THE INDIANS OF CANADA
By DAVID BROCK
ITHE newspapers, with their love for emotional but misleading sobriquets, are fond of calling the North American Indian 4' the vanishing American." According to this title the Red Indian was once here in large numbers, is now here in small numbers and will soon be gone entirely. In a serious English historical work I read not long ago that the Indian in Canada and the U.S.A. is now "a museum piece," and] am always running across English references (and North American ones too) to the way we killed off the red man and wiped him out and mopped him up and mowed him down. (We are never accused of doing anything sideways to him in any lethal way, which is something to be thankful for.)
If you have got used to the idea that the Indians are dying out in Canada, the facts will astonish you. Not only are our Indians increasing at the moment, but there are as many Indians in Canada today as there were before the white men arrived at all. In fact, the number has probably increased. It is estimated by reliable anthropologists that before the Europeans came there were roughly a quarter of a million Indians notth of what is now Mexico. And that, very roughly, is the figure today for the same area—Canada and the U.S.A. But today this population is fairly evenly divided between the two countries. In the days before international boundaries, it is reasonable to assume that the centre of population lay south rather than north, because of climate. And thus there are probably more Indians in what is now Canada than there ever were before.
The fathers of many of our Canadian Indians came north in. the last two centuries, either because game was being killed off faster in the U.S.A or because Indians were being killed off faster. Canadians never went in for wars against the Indians in the American style. Because of many complex factors, this is not necessarily to
the credit of the Canadians and the discredit of the Americans, and I will not go into the historical reasons here ; but it remains a fact that Canadians got along better with the Indians than the Americans did. As long ago as 1812 Indians were fighting enthusiastically on the Canadian side against the Americans, before the main American troubles with the Indians had begun. Two or three generations later, when a war-band of plains Indians had massacred the American General Custer and all his men, large forces of American cavalry were sent to capture these tough redskins and escort them to the Canadian border, across which most of them belonged. At the border appeared one Mounted police corporal, who took over from the cavalry regiments. The Americans were surprised and annoyed by this Canadian force of one man. It seemed a studied insult and a bit of insanity. But it was neither. Things were just different across the border ; that's all.
While we now imagine that there are far fewer Indians than there really are, our fathers erred in the opposite direction and thought that originally there must have been numberless hordes. The early settler didn't grasp the fact, for example, that the Iroquois con- federacy could conquer and police a vast portion of a gigantic continent with an army that never exceeded 6,000 men and often stood at 4,000. He assumed that the Iroquois army must be enormous and must draw upon a never-failing source of recruits. But all the Iroquois drew upon was close union and organisation. All their enemies were divided, proud, quarrelsome—isolationists, if yoli like, paying the price of isolationism.
If the Indian has failed to vanish in numbers, it is true that he has tended, for a time, to vanish in every other way. The chief reason for this loss of importance is not sufficiently stressed. We are often told that the Indian was peculiarly a prey to our respiratory diseases, that his spirit became oppressed by our cities and farms that conquered the wilderness and so on, and these things are true enough, but we are never told the most obvious and most important fact of all, wh:ch was this: the Indian was bred for fighting, his whole life was fighting, and nothing else could capture his imagina- tion. For a time in the early history of the New World he could still get just about all the fighting he wanted one way or another. But in the end all fighting ceased everywhere, and with it ceased the Indian's job, his joy, his philosophy—everything.
Far more than getting used to our food, our diseases, our inventions and clothes and houses and the rest, the Indian has had to get used to our pacifist philosophy and laws and our ways of proving that life, is worth while. All this takes time. There are many Indians alive to day whose own fathers (not grandfathers) were warriors pure and simple. You cannot change these things in a generation or two without dislocation and the creation of a certain aimlessness. The Indian didn't vanish, but his profession did. And that was a saddening thing for him, and for the whites who observed his sorrow. Up to a few years ago most men thought the Indian would pine away altogether, but today that opinion (unlike the Indian) has vanished. Time is beginning to work, and the Indians, some of them, are beginning to work too. There are new generations of Indians who have never heard a first-hand account of a battle, so that they find less to sorrow about. What they do sorrow about is remaining wards of the Government as museum pieces instead of finding useful and profitable work. They want an ordinary man's job, plus an ordinary man's vote, which is some- thing they do not get if they live on reservations as "treaty Indians." They point out that if they were fit to enlist in the armed forces, as they were, they should be fit to vote.
More and more in the last few years the Indians in my own province of British Columbia have become ordinary working citizens. That is very cheerful news indeed. At first they simply worked in canneries along the coast, filling tins of salmon, or selling to the can- neries a few fish calfght from simple boats by simple means. Then they began to build or buy better craft, and today there are Indian skippers of large modern seine-boats and trawlers which they own themselves ; and highly prosperous they are, most of them. There are literally thousands of Indians along this coast engaged in modern fishing, where a few years ago there were only a few dozen working in a lazy way, assisted by a few hundred who weren't working in
any ordinary sense at all. They were greatly stimulated by the removal of the Japanese fishermen from the coast when the Pacific war began, it is true, but the important fact is that the so-called unenterprising Indian seized this chance at once and seized it in large numbers and with great enthusiasm.
Fishing alone will not support all the Indians in Canada. Far from it. But once the idea of real work has gripped their imaginations the Indians can turn to other things, and are doing so. Also, it is the idea of work that is giving such impetus to the North American Indian Brotherhood, a new organisation that covers the continent, with a Coast Indian as its president and founder. The Brotherhood is pressing for all sorts of reforms in the treatment and status of the native. Work and prosperity will undoubtedly spring from the Brotherhood, but the Brotherhood itself could never have started in the days when the idea of work was too dim and unfamiliar. The Indian didn't give a damn. Now he does. The Brotherhood sprouted from work more than from lack of work. It is the hardest-working Indians who are its driving-force.
The other day I read about some inland Indians in B.C. who have started a sawmill. There are dozens of them in this enterprise. They cut their own trees, saw them into lumber and do their own market- ing. They all make money, and all are happy. This is real news, and we shall hear more news of that sort. What is so odd about that? Well, a generation ago it would have been impossible.
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