Dr. James Daschuk is our colleague here at the University of Regina where he teaches in Kinesiology. His research focus is on the impact of environmental change on the health of Indigenous peoples. He is also the author of Clearing the Plains, the number one selling textbook in North America this century, and published by the University of Regina press in 2014.

Presentation by James Daschuk

What I would like to do with you folks – and thank you very much for for joining us on Zoom – is take you back to November of 1885. In my mind, that month is probably the most significant in the formation of the relationship between Indigenous people and the state and the government, if you will, of larger immigrant society; maybe even more important than than the signing of the Treaties. There are three events I want to quickly go over.

The first is on November 7. The Canadian Pacific Railway was completed; we all know about the last spike, Pierre Berton has written a book about it. With the completion of the CPR we had an industrial level of immigration. The number of immigrants able to travel to this territory further West skyrocketed. So by 1920 we had a million people in Saskatchewan. We only surpassed that a few years ago, like it’s crazy, the amount of people that came. So we’ve got an industrial level of immigration.

The second event that is probably formative here is on November 16. That was the day Louis Riel was executed, probably the end of the vision for a multicultural state here in what became Saskatchewan. You know, and as Riel said, the Métis people will sleep for for 100 years. So again, almost all of us have learned about Riel, learned about the Métis resistance.

The third sort of issue I want to talk about happened on November 27 1885 and it probably is much lesser known and that, as Emily said, was the executions at Battleford. Eight men, six nêhiyawak (Cree) men and two Nakota men were hanged in a public execution at the fort in Battleford. What I want to sort of share with you is that this execution was choreographed in order to create as much terror as possible, but also, as a signal of just what the relationship of the state with Indigenous people was to be.

Now the men who were hanged were all warriors. What they were doing was they were involved in personal retribution, protection of their women, protection of their families, and in a quest for finding food for their hungry communities. They weren’t part of Riel’s sort of Utopian vision of creating a multiethnic state. Despite the fact that they were warriors, they weren’t involved in a military campaign in any way. The killings at Frog Lake are probably some of the most notorious that many of us have heard about. Those were undertaken by by members of the band, under the leadership of Big Bear, they took place at the beginning of April 1885. Big Bear is regarded as one of the most highly regarded, highly respected chiefs here in the West, because of his resistance to the state. Finally, by New Year’s Eve 1882, after being pushed into the United States, after doing whatever he could to avoid entering into treaty, Big Bear and and his community arrived at Fort Walsh, entered into treaty in exchange for rations. Big Bear’s granddaughter had died of starvation, his community was sick. And with the surrender of Big Bear, with the entry of Big Bear into treaty, like I said on New Year’s Eve of 1882, just about all of the significant chiefs in the West had entered into treaty with ones that were eligible for.

Soon after, rations were provided at Fort Walsh by the North West Mounted Police. They forced themselves in the spring, were told to dismantle Fort Walsh, which had been the the humanitarian center of assistance, providing rations to five or seven thousand people in the Cypress Hills, and they were ordered to rebuild their post at Maple Creek in order to protect the railway. And with that, it was a shift from the Department of the Interior, to the Department of Indian affairs, so the police ended up working for the Indian Department rather than than the Interior Department, which is a sign that their role, which began as an advocate for First Nations people, ended up being a participant in their subjugation, which we’ll get into in a second.

Once on reserve, pressure mounted and mounted, mounted over the course of probably four or five years. Rations were used basically as as a tool to control people. I’ve got a couple notes here: there are numerous reports in the newspapers of rations being withheld for questioning of authority. They were used basically to control just about every aspect of people’s lives. The Saskatchewan Herald, which was the settler paper in Battleford, described the policy in six words: “feed one day, starve the next,” so even this really racist newspaper criticizes the Indian Department for, basically, its lack of central control and its draconian ways.

So what I want to tell you about is the he killings at Frog Lake. Those, like I said, were members of the community, under the leadership of Chief Big Bear. Big Bear was away at the time and the killings were undertaken in an attempt to gain access to food. They took place on April 2, 1885. The day before, the notorious Indian sub-agent, whose name was Tom Quinn, who’s an American who entered into the civil service, called an April Fool’s Day prank to the community that was undergoing protracted malnutrition, even starvation, so he called everyone to the ration house and basically, you know, pulled an April Fool’s prank. The idea was that the people were so hungry that, under the leadership of Wandering Spirit and other warriors, they took the white people hostage. Tom Quinn was belligerent, refused to listen to orders, and what ended up happening was Quinn was killed and in the panic, nine other Europeans were killed, including two priests. Like I said, that was the act of desperate people. And just talking about Quinn: Quinn was known to to have abused Indigenous women. There’s a there’s a quote from an Anglican priest, Jack Matheson, that said, “an Indian girl more or less didn’t matter, I had seen rations held for six months until the girl of 13 was handed over to that brute,” being Mr Quinn. So the people at Frog Lake, like I said, undertook those murders and when they were tried and charged, they did not dispute the fact that they had undertaken those killings.

There were two other men, as I mentioned, that were hanged at Battleford as well, those were two members of Mosquito band, Nakota people, Itka, and Waywahnitch, also known as Man Without Blood. What they had done was they had turned on the farm instructor, who was known to have cut the community off rations. One of the men killed Barney Tremont, who was a settler who had been an Indian fighter and was known to basically abuse any Indigenous people who came near his farm. And he also had an Indigenous common law wife, whom he threw out into a storm and and she suffered frostbite and was never the same again. So those those killings were like I said retribution, probably in a traditional way, a way of regarding, of restoring justice to communities that have been brutalized for several years.

Another aspect that we’ve got to think about prior to the trial into the hangings I’m going to talk about was an event known by the immigrants as the quote unquote “Siege of Battleford” soon after the killings at Mosquito First Nation. A group of Cree people, led by Poundmaker and Little Pine, travelled to Battleford and made their allegiance to Canada, but also requested in a very forceful way to have rations. They’d had rations withheld from them several times over the past previous months. Rather than the Indian agent meeting the delegation from Poundmaker and Little Pine, what ended up happening was all of the settlers, probably about 500 people, entered into the North West Mounted Police post, closed the doors, and refused to meet with Poundmaker and Little Pine and their delegation.

