Full Transcript for Episode 1: The Beginning | Understanding Indigenous History: A Path Forward

we're going to take over. That was essentially the legal reasoning behind that. Now it wasn't legal at that point but eventually the US Supreme Court took that discovery principle and embedded it in law, and so it became a legal principle as opposed to a moral or religious principle. And that has guided both the US and Canada now for centuries, that notion that the government, the Crown, in our case the Crown owns all the land. The other people here, the Indigenous people, they occupy and they're given permission to occupy, through things like the Indian Act and other laws, the land but they don't own it and that can be traced right back to the discovery principle. And what's interesting about Jacques Cartier is that when he arrived on the shores of North America, there was a sickly crew. They were dying from scurvy and the only way that they survived is through the support of the Indigenous peoples there and who knew and had the remedy for scurvy, and so they gave life to Cartier and the people that sailed with him. And I mean I forgot about that. Well that was just the beginning of this symbiotic relationship where the Indigenous people actually made it possible for these explorers to create an economy, and in this country it was the fur trade for 250 years, which would have been a miserable failure had it not been for the Indigenous participation in all respects including men and women, that made it flourish for this period. Before we get into the economy of it, there was push back even then and I think people might not realize that for every Indigenous community are as multicultural as non-Indigenous communities. So they arrive here, the Europeans arrive here and what kind of reception do they receive depending on where they are. Different First Nations treated them differently, but in general. Well I think with a sense of disbelief because in their in their stories, the whole oral history, the spiritual people their medicine people talked about who would come across the waters to visit at some point, they didn't say when but that someone would arrive and they would be complete strangers to them. And lo and behold Cartier arrives and in the territory of the Mi’kmaq, the Passamaquoddy, Penobscot peoples that had been there for thousands of years and that evolved their own cultures and their own laws and means of existence, right, and they were they were amazed. Now we know how bloody and violent it became in the United States at that exact time, how how ugly did it get here? Well my own readings of the history the United States and Canada, there really is quite a difference. As you note the wars in the United States were bloody, vicious, violent and a lot of killing and massacres and mutilations on both sides. And it so happens that in the United States one tribe emerged as the most dominant of all of the tribes in the United States that was the Comanche peoples and one of the reasons for their dominance is their horsemanship. Because at one time there were, I think, at least four different species of horses in North America that became extinct. The Spanish brought horses with them and these horses then of course migrated outward and the Comanche were the first to harness, so to speak, horses. They became great horsemen. They knew how to breed horses and they became incredible warriors. They fought battles mounted on horses. And this is different from what I know in our part of the world is there no horses. People traveled by water, by land, by canoes, walked and so the movement of people not that there was no movement, but the movement of people was certainly at a slower pace than those to the southwestern part of the Americas. You describe a trade off there though the Spanish brought the horses the Comanche learned how to use them to their advantage. Kathleen tell us on the commerce side how that relationship, what the trade off was on this side of the border. Well it's interesting, the French seem to see the the Indigenous people more as allies than later when the British took over after the Indian Wars. The French married, often, Indigenous women. The French had military relationships with them, they had commercial treaties with the Indigenous peoples, and it was quite a, it seems like from the reading of history that I've done, that it was more of a friendly relationship. And so they traded with the Indigenous peoples European goods for furs. There was this great demand in Europe for furs, especially beaver pelts, to make hats actually for women and men. And once, in Europe this fashion trend had existed before the explorers came to North America, but once that trend was so popular they exterminated most of the beaver in Europe there was a market niche there. And the French knew it and they knew the Indigenous people could fill that niche with their skills, so they created commercial relationships with the Indigenous peoples, and then there was so much of this product in the North American scene of beaver that they felt that there was a huge industry potential here. The French king was not particularly interested so they went to England and talked to investors there the king got involved and thought wow let's see what where this will take us. So that's when the Hudson's Bay Company was formed and what's interesting, Lisa, about this is that they gave the Hudson’s Bay Company, if you can believe this, gave a British company without any consultation with the Indigenous people whatsoever gave them 1.2 million square kilometres of land to establish trade in furs. They had a monopoly. And particularly yeah and they had a monopoly so they could make well I guess in today's terms billions of dollars on this trade but the Indigenous people were the key to that. They were the trappers, they were the oarsmen, they were the pilots of the boats because you see they had to spread out from the Hudson's Bay to all of the areas of the Northwest. And so the Indigenous people were the centerpiece

