Labour / Le Travail
Issue 93 (2024)
Forum
At the “Challenging Labour” / «Le défi du travail» conference held at Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta, in October 2022, two plenary sessions invited scholars to engage in a dialogue on important historical and theoretical issues in the field of labour and working-class history/studies. One of these, on the entanglement of capitalism and colonialism, featured a paper delivered by Bryan D. Palmer and a response from hagwil hayetsk (Charles Menzies). These presentations are revised for publication here along with a rejoinder from Palmer in what is Labour/Le Travail’s first “Forum” section. The aim of this section is to foster conversation, with scholars meaningfully engaging with each other’s work across disciplinary, methodological, theoretical, or other kinds of differences in approach and understanding. The merit of this kind of dialogue is well demonstrated here by Palmer and hayetsk, and the editors would invite more such conversations for publication in this section in future issues.
The Past Is Before Us: Capitalism, Colonialism, and Canada, 1500–2023
Keywords: Indigenous history, Tsimshian, Gitxaała, capitalism, colonialism, economic history, labour history, Indigenous Marxism, Canadian history, British Columbia.
Mots clefs : Histoire des Autochtones, Tsimshian, Gitxaała, capitalisme, colonialisme, histoire économique, histoire du travail, marxisme autochtone, histoire du Canada, Colombie-Britannique.
In 1753, Voltaire offered a flippant and now well-known commentary on the origins of Canada: “two or three merchants from Normandy, on the slight hope of a small commerce of furs, equipped a few vessels and established a colony in Canada, a country covered with snows and ices eight months of the year, inhabited by barbarians, bears and beavers.” So begins the capitalism/colonialism determination. Over the course of the 1750s, Voltaire bemoaned the “poor human race that slit its throat on our continent about a few acres of ice in Canada.” The French and British were warring over this cold acreage, expending “more than all Canada is worth.” An English pamphleteer also queried this contest: “What does a few [fur] hats signify, compared with that article of luxury, sugar?” In the age of Empire’s clash and the slave trade, the plantation economy of Guadeloupe was prized, the “barren wilds” of Canada despised.1
A little more than a century later, the elite component of the white settlers about to establish Canada as a dominion nation-state were more upbeat in their assessment of the country’s worth. George Brown, editor of a newspaper destined to become Canada’s most influential daily, The Globe, was bullish on Confederation’s promise. Early liberalism and its doctrine of “representation by population,” to which Brown subscribed, was of course defined so as to exclude Indigenous peoples, women, Asians, and others whose “nature” and material limitations marked them as insufficiently entitled to the rights of citizenship. The racialization of Canada’s early making was evident in one 1871 publication’s declaration that “There never was found a nation, tribe, or society, however small, of white savages.” For elite spokesmen of the consolidating capitalist class, Canada’s prospects as a country, forged on the foundations of this civilized/racialized heritage, seemed boundless. “If Canada acquires this territory,” Brown mused as he glanced from his Toronto perch at the cartography of so-called terra nullius, conventionally known as “Indian lands” administered by the monopolistic Hudson’s Bay Company, “it will rise in a few years from a position of a small and weak province to be the greatest colony any country has ever possessed.” Snows and ice and barbarians, too, melted into the dream of nation, albeit one conceived colonially.2
A century and a half, again, takes us to the summer of 2022 and apostolic apologetics. Amid international “breaking news” – which of course was really nothing of the kind – that burial grounds adjacent to a number of Canadian residential schools contained the undocumented and unmarked graves of hundreds, possibly thousands, of Indigenous children subject to the rigours of a regime of training that too often included physical abuse, premised on cultural destructiveness, the Pope made a pilgrimage of penitence to three locations in Alberta, Québec, and Nunavut. The Bishop of Rome, Vicar of Jesus Christ, was supposedly addressing Catholicism’s pivotal place in a custodial system overseen by the Canadian state and managed, in good part, by the country’s churches, pre-eminent among them religious bodies owing their allegiance to the Vatican. The apologetics centred, however, on colonialism’s bad deeds, Catholicism’s unworthy sinners, and the state’s ultimate responsibility. No longer were the country’s original inhabitants barbarians. They were now wronged peoples, many of whom survived the disciplines, punishments, and cultural genocide foisted on them by state institutions and policies. The Pope was particularly aghast that their spiritual beliefs had been assailed. The restitution that the Catholic Church actually owed residential school survivors, as a consequence of an earlier settlement that it never honoured, went unmentioned until after the Pope departed Canada. The Doctrine of Discovery that papal bulls of the 15th century and before had rationalized, legitimizing Empire’s commercial reach into and appropriation of Indigenous lands and establishing the material foundation on which Canadian capitalism was established, was never rescinded. Exploring the colonialism/capitalism relation was not going to come from a religious entity that is, and that has historically for centuries been, one of the most powerful institutional players in land and finance in the global marketplace.
I need to pause, however, for my own apology. In what follows, I sidestep a number of important theoretical considerations that are now hard-wired into the discussion of colonialism and capitalism in Canada’s historical development. Terms such as settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and other designations that are, to my mind, rather cavalierly and ahistorically imposed on Canadian experience demand interrogation and reasoned exploration. It is necessary, however, as an initial stage in this assessment of the validity of such concepts, to follow Fredric Jameson’s injunction to “Always historicize!” This, according to Jameson in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, is “the one absolute … ‘transhistorical’ imperative of all dialectical thought.”3
I begin, and end, then, with a start – an attempt to develop a periodization of colonialism and capitalism, of capitalism and colonialism, in Canada. This, I would argue, constitutes nothing less than a history of the country for the 21st century – a history of the present, if you will. It is the foundation on which all theorizations and conceptualizations rest. But I intend to leave in abeyance, for a later and larger book-length study, some of the key conceptual matters that demand addressing. I have come to be unsure about many of them, both as intellectual guideposts and as politically inscribed meanings.4
The boundaries I set on this preliminary narration are inevitably arbitrary. I opt for large blocks of history that many might query in terms of actual dating or regard as unwieldy and insufficiently precise. I am not so much concerned with the dates assigned, since points of departure and new beginnings inevitably bleed into one another. What is important is that through these large swaths of time, appreciations of how capitalism and colonialism developed are seen as the material ground on which Indigenous peoples and their traditions and lands, white settlers and their class distinctions, the state and its various levels, and power as it evolves and is fought against, are all situated and come to interact with one another, in a process of change and conflict.
There are other qualifications. Colonization, of course, is not just about Indigenous peoples. It is about the Québécois as well, about the subordination of Canada to imperial metropoles and the breaking of those boundaries of limitation, about the growing international capacity of Canadian capital, confronted with falling rates of profit in its own domains, to colonize distant lands, in the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, and the Far East. Given space constraints, I focus here on Indigenous peoples. In doing so I am guided by the premise that it is not just colonialism that demands consideration but capitalism and colonialism in their togetherness. This is the historical foundation on which acceptance of Glen Coulthard’s insistence that effective opposition to colonization necessarily culminates in the admonition “Capitalism, No More!”5
Within this focus, my understandings of capitalism and colonialism are not particularly complex or complicated. Colonialism I regard as acquiring full or partial control over a territory or country, extracting the resources and exploiting the development of that land mass, and subordinating or displacing its original inhabitants, sometimes, but not always, through settlement, but certainly routinely through an enforced inequality that translates into a hierarchical political economy of imposed power relations. Capitalism, a system of private ownership of land, resources, and productive forces, is governed by the need to sustain accumulation in the hands of the few and keep that level of appropriation high. Those individual capitalists who invest in the process expect a particular return, although this regime of accumulation can be ruthless in pressing some to the walls of failure, while raising others to heights of dominance. Capital’s remuneration, known as profit, accrues to a distinct minority through the subordination – indeed, dispossession – of the broad majority.
Capitalism, like colonialism, shifts within distinct periods of differentiated development, but like the legal theorist Brenna Bhandar, I regard them as intricately related reciprocal projects. Over time these capitalist/colonialist relations become so intertwined as to be virtually indistinguishable. Historically, this connectedness has resulted in a “a panoply of premodern and modern property logic[s],” operating in “conjunction with one another” in “fragmentary and contradictory” ways. This includes the original dispossession that set the stage on which capital accumulation unfolds, conditions the establishment of privatized property, and leads to the consolidation of the capitalist class as well as the state that serves its interests. Along the way, different peoples other than those originally dispossessed of land have also had to be alienated from the ownership of production, from skills, from technologies, from value. Dispossession is ongoing, on a variety of levels, not only for Indigenous peoples in settler societies but for the majority of settlers as well.6
Dispossession of First Nations peoples was about land, but it also resulted in broad-ranging transformations that, while never entirely distinct from territory, pushed past it into other realms. Centrally important was how capitalism and colonialism combined to produce the hegemonic hold of an ethos of possessive, acquisitive individualism, a process in which state formation figured forcefully. This struck blow after blow at Indigenous sensibilities associated with what has been called the bowl with one spoon, a generalized set of beliefs that, however differentiated across the diversity of First Nations’ political economies and human ecologies, underscored a communal as opposed to privatized societal organization. From the Algonquins of the boreal forests of the Ottawa River Valley to the Gitxaała, or people of the saltwater, of the Pacific Northwest, understandings of property, trespass, and entitlements to resources and territories related to kinship networks and hereditary usage were embraced. These customs and the organization they imposed on everyday life were fundamentally different than those associated with the profit system of mercantile and then industrial capital.7
Lewis Henry Morgan, a 19th-century commentator unfairly, in my view, out of favour in many contemporary academic circles, was drawn to what he called the “primitive communism” of Indigenous appreciations of the public domain.8 In an 1876 review of Hubert Howard Bancroft’s Native Races of the Pacific States (1875), Morgan offered a brief outline of the bowl with one spoon: “Whatever was gained by any member of the household in hunting or fishing expeditions, or raised by cultivation, was made a common stock.” Central to this communal societal order was the “law of hospitality.” An 18th-century Onondaga chief contrasted the generosity of the Iroquois with the acquisitive parsimony of many white newcomers to his people’s lands:
You know our practices. If a white man, in travelling through our country, enters one of our cabins, we all treat him as I do you. We dry him if he is wet, we warm him if he is cold, and give him meat and drink that he may allay his hunger and thirst; and we spread soft furs for him to rest and sleep on. We demand nothing in return. But if I go into a white man’s house … and ask for victuals and drink, they say, “Where is your money?” And if I have none, they say, “Get out you Indian dog.”
Morgan insisted in 1876 that this “law of hospitality” was of decisive historical importance. It was his view, no doubt somewhat overgeneralized, that it was “universal among the northern tribes,” tending to “equalize subsistence,” and “while any household possessed a surplus, to prevent destitution in any portion of the community.” In reaching for an explanation of this gracious behaviour, Morgan looked “to the ownership and cultivation of lands in common, and the distribution of their produce to households in which communism was practiced.” He could also have emphasized the fundamental human necessity of adapting to the relative material scarcities and challenges of subsistence within often unforgiving ecologies.9
Early commentators on the First Nations of what is now constituted as Canada saw only the difference that distinguished Indigenous societies and practices from European appreciations of acquisitive man’s instinctual drive to accumulate, however much they exaggerated a “primitive” failure to recognize “property.” Baron de Lahontan’s New Voyages to North America noted in 1703 that “The Savages are utter strangers to distinctions of Property, for what belongs to one is equally another’s.” European interlopers and colonizers quickly came to the conclusion that Indigenous peoples of the North American continent, unlike themselves, “held all things in common.” Introduced to the Parisian French court and urban life in an empire’s metropole in 1649, two “Savage Indians” were shocked that grown men would prostrate themselves before a child king, Louis xiv. They were aghast that the city exhibited such disarmingly contrasting displays of wealth and poverty, since in their “uncivilized” understandings all were “equaliz’d in the ballance of Nature, and not one to be exalted above another.” When these observations were reported in England, an editor denounced the Indigenous men as “two Heathen Levellers.”10
None of this is meant to deny that First Nations societies contained gradations of power, that some groups, especially those rooted in the comparative abundance of particular Pacific coast regions, practised slavery and were ordered by caste hierarchies. Harmony among such peoples did not always prevail, and war and its many brutalities were certainly present. Peaceable kingdoms, before white contact, did not exist, just as they did not afterward, although there is no doubt that contact with European empires exacerbated and intensified conflict. The “noble Savage” was the mirror image of colonization’s casualization of “savagery” as the characteristic state of Indigenous peoples. That said, the bowl with one spoon was a material counterpart to capitalism’s ethos of individual property and privatized accumulation. How these counterposed sensibilities clashed and have continued to rub up against one another with friction is at the core of the making of modern Canada.
What I want to convey in what follows is a concern with structures of determination, as well as agencies of resistance, for it is a premise of my exploration of capitalism and colonialism that the tragedy of oppositions to these twinned engines of exploitation and oppression is that they so seldom became the subject of conjoined condemnation: simultaneous struggles against both capitalism and colonialism have been rare and fleeting. The four periods I choose illuminate not only the material determinations of capitalism and colonialism but also the nature of resistance to them. They are roughly designated 1500 to 1790, 1790 to 1890, 1890 to 1960, and 1960 to the present.