Having waited around for a while, Poundmaker, Little Pine, and people from their community undertook, basically helped themselves to rations. They’d been starved purposely several times and the fear, like I said, the fear on the part of the settlers in Battleford created a panic and there was some damage done. There were a few houses burned, and I think with that was an articulation of the frustration on the part of the Indigenous people who signed on to treaty, and we’ll get to Treaty in a second.

Now. The killings, like I said, were in retribution for previous violence that had been taking place. o the men were acting in an honorable way from their perspective, but at the time of the trials, none of them except for one man pleaded guilty, even though there wasn’t that concept in the Cree language. The government used that violence to impose even stricter measures on the communities.

So we’ve got a whole bunch of correspondence. Hayter Reed was Edgar Dewdney’s lieutenant, and what he talked about was any communities that were deemed to be disloyal were not to be fed. And one of his recommendations, not to feed them an ounce until the next spring, was to show them what it was like not to have the Government at their backs. So again, this was assigned, even though these were individual sporadic instances of violence, the government used this as an opportunity. General Middleton, who was involved in reacting to the Métis resistance, talked openly about confiscating guns and horses, and controlling movement and that kind of thing, and his goal according to many scholars was the abject subjugation of First Nations people.

In July 1885 Hayter Reed wrote a memo called “For the Future Management of Indians” and I think that it was a template for just how significant the strictures were going to be on First Nations people. What they talked about was the abolishment of the tribal system, getting rid of any chiefs they didn’t want, a system of reward and punishment and as harsh as possible sentences to anyone who was convicted of a crime. The idea was the Department of Indian Affairs had a goal to basically decapitate the Indigenous leadership out here on the Prairies. As all these things were going down, as Hayter Reed was making his proposal, Edgar Dewdney wrote to his boss John A. MacDonald. At the time John A. MacDonald is Prime Minister, but he’s also the Superintendent General of Indian affairs. Hayter Reed is the Indian Commissioner here in Regina. One of the things that Edgar Dewdney mentioned to MacDonald was that in order to confiscate horses and guns, or to compel people to live on their first nations – to basically confine them to their reserve – the terms of the Treaty must be altered. What Macdonald said was: we’re not going to alter the Treaty, we’re just going to force the police, we’ll request the police who work for the Department of Indian Affairs, to impose that pass system. Again what they’re doing is they are taking advantage of the situation to increase their power and basically to subjugate First Nations people at probably the highest level.

There are two two separate venues for the trials. Trials in Regina were for the high profile people. Louis Riel – many of us who live in Regina have seen The Trial of Louis Riel, it’s been taking place for generations probably – but also the trials of the high profile leaders: Big Bear, Poundmaker, and One Arrow were tried here in Regina. Many scholars have talked about, you know, these were travesties of justice, but one thing to remember is that at those trials in Regina they were represented by lawyers, the judicial process had taken place, Louis Riel who’s actually the only Métis person hanged for their actions as as the leader was tried and convicted of high treason, a capital offense. In recognition of the political consequences of executing chiefs like Big Bear, Poundmaker and One Arrow, what those chiefs were charged with was treason felony, something that wasn’t a capital offense, so those three chiefs ended up being tried and like I said, they had legal representation. They were found guilty and sent to Stony Mountain for three years. Now, again, they were they were sentenced to prison, while they were at prison conditions were such at Stony Mountain that all three of those chiefs contracted clinical tuberculosis, were let out of prison before they died to not be martyrs, and died soon after they returned. So while it wasn’t capital punishment, it basically took care of the issue. Riel, like I said, was the only person who was executed, but again going, through the legal procedure, there were three appeals to save Riel’s life. I want to contrast that with the judicial action at Battleford.

At Battleford, the eight men had no legal representation, they were not informed of their rights, with very few exceptions, they didn’t undergo any cross-examination of the witnesses. A few other contextual things: I mentioned the siege of Battleford not too long ago. The citizens of Battleford were literally out for blood. People were so vindictive that the newspaper talked about “good and loyal Indians are among the things of the past, there are none at present.” The Saskatchewan Herald in August talked about the favorable effects executions would have on the local population. Judge Rouleau, the stipendiary magistrate, had left the community after war broke out of the Duck Lake encounter with the Métis, and he was accused of cowardice. He took his family to to Swift Current for safety until things calmed down. While he was gone, his his law books were destroyed and his house was burned down, so the judge who is in charge of the trials had a personal stake in this and had mentioned “it’s high time the Indian should be taught a severe lesson,” as he reported to Dewdney, so there was no pretense of a fair trial. I think the way to think about this was the chiefs I just mentioned, Big Bear, Poundmaker, and One Arrow, were all high profile political leaders, the government intended to decapitate their power, but they realized that they probably couldn’t turn them into martyrs. These eight people were from the government perspective expendable so it was a show trial. One of my colleagues that I had a conversation with about this in Winnipeg talked about how this was a state sanctioned lynching that’s the way to think about – and lynchings, for those of you who aren’t really familiar with it, were used in the American South as a way to terrorize the the African American population, but also to to to reflect the dominance of the white population. Really that’s what went down in Battleford in November of 1885 and, as I said, the accused, with the exception of one person, did not deny what they had done. In fact, they would probably would have done it again, because in their tradition, they were upholding justice from their perspective.

Now, the executions were choreographed in order to maximize the terror. In a deciphered telegram between Edgar Dewdney and MacDonald, Dewdney recommended that the executions not take place on reserves themselves and the idea was that might lead to desertion on reserves, so they were done in the settler community with an intent to avenge those deaths, but also to teach the Indigenous community a lesson, so like I said the executions were intended to be a spectacle.

Earlier on, in the summer of 1885, in August, Prime Minister MacDonald, who’s also like I said the Superintendent General of Indian Affairs, wrote to the Governor general and he said: “we have certainly made it assume a large proportion in the public eye. This, however, was done for our own purposes, and I think it wise.” So what MacDonald is saying to the Governor General was: we are blowing this out of proportion, but we are going to use this for our own political benefit.

By November Edgar Dewdney is talking about these hangings as a public spectacle “to cause First Nations to meditate for many a day on the sound thrashing they have just received.” MacDonald, in his return correspondence says yes, “we want to convince the red man that the white man governs,” so this is Canadian justice but also this was intended as political theater. In doing so – this the largest mass execution the history of the Canadian dominion, but also, it was a public execution – in having a public execution, they were breaking a 1868 statute which had barred public executions, they were intended to be private. This again was it was intended as an intimidation factor and the reason for this – as one person said – was to remind them what would happen if one made trouble with the Crown and to provide a lasting reminder of the white man’s power and authority. So we’ll get into that in a second.

