or ambition of our ancestors,” he wrote in a letter proposing the creation of the Department of Indian Affairs.
“At all events, the Indians have been great sufferers by the discovery of America and the transfer to it of a large white population.”
To Daschuk, Macdonald’s apparent sympathies with First Nations makes his actions in the West all the more sinister. They reveal that the first prime minister was not a “cartoon racist” bent on genocide. Rather, he brought the hammer down on Plains First Nations simply because they were an obstacle in the way of his national dream.
“He was doing this strategically,” said Daschuk.
In his 2011 Macdonald biography Nation Maker, historian Richard Gwyn took a charitable view of federal actions in the West, saying that Macdonald had merely been overwhelmed by a famine that had been “inflicted on him.”
“While clearly he could have done better, Macdonald was unquestionably the best available man for a task that, at its core, was near to impossible,” wrote Gwyn.
Defenders of Macdonald contend that he was merely guilty of negligence. He was a man in his 60s heading up a shaky new country while simultaneously orchestrating one of history’s largest infrastructure projects. The fate of whole peoples was in the hands of a man who had no idea what the West even looked like, and had no time to care.
“He developed the habit of putting aside some of his most challenging files to be looked at later,” wrote historian Donald Smith in an essay on Macdonald’s relationship with Aboriginal Canada. “New incoming files soon buried these old ones.”
If a Canadian government was carrying out Macdonald’s policies today, there’s no question it would instantly become an international pariah. Daschuk uses the term “ethnic cleansing” to refer to Macdonald’s intentional removal of Indian bands from southern Saskatchewan. He notes that it’s no accident that there are no virtually no Saskatchewan native reserves along the route of the Canadian Pacific Railroad.
Of course, all this was happening in an era that was comparatively brutal almost everywhere. It was in this same time period that Belgium’s King Leopold II turned the Congo into his own personal slave state, killing up to 10 million Africans in the process.
When Macdonald went to London to negotiate the creation of Canada in 1866, British India was still recovering from a famine — exacerbated by colonial inaction — that had killed more than a million people.
The United States, meanwhile, would forcefully seize their country from Indigenous tribes through decades of wars and massacres. Even the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, brutally put down a Sioux rebellion with a mass-hanging that still ranks as the largest in U.S. history.
“The leading feature of Sir John’s Indian policy was to keep the Indian alive during times of scarcity, and gradually wean him from his wild ways into habits of settled industry,” wrote a glowing 1891 biography of Macdonald published soon after his death.
Robert Jefferson was a teacher in the Battleford area at the height of Macdonald’s policies in the west.
“It was not intended that the Indian should become self-supporting,” he wrote. “He was only to be kept quiet till the country filled up when his ill will could be ignored.”
Beginning in earnest shortly after Macdonald’s death, hundreds of thousands of European settlers poured into the prairies. As Jefferson predicted, the plight of Canada’s Indigenous virtually disappeared from history books, political discourse and the general Canadian consciousness. “For close to a century, to be an Indian was to be invisible, so far as the government and the majority of Canadians were concerned,” wrote Gwyn in Nation Maker.
For Macdonald’s contemporaries, it would have been clear that their “Old Chieftain” had definitively solved the “Indian Question.”
It’s reasonable to assume that almost anybody else in the prime minister’s chair at the time would have similarly pursued an assimilationist policy against Canada’s First Nations. Tellingly, in 1898 Wilfrid Laurier’s Liberals would repeal one of Macdonald’s few positive legacies for Canadian Indigenous; a slimmeddown voting rights act that had briefly given the franchise to certain Ontario First Nations.
But it’s similarly reasonable to believe that another man in Macdonald’s place would not have been so cruel.
“He had a deadline,” said Daschuk, “and that’s why he put the screws on so tight.”