1500–1790: Capital Cravings and the Coming of Colonialism
Colonialism did not come from nothing. It grew out of the dissolution of feudal Europe, the competitive scramble for Empire’s mercantilist accumulations, born of the crises of absolutist states, the slow but steady erosion of aristocratic authority, and the challenge of market societies and their nascent class formations. Colonialism and the first cravings for capital, in which the seeds of capitalism were surely germinating, arose together. The so-called New World’s riches of gold and silver beckoned, mercantilism’s self-proclaimed natural law of the political economy of the time dictating that the resources that might accrue to any one, single empire were finite and needed to be battled for against rival imperial projects, as well as the pagan occupants of territories supposedly untouched by the spirit of development. Such lands were, in the convenient “Doctrine of Discovery,” judged terra nullius, ripe to be overtaken. The divine right of kings accorded monarchs the capacity to entitle monopolistic companies to secure their interests in territories where flags of convenient ownership could be planted.
Thomas Paine’s Common Sense dealt this ideological rationale of conquest a decisive blow in 1776. Paine’s argument, while never conceived to be applied to discussions of First Nations–colonizer contact, seems entirely relevant: “A French bastard landing with an armed banditti and establishing himself King of England, against the consent of the natives, is, in plain terms, a very paltry, rascally original. It certainly hath no divinity in it. … The plain truth is that the antiquity of English monarchy will not bear looking into.”11 Neither, it might be added, does the Crown’s claim to Canada.
The craving was not so much for colonies as for capital to shore up European absolutist states, but one could not be had without the other. In Canada, the promise of an El Dorado rich in gold, silver, diamonds, and spices would quickly fade. Beaver pelts became the commodity fuelling the drive to accumulation, the fur trade the mercantile endeavour that planted the authority of monopolistic capital on the landscape of what would become British North America, a vast territory of Indigenous inhabitation administered by the Hudson’s Bay Company. This chartered company, bridging the transition from feudalism to capitalism in the Old World, extracted from the New in excess of £20 million over the years from 1670 to 1857. This fur trade profit became part of the accumulative foundation on which factories, mills, and mines rested, both in Britain and in its colonial “possessions.” As Gustavus Myers concluded in 1914, “From the Hudson’s Bay Company came officials who developed into land, railroad, steamship, and bank magnates – men promoting or controlling transportation and banking systems owning vast other resources.”12
As the French and English empires contested the fur trade territories of the St. Lawrence in the 16th and 17th centuries, a Montagnais hunter told a Jesuit in 1634, “The Beaver does everything perfectly well. It makes kettles, hatchets, swords, knives, bread; in short it makes everything.” Accumulation demanded commodities, which commanded human labours. A political economy of capital craving rested on a particular monoculture of fur. It entailed specific kinds of relations, in which Indigenous appetites for trade goods from Europe structured First Nations hunters and gatherers into the reciprocities of exchange, however unequal. If the beaver “made” the goods central to all of this, as well as the relations that structured their exchange, it also made much else: cheap brandy, wine, and rum, with the debilitating consequences of such spirits; devastating diseases that decimated First Nations peoples; the sign of the cross that went hand in hand with capital accumulation, carried by Jesuits and others, and unleashing a profound and disorientating train of uncertainty and psychological dislocation among Indigenous peoples; and finally, the wars and conquests pitting empires against one another and, necessarily, drawing First Nations into their escalating violence. As early as 1664, it was recognized that the trade “for beaver and other peltry must be carried on chiefly by means of gunpowder,” and W. L. Morton would later comment that “The Canadian fur trade had always fought as readily as it had traded. … war and trade went hand in hand; war was trade conducted by other means.” The seeming ease flowing from the beaver’s production of “everything,” then, had a plethora of results, most of which were disturbingly destructive. A model of First Nations–European relations that accents the shrewd bargaining and trading acumen of Indigenous peoples, constructed in an attempt to offset tales of victimhood and subordination, advances our understanding at the same time as it perhaps blinds us to the profoundly unbalanced nature of early exchange relations in the era of the fur trade.13
As profit flowed to London, coursing through that river of 17th- and 18th-century commerce, it came to rest in William Blake’s “charter’d streets,” where Empire’s plunder and monopoly’s momentous munificence registered, for the rich, in bounty and ostentatious privilege and for many others in “marks of woe” and “mind forg’d manacles.” If the “hapless Soldier’s sigh/[ran] in blood down palace walls,” the price of colonial subjugation registered only obliquely, obscured in its distance from accumulation’s final destination: “On the Canadian wilds I fold; feeble my spirit folds;/For chain’d beneath I rend these caverns: when thou bringest food/I howl my joy, and my red eyes seek to behold thy face—/In vain. These clouds roll to & fro, & hide them from my sight.” The price Indigenous peoples paid for capital’s cravings was invisible in Empire’s counting houses; so too, as Blake’s verse revealed, were the growing impoverishment and debasement of chimney sweeps, cursed harlots, and the dispossessed of commercial capital’s “midnight streets.”14
The 18th-century wars were winding down with the victory of the British over the French in 1760. Three years later, the Royal Proclamation established the ways in which the rising capitalist empire would govern the unimaginable expanse of territories now lost to one of Europe’s declining feudal orders. Land issues and the boundaries within which territories were enclosed reverberated loudly in the making of a new British North America. A vast “Indian Territory,” largely unsettled by British, French, or American colonists, was now recognized to be under the sovereignty, protection, and dominion of the British, for the use of “several Nations or Tribes” whom it was acknowledged should not be “molested or disturbed.” This “Indian Territory” constituted much of what would become Ontario, reaching into northern Québec and Labrador, extending west of the Appalachians and stretching south of the Great Lakes to Florida/Louisiana. An even larger northern expanse of Rupert’s Land was identified as under the tutelage of the Hudson’s Bay Company.
The Royal Proclamation has been interpreted as a “Magna Carta of Indian Rights” because it explicitly designated huge North American regions as “traditional land” and established that such territory could not be alienated in market transactions without approval of the Crown, which claimed to stand as the ultimate protector of First Nations entitlements. Indigenous peoples from the 18th century to the present have insisted on the constitutional precedents codified by this edict, largely because it was an early statement that the founding of Canada was something of a merger of three peoples – First Nations, British, and French – something rarely acknowledged in later colonial and state decrees. In stressing that only the Crown had the authority to transfer lands out of First Nations’ hands, the Royal Proclamation provided the ostensible legal basis for eleven numbered treaties signed with specific First Nations and the Canadian government in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Yet the undeniable premise of the Royal Proclamation was that “Indian Territory” was indeed subject to the age-old Doctrine of Discovery. So-called traditional lands came under British sovereignty as a consequence of the Conquest of New France in 1760. Like empires of the French and Spanish, the British assumed an innate superiority over Indigenous inhabitants of a geography that was hunted, fished, and planted but that was not ostensibly utilized in the building of what Europeans considered civilization. This view resonated with subsequent arguments of ownership by right of terra nullius. For all the claims that the Royal Proclamation “genuinely reflected a meeting place of European and North American traditions of legitimacy,” encompassing both Indigenous practices of reaching consensus and achieving freedom through “face-to-face” encounters and British constitutionalism based on governance through formal bodies of political representation, there was no question which side of the contending dualism prevailed. Ultimately, the Royal Proclamation straddled a divide. Looking to a future bourgeois democracy not yet arrived, the 1763 edict also contained not a little that was paternalistic, even feudal, as well as assumptions that were patently racist. In its ultimate subordination of traditional First Nations practices and customs, and assertions of the entitlements of the Crown, it expressed, not surprisingly, the imperial sensibilities of the age.
The Royal Proclamation thus laid the cornerstone for the subsequent claim that 89 per cent of the land in Canada belonged to the Crown, an entity that was not required to negotiate with anyone over anything. There was acknowledgement of reciprocity in the 1763 edict, but the reality was that the proclamation asserted British domain: “And whereas it is just and reasonable, and essential to Our Interest and the Security of Our Colonies, that the several Nations or Tribes of Indians, with whom We are connected, and who live under Our Protection should not be molested or disturbed in the Possession of such Parts of Our Dominions and Territories as, not having been ceded to or purchased by Us, are reserved to them, or any of them, as their Hunting Grounds.” This was indeed the royal “Our,” and as Peter Russell concludes, Britain considered that, according to its understanding of sovereign right, it was entitled to impose its own laws and system of government on First Nations inhabitants of “hunting grounds,” should such dominions and territories be required for Empire’s interests. As the Mi’kmaq of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick would soon learn, as early as the 1780s, their lands were being cut out from underneath them. In New Brunswick, the Mi’kmaq of Elsipogtog First Nation saw their traditional territory shrink from four million hectares of Acadia and beyond to 51,200 acres in 1800 to the roughly 2,000 acres on which they now live.15
This process of alienation took many twists and turns. Thayendanegea, or Joseph Brant, and his Mohawk followers, for instance, settled on the Grand River, securing their land through a Crown “purchase” from the Mississauga. The transaction earmarked territory for Six Nations Loyalist veterans of the guerrilla war waged against the Americans over the course of the 1780s. Brant would soon exhibit signs of assimilation and incorporation into colonial society, a biographer referring to him as a “man of two worlds.” One expression of this was his insistence that, as chief of the warrior Mohawks, he possessed the right to parcel the land granted by the Crown to his people and dispense with it as he saw fit, including through sales to Euro-American Loyalist settlers, who fought alongside Brant as members of Butler’s Rangers. Once a champion of the bowl with one spoon, the Thayendanegea of the late 18th century was giving way to the the Joseph Brant of the early 19th century. Brant dealt in land, repudiating, in effect, the meaning and principles of earlier beliefs and the protections of “Indian Territory” that supposedly animated the Royal Proclamation.
The emerging land market could, however, prove a tough taskmaster, as the case of Sarah/Sally Ainse, an Indigenous woman whose fur trade fortunes allowed her to accumulate vast properties, slaves, livestock, and houses in Detroit, indicates. Loyal to the Crown, she relocated to a rich alluvial plain watered by the Thames and Sydenham Rivers, purchasing a 150-square-mile tract from Indigenous peoples, possibly members of the Caldwell First Nation. A local land board voided her purchase, however, granting lots to discharged soldiers. In spite of her cultivation of friends in high places, Ainse ended up with neither the land she had purchased nor compensation for her expenditure. Colonial property was in the process of being made in ways that locked First Nations out of the land market that was itself a product of the theft of their territory. In the words of Alain Beaulieu, “French colonial practice, based on the non-recognition of Aboriginal land rights, and the Royal Proclamation of 1763, the symbol par excellence of the recognition of those rights, fused in a syncretic model that coated dispossession without treaties with the varnish of compensation.”16
In 1781, 1783, 1784, 1787, and 1788, the British received vast tracts of lands from the Mississauga, the areas designated in a language anything but precise, with phrases outlining the “purchase” characteristically vague: from the lakefront “as far back as a man could walk, or go on foot in a day”; all territory within earshot of a musket’s retort, prompting reference to “Gunshot Treaties.” In all such transactions, Sir Frederick Haldimand, a military officer and Governor General, directed that “the utmost attention to Economy be paid” in dealings with First Nations. As a consequence, the disbursements of presents to the Mississauga largely consisted of relatively trifling supplies of weaponry, tools, clothing, tobacco, and trinkets, the kind of gifts long used to seal military alliances with various Indigenous groups. One so-called surrender, transferring lands reaching from modern-day Gananoque to the Bay of Quinte, was solemnized with compensation of clothing for Indigenous families; guns, ammunition, and powder for those who needed to hunt; and as much “coarse Red Cloth as will make about a Dozen Coats and as many Laced Hats.” The entire Niagara Peninsula, three million acres of choice land, cost the Crown £1,200 in supplies. This alienation of “Indian Territory” saw the opaque language and paternalistic sensibilities of the Royal Proclamation translated into appropriations more akin to plunder than fair-minded market transactions.