At the hanging grounds, the scaffold was intended as as a public, a macabre public stage. The platform was 10 feet above the ground so the crowd could see what was happening. There were 150 armed soldiers under the the command of major Crozier, which ringed the gallows. There were probably about 500 citizens at Battleford gathered around, looking for blood. Children from the Industrial School were brought to the hanging grounds. Now, why children? Again, if there’s any question about this, children were brought there in order to teach them a very valuable lesson, according to the state. Another aspect of this political theater was a large group of many families, I guess, from Moosoomin, Thunderchild, and Sweetgrass First Nations were also brought. They’re probably given rations and told to go to the hanging grounds. So we’ve got a large Indigenous community, we’ve got the the settler community, we’ve got the police.

At the time of the hangings, there was a whole sort of ritualized event with the priests giving the last rites, and that kind of thing. As the men were about to be dropped from the gallows, they all sang a death song. In my conversations with people, the death song is actually a beautiful song preparing the people to go to the next world. It was also a sign that people weren’t afraid to go. This was mocked in the newspapers and whatnot as the people, as the men dropped to their death. Like I said, eight people. They were suspended for 15 minutes and newspapers all recorded this. And the entire audience was quiet, so you just imagine this cold, rainy, sleepy day at the end of November, the bodies kind of swinging in the wind for 15 minutes.

And then there’s some kind of dispute, confusion, about what happened. A North West Mounted Police physician determined that they were dead, the bodies were cut down. One of the stories that was reported in the newspapers was that the person contracted to deal with the bodies didn’t want to touch them. And so they were laid to rest in a common grave behind the North West Mounted Police barracks on the side of the North Saskatchewan River, again in a common grave, and largely forgotten about.

And so, in my research in the last few weeks, what I found was that some of the remain started to be exposed in the 1950s. Basically Parks Canada had to deal with it by pouring a slab of concrete over where the mass grave was. So again, not a super proud moment for Canada. Again, this was a shock and awe tactic, no question about it in my mind, and even to the present, family members, descendants of the people who either attended or people who were executed on that day, continue to pass down, basically, the shock and awe that was portrayed that day.

Stonechild and Waiser back in the 1990s, in the preparation for their book Loyal till Death, did a bunch of oral histories and Elder Paul Chicken from Sweetgrass talked about how the community at Sweetgrass lived in morbid fear of being picked up and tried before the hanging judge Rouleau because of his violence. There was another man, Joe Dressyman from Red Pheasant, who was interviewed by Stonechild: “My grandfather was there, he saw them hung, we watched it all, they didn’t like the hanging, the law was overdone, no question about that.” And so the newspapers like I said kind of rejoiced in this, they were they were out for retribution and one of the things they said in the first issue after the hanging: “It is devoutly hoped that the Indians at large will be duly impressed by the certainty which this punishment has overtaken their deluded fellows.” Again this wasn’t intended as strict justice for those eight people convicted of murder, this was intended for the entire First Nations population.

This took place less than a decade after the completion of Treaty Six. We heard a great talk a couple days ago on the spirit of the Treaty. So how do we get into this insane situation less than a decade later? We’ve got the state intimidating people, creating macabre political theater. We know that the original intent of the Treaties was nation-to-nation agreements, and because this is in Treaty Six territory, I’d like to talk about Treaty Six a little bit.

So nation-to-nation agreements based on the Royal Proclamation. Canada needed those, needed the completion of those Treaties in order to basically open the land for for my ancestors as a settler. So how did things go down? Well, one of the things that is becoming an ever more spoken of interpretation of the Treaties, was that it was intended to share the land. Jerome, you spoke of Sheldon Krasowski’s book No Surrender. We’ve got this growing interpretation: we’ve got interpretation by Aimee Craft at Treaty One on the Stone Fort Treaty; there’s a new book on the Vancouver Island treaties called To Share, Not Surrender. Chief Poundmaker talked about: this is our land, it isn’t a piece of pemmican to be cut off and given in little pieces to us, it’s ours and we will take what we want. So there’s a there’s a concept, from my perspective, of land ownership, but from the perspective of the Crown, we talk about unceded territory, in British Columbia, the city of Ottawa is still unceded territory. But the corollary of that is that just about the entire rest of Canada, from the perspective of government, is in fact ceded territory. So it’s great that we have these new interpretations, but what are we going to do with that, right? Anyhow, let’s keep that in our back pocket.

In Treaty Six, the negotiations at Fort Carlton took place just months after the Battle of Little Bighorn. I believe that those negotiations were maintained from positions of power on both sides. The Dominion of Canada, the Treaty Commissioner rounded up as many North West Mounted Police in their red surge and their pillbox hats as they could. The nêhiyawak (Cree) probably organized as many of their warriors as they could. Nobody wanted, nobody was looking for a fight, but people were representing their position as as one of power.

From that rather unique position, and late summer of 1876 there were a number of innovations that were included. The famine and pestilence clause advocated by Chief Beardy where, in the time of the famine, the Crown or their agents will provide whatever benefit to relieve them from the calamity that shall befall them. We’ll get into that in a second. The medicine chest clause is an interesting one; we’re still talking about that these days. What I perceive the medicine chest clause to be is a call for vaccination, because at the time, there are only a few physicians in the West and that was actually undertaken by Dominion physicians. There was a man named Haggerty who probably vaccined 10,000 First Nations people in the years after this. But vaccination also protected any newcomers, so that wasn’t a simple one way street, there was protecting the immigrants.

Another promise that Alexander Morris made was that there would be no interfering with the present mode of living. People would be allowed to hunt and fish as they had since time immemorial, which we can think of as free travel through Treaty territory, which we’ll get into in a minute. Another aspect was the nêhiyaw (Cree) negotiators managed to get extra agricultural assistance, because they realized if they were going to share the land with the white people, the bison wouldn’t be there forever.