of the fur trade, the women too because the women were traders they looked after the furs. They were interpreters because they married a lot of the traders and they helped them form alliances with Indigenous men, who might not be very anxious to have alliances with them. So it was a cultural thing, it was a social thing and it was a commercial thing it was about this kind of relationship. But in fact what kind of negotiators were the Europeans dealing with when you consider the fact that the Indigenous peoples were doing all the work and doesn't appear they had much of a say at the table to make that happen, to make a fair deal. Well I think before the big real estate boom, in other words taking over all the land, it seems the Indigenous half of the trade relationship was that they received woolens, they received other textiles, they received tools, they received firearms, so it made their lives easier in the sense of what, and as Phil pointed out, you know south of Canada where the horses became part of the relationship, but they also became yeah they also became highly mobile. So they weren't at the short end of the stick necessarily in the these early times with the explorers, it was only later, after the Indian Wars in 1763 that everything started to change because that's when the British took over. It seems like the Hudson’s Bay Company has been so romanticized with this history, but you know how dependent was the company on Indigenous resources. I would say totally. Absolutely, they were, without our people without the Indians, no fur right, and the Hudson's Bay Company and all of their factors and employees knew that they had to establish a relationship where the Indigenous peoples, the tribes, were seen as essential and so a lot of ceremony emerged from this early relationship between the English, represented by the Hudson’s Bay Company and various tribes in all parts of the country as the Hudson's Bay Company pushed westward and north, and so they encountered people that had their own way of looking at the world as I noted earlier and ceremony was really very, very important. The pipe, sitting down and smoking the pipe and the British knew too, you know, that our people enjoyed a bit of rum or brandy, pass out the rum and brandy after they had smoked the pipe then the trading would start right. And quite often, too often the Hudson's Bay people that ran these trading posts knew that they could secure by debt the services of the various Indian tribes and one of the most important commodities was liquor, alcohol. Which they brought in. Which they brought in and a lot of our people became a slave to this commodity. Why do you think that is? Well it was new, and we had no experience with alcohol and it just it became an evil, an evil presence in our communities and in fact the word fire water was something that was created is a word that came from our people because they knew that the traders were diluting the product and they’d spill the alcohol on fires right, and so if it was diluted you didn't have the big flame. I never knew the origin of that term. Yeah, that's how it, but I was going to make a point here earlier in the early part of our discussion with the French. The French were very focused not just on land and commercialization of their relationship with our people, they were very much into evangelization and they were very interested in the culture and languages of the people, the first inhabitants of this land, of these lands that, and so they would send out their young men to various tribes to go live with the Indians of this tribe or that tribe to learn learn the language, to learn the customs and to learn as much as they could learn about these various tribes they were encountering. To better negotiate with them or as a level of exploitation, or? Well you could use different words for that exploitation, commercial advantages. Christianized. I was going to say to convert. Oh to convert, in fact the Jesuits were one of the first missionary groups to to come to North America and they were first to begin this process of educating our people and they failed but they didn't give up. They failed again and and in fact it's interesting to read the history of the Oblates, the Oblate order OMI. Under the Catholic church. When they sent their people out to evangelize to christianize, they made absolutely certain that they knew the language of the people that they were going to deal with. The English on the other hand didn't pay much heed to that they didn't see it as something necessary or important to them so, of course, the inroads, the major inroads in terms of evangelization and success in that process were the Catholic orders. That's just a whole new level of this discussion Phil, that's going to take up a whole episode. I don't know why I went there. No but it's fascinating because it permeates the whole story, I think. But I before we move off the Hudson's Bay Company because it really is fascinating, I mean there's one around the corner from where we are sitting right