By the 1790s and the formation of Upper Canada, the Mississauga came to regret their generosity and trust in colonial officialdom, as had the Mi’kmaq their treatment at the hands of Nova Scotia’s first governor, Edward Cornwallis, decades earlier, or the Odawa/Ottawa chief Obwaandi’eyaag/Pontiac, who, Royal Proclamation or no, was dedicated in the 1760s to wiping the British “dogs dressed in red” from “the face of the earth.” The Mississauga continued this armed warfare, albeit often clandestinely. Guerrilla raids on settlers’ farms occurred; fear of “Indian attack” spread. Trade between the Mississauga and petty merchants was often accompanied by rations of rum, and with exchanges taking place outside of taverns, this commerce could turn ugly. The tense atmosphere was exacerbated as the colonial officialdom fostered jealousies among Indigenous peoples, their stated intent being to thwart “any Junction or good understanding” among different tribes. Controversial sales of land drove Chippewas, Six Nations, and Mississauga apart as hundreds of thousands of acres of “Indian Territory” were yielded to the British. Smallpox epidemics, alcohol abuse, and reliance on European trade goods further destabilized the Mississauga, their number reducing year by year until, in the 1820s, it dipped below 200. As a chief lamented, there was precious little comfort under the compensatory tent of the Royal Proclamation. “You came as a wind blown across the Great Lake. The wind wafted you to our shores,” he said. “We received you – we planted you – we nursed you. We protected you till you became a mighty tree that spread thro our Hunting Land. With its branches you now lash us.” Hospitality’s thanks were few.17
In 1913 Duncan Campbell Scott published a list of twenty so-called land surrenders in Upper Canada that followed immediately on the creation of the province. The years between 1790 and 1841 saw traditional lands of the Ottawas, Hurons, Pottawatamies, Chippewas, Mississaugas, Mohawks, and Moravians alienated, totalling 17 million acres. Compensation for this territory ranged from ten shillings to £4,000, usually paid in supplies and sometimes doled out in annuities. Scott considered this colossal appropriation an act of kindness bestowed on Indigenous peoples as the province “relieved the burden of Indian title.” It was a relief the capitalist development of Canada would have been inconceivable without.18
1790–1890: Capitalism’s Consolidation, Colonialism’s Constrictions
Land accumulated in such quantities was alienated by the Crown and dispensed to large monopolistic companies like the William “Tiger” Dunlop/John Galt–promoted Canada Company. This was a grandiose colonization and land acquisition scheme that, through its close ties to Upper Canada’s Executive Council, corralled 2.5 million acres. In Québec its less successful equivalent was the British American Land Company, a major purchaser of Crown and Clergy Reserves lands in the Eastern Townships. Transactions of this magnitude indicated how the Canadian colonies were reaching past the limitations of fur trade society. Such land was sold to settlers, apportioned to half-pay military officers and the like, but this settlement process was, from the outset, also animated by Wakefieldian understandings of the need not only to sustain capitalist development through the land market but to create, as well, a landless labouring class that would produce the surplus on which capital could continually fatten. As Leo A. Johnson noted in a study of Upper Canada’s Home District, adjacent to York/Toronto, the country’s currently richest region entered the 19th century impoverished in all else but rich in land, alienated from Indigenous peoples. “In the absence of money, land was viewed as capital, to be accumulated and spent as needed. When Loyalists demanded repayment for losses, land was awarded; when militia and military begged for rewards for valour and service, land was given; when Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe and his successors dreamed of creating an aristocracy, land was seen as its basis; and when the Colonial Office decided to create a class of labourers and servants in Upper Canada, land policy was seen as the means.”19
By the opening decades of the 19th century, land, in short, was making everything. Beavers no longer were. As the fur trade frontier receded, capital’s frontiers advanced. Mercantilist craving for capital was giving way to capital formation, the end result of which would be the solidification of capitalism as a system of accumulation. The fur trade, ironically, played a role in this making of Canadian capital and the realization of capitalism, and not only as part of an original accumulation. For the fur trade was not, of course, the simplified homogenized economy I have glossed over too hastily in this truncated discussion of the years 1500 to 1790. It proceeded with some encouragement of settlement in New France, although, like the Newfoundland fishery that preceded it, agriculturally based communities of Europeans were not so much encouraged or discouraged as treated with indifference. After centuries of fishing vessels visiting its shores, Newfoundland’s population around 1760 was a meagre 16,000; its Indigenous inhabitants approached extinction. On the eve of the Conquest, in the 1750s, New France’s population was a mere 70,000, its major cities of Montréal and Québec City boasting populations of 3,500 and 5,000, respectively. This compared with a population of almost 1.2 million of European descent in the British colonies to the south, whose labour force was augmented by 300,000 African American slaves. Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and Charleston each supported populations of 11,000 to 19,000.20
Unlike the fishery, however, the fur trade depended on certain reciprocal relations with First Nations, as did the wars of European empires fought out within “Indian Territory.” This led one of Canada’s pioneering political economists, and influential historian of the fur trade, Harold Adams Innis, to the startling assertion that “Canada has had no serious problems with her native peoples since the fur trade depended primarily on these races.”21
If there is Lesson One in the histories of capitalism and colonialism, it is that dependency does not necessarily lead to goodwill and benign relations, that provisioning and production do not eliminate problems. As a source of profit, the fur trade was plagued by its unstable, seemingly always transitional nature. By the mid-18th century, the Hudson’s Bay Company was exporting an impressive 100,000 pelts per annum, but complaints surfaced as early as 1704 that furs were bringing low prices, their quantity and quality on the decline. Animal pelts never quite rose to the profitable economic heights of fish. And fur-bearing animals were, as a resource, less resilient and more quickly and easily depleted than cod. The trade in animal skins was eventually forced to move west, and the voyageurs recruited from the seigneuries of the St. Lawrence were contributing to the rise of a Métis population as well as the mapping of the northwest interior.
With the Montréal-based North West Company and the Hudson’s Bay Company engaged in an often murderous and ecologically destructive competition for furs in the late 18th century, Indigenous women, who often cemented fur trade ties through their relations with voyageurs and chief factors of the trading forts, found themselves on the receiving end of violence and retribution. Meanwhile, the southern trade in beaver pelts was clearly exhausted and the Northwest, even the Mackenzie Subarctic, began to be overtrapped. Iroquois in the employ of the Nor’westers reportedly slaughtered beaver indiscriminately on the traditional territory of the Dene peoples, and Ojibway and Algonquin groups were enticed by fur trade companies into the area between Lake Winnipeg and the Rocky Mountains, outfitted with steel traps to wage profitable war on the beaver and other fur-bearing species. They “leave nothing wherever they came,” wailed one commentator.
The so-called reciprocities of the fur trade enriched the Scottish patrons of Montréal’s Beaver Club and lined the pockets of Hudson’s Bay Company officials in London. Indigenous peoples, however, were too often eventually left in a state of chaotic migratory dependency, alienated from lands and livelihoods of sustenance they had known for centuries but that were now barely recognizable, caught in a rapidly descending cycle of debilitation that only worsened with the overkilling of animal species and the onslaught of disease.22
As if this were not bad enough, the fur trade fostered more diverse economic developments, few of which afforded Indigenous peoples the same level of economic opportunity as white newcomers, and all of which seemed insatiable in their demands on lands and resources. New France always harboured, even as an outpost of mercantilism, craft productions, and if the forests and waterways nurtured fur, they also sustained shipbuilding and a host of ancillary enterprises. The timber trade was not only about shipping oak staves and white pine boards to European markets but about cordwood to keep fires going in agricultural family hearths as well as for village merchant stores, blacksmiths’ forges, and cobblers’ kitchens and workshops. This was a nascent capitalism, evident in the fortunes made in cutting and transporting wood, reliant on Crown lands, and realizing £60,000 annually in Upper Canada/Canada West by the mid-19th century. Even as enterprise-friendly a historian as Michael Bliss acknowledges that the timber trade “was one of the few British North American businesses which can fairly be said to have been founded on theft,” although he spends no time pondering how stands of spruce, pine, and oak were pilfered, and from whom.23
Scrutiny suggests that the timber trade was not that unusual. Nova Scotia’s General Mining Association (gma), for instance, depended on a 60-year lease and a Crown-dispensed monopoly to sustain its coal mining operations, which also encroached on traditional Indigenous lands and waters with iron forges, shipping wharves, farming operations, and, harbinger of the new industrial order, railway tracks. Employing 1,500 by mid-century, the gma’s monthly payroll was $5,000, and it was heralded as a “weighty” capitalist initiative that would usher Nova Scotia into the industrial age. Emigration to the colony was encouraged, and a massive influx of 30,000 largely Scots settlers flooded into Mi’kmaq territory on Cape Breton Island. Indigenous peoples were, with considerable reluctance, forced into agricultural pursuits on lands incapable of sustaining them. Squatters intruded on the small acreage allocated to the Mi’kmaq, with newly arrived emigrants “by no means disposed to leave the aborigines a resting place.” The roughly 12,000 acres put aside for the Mi’kmaq in the 1830s constituted but a fraction of the Crown land controlled by the gma associates, one of whose influential shareholders, and a director of the Nova Scotia Land Company, David Stewart, boasted that his close connections with governing authority gave him alone access to over 80,000 acres.24
The century reaching from 1790 to 1890 saw Canada consolidated as a nation embedded in the global marketplace of the profit system, as Charles Menzies has argued in his ongoing research focusing on laxyuup Gitxaała and the Pacific Northwest, and as muckraking and Marxist writing from Gustavus Myers to Stanley Ryerson long ago recognized.25 Indeed, the Canada of 1890 bore absolutely no resemblance to that of the patchwork quilt of colonies and territories of the 1790s. Urbanization, industrialization, state and class formations spoke of a great transition. This was not simply an age of wood, wind, sail, fish and fur, but increasingly one of railroads, mines, mills, and factories, with their outputs of minerals and iron moulds, textiles and tobacco, bricks and beer.
Population told a part of the story: the Canadian colonies’ estimated population in 1790 was just over 160,000; a century later it approached five million, and almost 30 per cent of these people were urban dwellers. Canada’s first industrial city, Montréal, claimed a population of 22,500 in the 1820s, when early Toronto, or York, housed barely 2,000 individuals. The city of the country’s fur trade fortunes survived the first global capitalist crisis of 1825–26, supporting hundreds of manufactories, shipyards, and leading financial institutions. By the 1880s, its population surpassed 200,000, and that of its rival, Toronto, had grown to over 180,000. Rolling mills, sugar refineries, furniture works, and textile mills, with their growing and concentrated workforces of essentially landless labourers, constituted the industrial landscapes of Toronto and Montréal, and class formation in places like mid-19th-century Hamilton was visible in the architecture and art, workplace relations and housing stock of the urban industrial city. A small percentage of adult men – likely no more than 10 per cent of the populations of such industrializing cities – controlled the resources on which the health, well-being, and prosperity of the bulk of urban peoples depended.26
As this industrial capitalist transformation unfolded, and Canada’s non-Indigenous population grew by leaps and bounds, the numbers of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples declined, a consequence of dispossession and disease, disruption and dislocation. The demography of Indigeneity is complicated, and no certain figures of First Nations populations at the time of sustained European contact in the 16th century can be ascertained. Estimates range from hundreds of thousands to as high as two million. But with that contact, decline definitely set in. At the time of Confederation, in 1867, roughly 125,000 First Nations people remained, as well as 10,000 Métis concentrated in Manitoba’s Red River settlement, and perhaps a few thousand Inuit in the Arctic. As Maureen Lux and James Daschuk have shown, disease and government policies with respect to the Plains Cree and other nations on the prairies exacted a high demographic toll in the late 19th century, further reducing Indigenous populations, which were subject to increasingly draconian repression. As Winnipeg consolidated, becoming the urban gateway to the West, its capitalist elite envisioning that it would soon displace Montréal and Toronto, that western region’s Indigenous population was decimated. Indigenous scholars have described the late 19th-century years as “the moment of settler-colonial transition,” a historic fulcrum on which a turning of “mercantile and industrial capitalism” took place.27
To the west, Vancouver remained a city of fewer than 20,000, but industrial capital reached into the Pacific Northwest’s coastlines and rich timber stands. The enticements of gold drew tens of thousands of migrants in a rush for spoils in the 1850s, but it was salmon canneries, railroad construction, and timbering that proved more lasting and transformative enterprises in what would become British Columbia. First Nations people in the region would become entangled in the web of capitalist accumulation. Unlike older colonies such as Upper and Lower Canada, or those of the Atlantic coast, British Columbia, as late as the 1870s, had roughly equal numbers of Indigenous peoples and newcomers. There were far more Natives in proportion to whites, and colonization’s dispossession and capitalism’s consolidation occurred not as distinct and separate phases but as aligned movements of socioeconomic transformation.
British Columbia’s capitalist labour market in the late 19th century was thus unfathomable without the waged work of Indigenous peoples. The situation was different in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, Ontario, and Québec. First Nations men and women certainly worked, but they were less centrally placed in the emergent industrial capitalist economy, more likely to be racially excluded, and generally engaged in more casualized and precarious job offerings, although, of course, they could be found employed in seasonal sectors of the economy like the timber trade, and even in emerging industrial employments.28
To be sure, vast reaches of the new Dominion remained unsettled, seemingly untouched by the new industrial capitalist order. But there was no denying the ways in which the profit system’s tentacles reached across the expanse of Canada, transforming everything with their touch, and not always lightly. Capitalism brought with it an inherent tendency to crisis, unleashing recessions and depressions, panics and slowdowns. Barely a decade between 1820 and 1900 was spared financial meltdowns and business stagnations: workplaces closed or were reduced to the imposition of short time. As the economy collapsed in 1857, a Toronto report described,
Old established houses smashed like glass bottles, and mercantile credit erelong reached a state of collapse. Manufactures of all kinds were smitten by paralysis, … [the] streets swarmed with discharged operatives who could find no employment. … So depressed was trade, and so scarce was money during this direful year, that hundreds of persons in our city who had hitherto enjoyed all the ordinary comforts of life, for the first time felt the sharp pinch of poverty.
The nascent working class lived in fear of these downturns, which consolidated capital, concentrated riches in fewer and fewer hands, and dictated the trajectory of the politics of nation-building, which was, as much as the history of any 19th-century dominion, ordered by capitalist magnates and financiers of the ultimate Victorian megaproject, the Canadian Pacific transcontinental railroad. Jesse Edgar Middleton, commenting on Toronto in the depression decade of the 1850s in a multi-volume history of the city published in 1923, noted tersely, “Much disorder was caused by railroad construction laborers between 1852 and 1860.”29
Confederation’s wire pullers were, as countless tomes on the Fathers of Confederation and the architects of National Policy make abundantly clear if read between their often fawning lines, those who profited from the laying of transcontinental track. On the Cypress Hills reserve, Poundmaker appreciated what the coming of the “Iron Horse,” symbol and substance of capitalist transformation, meant to his people. He declared on New Year’s Day, 1882, “Next summer, or latest next fall, the railway will be close to us, the whites will fill our country and they will dictate to us as they please.” If the railways, in Daschuk’s words, were “a fatal disease vector” for the First Nations of the Canadian prairies, to the young Dominion’s capitalists they were a bottomless pit of bounty, one measure of which was a state gift of $62 million and 25 million acres of land. Those who laboured to build the railways, however, often confronted contractors absconding from construction sites without paying wages due, seasonally inflicted work stoppages, bullying foremen, and industrial accidents, not to mention the periodic crises of economic collapse.30
What emerges with decided and destructive staying power out of the century of 1790 to 1890 is capital’s relentless accumulation, consolidating capital and constructing a state essentially pliant in its hands. That state orchestrated an increasingly constricting colonialism, one that threw off the reciprocities exploited by mercantile capital and warring Empire’s dependencies on First Nations, their traditional territories, and the necessity of military alliances between European powers and First Nations peoples and their warriors.