So with those negotiations we probably had the outset, the foundation of probably a pretty good relationship. What no one [saw], with perhaps the exception of Chief Beardy who had that famine and pestilence clause included, was the extirpation of the bison. Within 18 months of the Treaty being completed, the bison disappeared forever. Now that was the greatest ecological crisis probably ever to take place on the Northern Great Plains, the greatest tragedy for First Nations people. But again, thinking about the political relationship, what that did was that change the balance of power, rather than nation negotiation that have taken place at Fort Carlton, the Plains Cree and other bison hunters had lost that position, and so you know the the famine and pestilence clause came under very stark focus by the spring of 1878.

The early response by the Dominion government, which was a Liberal government under Alexander MacKenzie, was totally unprepared, but in my mind, for a few months, they did what they could with the infrastructure they had. It wasn’t a very good response, but there was only one Indian agent in the West, at the time. Where things changed was in the aftermath of the election in the fall of 1878, the National Policy election, so this is where I think the terror aspect of my talk really starts to come into play. So there’s a humanitarian crisis, here in the West, but for the politicians in Ottawa there’s a political advantage to be exploited. On his return to power, John A MacDonald has committed himself, and the stake of this Conservative Government, to building a railway probably four or five thousand kilometers from Ontario to British Columbia. Even today, that is probably the most ambitious mega project in Canadian history, right, no question about it, it’s the backbone of the state, which again we’ll get into in a minute.

At the same time as MacDonald takes on the position of Prime Minister, he also took on the portfolio of Superintendent General of Indian Affairs. Because the completion of the railway in his mind and his correspondence was absolutely contingent on his management of “Indian affairs.” So MacDonald was basically the Minister of Indian Affairs from his return to power in 1878 all the way to 1888 – and even in 2022, MacDonald is the longest serving Minister of Indian Affairs in Canadian history. At the time when treaties were first implemented out here in the West so, we’ve got the National Policy and that imminent settlement agenda, I think, really shifted the scales and led to the creation of the settler state.

Where are we going with this? Well after Macdonald’s people and because there were no civil service laws, the Liberal Indian agent Dickason retired from the civil service and he was replaced by a number of Conservative appointees who were given the instruction that no one during this famine, no one who is hungry, who had not yet entered Treaty was the responsibility of the Dominion government. Within 18 months of Macdonald’s return to power, probably 11,000 people entered into Treaty basically exchanging their freedom for food. In my mind changes the equation, the Treaty equation.

Macdonald’s is running a ration policy as as both the Ministry of Indian affairs and as Prime Minister. In the House of Commons, he is bragging about he’s not wasting the taxpayer’s money he is holding people on the absolute proof of starvation before distributing food, to save the expense of the taxpayer. He’s using food, and Edgar Dewdney who’s come under increasing scrutiny here in Regina for the naming of of one of our main streets. He is the eyes and ears of MacDonald here in the West, MacDonald only ever traveled West once so. Dewdney is actually providing MacDonald with most of these ideas and I guess that’s one of the reasons why we’re we’re rethinking his legacy. We’ve got an increasingly harsh food policy and by 1885, after the trouble, all of these strictures are being imposed, in a Senate Committee MacDonald defends himself against you know sort of the corruption of the ration policy by saying, well, it can’t be considered a fraud on the Indians because they’re living on Dominion charity. And as the old adage says “beggars can’t be choosers.” The abrogation, the forgetting, of the famine and pestilence clause is just one aspect of what I’m defining as terror. It’s tough to think of terror lasting for generations but, honestly, I think that state terrorizing of Indigenous people even continues to the present.

I talked about the settler state, and the idea of the settler state was kind of brought to me by my friend Sylvia McAdam a few years ago, when we spent a week together in the Nelson Mandela dialogues. She’s like: “Canada’s a settler state you guys showed up and you changed everything so in looking at that and in looking at our rather new field of interpretation, settler colonial studies, basically founded by a group of Australians, sort of spread to us, to our nation, to our territory. One of the the pioneers, if you want to think about it, of that field is Patrick Wolfe, like I said in Australia and an academic. I want people to think about is the notion of settler colonialism as different from what we would know of as colonialism in old fashioned colloquialism, that the European powers would go to someplace like Jamaica or someplace, exploit their labour, exploit whatever natural resources, and when they were done, they would just leave. So they wanted the Indigenous labour of wherever it might be, and in the case of, say, the Caribbean, when the Indigenous people disappeared, they brought slave labour over to exploit that labour.

In the case of settler colonialism it’s probably more enduring and even more harsh, because the people who came to exploit stayed and, based on Wolfe, it’s about the land, right, and so in old school colonialism, it was about basically making a profit, slashing and burning and leaving once you’re done with it. But here, and in other settler colonial states or I’m testing to see whether Canada is a settler colonial state, it’s about access to territory. And that’s what Wolfe says is a settler colonialism specific irreducible element: it’s the land. It’s also based on the destruction of one society to rebuild another. So in the early settler colonial discussions you have a discussion of say Zionism in Israel sort of overtaking Palestinian societies, whatever it might be. And like I said it’s the ideological justification that he incoming dominant society is going to use that land for better purposes. In the Canadian context, a quote by Frank Oliver, who became a Liberal Minister of the Interior in the early 20th century, as they were taking over reserves said: “the land is wanted by better men.” There isn’t a better encapsulation of what Patrick Wolfe is talking about, so this is especially true in in areas where agriculture is taking place, right, and you know our mythology, our creation myth here in Saskatchewan is that we were the breadbasket of the world. So there’s an implication of scientism of permanence of reproduction because we’re growing, we’re growing every year. And another aspect that Patrick Wolfe mentioned was spatial sequestration, the physical division of the Indigenous with the settler colonial population. We’ll get into that in a second.

Another one of these early pioneers of settler colonial studies was, and this is Lorenzo Veracini, and what he talked about was the settlers just wanted the Indigenous people to go away, they didn’t fit into the paradigm, right. And so how did they go away? Well, there are a whole bunch of different ways we can talk about from abject genocide to erasure, to absorption to assimilation to amalgamation. And it’s not just a single event, this is a structure that’s imposed and in the Canadian context imposed early in the 1880s that probably still continues, we can get into that in a second.