now. When you think of the history it truly is stunning, but I wonder if you could tell us what is one of your first memories, where, how old were you, what were the circumstances of a Hudson's Bay Trading Company trading post? I have two memories, distinct memories. One was going with my father to see Santa Claus in front of The Bay in the town next to the reserve Pine Falls that was established as a pulp and paper company town and Santa Claus was there and I wasn't brave enough to you know go sit on his lap or whatever. So that that's one memory I had of The Bay, The Bay store. The original Hudson's Bay trading post was in Sagkeeng that. Which is where for people who may not realize the geography. Well, about an hour and a half northeast of Winnipeg at the mouth of the Winnipeg River that discharges to Lake Winnipeg and reserve and that's where our reserve is located, and the reserve has the north side

and the south side and there was a series of seven dams along the Winnipeg River. The Hudson's Bay established, and they weren't the first by the way, established their post at the mouth of the river and they were there for, gosh, 200 years or thereabouts and that was a staging point for their journey up to the north Norway House and then York Factory, and so to be a factor at the Hudson's Bay post in Fort Alexander was an important, an important posting with the Hudson's Bay. And Indians from here and there would come to that area because there were prime stands of birch, come there there to repair their canoes or to build canoes. And so when I became aware of the Hudson's Bay this was when I went to the store on the reserve that was no longer Hudson's Bay but had been the post and been taken over by three different French families and there was a cairn put up, not a monument, yeah not too far from The Bay to La Verendrye, the first white man to ever visit the area. So I was well aware of the Hudson’s Bay but not to the extent that I know now given my knowledge of the deeper history of the relationship between us and the Hudson's Bay Company. It's the legal structures that were in place and Kathleen if you can explain a little bit about that how did it it become so lopsided? What's really interesting I told you a few minutes ago that the Hudson’s Bay was given for starters 1.2 million square kilometers of land without any input from the the Indigenous people on whose land it was, of course. That expanded to over 8 million square kilometres of land, which basically encompassed Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec and the North. Is this Rupert’s Land? This was Rupert’s Land. The king decided to name it after his cousin Prince Rupert, and this became Hudson Bay land, if you can believe it, this massive amount of land with all their trading posts and so on, and then what happened was the Americans became a bit of a threat to Canada so they thought that especially the West could be taken over by American interests, so the government went to The Bay and asked them to sell them Rupert's Land so The Bay sold Canada Rupert’s Land for 300,000 pounds plus 10 million acres of their choosing, again without any discussion with the Native people whose land it was. So this started a problem, a huge problem about land, not that that it didn't exist before but this really brought it to head and Louis Riel was one of the loudest protesters but many chiefs as well because they said how dare you sell our land for $300,000 that's going to the Hudson’s Bay when it was our land to begin with. If anybody should be getting the money it's us. So that showed you the power of the Hudson's Bay, the political linkages of course with this emerging governing structure that was developing for Canada and the complete ignoring of the Indigenous peoples whose land it was, and shortly after that, of course it became, with this unrest on the part of the Indigenous peoples

there was a urgency to start treaty making. Let's, so before we get to the treaty making, I think we need to talk about the Royal Proclamation, 1763. The importance of it as a sort of the first negotiations legitimately, agreement take us there and what it created that we still actually have some of today. Well the Indigenous people, and Phil will know more about this than myself, but the Indigenous people called it the Indian Magna Carta. Why? Well because the king who gave the Royal Proclamation its legal reality said that yes this is our land. North America's us this was after defeating the French in the Seven Years War. This is our land but the Indigenous people have an interest in this land and if anybody wants to occupy Indian land they have to come to us. They have to buy, if they want to buy Indian land they have to come to us so in the proclamation itself it essentially recognized Aboriginal title and sovereignty to their lands, even though they said they owned the lands they made this caveat about Indigenous sovereignty. So from that day forward it has been there as a foundation for Indigenous claim to Aboriginal title from a legal sense, and the Royal Proclamation became part of our Constitution in 1982. The Constitution says that the Royal Proclamation is applicable today, so this is where we get the idea of Aboriginal title which we see now day-to-day in the newspapers about claims of Aboriginal title and being opposed by the Crown or opposed by private corporations, who want to exploit Indian land for economic development. You see these claims of Aboriginal title that's where it goes back to. So back to 1763 is the basis