With respect to this latter history of alliance, it ended with the last of the 18th-century “Indian Wars,” the War of 1812. In that conflict, Indigenous peoples, loyal to the Crown and the Royal Proclamation, fought on the side of British colonialism, appreciating, perhaps, that it proved less of a threat than its American counterpart. The Iroquois, at first professing no interest in warring against the United States, declared, “We do not want to fight nor do we intend to disturb you; but if you come to take our land, we are determined to defend ourselves.” In the end, many First Nations did battle on the side of the British, and in some contests, like the 1813 Battle of Beaver Dam, which paralyzed the American offensive in the Niagara Peninsula, Mohawks and Caghnawagas carried the day. “Not a shot was fired on our side by any but the Indians,” wrote Lieutenant James Fitzgibbon, an Irish militia leader. “They beat the American detachment into a state of terror.” As British military leaders turned tail, Indigenous chiefs led warriors in successful rebuke of the republican forces from the South. Historian George F. G. Stanley concluded in one assessment that in battles of the War of 1812 it was often “Indians who did the fighting” and that First Nations chiefs like Tecumseh gave their lives, while cowardly major-generals like Henry Patrick Proctor “saved his in flight.”31
Valued allies of the colonial officialdom in 1812, Indigenous peoples, many of whom remained firmly in the camp of the Crown’s defenders, were shunned as military assets a mere two decades later, during the Rebellions of 1837–38. “Indians” were both courted by anticolonial insurgents and, at times, regarded as potential shock troops of anti-Rebellion reaction. No matter, even as warriors prepared to arm themselves and be led into battle against the disloyal, their valour in defence of the Crown, so evident in mere decades past, was not wanted. Instead, First Nations were constructed as part of “une grande peur” by both Tories and Radicals alike. William Lyon Mackenzie insisted that Toronto’s city hall was an arms cache about to be distributed to “Indians, blacks and Orangemen … who would be allowed to murder and pillage at will.” A Church of England priest aligned with Upper Canadian executive authority indicated that the use of Indigenous warriors near Delaware in a conflict during December 1837 would have descended into the “horrid barbarities of scalping and burning.” The savagery was often on the other foot. Colonel John Prince captured Patriot invaders in December 1838 and ordered staged extralegal killings. An Indigenous Loyalist militia member refused to participate in the executions, and Prince was entreated by some of his men to show mercy and not “let a white man murder what an Indian has spared.” The colonel was unmoved. “Damn the rascal, shoot him,” was Prince’s curt condemnation. When the British Colonial Secretary weighed in on the use of First Nations warriors in suppressing rebellious activity in the 1830s, he was categorical in his “repugnance to such a measure,” as nothing would alienate civilized people more than attempts “to let loose on the assailants of government the horrors of savage warfare.”32
This was a measure of colonialism’s constricting character. Liberated from the unequal exchange of Empire–First Nations relations and mercantile capital’s reliance on First Nations’ capacity to harvest pelts, the consolidating capitalist order could materially move not only to dispossess Indigenous peoples of lands but to tighten the noose of cultural genocide and secure the scaffold constructing First Nations as wards of the capitalist state. This registered in a shift in constitutionalist quarters from the 1820s to the 1840s as specific colonial documents – Henry George Darling’s brief on the Canadian Indian Department, a mid-1830s 1,000-page publication of a parliamentary inquiry into the material conditions of First Nations and the report of John Lambton/Lord Durham (the Durham Report) commissioned in the aftermath of the rebelliousness of 1837–38, and an 1840s Royal Commission set in motion by Charles Bagot, Governor General of the province of Canada, addressing legislation pertaining to the administration of “Indian Affairs” – structured the path of colonial-Indigenous relations increasingly into the liberal rut of coercive assimilation.33
Legislation such as the Gradual Civilization Act (1857) and the Indian Act (1876) continued and codified this trend, as did the British North America Act (1867), sanctifying Confederation. The 1857 enactment set out the terms on which a century and more of state policy toward Indigenous peoples would rest. It proclaimed the desirability of removing all legal distinctions between First Nations “and Her Majesty’s other Canadian subjects,” insisting that the deserving path to Aboriginal citizenship ran through the individual acquisition of property and the renunciation of “Indian” status and identity. Involvement in the Canadian body politic, through voting, was deemed a denial of Indian being. Any “Indian so declared to be enfranchised … shall no longer be deemed to be an Indian.”34
The alienation of huge tracts of Atlantic Canada, Québec, and Ontario, well underway with the Royal Proclamation and subsequent “land surrenders” in the early 19th century, was followed by the numbered treaties of the 1870s, the immediate background to which was the violence and suppression of the first Red River Rebellion. This was the material foundation, often unarticulated, of Confederation’s multi-faceted National Policy, traditionally understood to rest on the planks of tariff protection of Canadian industry, the building of a transcontinental railway, and the settlement of the West through encouragement of immigration. But none of these National Policy components would have been possible without the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, the privatization of “Indian Territory,” its capitalist commodification, and the uses that would be made of it within the profit system.35
An immense land mass – reaching from Lake of the Woods to the Rocky Mountains, and extending from the 49th parallel in the South to the middle of the three modern-day provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta – was pledged, along with Indigenous loyalties, to “Her Majesty the Queen.” It was a fire-sale capitalist acquisition, a market transaction cooked in an inferno of acute adversity, where the early federal state, its railroads and military apparatus, exercised the decidedly upper hand. If the price exacted by the leaders of First Nations was higher than the cost-accounting state wanted to pay, it was nevertheless not so much a bargain as a steal. Treaty settlements were rationalized in Ottawa as money well spent in securing land that would solidify the formation of a nation, within which capital would reap fortunes making the mercantile profits of the fur trade seem small potatoes indeed. In the United States, the seemingly never-ending “Indian Wars” of the 1870s were being fought at a crippling cost of $20 million yearly. The entire annual budget of the Canadian government was $1 million less. In the House of Commons in 1877, Prime Minister Alexander Mackenzie championed his government’s course of action in signing seven numbered treaties:
My Commissioners have made further treaty arrangements with certain of the Indian Tribes of the North-West Territories, by which their title is extinguished to a very large portion of the territories … and, although some of the provisions are of a somewhat onerous and exceptional character, I have thought it nonetheless advisable on the whole to ratify it. … The expenditure incurred by the Indian Treaties is no doubt large, but the Canadian policy is nonetheless the cheapest, ultimately, if we compare the results with those of other countries.
This, of course, was a view of Indigenous-colonizer relations through rose-coloured, capital-tinted glasses, as the events of 1885 and 1886 would show.36
The political history of what Stanley Ryerson early called Canada’s “unequal union” was less a story of the much vaunted “peaceable Kingdom” than it was a narrative of subordination, in which capitalist and colonial imperatives were sandwiched between moments of rebellious resistance in the 1830s in Upper and Lower Canada and the first 1869–70 stand of Riel and his Métis followers. Both armed uprisings failed, but they were not without momentous consequences. The former birthed the path to democracy and responsible government; the latter instituted a Métis provisional government headed by Riel and committed, ironically, to wresting the freedoms of the capitalist marketplace from the infringements on free trade of the infant state’s surrogate, the feudal monopoly of the Hudson’s Bay Company, and insisting on the rights of the original founders of Red River to a say in their governance. Paralleling these episodic confrontations were an escalating, but nonetheless persistent, series of class conflicts, rising in numbers and intensities decade by decade.37
By the 1880s, the ambiguities of the 1830s and the 1860s were largely resolved. Dual movements of opposition consolidated and, by 1885–86, struck a dagger of danger into the fearful heart of consolidating bourgeois authority. Prime Minister John A. Macdonald wrote to a future Minister of Finance and receiver general and provincial premier, Charles Tupper, that the governing Conservatives were not in a “flourishing state,” citing “Riel, the Knights of Labor, Home Rule and the Scott Act” as serious challenges. An emerging workers’ movement that aligned with temperance advocates and encompassed Irish republicans reached forward from early class actions and strike movements of the pre-Confederation years into province-wide struggles for the nine-hour day in 1872, the formation of trade union federations, and the rise of the Knights of Labor, the Provincial Workmen’s Association in the Maritimes, and the beginnings of independent labour politics, all features of the increasingly class conflictual 1880s. Riel galvanized grievances long germinating among the First Nations and Métis peoples of the West, threatening and ultimately leading an armed insurrection.
At the same time, emerging class conflict brought to the fore socialist intellectuals and critics of capitalism. They helped accelerate and extend opposition to capital and challenges to the state: workers organized, strike activity was more pronounced, a language of labour took on a more aggressive inflection, and political campaigns were mobilized in ways unprecedented over the course of the previous century. At the same time, the war of resistance in the Canadian West took aim at colonialism directly. There were suggestive links between the two oppositional currents and their activities, but they were fragmentary and fleeting. The simultaneous sidetracking and defeat of workers’ and First Nations/Métis rebels indicated a fundamental divide. Workers were drawn into the accommodations of the state, left internally divided amid splits and differentiated strategic directions, and quieted by economic depression in the 1890s. Riel and his army of redressers, forced on to their insurrectionary stand, were militarily vanquished, their retreat mandated by the superior forces and technologies at the disposal of the capitalist state, which had come a long way in enhancing its power since 1869–70. A class mobilization struggling to find its anti-capitalist voice and an anticolonial uprising unsure of how to confront the consolidating state both went down to what might be considered defeats. These 1880s uprisings were overdetermined, in part, by their limitations, one measure of which was their separation from each other. This was a tragedy for the ranks of emerging anti-capitalist, anticolonialist movements.
Richard J. Kerrigan – a Montréal labour activist who began as a Knight of Labor, joined the Socialist Labor Party, and ended up in the 1920s in the One Big Union movement – wrote of “the dynamic year of 1886,” in which state repression, anti–Knights of Labor pronouncements from the Catholic Church, and a host of issues flowed together in an avalanche of reaction. The end result was the demoralization of resistance:
The Knights of Labor grew to alarming proportions in the country, and the Province of Quebec, always the political storm center of Canada, had to get drastic treatment if it were to be kept safe for law and order. Bishop Taschereau of Quebec launched his famous excommunication decree against the Knights of Labor. … Shortly after the political landslide which placed the provincial Liberals in power, the Federal Conservative Government, reeking with financial scandals, and presumably on the principle of the more the merrier, took all the other scandals to its bosom and appealed to the country. So with Home Rule, land thievery, cp Ry scandals, Louis Riel, National Policy, Jesuit Machinations, etc. etc., as issues the electorate would have been hogs for misfortune had they not some reason to vote for or against the Conservative government. The Labor issue was linked up with the Liberal and the Tory, and had its throat cut accordingly.
The same could have been said of a significant component of the anticolonial forces led by Riel and Gabriel Dumont, their collective throat metaphorically strangled with Riel’s all-too-actual hanging.38
In this truncation of a fusion of the anticolonial and working-class, potentially anti-capitalist, struggles lies a measure of the legacy of division and difficulty willed to 20th- and 21st-century dissent. Each of the currents of challenging thought and active struggle associated with the mid-1880s war of resistance in the West and the Great Labor Upheaval that spread throughout Canada was weakened without the benefit of the strengths of the other. The insurrectionary resolve that arose out of the struggle against colonialism in the Northwest needed the emerging critical political economy generated within the organized workers’ movement, out of the experience of industrial workplaces, and among “brainworkers” like the Toronto journalist, and mainstay of the Victor Hugo Assembly of the Knights of Labor, Phillips Thompson.39 The labour reform movement that burst on the industrial capitalist scene in the 1880s, however, also needed to embrace and enhance understandings germinating among colonized and dispossessed peoples, whose grappling with racial oppression might well have enlightened workers whose attitudes toward peoples of colour were too often constrained by prejudice. This was especially evident in the cases of Asian labour, viciously targeted and scapegoated by the British Columbia Knights of Labor, and Indigenous peoples, whose dispossession and subordination remained largely unacknowledged in the emerging workers’ movement.
The anticolonial stand of Riel, Poundmaker, and others – embraced by rare socialist and labour-sympathetic figures such as William Henry Jackson/Honoré Jaxon, Riel’s English-language secretary and a future Knights of Labor activist in the United States, or the Socialist Party of Canada anthropologist James A. Teit – would have proven invaluable to the emerging workers’ movement.40 It might well have stiffened militant working-class resolve to stake out an uncompromising opposition to the state-capital coupling, which figured so prominently in the political economy of late 19th-century Canada.
Anticolonialist commitment, if wedded to anti-capitalism, would only have extended and fulfilled labour’s original organizing principle, “An injury to one is an injury to all.” This truly was the corollary of the bowl with one spoon. In failing to bring these congruent traditions and agitations into a more concerted and common struggle in the 1880s, both streams of dissent and protest were enfeebled. Those opponents dedicated to their defeat – colonialism, capitalism, and their proponents – were empowered. The difficulty we have, a century and more later, in grasping what was missed in this road not taken is itself a reflection of what was repressed and lost, as well as what has been validated and vindicated, in the promise, possibility, and passing of 1885–86.