Again the old school colonialism, that we you know kind of were trained up in years ago, was based on the demand for labour, but settler colonialism is based on that demand to go away to disappear, and like I mentioned in other talks, there was no place for Indigenous people in Macdonald’s view of that new agrarian society. The settler state is one of newcomers coming, their descendants staying, they are in a position of dominance and like I said they’re not going anywhere. And again often this is authoritarian rule. We look at other countries and there’s social segregation, there’s economic segregation, spatial division. So is Canada a settler state? And I had to think about that, after my friend Sylvia brought that up.

Well, we think about the land and I’ve got a picture, just as a memory device here, I’ve got a map of Saskatchewan. You’ve got to remember that in 1882, five or seven thousand people were forced out of the Cypress Hills. There were even reserves that were surveyed and settled by the Lakota people in the Cypress Hills. Well the land, according to the authorities, was wanted by – air quotes please – “better men” and so those people were forced away from proximity to the Canadian Pacific railway, which is why there’s an amalgamation of reserves by Battleford. There was also a promise of a school on every reserve; there was a request for education. Well we know how residential schools panned out. We probably don’t have to get into that right now. By 1885 the level of control was such that even prayer was managed, so traditional ceremonies like the Sun Dance were criminalized and had to be undertaken in private.

Wolfe and Veracini talked about the elimination of the [native]. There was no place in the new economy. By 1881 you get an Order in Council, not something that was passed in Parliament, essentially barring Indigenous producers from providing their produce, from reserve agriculture say, in a commercial setting through the permit system. That permit system lasted at least until the 1960s, so there was a physical, political, legal barrier to entry of First Nations people into the commercial economy. And like I said that went on for generations. Agriculture was seen more as a social experiment, and it was as a means, as a bridge to a new economic prosperity. So we’ve got in 1884 – just one little note here – only 770 of 20,200 First Nations people in the Territories were not reliant on relief.

And if you contrast the Treaty bands with say the Dakota, their economic prosperity, their economic futures diverged greatly at this time, because the Dakota weren’t part of the treaty process, which is another talk altogether. But the idea is that reserve agriculture was a total failure, and it was a failure, basically because of government regulations, in seeing that it was a failure. By 1888 there was a new measure imposed on prairie agriculture, called the Peasant Farming Policy, wherein agricultural implements were taken away from First Nations people and they were basically forced into subsistence farming – again, pushing them out or keeping them away from the expanding commercial agriculture that was happening.

Probably one of the most absurd situations, but that really lends itself to that interpretation of the settler state, is the imposition of the pass system. For probably 70 or 80 years you could think of Treaty reserves as basically internment camps and, as I mentioned, Edgar Dewdney, as this system was being imposed, knew that there was no basis in law. I’ve just got another quote here from basically the time of the Saskatchewan resistance, where Edgar Dewdney is writing to General Middleton. General Middleton  wants a military solution, he wants to confine everyone, and basically what Dewdney says is: “I’ve issued a notice advising the need to stay on reserves, warning them of the risk they run being found off, but have no power to issue the proclamation you suggest.” So he knows that the police work for the Indian Department, essentially work for Dwedney. So what do they do? They impose controls on movement and according the newspaper – I won’t read this out, but according to the newspaper, the way they did it was in a very violent way.

One example is in March of 1886 so soon after the the hangings there was a woman in Battleford the newspaper describes as they can’t get rid of, so there’s a posse of white men who basically go and grab the Indigenous woman, take her back to jail, cut off all her hair, freak her out, and she leaves screaming and the newspaper mocks her by saying look, an hour later, not a straggler left in town. That’s how the the pass system was imposed. It was imposed for decades and with no legal basis in law, but for probably 20 years in that early 20th century it was against the law for First Nations person to hire a lawyer so we’ve got a totally stacked deck.

One of the reasons, one of the medical rationales, I guess, for the imposition of the pass system was described by two physicians in the 1930s and what one of the physicians said was: “If the Indians were not segregated on reservations, we should be compelled to take better care of them for our own protection.” First Nations people are so sick they’d be a threat to the settler community. We’ve got tons of stories of people going hungry, eating gophers, that kind of thing, because they weren’t allowed to leave the reserve and like I said those impositions continued at least until the 1950s.

Now talking about free travel, I just want to bring this up into the present. In the aftermath of Colten Boushie’s shooting back a few years ago, the government’s response here in Saskatchewan was something called the Rural Crime Strategy, which really sort of heightened the trespassing laws, heightened a whole bunch of private property. With the reaction to that I’m just looking at a couple of news stories. Here one is from The Toronto Star; people like Chief Wilton Littlechild talk, they were not consulted and is this targeting First Nations people out in the country because they’ve got the right to pursue their traditional practices. For example here in February 2022, Cree nation voices are concerned about the trespassing law here in Saskatchewan. Another one again from February 2022, the Office of the Treaty Commissioner talks about, actually mentioned that there’s a direct relationship between the killing of Colten Boushie and the upping of the trespassing laws. So where does that bring us? The settler state is being imposed, we think about Saskatchewan, as I said, as the breadbasket of the world, the homeland for displaced Europeans, and why not, but in my mind, we still have an awful long way to go with regard to reconciliation, but I guess that reconciliation is equality and I teach health studies, and one of the ways that I measure inequality is the 15 year life expectancy difference.

We’ve got such a stark difference in our own home among our own neighbors. That’s how we’re going to change things. So not a very pretty picture. I guess that’s my way, we were talking about that beforehand, but I guess I’ll stop and maybe if anyone or Jerome if you’ve got any questions I’d be happy to try to answer them.

Conversation between James Daschuk and Jérôme Melançon

Jérôme Melançon: Thank you so much for going over this part of Canada’s founding and history for us. Today I’ll just to start with I might bring up a question that the audience asked – and I want to add to it as well. The charges that were brought against Riel and against other leaders was treason. Did the chiefs who had signed the Treaties actually agree to be subject to European Canadian law at that point? Were they actually subjects, and so could they really be traitors to Canada?

James Daschuk: Well that’s good question because Annie a couple days ago talked about how these were nation-to-nation negotiations, and how First Nations are still supposed to be sovereign. One of the characteristics of the settler state is the negation of that relationship. You sign on to Treaty and, like I said, after the beginning of the buffalo famine, people basically exchanged their freedom for food, so they recognized by that time, by 1879, that entering into Treaty meant subjugation. Again, since the patriation of the Constitution, Section 35, the recognition of Indigenous Rights, we’ve had a generation of court cases litigating what those rights are. And so, if a community has enough resources to take the government to court, I don’t know about the vast majority, but the majority of time they win, so like I said we’ve got a long way to go, we’ve got a lot still got a lot of resistance for sure.