that all other treaties were signed is right there is a fascination. That's right, and to this day as Kathleen was pointing out the the legal implications for the Royal Proclamation and ownership over the lands the underlying title still rests with the Canadian the federal Crown, even when the courts say that these are Indian lands or First Nations lands, they also have a caveat to that, the underlying title even though there's Aboriginal title the underlying title still rests with the federal Crown. And that goes back to the discovery principle. And it also goes back to the philosophy at that time and I'm going to quote right now the Eurocentric thinking really that Indigenous did not quote “live in civil society”, so there was a sense then that they could actually do whatever they wanted, negotiate, well I guess it feels weird calling it a negotiation when it's so one sided, but Phil why wasn't oral tradition viewed as sort of legitimate evidence that there was ownership there. Because the people on the other side were not an oral society right? They wrote everything down. The treaties were written in legalese and the other side you had a peoples that were oral societies, they handed down stories of their existence in this particular region of the country or another region and this had represented very little value to the people representing the federal Crown, the commissioners. And so while they were part of the major ceremonies that went into creating treaty, the smoking of the pipe, the singing, the dancing, the celebrations that went into the events or the days before the actual negotiations the federal, I say the federal, but the commissioners had no interest in hearing these stories or paying any attention to the stories, but you know they knew our people were very open, respectful, and they treated them like children. So in all of the discussions, if you read the history of treaty making, the commissioners talk about the mother the great white mother. And if they wanted to press their case, for example, when in Treaty 4 negotiations the chiefs were saying we want this much land, right, to make it possible for us to sustain ourselves in our traditional pursuits of hunting, trapping, fishing, the commissioner said well your mother in England doesn't want you to have more than you need. So Queen Victoria you're talking about. Yeah doesn't want you to have more land. She knows that that the railroads needed land, the settlers needed land and if we give you too much we won't be able to undertake all of this important, these important enterprises. And so one of the chiefs there, or he wasn't, but one of the negotiators said, for example, coming back to the Hudson’s Bay Company, he said how come we are meeting on Hudson’s Bay land when the Canadian government, the commissioners, your queen gave the Hudson’s Bay Company £300,000 plus a whole bunch of our land and you expect us to negotiate our treaty on their lands, said we won't do it. So they backed off they, the negotiations for Treaty 4, Fort Qu’appelle, stopped at that point, there was a pause and the commissioners conferred among themselves they said okay we'll meet off the Hudson’s Bay lands. So our people, even though they weren't literate people knew and understood the Hudson’s Bay Company, how it operated the value of the Hudson's Bay and their major, major interest in Canada. It feels like historically now is where we bring in the British North America Act 1867. You know this was essentially the Constitution until 1982. Still is we just added to it. We added to it essentially unchanged except for a few amendments right. The impact though of the BNA act on the Indigenous peoples. The unfortunate turn of events as the BNA act came to, came into existence was a complete absence of our people's participation in crafting the BNA, the British North America Act. There's only two peoples essentially that were at the table, the French and the English, and these two interests went about carving out for themselves space in different parts of the country, right, Lower Canada, Upper Canada and no interests, no need to engage with the Indians. Well and at the same time in the BNA act they recognized that if they wanted to have a peaceful co-existence they had to protect language French and English, they had to protect education French and English, they had to make sure people were happy with the land distribution, they protected the laws both French and English, so that when there was no seats for the Indigenous people at the table they got none of that protected for them, even though they were interested in protecting the same things and the BNA act not only didn't have Indigenous representatives to speak to that first constitution, I mean setting aside Proclamation of 1763, not only did they not have them there but that they made the Indigenous people wards of the state. So they were less, really, than human in a sense, less than equal for sure to the French and British citizens who whose cultures have flourished ever since as we know and the Indigenous peoples have not. They were made wards of the state, the responsibility of the federal government, so the federal government took on responsibility for Indians as it says and lands reserved for Indians, full stop. Nothing about language, culture, education any of that. That is really where the hard negotiations started as far as treaties. Now treaties are a conversation that deserve their own time and space with the complexities and importance so let's save that for our next session.