With resistance repressed, efforts at effectively eliminating “the Indian,” whose being stood as something of an antidote to a consolidating capitalist order, only intensified. Rightly considered a particular weapon in the arsenal of colonialism, the residential school system was undeniably a vital mechanism in the state’s policy of coercive assimilation/cultural genocide. In many ways, residential schools provided a late 19th-century extension of the doctrine of terra nullius. If the original imperial project of colonization rested on the ideological assertion that Indigenous peoples lacked capacities to claim land because they failed to “develop” this territory, the institution of the residential school was premised on the belief that the children of First Nations clans were incapable of properly developing their bodies in the service of capital and “cultivating” their minds, especially if they retained any connection to traditional ways of life. They, and the bodies and minds that they inhabited and were animated by, were, like the land long occupied by their ancestors, rationalized as simply there for the taking and changing. Hair was to be cut, languages suppressed, thoughts reconstituted, bodies used, names denied. John A. Macdonald declared in an 1883 House of Commons speech,
When the school is on the reserve and the child lives with the parents, who are savages; he is surrounded by savages, and though he may learn to read and write his habits and training and mode of thought are Indian. He is simply a savage who can read and write. It has been strongly pressed on myself as Head of the Department, that Indian children should be withdrawn as much as possible from the parental influence, and the only way to do that would be to put them in central training industrial schools, where they acquire the habits and modes of thought of white men.41
The colonial intent of the residential schools was, and remains, abundantly apparent.
Less well appreciated is that these schools of suppression were also part of a much larger disciplinary apparatus, an institutional state that encompassed the educational system in general, asylums, houses of industry, prisons, police forces, and other components of a bureaucratic, administrative order dedicated to instilling in subordinate classes and groups an appropriate obeisance to consolidating capitalism. That the residential school system and the cultural genocide that it perpetuated became institutionalized and generalized throughout Canada in the immediate post-Confederation years is thus neither accidental nor arbitrary. The system was inseparable from capitalism’s consolidation, which demanded and fostered colonialism’s constricting grasp on and need to stifle Indigeneity. This complemented a corresponding assault on the dangerous classes and the so-called undeserving poor, as well as a wide-ranging orchestration of the sphere of capitalist legitimation, which deepened the hegemonic hold of capital and widened the ideological reach of the state.42
All of this constituted a formidable edifice. With capitalism consolidated and colonialism constricting, a nation-state was being erected on particular kinds of pylons. Canada’s future seemed secure in judgement that the country’s First Nations were an inconvenience that had been dealt with and that would, slowly through time, fade away. Diamond Jenness, the favoured anthropological voice of the colonial state, was predicting as late as 1932 that the disappearance of Canada’s Indigenous peoples was an inevitability. This was a part of dispossession’s bright capitalist and colonialist 20th century, however much it rested on dark, often diabolical, 19th-century deeds kept obscured by the shadow of illusion and the overhang of ideology. Liberal Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier, comfortable in this complacent denial of what brought Canada to its seeming prosperity and boundless prospects, was confident at the close of the 19th century that the years ahead would take the country to new heights. “The nineteenth century was the century of the United States. I think we can claim that it is Canada that shall fill the twentieth century,” he said.43
1890–1960: Capitalism Ascendant, Colonialism Extended, and Resistance Restrained
In many ways, the years from 1890 to 1960 accelerated and intensified processes underway in the preceding century, with respect to both capitalism’s development and colonialism’s alignment with it. To be sure, by the end of this period, colonialism with respect to Canada’s First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples did soften its repressive assault somewhat, especially in terms of Ottawa’s public pronouncements, but the commitment to coerced assimilation remained and, in some instances, hardened. Especially in the Canadian North inhabited by Inuit peoples, the forced relocations recounted in Farley Mowat’s The People of the Deer (1952) and The Desperate People (1959) made it all too apparent that the heavy hand of bureaucratic authority still exercised a devastating impact on Indigenous peoples.44
It was in this immediate postwar period, as well, that the overincarceration of Indigenous men and women commenced. Their numbers in federal penitentiaries increased fivefold to more than 2,500 in the decades reaching from 1950 to 1970. Petty offences, many of them related to alcohol, vagrancy, or, for women, sexuality, brought Indigenous peoples into jails and prisons, as did violations of the Indian Act, which remained a tool of repression especially prominent in northern locales. First Nations and Métis women in Ontario’s Mercer Reformatory accounted for 2 per cent of all inmates in the 1920s (39), 4 per cent in the 1930s (80), 7 per cent in the 1940s (109), and 10 per cent in the 1950s (370). Even more telling were jail registers in a place like Kenora, Ontario. Over the course of the years from 1920 to 1959, First Nations and Métis women rose from 13 to 16 per cent of all females arrested in the 1920s and 1930s to 50 to 76 per cent in the 1940s and 1950s. As the law began to be used against the Inuit in the Far North in the immediate post–World War I years, Canada’s Criminal Code extended into the Yukon and the Arctic. Between 1950 and 2000, 46 federal prisons were built, compared with the thirteen penitentiaries constructed in the previous 115 years from 1835 to 1950. They were destined to house disproportionately large inmate populations of Indigenous peoples. The penitentiary was now an economic growth sector. Communities confronting economic restructuring in the 1950s, spiralling downward in deindustrialization, regarded the coming of the carceral state as antidote to their woes, lining up to bid for building penitentiaries in their midst.45
Capitalism changed dramatically, of course, in these 20th-century years. Urbanization accelerated, capital concentrated through a series of consolidations and merger movements, most notably from 1909 to 1913, in the late 1920s, and, again, in the 1940s and 1950s. Roughly 550 industrial consolidations absorbed 1,250 enterprises in the years between 1900 and 1940 alone, leading to the formation of a number of highly capitalized industrial giants. O. D. Skelton, writing as the first pre–World War I merger movement gained momentum, referred to the consolidation of capital as an “epidemic … accompanied by serious evils,” the most egregious of which was the overcapitalization that spawned “inordinate profits of promoters and vendors.”46
If Skelton was troubled by the concentration of capital in 1912, by the end of the period from 1890 to 1960, two world wars, the Great Depression, and periodic crises of overproduction further weeded out the economically marginal and led to the emergence, by the 1950s, of massive financial and industrial trusts. The E. P. Taylor–led Argus Group did its best to corner the market in the lucrative Canadian – and international – beer trade. This culminated in a toothless symbolic state-initiated bite at capital’s restrictive trade practices: a commission established in 1955 to inquire into Taylor’s brewery acquisitions. None of this dampened the Argus Group’s acquisitive spirits, which, by the early 1960s, extended to control over major breweries in the United States and the United Kingdom, as well as Dow and O’Keefe’s, making Taylor the largest beer producer on the planet, with a capacity of over 13 million barrels and an annual advertising budget of $30 million. Argus, moreover, did not stop at beer but bought large, and controlling, blocks of shares in Massey-Harris, Dominion Stores, Dominion Tar and Chemical, the St. Lawrence Corporation, and BC Forest Products. By 1950 Argus controlled ten of Canada’s dominant corporations identified by John Porter in the mid-1950s. Its pulp and paper industry interests in eastern Canada alone constituted assets approaching $175 million by 1958. Such holdings linked the Taylor group to both the Royal Bank and the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. Massey-Harris, the largest producer of tractors in the world, managed subsidiaries in the United States, Britain, France, West Germany, Italy, Brazil, and Australia, and its annual profits at the end of the 1950s grew by over 20 per cent annually.
As an expression of the trend toward oligopoly and even monopoly, the Argus Group extended its corporate reach throughout Canadian capitalism, with sixteen of its leading managerial figures holding 84 corporate directorships outside of the cloistered Taylor-headed conglomerate. Their influence extended, octopus-like, throughout manufacturing, media, and mining and across the spectrum of an array of powerful Canadian financial, industrial, insurance, and retail brokers. Other powerhouses of the Canadian capitalist economy – like the Brazilian Light and Power Traction Company that came to dominate public utilities in a number of Latin American countries, the profitability of enterprise in the Global South now far exceeding that of Canada – spoke to capital’s capacity to colonize distant markets.
This combined development of Canadian capitalist activity at home and abroad constituted an increasing reach of domestic capital in these years from 1890 to 1960. Often overshadowed by the influx of American capital and branch plants of major US corporations establishing themselves in Canada and dominating productive spheres like oil and natural gas and the automobile industry, this global activity of Canadian capital sustained corporate ledgers in many spheres, including mining, metal processing, and banking. As a study of the 1940s concluded, the profit system within which this increasingly concentrated economic power operated knew “no patriotism. … Any attempt to picture Canadian owned and controlled capital as a domesticated tabby cat as compared with the ravening Bengal tiger of foreign capital should be treated with a healthy skepticism. They belong to the same species and have similar claws.”
Capitalism in Canada was fully integrated into a continental financial and industrial order whose international imperialist activity buttressed its domestic concentration. Porter ascertained that among 170 dominant Canadian corporations, 907 individuals residing largely in Montréal and Toronto shared among themselves 1,300 directorships, as well as almost 200 board positions in the country’s nine chartered banks and a number of its life insurance companies, representing 81 and 58 per cent, respectively, of the entirety of such positions. Such men, and they were men, were listened to in the corridors of state power. It was there where policies directly affecting Indigenous peoples and the lands and resources they exercised claims over were conceived and implemented. And it was in those same governing venues where there was considerable consternation over the possibility that the lid containing class struggle would be blown off in strikes and political mobilizations of militant workers and socialist parties committed to curb, if not end, the exploitation and oppression that capital fed on and fostered and the state rationalized and sustained.47
The 1890-to-1960 years were not without significant class uprisings. Strike counts soared, trade union memberships climbed, and radical and reform parties formed and made significant dents in the political armour of the capitalist system. From 1891 to 1950, roughly 2.6 million Canadian workers engaged in upwards of 9,700 strikes, involving over 42 million days lost to capital’s factories, mines, and mills. The total union membership in the country approached one million workers at mid-century, although they were divided regionally and according to craft versus industrial organization. Major moments of conflict occurred during the era of the Russian Revolution, the Winnipeg General Strike, and the miners’ wars that rocked Cape Breton from 1917 to 1923; in 1934 and 1937, during the Great Depression that saw the momentous stirrings of previously unorganized mass production and resource workers, as well as huge and often riotous protests of the unemployed; and in World War II and the postwar upheaval that secured for many workers the collective bargaining rights that the country’s labour movement had been struggling to achieve for almost a century.
The period from 1890 to 1960 commenced with mass struggles of mill workers in the Ottawa-Hull companies run by lumber barons like Perley and Patee, Booth, and Bronson; exploded in the post–World War I rash of general strikes reaching from Amherst, Nova Scotia, to Victoria, British Columbia, the high point of which was the Winnipeg General Strike, which required federal intervention, countless arrests and deportations of strike leaders and activists, and repressive state trials; and ended with the momentous battles of miners (Kirkland Lake, Asbestos, and Sudbury), steel workers (Hamilton and Murdochville), auto workers (Windsor), loggers (British Columbia and Newfoundland), and many others in the 1940s and 1950s. Knights of Labor, the Socialist Party of Canada, the Communist Party (cp), and the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (ccf) had a hand in these class battles, and the federal state, long headed by William Lyon Mackenzie King, a trained authority in pacification of such industrial struggles, initiated a spate of legislation to placate unions at the same time as it hedged them in. Against the revolutionary left the state waged relentless war that began with the assault on far left organizations in World War I; lowered the curtain on anarcho-syndicalists, One Big Unionists, nascent communists, and all manner of foreign radicals in the purging of the General Strike mobilization of 1919; struck out viciously in its criminalization of Communists and their supporters and followers in the Great Depression; and, with the Soviet Union moving from ally to antagonist in the postwar entente, conducted a Cold War that targeted dissenters, freezing them out of public life, including the long-favoured terrain of revolutionary leftists, the trade union movement.
Enactments like the Industrial Disputes Investigation Act (1907) and the Industrial Relations and Disputes Investigation Act (1948) drew on understandings of property as well as liberalizing appreciations of the need not to apply to workers too much of the proverbial stick of repression. They did not entirely give workers a free reign, of course, and were often supplemented by more draconian provincial legislation. Workers engaging in “illegal strikes” and picketing could be fined and, as trade unions were ever more entangled in the web of legalism, they could be sued for damages if their activities violated the law. In British Columbia and Newfoundland, the 1950s saw the passage of a number of labour acts that left trade union heads under the guillotine of the state’s authoritarian class regime. Joey Smallwood’s Labour Relations Amendment Act of 1959, for instance, criminalized secondary boycotts and sympathetic strikes in Newfoundland. The province was empowered to dissolve any trade union whose officers were convicted of an illegal act. Between 1958 and 1962, the number of organized workers in Newfoundland declined precipitously, to 16,000, while union locals were reduced in number from 186 to 109, a collapse of more than 40 per cent. Class struggle, threatening in the period from 1890 to 1960, was recognized and accommodated somewhat, but it was also relentlessly contained.48
The same might well be said about anticolonial First Nations–led protest and efforts to integrate into the workers’ movement. Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh workers formed their own Local 526 of the revolutionary syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World in 1906, dubbing their union the “Bows and Arrows.” But like the IWW as a whole, this local led a somewhat mercurial existence, rising and falling, ebbing and flowing, until it disappeared in the 1930s. Longshoremen such as Joseph Capilano and Andrew Paull led the British Columbia First Nations struggle to turn back the appropriation of land, travelling to London to lay before the king the grievances of a still sizable Indigenous population of 80,000. The west coast would prove the cradle of pan-Indian mobilization, and in 1916 Paull founded the Allied Tribes of British Columbia. Keying off the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the contribution of First Nations soldiers to the war effort of 1914 to 1918, and the labour militancy of 1919, a Mohawk from the Six Nations reserve near Brantford, Fred O. Loft, built the League of Indians of Canada into a widening protest over land that angered Duncan Campbell Scott and the Department of Indian Affairs (dia).