Jérôme: You’re known for the book Clearing the Plains. I love the meaning that’s put into that title. Can you explain a bit about the impact of the displacement of communities?

James: Sure, well, we’ve just got to look at the map of Saskatchewan, right? Many of the Chiefs, Chief Piapot, the community that became Carry the Kettle, Moosoomin, had chosen their land in the Cypress Hills. Had those communities been allowed to establish their reserves in the Cypress Hills, there was access to water, there was access to different types of game, probably elk and deer, that kind of stuff, access to to trees, so that those communities would have been much more independent, not reliant on rations, not subjugated. But again, in the House of Commons in 1882 those communities, because they were south of the proposed railway project, were perceived as a security risk by MacDonald, right, they’re south of the train tracks. So what they did was they were forced to move, and I remember a few years ago giving a talk to the grade sevens at Little Pine, it’s like: that’s the origin of your community, I’m sorry, don’t break a window if you’re mad, go to law school!

Jérôme: I’ve got a question from the audience here: can you speak more about how the Dakota faired differently? Were they still subject to the Indian Act, still subject to permits and pass and confinments on reserves? How did being out of treaty benefit them?

James: yeah it’s interesting, a few years ago my buddies and I wrote an article called “Treaties and Tuberculosis,” and what we did was we looked at basically the Treaty bands around Fort Qu’Appelle, in the Qu’Appelle Valley, and I’ve talked about this quite a bit, the bands that signed on to treaties had the rations, had the subjugation, the abuse from the Indian agents, but places like Standing Buffalo didn’t have an Indian agent – excuse my language – jerking them around on a daily basis. So if you go to Library and Archives Canada, online you can probably go find this, the amount of documents that concern Dakota and Lakota reserves are probably one one tenth of what they are in comparison to the Treaty reserves.

The Dakota were allowed to come into Canada, were considered to be refugees from the United States. From their actions in the War of 1812 they were allies with the British, so they were allowed in, provided with reserves, but hadn’t been given, hadn’t had access to entering into treaty. But there’s actually an awesome book by Peter Douglas Elias, The Dakota of Western Canada: Lessons for Survival; if you read that book and you read any other book about say the Treaty population, it’s as if the people are on different planets. Despite the fact that Pasqua and Standing Buffalo are contiguous, they match up, people at Standing Buffalo actually provided food to people at Pasqua who were starving during that time. So that’s what my friends and I found in that research. Tuberculosis wasn’t natural, it was created by conditions and, fortunately for the Dakota, those conditions weren’t imposed on them.

Jérôme: You mentioned settler colonialism being about land, access to land. What kind of relationship to land was was created in the events around 1885 and the events and policies that you described today?

James: Well like I said, the imposition of the pass system basically broke the relationship of First Nations people with the wider aspect of land. They weren’t allowed to leave, so I remember talking to some archaeologists who are working on a railway project to one of the potash mines and they said: why don’t the traditional knowledge keepers know about this thing? It’s like, well, because they weren’t allowed to come here for generations. That’s the break with the land, it was imposed by the state. And while that land and while that relationship was broken, our ancestors were able to come here by the thousands, in an industrial way, taking the train, and they took up the land and aren’t going anywhere.

Jérôme: We’ll go to the audience again here, maybe more of a personal question as a citizen here, but this audience member is asking: how do I, as a settler, share information about this topic? I can’t be a representative of the lived experience, I don’t want to come across as a white saviour.

James: Well, I guess the first thing is to learn about things, right? Many times I’ve given a talk and it’s mostly white people who are shocked, because they had no idea. And one of the things about this is, I don’t know like from the hangings or this whole terror aspect – there’s I’m going to be too Christian! – there’s a shame component to it, so that’s never really been celebrated in our school system or anything like that. So I think the first thing is to learn about those things. You don’t necessarily have to be the saviour. Indigenous people can organize themselves. But I guess the one thing is maybe you let people, somebody says something racist, maybe call them up. Or maybe we push our politicians a little bit because that’s the one bit of power we do have in a democracy. A power which was taken away and not provided to First Nations people until 1960. You’ve got to remember that Treaty Indians were not citizens until 1960.

Jérôme: Can you talk abit about your sources too, because a lot of the sources that you’re quotaing here I mean, these were out in public right? These are all the debates in the House of Commons, in Hansard, this is in newspapers, right? How much of this was known by people at the time?

James: Well, that’s a good question. Like I said, The Saskatchewan Herald newspaper, you could unpack the racism in it probably for days. But it’s almost like Twitter: there wasn’t a lot of filter, so the guys just sitting in front of this typewriter, putting his letters out to the printer or whatever, and he’s talking about rations being withheld. And to corroborate that, government records are also talking about rations being withheld, so they’re not ashamed of this by any means. What they’re doing is, I guess in their minds, they are just punishing people who were questioning their authority. So one of the things I’m hoping to do is hear from the descendants of say witnesses, who’d like to talk about that. And I’ve only been on this for a little while, this is for sure a draft, but what I’m hoping to do is go through some protocol, go through, sort of build those relationships and hear some of the stories. Because I’m kind of blown away, just as a documentary-based historian, on how much those stories are still alive. Those experiences continue to reverberate from generation to generation, and they’re probably going to continue.

Jérôme: This was in First Nations and Métis communities, because we would have people at the time in Battleford, for instance, people reading the newspaper, they knew what was happening, but those stories didn’t get passed down. So why do you think we haven’t heard about this until you went out and and read these papers?

James: That’s good question. Probably because, you know, the people in First Nations communities – I don’t want to enter into their headspace or anything like that, but those are like: this is why we are in the situation we’re in, there’s a direct relationship, we can follow follow the dots. But I think a lot of us who are non-Indigenous probably wanted to hold on to that myth that Canada is a humane, friendly place for all and welcoming and multicultural and all those other things, right? It’s a challenge to our identity and so I’ve been surprised at how little resistance there has been to kind of the ideas portrayed, in Clearing the Plains or in other parts of my research. But I know that this is a challenge to how people think of themselves and how people have thought about themselves, their identity, maybe for their whole life.

