With the strong #BlackLivesMatter and #IndigenousLivesMatter movements, I thought I'd help by addressing some of the popularized misconceptions around Indigenous people and prairie farming. We know that serious systemic racism exists, and it exists strongly in ag communities.
First: the history of First Nations within the space we now know as western Canada (prairie, boreal, and cordillera) spans 10,000+ years. It's deep, and is complex with many layers. It cannot and should never be dismissed by a sentence or two, or a paragraph.
Yet that's typically what happens in a local history book, where 'history' begins with white European settlement. That's the first erasure: when we spend energy proudly promoting 'pioneer' history, we deliberately dismiss thousands of generations in this landscape.
Second: built environment. When we praise a fixed, physical built environment (especially buildings), we automatically relegate First Nations' brilliant, sweeping use of landscape in a way that changed with seasons/needs to 'nomadic' and somehow lesser. That's false.
Three: the concept of nomadic or wandering, which is often used and still found in curriculum. It deliberately skews perspective, as if First Nations were somehow lost, when in fact they knew *exactly* where, when, why and how they moved through each space.
Tied to this 'nomadic' dismissal is that prairie First Nations 'followed' the buffalo. In truth, they knew those herds intimately, like a rancher knows where her herd is and what it's doing. FN fired the prairie to encourage growth, direct bison.
FN understood and capitalized on this knowledge for thousands of generations, long before horses, to identify and use landscape for bison jumps and bison pounds, effectively maximizing efficiency, nutrition and culture. FN were pastoral herders with enormous success.
Four: Indigenous agriculture. It's a trope, and we see/hear it often: Indians didn't farm. This is a classic and deliberate erasure, especially from those who believe that agriculture is the root of civilization: no agriculture, no civilization. Uncivilized-barbarian-savage. NO!
In addition to the above-mentioned high intensive ranch-style agriculture, you did know that 60% of today's foodstuffs were originally farmed in the Americas, right? Example: the corn-beans-maize complex (Three Sisters) spread right into southern SK and MB.
Tobacco was growing in western Canada in the 1700s, and Indigenous trade systems brought all kinds of food, including things like potatoes which were grown in all kinds of small settlements by the early 1800s.
And these examples don't even touch on the herbal medicine and food complex which cultivated and nurtured and traded those items. Nor does it touch on the fish culture, which was huge and rich and supported many northern and mountain and coastal regions.
OK. Treaties. You understand that treaties were negotiated (then ignored) specifically to eradicate Indigenous title, confine FN to reserves to open the way for white European settlement? That's a fundamental understanding that each and every farmer/rancher must face.
Your land ownership, the pride you have in documenting generational history and pioneer grit and hardships is predicated on erasing and swindling those who owned the land before. Full stop. Don't pussyfoot around this. It's not surveys that started settlement; it's the swindle.
Treaties and surveys went hand in hand with another institution: the NWMP (now RCMP). The Canadian government (and their on the ground arm, the NWMP) had formal policies of subjugation, starvation, and ethnocide. Those are the roots.
Read James Daschuk's Clearing the Plains by @UofRPress or a shorter, earlier article by John Tobias called "Canada's Subjugation of the Plains Cree." drc.usask.ca/projects/legal…
Back to agriculture: embedded in the treaties were formal requests for agricultural training and support to transition economies and cultures from bison (near extinct) to agriculture. The agricultural promise was hope; that hope was deliberately, and methodically, dashed.
The best source for this story remains Sarah Carter's Lost Harvests. For a VERY quick overview, see teaching.usask.ca/indigenoussk/i… where Dr. Carter herself wrote a precis.
Indigenous reserve agriculture never had, not even close, to an equal footing with European settler agriculture. And if you just said to yourself, that's because they didn't have agricultural experience, you're not really listening.
There were some FN reserves where agriculture boomed so fast and made so much money that nearby white settlers complained to the Indian agent. So the agricultural support policy was changed, forcing FN to abandon commercial ag, adopting a peasant farming policy using hand tools.
(I posted too soon, sorry. Still adding). I repeat -- successful FN farms and farmers were FORCED to go back to 'two acres and a cow' peasant agriculture, because they were too successful. Let that sink in then next time you think, they didn't know agriculture.
Also: the Pass system. Part of the reason this system was put in place was to confine any burgeoning FN entrepreneurs going to town to trade hay, garden produce, or other marketable goods, so that settlers could have that advantage. It wasn't just the 1885 resistance.
Related: the trope of "Indians don't do agriculture' was/is so pervasive that I've seen histories written by FN that misunderstand and forget this past: When speaking of a reserve farmer, "he must have been a white man because he had a big farm." That's a curriculum issue.
Add to this forced backwards policy push away from agriculture: the immense 20thC history of reserve land being "surrendered" back to the Crown for auction and redistribution to white settlers. These surrenders were so riddled with corruption, we still have numerous court cases.
I only know of one case -- and I studied and wrote about it in my book, Forest Prairie Edge -- where white settlers pushed for a surrender and the government refused. That's from Little Red Reserve north of PA, which was set aside as an agricultural reserve for northern FN.
Now we're into the 20th century, where FN still can't vote and can only hold land/get a homestead IF they gave up their Treaty rights. Since reserve land is held in common, how do you get a mortgage or loan to grow your farm, expand, practice modern production techniques? Can't.
Add to that: many FN fought in both WWI and WWII, where upon returning home, thousands of returning soldiers received both a soldier settlement and a homestead quarter, plus loans and training. Unless, of course, you were a FN soldier. You didn't qualify.
OK. I'll end here. Why? Not because there aren't more stories, exactly like this to tell, but because there are *so many* and they are *so huge* that honestly, I'm interested to know if you've even made it this far. Are you still with me?
How much of what I've just said did you already know? How many times did you find yourself arguing with me, disbelieving the extent? THAT'S the systemic racism that I'm talking about. It's so much a part of settler society that it's hard to see and pick apart. It's normalized.
But that's my Saturday afternoon contribution to the larger discussion of whether or not there is systemic racism in western Canada, and how and where agriculture has not only benefited from, but added to, that systemic problem. #IndigenousHistoryMonth
I am seeing lots of RTs of this thread, and pushback on my feed from farmers who are proud of multi-generational, come-from-nothing farms. *I am too.* But I encourage you to hold both thoughts: pride in farm history WHILE understanding the systemic racism that allowed it. Both.
(Apologies also for the weird tense problem in the tweet where my mind switched into the 20thC.) Inuit gained the right to vote in 1950; status FN in 1960. See thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/ind…