Scott did his best to besmirch the likes of Loft and Paull. In 1927 the Indian Act was revised to prohibit any solicitation of funds directed at the “recovery of any claim … for the benefit” of “any band or tribe,” without the express consent of the dia and its Indian agents. A vindictive retaliation against Indigenous peoples who would challenge colonialism’s material foundations, this rewriting of legislation governing First Nations was an overt attempt to squash dissent and restrain political organization aimed at reinstating First Nations’ entitlement to unceded land. It was reinforced by a host of other parliamentary restrictions, running the gamut from game law regulations to refusing the right of Indigenous farmers to sell produce off the reserve or curbing/outlawing the time that might be spent in particular spaces, such as pool halls and taverns. Colonialism went into overdrive, its repressive apparatus entrenching dispossession.
Within the capitalist labour market, too, it became more and more difficult – even in places with long traditions of First Nations waged work, like British Columbia – for Indigenous peoples to retain their places on payrolls, a trajectory of truncated economic possibility noted by Rolf Knight and John Lutz. In the residential schools, as George Manuel later recalled, “Every Indian smelled of hunger.” The training of Indigenous peoples was far less about integration into capitalism than it was about numbing the mind and obliterating strains of Indigeneity that harboured attachments to the bowl with one spoon.49
Detailed studies of Manitoba’s North by Frank Tough and Jim Mochoruk conclude that by 1930 the decimation of fish stocks, rapacious cutting of timber, surveying and selling of Aboriginal lands never legally “surrendered,” and prejudice against hiring Indigenous and Métis peoples left Cree, Ojibway, and other communities reeling in the wake of capitalism’s ubiquitous onslaught. Traditional subsistence fishing gave way to commercial, capitalized ventures, with firms employing York barges, gasoline-fed motorboats, and steam tugboats. In 1890 the Lake Winnipeg fishery investment was valued at just under $80,000. Fifteen years later, that figure had climbed to $500,000. Fish often went the way of the beaver and the buffalo, as Manitoba’s northern lakes were plundered to feed American markets. Mining ran a similar course, with the value added to the Manitoba economy by this sector in 1926 approaching $1 million, increasing eleven-fold over the course of a decade. By the 1940s, Manitoba’s mining interests, which rarely employed First Nations labourers, were profiting from resource extraction to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. While in-migration to Manitoba of white mine workers and others saw the percentage of the province’s population living in northern resource-extractive communities jump from 9 per cent to 29 per cent in the years from 1921 to 1931, the proportion of the population designated Native/Indian declined.50
The Great Depression was punishing enough for most Canadians. But for Indigenous peoples, disproportionately dependent on relief from government agencies, the “dirty thirties” saw times only get tougher. Per capita relief for Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples residing in Canada exhibited a marked divergence. In 1932 the per capita relief expenditure for First Nations was about $20, compared with over $44 for Canadians as a whole. Those amounts were roughly $18 and $47, respectively, two years later. In 1936, with the dia folded up and the Depression clearly an ongoing crisis, per capita Indigenous relief rose back to over $20.50, but the comparable figure for the settler population jumped significantly, to almost $67.70. This, moreover, occurred as Indigenous incomes – from the faltering fur trade and other waged sources – collapsed between 1925 and 1934 across the northern reaches of Québec, Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. Pillars of the Canadian social work establishment, such as Charlotte Whitton, attacked Métis relief recipients as undeserving, and a constricting permit system drastically limited First Nations peoples on the reserves of western Canada. An embittered Elder recalled the hierarchies of relief support. In 1931, city families received $15 monthly, and country domestic units were given $10 because they had livestock and vegetable gardens, but Indigenous people, who could ostensibly “live off the land,” were beneficiaries of $5. “Indians haven’t lived off the land since the days of Custer,” this disgruntled First Nations informant told Barry Broadfoot, “but you couldn’t tell the bastards in Ottawa that. I honestly think they didn’t consider Indians as people.”51
As it had a generation earlier, world war kickstarted new initiatives on the part of First Nations to build a broad, organized resistance defending land and traditional entitlements. Jules Sousi of the Huron Nation issued a bilingual circular to chiefs of all the First Nations in Canada, asking them to convene in Ottawa in October 1944, raising the issue of compulsory military service and the erosion of First Nations’ exemption from taxation. Indian Affairs officials were especially threatened when delegates to this gathering gained an audience with Mackenzie King’s private secretary, J. W. Pickersgill, and soon formed the North American Indian Brotherhood (naib) with Sousi, John Tootoosis from Saskatchewan’s Poundmaker reserve, and Andrew Paull from British Columbia taking leading roles. Ottawa’s position remained, in the words of its Minister of Mines and Resources, Thomas Crerar, that “Indians of this country will become full citizens of Canada” – a diplomatic phrasing of the intent to phase out special treatment and acknowledgement of treaty rights. First Nations sovereignty, Crerar told the naib, was a dead letter: assimilation was the course to follow. Sioui and the naib disagreed, inspired by anticolonial sentiments and mobilizations around the world, as well as growing civil rights activism in North America. Along with other activists, Sioui helped mount an opposition movement that aimed to speak for all “Indian peoples in Canada and the United States.”52
This political opposition never quite managed, again, to connect up with, or be embraced by, the left-wing, working-class, and social democratic campaigns animating many Canadians in the 1930s and 1940s. As the Canadian working class revolted in 1919, the epicentre of the conflict, Winnipeg, saw the city’s working class down tools for collective bargaining rights at the same time that capital was constructing an aqueduct to divert water from reserve lands at Shaol Lake to the burgeoning population of the western metropolis. As working-class surplus value was being stolen by capital, and a massive mobilization to put limits on this extraction arose, that same capital was using section 46 of the Indian Act to appropriate a vital Indigenous resource and maroon a reserve, leaving it cut off from services and making it impossible to remove garbage or treat sewage. For less than $3,000, Winnipeg’s mayor and his capitalist confreres were granted 3,700 acres by the federal government and undertook a $17 million waterworks project that lined their pockets with cash for decades. Celebrated in 1923 as “the largest public works in the British Dominion” and championed as one of the longest water-supplying construction projects in the world, the Winnipeg aqueduct was a reminder, like the repression meted out to the city’s General Strikers, of capital’s power and the state’s obeisance to its deity of profitable development. That this relied on ongoing colonial expropriation, as well as expansive exploitation in the productive realm, was, however, evident to those in the know but less clearly understood as a coupling by the workers and First Nations who experienced capitalist development differentially and unevenly, albeit both rather roughly, in 1919.53
A decade and more later, with capitalist Canada plumbing the depths of economic crisis and collapse, the situation had changed very little. Two Métis radicals, Jim Brady and Malcolm Norris, drawing on the growing resentment and tensions among the destitute non-reserve Indigenous peoples of Alberta and Saskatchewan in the Great Depression, struggled within both the cp and the ccf to raise the level of political awareness of First Nations and Métis issues with their Marxist and socialist comrades. It was tough political sledding.54
The formation of bodies like L’Association des Métis d’Alberta et des Territoires du Nord Ouest/Métis Association of Alberta (maa) was a step forward. The maa prodded a provincial government inquiry into “the condition of the Half-Breed population,” resulting in the passage of 1938 legislation establishing a legal framework for setting aside land for Métis settlements and protocols for joint Indigenous-state governance. But little, in the end, came of this. The maa’s constitution called on any British subject with “Indian ancestry” to join the Métis in their resolve to “defend their constitutional rights against the encroachments of nascent monopoly capital,” completing their “unification with the Canadian nation,” the basis of which would be recognition of sovereign rights to land and its use. But Brady and Norris found themselves increasingly frozen out of the maa as it moved into closer proximity with state officialdoms, and while they recruited working-class Métis militants to both the cp and the ccf, this did little to alter the fundamental reality that there was a basic disconnect between Brady’s forthright linkage of anti-capitalist and anticolonial struggles and the positions of the two leading radical organizations of the 1930s and 1940s.
The cp, for instance, considered Métis recruits “to the struggle for socialism as workers rather than as fighters of an anti-colonial struggle,” embracing dichotomization rather than transcending it. When the ccf came to governing power in Saskatchewan in 1944, its record in addressing First Nations and Métis issues remained wedded to age-old prejudices and perspectives on citizenship, enfranchisement, and assimilation. With respect to the northern reaches of the province, the social democratic ccf could not see past its commitment to the region as an expanding capitalist frontier. Mining communities, where the vast bulk of northern Saskatchewan’s white population resided and worked, received most of the Regina government’s attention and largesse. The trapping, hunting, and fishing subsistence economies of the northern parts of the province, on which 95 per cent of the First Nations and Métis inhabitants depended, withered.55
Little seemed to have changed from the 19th century. There were, however, signs of a shifting context by the mid-20th century. The long-standing demographic decline of Indigenous peoples was stemmed, and population increases – a consequence of declining mortality and rising birth rates that themselves probably reflected adaptations to colonialism, the improved medical and welfare systems of the post-1940 years, and many other factors – registered in a rebounding of Indigenous numbers. Precise statistical measures of this are difficult to arrive at, given changing status designations and how they translated into self-reporting to state agencies and surveys, like the census, but those whose origins were declared Indigenous and Inuit (the actual designations were “Native Indian” and “Eskimo”) saw a jump from roughly 125,500 in 1941 to 220,100 in 1961.
Saskatchewan’s First Nations demographics in the years from 1941 to 1959 were striking: the province’s reserve population increased 9 per cent between 1941 and 1946; 15 per cent in the period from 1946 to 1951; 18 per cent from 1951 to 1956; and an astounding 21 per cent over the last four years of the 1950s. This resiliency, coupled with a political climate more and more receptive to the civil rights of minorities in the advanced capitalist West, the emergence of pan-Indian mobilizations of protest, and growing discontent with the parsimoniously run dia, headed by Duncan Campbell Scott’s replacement, Dr. Harold McGill, all contributed to an assessment within the state that the Indian Act needed reconsideration.
A Joint Senate and House of Commons Committee held hearings from 1946 to 1948 and provided draft revisions to the foundational legislative document of 19th-century colonialism, anchoring state policy on Indigenous peoples. What came out of this process reflected both the necessity of change and the political and intellectual sclerosis that, ultimately, blocked the possibility in postwar Canada of any substantial reconfiguration of Indigenous-state relations. But the hearings at least provided a forum for consultation and input, something shunned in decades past. First Nations militants insisted that Indigenous sovereignty could only be achieved through the establishment of Indian councils liberated from the arbitrary authority of Indian agents and beholden not to the government in power but to the Parliament of Canada. Other witnesses, often speaking on behalf of distinct bands, placed less of an accent on issues of governance, focusing instead on the need to adequately provide for the destitute and the elderly.56
When the Indian Act was revised in 1951, the amendments addressed narrowly specific points. They enhanced band authority over Indigenous lands, administrative bylaws, and funds, but it would take the better part of a decade to secure First Nations control over expenditures on reserves. Prohibitions on dance and potlatch rituals, first enacted in the 19th century, were repealed. The circumstances in which compulsory enfranchisement and the consequent loss of Indian status could be imposed were relaxed, and bans on political organization, largely ineffective by the mid-20th century, were rescinded. Finally, there was a lessening of the moral regulation of Indigenous people through restrictions on their use of alcohol. Companion legislation extended welfare rights to Indigenous peoples, making them eligible for old age pensions and entitlements under the provisions of the Blind Persons Act. John Diefenbaker, a future Conservative prime minister and leading Opposition member in the House of Commons, considered that after three years of deliberation the Liberal government’s reconsideration of the Indian Act had produced little. “The mountain brings forth a mouse,” he bellowed in the House of Commons.
Chief Joe Dreaver of the Mistawasis band and leader of the Associated Indians of Saskatchewan expressed his disappointment: “It appears my people are to remain manacled to, and governed by, bureaucracy. Should the government decide to retain the smothering protective laws that have kept us down for so long, then the future is dark, without a glimmer of the expected dawn.” This was a metaphorical likening of the situation of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples that resonated with the portrait of the colonized Québécois in these same mid-century years. Pierre Vallières, in Nègres blancs d’Amérique/White Niggers of America, considered this period “a great darkness.” All indications were that a liberal understanding of the country’s “Indian problem” demanded the solution of assimilation through citizenship and inclusion, introducing, in Hugh Shewell’s words, “a new intensified form of state subjugation.” As the relocations of Inuit bands in the Far North indicated, this suited capital fine, and both colonialism and capitalism seemed set for a further long and lucrative run. Then the 1960s happened.57
1960–2022: Anti-Capitalism and Anticolonialism – The Climacteric and Capitalist Crisis
The post–World War II years, not unlike the beginnings of the 20th century, were hailed as Canadian capitalism’s success story. Buoyant in the aftermath of war’s destruction of Europe, a global confrontation that further concentrated international capital and focused the state’s role as the overseer of the profit system and architect of capitalist legitimation, the Canadian apparatus of governance extended social welfare in the 1940s and 1950s. Understandings that much was possible within capitalism’s expansive potential were unleashed, in good part because the state coffers were, due to rising profits, relatively full. The ideological value added of this largesse was especially decisive if, as would be evident by the 1960s, Western societies could triumph over Stalinist deformations of communist potential, on heightened display since the revelations of the 1950s and suppression of dissent in Hungary and Czechoslovakia in, respectively, 1956 and 1968.