Jérôme: We can go back to the audience, we have a question here following a previous question, so it says: I think one way to not be a white saviour is to be steadfast and supporting Indigenous political sovereignties from nation to nation. Is that something that that is part of how you view your work?

James: Yeah for sure, and I’ve had the privilege to go to university for 22 years and that money was terrible, but the hours were good. I guess with the opportunities I’ve had, I’ve been able to do a certain amount of research, and you know I’m the parent of three daughters, so I want them to live in a society that doesn’t have those relationships. My work is, you know, I’m not necessarily informing First Nations people about this because, like I said it’s part of their family experience, but more so, we’ve got a vast majority non-Indigenous population that really haven’t been exposed to this information and most people, I think, once they know something, will deal with it in a proper way. There’s probably going to be some resistance, but it is what it is.

Jérôme: This reminds me of a comment that Wilton Littlechild, who was one of the Commissioners of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission had said, is that the residential schools aren’t an Indigenous problem, they are a Canadian problem. Then that goes for a lot of the history that we’ve talked about today, this isn’t simply the history of Indigenous peoples, this is the history of Canada, this is about us actually, about what the history of our country is, what allowed us to be here on this land.

James: I think the burden of the oppressor pales in comparison to the the burden of the oppressed, but if you’re living in a society, we just talked about a 15 year [difference in] life expectancy, the overrepresentation in the justice system, differences in educational outcomes, those issues unaddressed are dragging all of society down. Even the humanity aside, think of the business case, right? We’ve got to deal with these things. Especially as the proportion of Indigenous people ever increases here in Saskatchewan, say. If we don’t deal with those problems we’re going to go bankrupt building prisons and hospitals.

Jérôme: To go back to the history part of your talk. There is a question here about the actual charges that were brought against the eight men who were hanged in Battleford: was it manslaughter or murder, and was any consideration given by the judge to any kind of mitigating circumstances between behind the raid at Frog Lake.

James: Absolutely not. Like I said, judge Rouleau was on basically on a personal vendetta. His law books were burned, I think he put in a claim for $5,000 for his law library. Like I said, he was personally implicated in the quote unquote “siege of Battleford,” his correspondence was like: we’ve got to teach these guys a lesson, we’ve got to teach them a hard lesson. The issues I brought up about, say, the abuse of women were not really brought up. There were a few times in the Court testimony when people talked about – there was a conflict over rations. But that seemed pretty irrelevant, I guess, in judge Rouleau’s decision. So they killed – oh actually, there’s a discussion; one of the accused was like: shouldn’t white people who kill an Indigenous person be tried for the same thing? And judge Rouleau can kind of mentioned that, though in the newspaper, there were several references to Indigenous people who killed, like, entire tents of people, I think there was one case where nine people were found dead in the Eagle Hills and no one was ever charged, no one ever, you know – what would the newspaper say, nor is it relevant, right? So the fact that Indigenous people were killed was irrelevant, the fact that other Indigenous people had killed white people was front and center and like I said, the basis for this very strong message that was delivered on November 27.

Jérôme: Do you have a bit more information about the way that Indigenous people were murdered at that point, any kind of criminalizing or retaliation?

James: Well, there are several references to atrocities being committed by Canadian forces, by the Alberta field force and stuff like that, but they were never they were never pursued sort of legally because they’re the state, right? And so I guess that bit of vigilante justice, whatever it might be, and people – like I said, we’re still talking about this event 130 years later because the Indigenous people had taken up arms. We have totally forgotten about the white people, the settlers, taking up arms against the Indigenous people and, like I said, the newspaper mentions it without without editorializing, without moralizing, just: it is what it is.

Jérôme: We have another question here. You mentioned that the 1885 trial and hangings were part of a break in relationship to land, so a spatial and land break. Can you talk about some more contemporary breaks with relationship to land within this project?

James: Well like I said, I think that the rural crime strategy, the no trespassing laws – and it’s interesting that Alberta based their trespassing law on Saskatchewan’s trespassing law, which came in the aftermath of the Boushie shooting. And again as Chief Littlechild said in his Toronto Star interview, “are they targeting us?” If the state is digging in their heels, trying to protect a community whose demographics are changing, right, the the countryside is ever less populated and this is part of the moral panic, but it’s certainly something. I just watched Tasha Hubbard’s film on the Boushie shooting and you can see the agitation, if not panic, on the part of the farmers.

Jérôme: Maybe to go to a similar comment I hadn’t woven in yet, so, well, I’ll get to do it now, but that’s also partly what we saw just before the pandemic hit us and in Canada, with the Wet’suwet’en and the different protests that followed throughout the country. There’s a bit of a panic as well around the extraction of resources.

James: Right, and one of the things in settler colonial studies is that one of the ways the state works is to coopt Indigenous people into cooperating with that economic development and honestly I don’t know what the alternative is, right? Communities have to generate wealth and I guess the way to generate wealth is to participate in the unsustainable capitalist economy, right? So it’s a tough one, like: what are you going to do? So yeah I agree with you. The Wet’suwet’en issue, the pipeline, there’s going to be economic developmento. It might be unsustainable in the long run, but maybe the state’s just got to negotiate in an honest way with people who have the title to the land or whatever it might be.

Jérôme: Of course, who is entitled the land is part of the issue in the first place.

James: Yeah, for sure.

Jérôme: Another question here. Oh, we’re getting into Agamben. In the US, the designation of Homo sacer was used to designate enemy combattants and also applied to Native Americans. The outcome in the States was there was no accounting for the deaths of people designated as Homo sacer. Are you aware of whether this also applies in Canada as it does in the States. It might account to how the deaths of Indigenous people are given less punishment or attention, it’s as if no one actually died.

James: Oh that’s a good question, I honestly can’t address that specifically. I guess I just mentioned, I just watched Tasha Hubbard’s film. The preemptive dismissal of jurors and that kind of thing, right? So that’s going to get addressed by the federal government, but I think if you talk to any Indigenous people: is the justice system working fairly and equitably? It could be interesting to hear their answer.

Jérôme: I maybe want to go back to Treaty from here. We had a chance with Annie Battiste to talk about the promises in the Treaties, and we also have left it up to you. So i’ll bring that thread here. Can you talk about whether the Treaty promises were actually upheld and – just to give it away – to what point were they were not respected?

