Sir John A. and Indigenous People: It’s complicated
Sir John A. Macdonald played a critically important role in founding Canada and in leading it as Prime Minister for almost 20 years. Over the past few years, however, he has fallen out of fashion. His legacy has come under sudden and severe revisionism as new interpretations of his role have emerged, and monuments in his honour have been defaced across the country. Has the new wave gone too far? In recognition of his 206th birthday on Jan. 11, the National Post will revisit the Macdonald record with pieces by notable Canadian thinkers, in a series curated by author/academic Patrice Dutil, who has written extensively on Macdonald.
Sir John A. Macdonald fully accepted the conventional wisdom of his day: that the First Nations had to be fully assimilated into mainstream society. He wanted to see Indigenous people become full citizens of the British empire. In his day, assimilation was seen as a sign of progress. Today, some see it as cultural genocide.
Without question, the policies of Canada’s first prime minister in the early 1880s could be seen as ruthless, perhaps the greatest failure of his career. But to those in central and eastern Canada, at least to those status Indians with property, he showed a gentler side.
Macdonald knew well the first two Canadian Status Indians to study medicine in Canadian universities: Oron
hytekha (“Burning Cloud”), and Kahkewaquonaby (“The Waving Plume” or “Sacred Feathers”).
Oronhytekha was a Mohawk, a member nation in the Six Nations ( Haudenosaunee) Confederacy on the Grand River. Born in 1841 ( and baptized as Peter Martin), he was raised in the Grand River region and attended the Mohawk Institute, an Anglican residential school at Brantford. His experience there was often brutal and several times he escaped, but always returned, and he persisted in his studies. Self- reliant and capable, the young Mohawk gained entrance to a Methodist school in Massachusetts, followed by Kenyon College in Ohio. To pay for his tuition he often worked as a shoemaker, the skill he had learned in residential school. Oronhytekha went
on to receive an MD from the University of Toronto in 1867.
After he campaigned for Macdonald and the Conservatives in the 1872 election, Oronhyatekha was named physician to the Tyendinaga Mohawk near Kingston. So great was his respect for Macdonald that he mentioned in an 1882 letter that he and his wife had decided to name their newborn son, John Alexander after him.
Medicine could not contain either his abilities or his ambitions. He turned his attention to business and between 1878 and 1907 transformed the Independent Order of Foresters from a struggling fraternal organization providing insurance to a small circle of local members into a successful international company.
Oronhytekha had no sense of inferiority in his relations with the prime min
ister of Canada. In 1884 he reportedly told an audience at Tyendinaga that John A. Macdonald “had reason to be a friend to the Indians as he had got the idea of confederation from the confederacy of the Six Nations.” And yet when he was invited to accept the right to vote ( on condition of surrendering his legal Indian status) Oronhytekha refused. Culture, family and language were more powerful bonds.
Macdonald also counted among his friends Kahkewaquonaby, the Head Chief of the Mississauga of New Credit, who lived adjacent to the Six Nations Territory. Born in 1843, Kahkewaquonaby ( also known as Peter Jones) received his medical degree from Queen’s University in 1866. The prime minister saluted Dr. Jones’s “deep and active interest in the welfare of his people.”
Through his political work as Head Chief, Jones fought for more municipal powers on reserves, and for the removal of the Indian Act’s paternalistic wording.
Dr. Jones also strongly supported the Conservative Party and its leader but, like Oronhyatekha, never applied to enfranchise. By 1885 Macdonald had accepted the reality of even his closest First Nations allies wishing to retain their Indian status. As he explained in the House of Commons on May 4, 1885, “They prefer to stick to the clan system, just as, until lately, in my own country, the Highlanders stuck to their clan system in the highland of Scotland. They desired not to be severed from their brethren.”
Macdonald’s outlook toward the First Nations was complex, and cannot be easily summarized. The contradictions of his policy included his ferocious repression of the Indigenous Peoples of the North West immedi
ately after the unrest of 1885, while at the same time extending the federal franchise in central and eastern Canada to adult male status Indians who met the property requirement, without the loss of their Indian status.
Both Oronhyatekha and Dr. Jones had made their position clear. Macdonald listened. They and a number of others who qualified, wished to participate in the Canadian political system, but without losing their legal registered Indian status. Macdonald’s new provision only stayed on the books for 13 years. The Laurier government abolished the indigenous right to vote in 1898. It was not until 1960 that registered Indigenous people obtained the right to vote without giving up their Indian status.