Ironically, however, the economic prospects of endless possibility associated with the 1960s proved to be ascendant capitalism’s last gasp. Appeasing workers with limited concessions only encouraged labour to demand more; policies promoting equality and promising a state-orchestrated war on poverty seemed to lift the lid on a Pandora’s box of containments, leveraging dissent in all kinds of quarters, among the poor, women, youth, the Québécois, and Indigenous peoples. All of this happened because capitalism seemed, for a time, to be able to absorb such costs, be they material or ideological. This climate of placation, however, could not last.
Collective bargaining entitlements were extended to the exploited Canadian working class in the late 1940s, and these would be followed by the building up of the “social service” or welfare state. Envisioned in the pressure cooker of wartime, the true flowering of Canada’s welfare state would occur in the 1960s, culminating in a national healthcare program, a $4 billion employer-employee pension plan, and a revamped unemployment insurance initiative put in place in 1971. What the state gave, with funds that workers underwrote, could, however, be withdrawn or clawed back as capitalism constricted, which it inevitably would. And welfare came with many strings, including an often-intrusive bureaucracy with enhanced powers to intervene in the personal lives of recipients of state funds.
Granting collective bargaining rights to workers, with the quid pro quo of suppressing communists among their unions, brought gains of political stability extending into the early 1960s. But by mid-decade, a new generation of youthful workers who knew little of the ideological battles that animated past generations of labour activists, and were no longer easily cowed by authority, be it ensconced in the state or in the ownership of enterprises, were breaking out of this containment. They were in no mood to bend the knee of supplication before arbitrary workplace rules or be confined by conventional labour-capital relations. Authority, at every level from the foreman to the legal system to state decrees and political pronouncements, they regarded with disdain. Playing the “red card” of anticommunism was not going to bring them in line. A wave of illegal wildcat strikes erupted in 1964, 1965, and 1966, challenging capital, the state, and ossified union bureaucracies.58
Radical students, fed up with Cold War conventions, protested the nuclear arms race, demanded civil rights for oppressed minorities, and marched against imperialist aggression and colonialism abroad, demanding an end to the war in Vietnam. To offset the growing influence of militant dissent in organizations like the Canadian Union of Students and the Student Union for Peace Action, the state bankrolled the Company of Young Canadians (cyc), in an explicit attempt to co-opt youth radicalization. This simply whet the appetite for social activism and transformation. The cyc soon harboured militants putting out a newspaper called Workers’ Power, supporting Indigenous activists who were resisting colonization, and aligning with a rising movement of revolutionary nationalism in Québec that, with each passing year from 1963 to 1969, mounted more protests, many of them violent. A veteran of the cyc, Jeannette Corbiere Lavell, of Manitoulin Island’s Wikwemikong First Nation, would lead the 1973 court challenge to the Indian Act’s sexual discrimination against women who married non-Indigenous men. Other Indigenous cycers helped create autonomous First Nations, Métis, and Inuit organizations, such as the Indian Brotherhood of the Northwest Territories, worked with white supporters and radicals to pioneer media projects such as Northern Ontario’s Kenomadiwin News or the National Film Board’s Indian Film Crew, and founded the North American Indian Travelling College.59
Sovereignty demands exploded in the streets of Montréal, “Indian country” seethed with discontent, and workers and their trade unions were in an obvious state of upheaval. Antipoverty campaigns called attention to the inequalities both obvious and growing in a supposedly affluent Canadian society, with colonized Indigenous peoples and francophones at the bottom of a hierarchical society whose claims to being just were publicly pilloried. Young women were fed up with being ideologically confined to kitchens and nurseries when they were more and more of a presence in waged workplaces, albeit at the receiving end of pay differentials that further infuriated them. Royal Commissions on their status were offered, but for many this was, again, only an inducement to push demands to other levels, with Indigenous women playing a significant role in such protest. In Montréal, a rampaging crowd supported imprisoned Front de libération du Québec activists Charles Gagnon and Pierre Vallières by terrorizing the city’s business district. Incendiary devices rained down on police headquarters, city hall, the Montreal Star offices, and any insurance company or bank ready-to-hand. Mayor Jean Drapeau responded with a repressive banning of demonstrations and public meetings. Feminists were quick to react. They decked themselves in chains, parading on Montréal thoroughfares. The streets echoed with chants of “No liberation for Quebec without women’s liberation. No women’s liberation without Quebec’s liberation.” Arrests followed. So, too, did the formation of the Front de libération des femmes du Québec. It espoused socialist, feminist, and indépendantiste politics.60
The 1960s, perhaps for the first time in Canadian history, offered the possibility of the fusion of anti-capitalist/anticolonialist mobilization and protest. As mercurial and ultimately fleeting as was this moment, it was a climacteric in the history of Canadian capitalism and colonialism. If this climacteric would succumb to capitalism’s post-1973 crises, which witnessed the rise of neoliberalism, the decimation of the labour movement, and the decline of the New Left – all of which eviscerated radical organizations, numbed the anti-capitalist sensibilities of 1960s struggles, and conditioned many a personal retreat – it left a lasting legacy of anticolonialism. This would constantly refer back to the politics of Red Power associated with the wider mobilizations of what has come to be referred to as “1968.”61
If the largesse of the postwar boom trickled down to reserves and funded employment and welfare programs for First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples, the rhetoric of change cloaked the continuity of material dispossession.62 A 1964 survey of 35,000 status Indians living on (73 per cent) and off (27 per cent) reserves reported per capita Indigenous yearly income of just over $300, compared with a Canadian average of $1,400. Annual earnings for Indigenous waged workers averaged $1,361, with the comparable national figure being about $4,000, but even this masked the extent to which most First Nations, Métis, and Inuit reporting employment cashed a cheque intermittently. About a quarter of these Indigenous workers secured only two months of paid work in any given year. One-third of Canada’s Indigenous families surveyed were dependent on subsidies from Indian Affairs. By the end of the 1960s, this government department was spending $175 million annually on welfare, education, housing, economic development, and the ever-present and rising costs of administering such programs, as well as $100 million on Indigenous health care.63
A late 1960s Liberal government of Pierre Trudeau took one last patently transparent stand on the now long and tired history of overt coerced assimilation, suggesting in 1969 that it would revoke the Indian Act and “free” Indigenous peoples to become citizens like any others. This backfired. Those offered this state-determined freedom wanted no part of what they understood was a truly Faustian bargain: relinquishing Indigenous special status, however much it was itself dripping with oppressive conditions and restrictions on liberties, was not worth what was on offer. Jettisoning the Indian Act, as much as it was hated and opposed, most First Nations people appreciated, would abolish treaty entitlements and forever bury claims to historic prerogatives, including outstanding land issues that the government wanted to deal with precipitously.64
The ineptly canonized “White Paper” of the Liberal government’s newly proposed policy initiatives – so named because of its covers – was challenged by First Nations resistance. Leading the anti–White Paper brigade was a 24-year-old Cree activist, Harold Cardinal, author of a wildly commercially successful 1969 book, The Unjust Society, that aimed to sweep back the racist “buckskin curtain” that kept mainstream Canadian society blithely ignorant about the lived experience of the country’s Indigenous peoples.
Cardinal was less radical than many of his Red Power contemporaries. He used their militancy to poise a threatening guillotine over the collective head of the Canadian political economy. If it wanted to avoid the mayhem unleashed in the United States by the Black Power movement, it was high time to redress Indigenous grievance and finally put the brakes on the overdrive to coercively assimilate First Nations peoples. Cardinal was adroit enough to realize that his “curtain” metaphor resonated in Cold War Canada, with its unmistakable animosity to the Soviet Union’s “iron curtain.” He parlayed all of this into leading the anti–White Paper forces, headed up by the Indian Association of Alberta, helping to orchestrate a decisive treatise of refutation, colloquially dubbed the “Red Paper.” The 1970 document, appropriately formally titled “Citizens Plus,” borrowed a term used by H.B. Hawthorn in a 1967 government report that was largely ignored by those in Ottawa who commissioned it. Indigenous peoples were not about to be railroaded out of their rights and treaty entitlements by a government promising them citizenship but obliterating their traditional ways, cultural distinctiveness, and unique place in the Canadian mosaic. Their stand prevailed, and Trudeau, his Indian Affairs lieutenant, Jean Chrétien, and the Ottawa bureaucracy behind the White Paper were forced to stand down.65
In the process, colonialism was forever branded a vehicle of Indigenous oppression and suppression, and the state was forced to shift its stance. Past indifference and worse was now sugar-coated with language of good intentions, and the federal government was forced onto ledges of acknowledgement of past wrongs. Its post-1970 course would necessarily be one of reconciliation and ostensible restitution, however much these would be repeatedly sidestepped. Indigenous peoples responded with refusals to countenance colonialism’s many legacies, upping the level of demand around claims to land and sovereignty and insistence that their treaty rights be acknowledged.66
Indigenous politics in the 1960s entered a new phase. Many more political organizations of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples were formed in the years from 1960 to 1973 (86) than in the entire period from the late 18th century to 1959 (61).67 Even more important than this explosion of Indigenous organization, however, was the changing nature of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit agency. Their reduction to the status of wards of the state, and their alienating relegation to cul-de-sacs of impoverished dispossession and isolation, was subject to powerful critique, as Indigenous militants became part of a more generalized youth radicalization, with which they identified. Anticolonialism’s foundational place in the politics of the New Left, combined with Black Power’s notoriety and credibility, translated into the relatively easy embrace of the struggles of all racialized peoples.
Canada’s reserves were described as “rural ghettoes.” A leading figure in Toronto’s Afro-American Progressive Association, the Guyanese novelist and playwright Jan Carew, summarized the symbiotic relations of Blacks and Indigenous peoples and the racist Canadian legacies of dispossession they lived with for centuries:
In analyzing race relations in this country it is impossible to deal with the Black minority without reference to the Indian one. The two are indivisible since racism springs from the same tap root in society – a history of exploitation and greed where profits were more important than human rights. The Blacks and Indians were dispossessed for the same reasons.
Black Power, Red Power, and the anticolonial politics they conditioned were taking on the trappings of a resolute anti-capitalist stand, as evidenced in the memoirs of activists such as Lee Maracle and Indigenous fiction set in the 1960s. In the coalitions and cross-fertilizations of the decade’s New Left, Indigenous men and women were influenced by Malcolm X, the Black Panthers, and Frantz Fanon; anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and anticolonialist thought percolated through such circles; and organizers of iconic Indigenous protests and campaigns, like a 1965 Kenora march in Northern Ontario or the activities of Vancouver’s Native Alliance of Red Power (narp), drew direct lines of connection between their militancy and those of Marxists such as Jack Scott of the Progressive Workers or Métis militants like Jim Brady and Malcolm Norris. Pledges to the cause of all “persecuted peoples” were commonplace in cells of Red Power activists.68
Old grievances, such as resentment of the treatment of Indigenous children in residential schools, received added impetus, and by the 1960s it was recognized in government agencies that these colonial institutions had to be wound down. But enough of the old mentality of coerced assimilation remained to keep filling residential school classrooms with Indigenous children. A significant contingent of these supposedly “rescued” children, torn from families and traditional surroundings, ended up in foster care, where they might be loved and cherished, or abused and denigrated, but others found their way, once again, to residential schools. At one BC residential school, half of the children in 1960 were said to have come from “broken homes” where “immoral conditions” prevailed; by 1974 the figure climbed to 83 per cent. This was the infamous Sixties Scoop. At-risk Indigenous youngsters were once again removed from parents, be they living on reserves or in urban centres – many of whom were themselves psychologically damaged graduates of the residential schools – and whose criminalization, substance and alcohol abuse, and neglect of their sons and daughters were targeted by an increasingly intrusive welfare bureaucracy and a legal system known to imprison First Nations and Métis offenders at disarmingly high rates. Red Power militants like Howard Adams routinely and angrily noted that “from 60 to 90 percent of inmates in Canada’s jails are Indians and Métis” – figures that exaggerated overincarceration but, in provinces like Saskatchewan, not by much.69
Dene militants in the Canadian North opposed to the construction of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline linked the colonialism of the residential school system, capitalist encroachment on their lands, and the denigration of alternative ways of living that both Indigenous peoples and New Left youth were embracing:
How can we tolerate an educational system that is set up to fit into a capitalist world? Where the whole purpose of life is to become rich? Where the competitive spirit, the individualistic spirit, is far more important than the spirit of co-operation and the spirit of community? Where there is no room for mercy for the many who cannot make it? Where either you fit into the system or you are an outcast, a drop-out, a hippie?