James: Like I said in my in my talk, from my perspective, as soon as the state, as soon as the Dominion of Canada could take the opportunity to negate those promises, I think they did, and that’s part of the creation of the settler state. So the famine and pestilence clause was weaponized, agriculture was never really seriously implemented and practiced in an honest way, free movement was totally abrogated, turned on its head. Had the bison been around for a while, maybe had MacDonald’s not come up with the National Policy at that time, things would have been different, butl, like I said, all of those draconian measures, the subjugation, the terror was, from my perspective, MacDonald’s way to ensure the success of the settlement project. And once the settlement project was underway, was completed, Saskatchewan was flooded, absolutely flooded with immigrants. So there was some issues in the very first years probably within a decade, children were – many people talk about kidnapped – taken to institutions that are formally known as residential schools, there was a pass system imposed. A lot of immigrants probably never saw an Indigenous person unless it was something like at the fair or something, like where Indigenous people were allowed to come and were the entertainment for the settlers. So again, that’s that segregation, that spatial division that in a lot of ways continues even to the present.

Jérôme: But the fair isn’t something that we’ve had a chance to talk about today. Can you describe a little bit what the fairs were like?

James: The Regina fair, Buffalo Days: after a campfire conversation with a friend of mine telling me about this, I went to the archives and found a number of photos, probably from the 1920s, all the way up to the 1950s, of people in regalia in the Regina exhibition grounds. There are beautiful photos taken by photographers and you can see the 1920s telephone lines behind them and an old put-put cars and that kind of thing. And they look pretty cool. But one of the things if you start thinking about those images, is the people – and they were mostly from Piapot First Nation – that people were only allowed to come to town, were given a pass to be an exhibit at the fair, so they were there. And in conversation with someone from Piapot, they wanted to get out of, get off the reserve if they could, but they were there to entertain the white people settlers. And as a person told me that’s just the way things were back in the 50s. So again we’ve probably come a way but we’ve got a long way to go and even addressing that kind of thing, bringing these things to light and giving the people who are brought to the fair a voice, or giving them a place to speak, I think that’s going to go a long way.

Jérôme: Of course there’s parallels between that form of entertainment, right, so you talked about John A. MacDonald and Dewdney and the possibility of renaming Dewdney avenue like we’ve already the name of the pool and the park. The statue here for MacDonald has been taken down. So we can talk about what happens with representations in the arts as well, entertainment as well. So we’re addressing a lot of things that have to do with presence in public space, but maybe not so much the actual treaty relationship that we haven’t addressed.

James: Those things are symbolic and I remember back, we were talking about the the meeting of the Canadian Historical Association here back in 2018 during Congress and one of the senior members of the CHA said: this is so symbolic, who cares, to get rid of the names for the John A. MacDonald prize. And one of the things that came up in rebuttal to that was: if we can’t deal with something symbolic, how are we gonna do something substantive? So say the statue in Victoria Park. Okay, it’s a statue, but if people find it offensive if that’s this representation of the person who impoverished and brutalized your family, yeah like maybe that’s the first thing we can do. We still have to change economic relationships, we have to change education levels, health levels, you name it, but it’s a start. And having those discussions – I know that there was pushback, but that’s good – if we are having those discussions, that’s that’s the first part of moving forward together, I think.

Jérôme: We have a couple good questions to bring us back to your talk, to a couple of ideas you shared there. How can we tie the history of the health of Indigenous peoples around the time that you’re describing here, to the current health conditions and health situation and quality of life of Indigenous people? What can we learn from that period in time?

James: I teach health studies, so the way I would measure marginalization or measure equality is life expectancy. So as I tell my first years: okay, we’re all going to die, we’re all going to die, but it’s only hopefully going to happen once. If we all die at relatively the same time in our lives, that’s probably a sign that our society is egalitarian, but if we’ve got a 15 year life expectancy difference – and Wolfe mentioned I think it was a 20% life expectancy difference among Indigenous people in Australia and and the immigrant population of the separate population in Australia, that’s a huge gap – what that is, is that’s a reflection of housing, that’s reflection of education, all those social determinants of health. In my research, I wanted to go back to where was the origin of that gap and really where that gap originated was with these policies. Tuberculosis was as rare as hen’s teeth prior to 1879. It was extremely rare. Don’t get me wrong, there were epidemics of disease like smallpox, it wasn’t a utopia, but TB is a very reluctant disease and it’s created by living conditions. Then I had to kind of cross my mental threshold with this, there has never been a time since the Treaties to 2022 when the health outcomes of Indigenous people were equal to those of the settlers. There’s never a time. Like 1935, during the depression or anything like that, when the settlers’ health declines say during the dust bowl, the health of Indigenous people has absolutely declined, because the resources, what meagre resources they were receiving were diverted to the settler population. We talked about the Dakota earlier. That’s when Dakota health conditions really changed: they didn’t get much assistance during the drought era, the dust bowl and the depression, so, the economic conditions change.

Jérôme: Let me ask you one last question here to bring us back to your great title: what can we learn about this terror, what can we learn from this terror and the political trials, the executions of 1885, in terms of nation to nation relationships for us today?

James: Well, I think what the message was, was do not mess with the Canadian government if you are an Indigenous person, this is what’s going to happen to you, and that was part of that political theater. And I think, in a lot of cases, and again I can’t speak for indigenous people, I can only read what the documents say, in a lot of cases that fear remains. Don’t get into trouble, because it’s not a fair system. And I guess maybe the way to think about this is, like if you get pulled over by the police. Are the police there to help you, or are you nervous about the police, whatever it might be – I’m not dissing the police personally – but those kinds of authorities, if you trust the authorities or is there some relationship or some past relationship that gives you the reason not to trust them. That to me, that was the message of that terror is like: there’s a new game in town and here’s what it is.

Jérôme: Jim, thank you so much for talking with us today and sharing all this history, all this work.

I also want to thank First Nations University for hosting us in their beautiful spaces, today. I want to thank our sponsors, including SSHRC who are making this possible and, once again, Stephen Martin who’s making sure that we look good and well framed and that we sound good. Thanks to everybody who sent in questions, to Emily for moderating.

James: And yeah once again, thank you thanks Jerome

Jérôme: Thanks James for spending time with us

James: Thanks for the invitation. Take care.