The Moonspeaker:
Where Some Ideas Are Stranger Than Others...
Whose Trouble?
Once Indigenous peoples had been rounded up and put on reserves the "Indigenous problem" became embedded as a policy discourse which reached out across all aspects of a government's attempt to control the natives. Both "friends of the natives" and those hostile to Indigenous peoples conceptualized the issues of colonization and European encroachment on Indigenous territories in terms of a problem of the natives. The natives were, according to this view, to blame for not accepting the terms of their colonization.
– Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies
No doubt it is overdetermined that an Indigenous writer such as myself would find various references to the "Indian," "Native," "Indigenous" or other label "problem" puzzling. Sticking to such formulations in the case of Indigenous peoples, they are an old standby in settler colonial government contexts, and while not as obviously deployed anymore, they come back in more or less subtle ways. Part of what makes the term so strange is that it is so often used when the discussion going on is about addressing the challenges Indigenous peoples face due to colonialism and its ongoing violence and interference with Indigenous peoples' existence as nations and communities. Time and again Indigenous representatives and communities sought to work on these matters, only to see and hear the various colonial settler authorities begin talking not about justly rectifying this issues, but about their "Indian/Native/Indigenous problem," or "Indian problem" for short. Any non-Indigenous readers, settler, colonial, or neither may well still be wondering how this can be true, and what evidence I may have for that. This is a fair question, and so I will summarize here the things I have learned in the course of some recent reading to support composing lectures for a history of canadian colonialism class.
While there are many ways to recount the path of canadian colonialism based on a selection of various key events depending which Indigenous nations or places are taken as focii for the lectures at hand, there is one year and specific colonial act no instructor can leave out. The year is 1969, and the colonial act is another round of attempted revisions to the legislation known as the Indian Act by the government of Pierre Elliot Trudeau. This was supposed to be a groundbreaking effort, based on "consultative democracy" in which "the Indians" would be canvassed about what they wanted before amendments were composed and presented as a bill to the house of commons. The attempt backfired so badly as to eventually spoil Trudeau's attempt to "patriate" the canadian constitution from the british crown. This seems an astonishing mistake for a government with access to plenty of experts to make. So astonishing, that historian Sally M. Weaver researched an entire book just about this incident, Making Canadian Indian Policy: The Hidden Agenda 1968-70, published in 1981. There are no more recent treatments, despite the continuing reverberations of this policy initiative. I should also note that Weaver is quite sympathetic to the government of the day, from the elected members of parliament to the members of the public service tasked with carrying out the policy development.
There are a few habitual descriptions and references Weaver makes demonstrating this sympathy. She regularly describes Indigenous peoples within canada as a "disorganized, disadvantaged minority." As the narrative goes on, and Weaver ends up revealing how Indigenous peoples were in fact organized, by which I mean according to their own laws and methods, not just the existence of Indian Act imposed band councils. Even in the late 1960s and early 1970s, band councils had extremely restricted authority and there were still "Indian agents" who could, and regularly did, overrule them. These "Indian agents" were almost exclusively non-Indigenous men, often drawn from christian clergy or lay orders. Therefore, "unorganized" in the context of Weaver's book in effect meant "not organized in a way that mirrors colonial structures, reproduces what colonizers want to see and hear, and puts colonizers in charge." As she describes the various federal officials, staff, and consultants involved in the two years of work leading up to the production of the still infamous 1969 White Paper on Indian Policy, they fall into roughly two groups. One group is committed to continuing the established practices of federal "protection" in just the way things were going, barring certain small adjustments already in process, like reducing the powers of Indian agents and enforcing health and safety improvements on residential schools. The other group, referred to by Weaver as "the activists," wanted a major overhaul and to get finally get rid of the Indian Act all together, and in their minds, dissolving all the treaties that had made "canada" possible.
Weaver observes in the completely even tone she maintains throughout the book concerning "the activists" how their proposals "rested on certain questionable assumptions, particularly the belief that native people valued 'Indianness' because they had been excluded from normal social relations and economic benefits in white society. Indian ethnicity was seen as a negative concept, the result of Indian reaction to exclusion, not a positive feature in its own right. Class, not ethnicity, was the basic framework of their analysis." The department group's views were not necessarily so far from this viewpoint, but they were more likely to have previous or current experience working directly with Indigenous people, and therefore some awareness of Indigenous nations, cultures, and histories, however dim. The government of the day was a different question. Arthur Laing, who served as Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development and then Minister of Public Works in over the two year period Weaver discusses, had some pointed thoughts about Indigenous peoples in canada.
