A THREAD: In past days, Canadian politicians and media have invoked the spectre of “outside agitators” to infantilize and dismiss Indigenous peoples’ protests, and undermine the vital work of solidarity. It’s a racist myth deployed frequently in Canada's history. Some examples...
In the 1870s to 1890s, the Canadian government pushed Indigenous peoples to take up farming on the prairies, but denied them technology and market access, and gave good land to white farmers. When Indigenous peoples petitioned for changes, guess who government officials blamed? 
In 1927, as BC First Nations pushed for their Aboriginal title to be recognized, a Canadian parliamentary committee recommended making it illegal for Indigenous people to hire lawyers to advance their claims (that prohibition would stand till 1951). Their justification?
Duncan Campbell Scott, the Indian Affairs deputy superintendent and chief architect of cultural genocide who banned potlatches and sun dances and made residential schools compulsory, often used the "outside agitator" line, invoking it to support the prohibition on hiring lawyers.
In the post-WW2 period, federal Indian Agents oppressed Indigenous peoples by controlling every aspect of life on reserve. What was their go-to justification to explain away why Indigenous peoples were deeply suspicious and hostile to them and tried to resist them at every turn?
This piece by @Heidi__Matthews is excellent, but we don’t need to point to a US playbook to explain racist tactics. The Canadian elite have a home grown tradition to draw from.
macleans.ca/opinion/andrew…
macleans.ca/opinion/andrew…
@Heidi__Matthews There’s also a subgenre of the outside agitator myth, what we might call the “outside Indigenous agitator” trope. Duncan Campbell Scott often accused Indigenous activist Fred Loft of “riling up” and taking advantage of other Indigenous peoples in the 1920s.
@Heidi__Matthews In the late 1960s, while Indigenous and non-Indigenous activists did political organizing on reserves through the Company of Young Canadians, the premiers of Alberta and Saskatchewan dismissed any protest as the work of “outside agitators.”
@Heidi__Matthews Government and media have often fingered Warrior Societies as "outside instigators" stoking action - even though they are called in to protect local Indigenous people - from Anishinabe Park occupation in 1974 to Oka Crisis in 1990, to Elsipogtog anti-fracking standoff in 2013.
@Heidi__Matthews Ojibway activist Lyle Ironstand, who participated in the occupation of Anishabe Park in Kenora, Ontario in 1974, had this excellent response to the racist accusation about “outside agitators”:
“It's the government that should be called the agitators of native people," he said.
“It's the government that should be called the agitators of native people," he said.
@Heidi__Matthews In my book The Trudeau Formula, I talked to a Liberal-affiliated lobbyist about the broad resistance to the Transmountain pipeline. How could the Liberal government overcome it? No problem, he said, the activists were just “Indigenous imports.”
@Heidi__Matthews This is a classic case. It’s devoted to a “gotcha” moment of getting an Indigenous woman to repeat she’s from nations on US side of border. As if this explains away local resistance, or undermines Wet’suwet’en demands and her right to organize solidarity.