Laing argued that the government would be charged with abandoning the Indians and that the provinces would side-step their responsibilities, but his basic point was that it was premature to remove government protection, in short, to end the patron-client relationship, because Indians had not yet accepted the values the government wanted them to accept. He wrote "The prime condition in the progress of Indian people must be the development by themselves of a desire for the goals which we think they should want."
I am not convinced there is any way to present Laing's commentary as somehow not in fundamental agreement with the presupposition of there being no positive reasons for Indigenous peoples to refuse to assimilate.
In any case, we now have a sketch of the overall shared view of Indigenous peoples among these policymakers. They were viewed as inconveniently organized for colonial purposes, small in numbers, lacking any real independent existence, history, or culture extending into the present. Indigenous peoples stubbornly refused to get with the program, and worse yet unlike impoverished settler groups, refused to either vanish or buckle down and adopt the goals they were supposed to. When the backlash against the 1969 White Paper among Indigenous peoples began, it seems many of these policymakers were not just shocked, but even rather offended. Hadn't they consulted with the "Indians"? Never mind how in the late twentieth century "consultative processes" elicited merely advice the government presumed to apply or ignore as it saw fit. Never mind how in the course of revising the White Paper, it was steadily reworded to declare it described what the "Indians" wanted, when in fact it described the government's desired changes. Even if the revisions hadn't resulted in this crass attempt to ventriloquize Indigenous people and pretend they had unquestioningly adapted the values the government wanted after all, Indigenous resistance and backlash to the proposed policy changes was guaranteed. It is a wonder how so many officials could have failed to realize what a provocation those pretences on top of the proposal itself were the equivalent of a soaking in gasoline with a garnish of lit matches.
So let's turn this around, and consider a different question, the one of the settler problem.
Among the best descriptions of this problem I am aware of, one sensitive to the diversity of settler histories and potentials for overcoming them while maintaining the positive and neighbourly aspects of their unique cultures and histories, is Anishinabekwe author Patty Krawec's. Her entire beautiful and challenging book, Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future is emphatically worth the time to read and savour. Here is her summary of the settler problem, in two key, pithy paragraphs.
Settlers and newcomers, Black and Indigenous: the history we learn in elementary school is rooted in explorers and settlers. We learn about brave colonists fighting for freedom. We learn about Native people who, despite early Thanksgiving friendship, become dangerous and then mysteriously vanish. The history of slavery is placed comfortably in the past. The American story is one of a war fought to end slaery. The Canadian story is about being the final stop on the Underground Railroad, the place of freedom. We all, settler and newcomer, Black and Indigenous, learn about how those countries were the ones that ended slavery. Somehow in this history, the very people who created the problem are transformed into the ones who saved us.
The story of America as a nation of proud immigrants is a myth, one that Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz unpacks in her book Not "A Nation of Immigrants." Put simply, immigrants come to a place and join with the existing political order. Those who came here by force – such as African people who were enslaved – or those who came through desperation – such as economic or climate refugees or those fleeing war – are welcomed by that political order only according to their usefulness. Those seen as threats are contained in prisons and migrant detention centres, just as Native people were contained in reservations. The United States has never been "a nation of immigrants." The Haudenosaunee offered settlers a kind of immigration – a way to join with the existing political order through the Two Row Wampum. Instead, the United States chose to become a settler-colonial nation, imposing a new order.
Krawec refers just to the united states in the second paragraph since it is the settler state she is living within, but canada also refused to join in the Indigenous socio-political order through the Two-Row Wampum. Contrary to the way mainstream authors tend to describe this early treaty, the Two-Row Wampum does not demand Indigenous and newcomer peoples live in isolation from each other. It commits its signatories to living together in peace, without interfering in one another's governments or ways of life. It is more than a little tell-tale how non-Indigenous commenters so often protest about how this treaty supposedly demands Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples be sealed off from one another.
I concede that Indigenous peoples would much prefer for settlers and other newcomers overall to adapt different goals than the ones indicated by government policies towards us and towards the land. Instead of the goals of the complete destruction of Indigenous people and total exploitation of the land until no more profit can be wrung from it, the goals of enacting respect for Indigenous peoples as peoples and nations, and respect for the land we and our descendants all need. Since there is quite a bit more to newcomer cultures than the practices and beliefs supporting the destructive goals, I don't see how these alternative goals would demand the destruction of the newcomers to the americas, whether cultural or physical. The tragic fact is, the present settler colonial goals are set to cause the cultural and physical destruction of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples.
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