A 40-year-old social democratic lawyer and British Columbia Supreme Court Justice, a former leader of the New Democratic Party of New Left sensibilities, Thomas Berger, was, by something of a political fluke, appointed to oversee a 1974–77 inquiry into pipeline construction in the Canadian North. The confluence of 1960s radicalism and Red Power came together in a stand both anti-capitalist and anticolonial as Berger’s investigations unfolded. What emerged out of Berger’s commission was less his judgement, which placed constraints on one pipeline proposal and vetoed another because of its potentially destructive impact on the cariboo migrations so crucial to northern people’s survival, than its process.70
In Berger’s 1970s undertaking, Indigenous peoples of the Canadian North were afforded a platform, possibly for the first time, to air their views on colonialism and capitalism and how traditional lifeways and demands around self-determination were counterposed to these deep structures of subordination. The Berger Commission’s numerous and geographically dispersed hearings became a significant exercise in 1960s participatory democracy, and one in which New Leftists like Mel Watkins worked with First Nations such as the Dene. Indigenous peoples, with whom Berger obviously sympathized, were encouraged to voice their views of pipeline construction in their own languages, translation services and other procedures facilitating their involvement being central to the proceedings. Animating the hearings was Berger’s and Indigenous people’s insistence that pipeline construction was but the immediate accumulative wedge that would spell the capitalist deathknell of a particular way of life in the North: “Native land and culture would have been destroyed and people left with nothing.” As the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation covered Berger’s northern hearings, and the National Film Board recorded the proceedings, 300 delegates from the Indian Brotherhood of the Northwest Territories, later known as the Dene Nation, and the Métis Association of the Northwest Territories met in Simpson. They drafted and approved a 1975 statement called “The Dene Declaration,” the first line of which proclaimed, “We the Dene of the N.W.T. insist on the right to be regarded by ourselves and the world as a nation.” Georges Erasmus later recalled that the Berger Commission was noteworthy because Indigenous peoples made it into a forum through which they declared their struggle for national rights, an exercise that advanced “collective self-awareness.” This would prove a process centrally important in Coulthard’s influential discussion of First Nations self-determination as a struggle against dispossession and “for land, understood now as material resource to be exploited in the capital accumulation process.”71
As the Berger inquiry was happening, capitalism was spiralling downward in a global crisis that turned on the very resources – oil and natural gas – that prompted the hearings galvanizing northern Indigenous peoples. When energy-producing nations in the Global South fought back against their own colonial constraints, imposed by capitalist enterprises that exercised a stranglehold over global marketing of oil, the world was precipitated into a wild, mercurial ride of skyrocketing, then falling, energy prices. This unleashed surging inflation, business stagnation, and, particular to Canada, an acrimonious regionalism: oil-producing provinces like Alberta pitted themselves against the Ottawa-emanating cries of the need for federal intervention to secure the national interest.
Capital was in the throes of a debilitating economic downturn. The crisis was undeniably global but manifested itself in distinctly Canadian ways. Canada’s Gross National Product, accounting for inflation, never dipped below 5.7 per cent in the two decades reaching from 1950 to 1970. In 1975, GNP slowed to a 1.2 per cent increase. By the calculations of sociologist Murray E. G. Smith, the rate of profit for Canadian capital in the years 1971 to 1975 reached lows never experienced in the post–World War II period. M. J. Weber and D. L. Rigby conclude that the rate of profit in Canada’s manufacturing sector declined from 45 per cent in the early 1950s to 28 per cent in 1981, a drop of 17 per cent. The state experienced a cash flow problem, as revenues dried up. Government deficits, rare and modest in the years from 1947 to 1974, when 20 of 27 annual accountings recorded surpluses, soared in 1975–76. From a balance of almost $3 billion to the good in 1973, Ottawa confronted large deficits in 1975 and again in 1976. The ideology of Keynesianism, in which government spending was extolled and welfare and other state programs of amelioration extended, had run its course: a fiscal crisis of the state was unfolding amid the real politik of a profitability crunch.72
Trudeau’s Liberal government introduced restraint measures and wage and price controls that, in conjunction with the economic downturn, initiated an intensified class war from above that would lead into late 20th-century years of neoliberal austerity. This ultimately cowed a mainstream labour movement that, over the course of the 1960s and into the early 1970s, appeared to be mounting effective insurgencies that often secured double-digit wage hikes. Labour leaders who resisted the state’s program were jailed as the 1970s came to a close. Decades later, precious few such workers’ representatives were willing to defy the state and risk their loss of freedom. As a neoliberal age of austerity was championed by virtually all sitting governments – social democratic, liberal, and conservative – the state turned against the working class it had, in the aftermath of the Rand decision in 1946, seemingly placated with the carrot of collective bargaining entitlements. This set the stage for a climate of anti-labour initiatives that, in the words of Leo Panitch and Donald Swartz, dismantled the postwar labour-capital accord, such as it had been, and implemented an era of permanent exceptionalism. Virtually the entire public sector was banned from striking – a draconian cue that was quickly taken up by unions in the private sector, whose leaderships grew more and more timid, fearful of pushing the envelope of class struggle in unpropitious times.73
As capital lurched from crisis to crisis – weathering international currency collapses in the 1990s, a 2007–09 meltdown induced in part by reckless mortgage policies, and a 2020–22 seemingly never-ending pandemic – it rebounded from the profitability crisis of the 1970s but managed to keep labour under its increasingly powerful, and state-supported, thumb. Annual strike levels of the mid-1970s, numbering 1,171, were reduced to roughly 650 in 1982–83, falling further to fewer than 550 in 1988, and barely crossing the 400 threshold in 1992. The percentage of working time lost to strikes fell almost continuously in these years and by the late 1980s stood at approximately one-third that of the mid-1970s; in the early 1990s it was less than one-fifth. As the 2007–09 financial crisis crippled workplaces, with 450,000 full-time Canadian workers laid off, the unemployment count ratcheted up to 1.5 million, and Ontario’s critical manufacturing sector shed 176,000 jobs, strike activity was brought to an absolute halt, as it was during the covid-19-induced crisis a decade later.74
In what was a recurring cycle of boom/bust, subordination/accumulation, capital lowered the proverbial iron heel on workers, grinding their organizations, agency, and militancy into the ground. At the same time, it feathered its own nest with income grabs, intensification of inequality, and increasing profits. Income gains occurring over the years from 1992 to 2005 were the prerogative of the wealthiest 10 per cent of Canadians, who accounted for 67 per cent of this material advantage. Mainstream newspapers like the Toronto Star reported that Canada’s richest 86 individuals controlled net worth comparable to the poorest 11.4 million Canadians, or more wealth than was present in the entire province of New Brunswick. When a flurry of 2011 Occupy protests targeted capital’s greed, pillorying the richest 1 per cent while the remainder of the population suffered, it did so largely distanced from the trade unions, with many in the new movement regarding “Big Labour” as a part of the problem rather than an ally in any future solution to capitalist crisis and inequality. In an epoch of seemingly permanent crisis, sectors of capital, especially finance, prospered and consolidated their power. Bailed out in 2007–09, Canadian banks turned the subsequent pandemic crisis into a financial boondoggle. Profits climbed astronomically. On the strength of over $57 billion in windfall gains during the covid crisis, Canadian banks prepared to pay out $19 billion in bonuses to their corporate leaders. As the economy shrank in 2020, the median stock-price increase for 2021 jumped 30 per cent. Canadian Pacific Railway, Enbridge, Barrick Gold, Manulife Financial, Pembina Pipeline, Suncor Energy, and, of course, the chartered banks that serviced them rewarded their ceos with salary top-ups of between $11.8 and $26.7 million. Crisis was clearly good for some. For others, not so much. Almost 70 per cent of Canadians thought that whatever the government was saying, they were caught in the vice-grip of recession in February 2022. One-quarter of the country’s people confronted insolvency, and nearly one-half reported that they were $200 away from being able to cover their monthly expenses.75
This was the discipline of the neoliberal marketplace, lowered on Canadian working people with relentless vigour in the post-1973 years. This long half-century of belt-tightening for the many saw the Canadian capitalist elite consolidate its place not only within the boundaries of Canada but as a world player in the global capitalist marketplace. Canadian colonialism was not only operative across the vast expanse of the country but increasingly evident in domestic capital’s role continentally, especially in the United States but also around the world, where mines, banks, and utilities in the developing world, as well as many other enterprises, were profitable wellsprings for Canadian corporations.76
Among Indigenous people, who felt the blows of this process of capitalist consolidation in workplaces and in the state’s neoliberal penchant for cutbacks and austerity, the repressive attack was somewhat different. During the entire 20th century leading up to the age of permanent crisis in the 1970s, First Nations, Métis, and Inuit communities, families, and individuals generally confronted the state as an agent of dispossession, coerced assimilation, and blunt attack. In contrast, labour may well have seemed, at least in the post–World War II years, to have been looked upon by governing authority, if not its direct capitalist adversaries, with a more benign countenance. Of course, the stark reality was that both Indigenous peoples and workers were anything but favoured by capital and the state. Nonetheless, the rhetorical terms with which these key adversarial components in the capitalism/colonialism combination were addressed shifted somewhat in the post-1970 years. Whereas organized labour and militant workers were perceived as being offered more in the way of state conciliation in the era of the postwar settlement reaching from 1946 to 1973, Indigenous peoples remained an object to be coercively assimilated for much of this period. After 1973, things changed, at least at the level of state pronouncement and the rhetoric of recognition. It became commonplace to denounce workers and their organizations, just as it was increasingly seen as prudent in the corridors of state power, and even in the boardrooms of more astute corporations, to acknowledge that consultation with and recognition of First Nations was necessary. This subtle seeming shift, of course, did little to alter the relations of either workers or Indigenous peoples with substantive colonial/capitalist power.
This seemingly softer Indigenous touch on the part of the colonial state and the capitalist interests it championed, however, was often backed by an intransigent negotiating stance on land and a failure to implement concrete actions addressing issues as pressing as overincarceration, potable water on reserves, and the violence taking many lives within Indigenous communities, especially with respect to murdered and missing girls and women. The state, in particular, sustained a certain continuity of centuries-old practices of dividing First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples, the better to keep them subordinate. Colonization’s secure hold over Indigenous peoples was increasingly dependent on what the Red Power advocates of the 1960s rejected: acquiescence to capital and integration into the ultimately hegemonic hold of the Canadian state’s policies of negotiating consent.
This was more than evident with Trudeau and Chrétien courting and bankrolling pro–White Paper chiefs like William I. C. Wuttunee, who was persuaded to embrace the government’s program of coerced assimilation in the late 1960s and early 1970s. By the end of the 20th century, this approach was no longer possible. Yet there were conservative Indigenous academics like Trent University’s David Newhouse who, while embracing First Nations’ difference in the spiritual and knowledge realms, were adamant that only through acceptance of and integration with capitalism could Aboriginal peoples advance.77
Even more subtle and sinister was the process whereby militants in Red Power circles were hived off from their counterparts, many of whom could not resist a bite of the apple of recognition and, subsequently, the rhetoric of reconciliation. Even a figure like Harold Cardinal, so often associated with the anti–White Paper surge of Red Power, was entangled in the complex web of political machinations that saw a more accommodationist wing of Indigenous protest use the radicalism of the 1960s to pressure the state to appease a moderate and “politically responsible” First Nations and Métis leadership. Cardinal’s The Unjust Society (1969), unlike Howard Adams’ later publication, Prison of Grass: Canada from the Native Point of View (1973), was neither particularly anti-capitalist nor anti-imperialist, making its case for “Indian policy” reform with the threat that if the state persisted in attempting to foist its tired agenda of coerced assimilation on Indigenous peoples, “the future holds very little hope for the Indian unless he attempts to solve his problems by taking the dangerous and explosive path travelled by black militants in the United States.” Cardinal thus parlayed a fear of Red Power’s message of possible retribution into a wake-up call that resonated with the federal government’s increasing unease with the anticolonial/anti-capitalist mobilizations impinging on different quarters of North American life in the late 1960s and early 1970s.78
These were years of international bridge blockades; cross-border caravans of militant Indigenous protest; occupations of lands, from Alcatraz to Anicinabe Park near Kenora; demonstrations resisting fish and game regulations; a “Beothuk Patrol” counter-policing the streets of Vancouver; and much else. Elements of the Canadian security state tied their fearful knickers in knots over the possibility that armed Indigenous insurgents were about to rise up against the state. The government thus saw in pliant leaders like Wuttanee, as well as those like Cardinal who espoused a more demanding stance of recognition, pressing Ottawa to live up to the promise of the Canadian mosaic by making a place for the country’s First Nations “citizens plus,” useful allies. They represented the possibility of alliances and integrations that would work in colonialism’s and capitalism’s interests.79
Red Power militants such as Howard Adams deplored the drift of significant components of leadership among First Nations and Métis peoples into collaboration with the colonial state. This comfortable relationship might well be consolidated as its practitioners proclaimed their radicalism. Adams identified a tendency to project “the erroneous idea that the native people are about to rebel,” making demands on the government and “threatening them with the possibility of native violence if their demands for financial gains are not met,” as but a means of propping up a deeply compromised cohort of First Nations chiefs and spokespersons. Adams issued a blistering denunciation of the “Uncle Tomahawks” within the rising Indigenous leadership who he saw scrambling to access the tap of state funds, turned on to drown radical advocates of “genuine red nationalism.”
The liberation of Indigenous peoples, Adams stated categorically, would not come from capitalism “becoming more humane” or colonialism “more just.” Whereas Cardinal pressed for dialogue with the state and a reform of the system as it was, Adams called for a dismantling of colonial and capitalist institutions, such as bureaucratic government agencies, welfare systems, prisons, as well as authoritarian structures of governance, and the patriarchal relations of men and women – ensconced in the Indian Act – and pilloried the economic elite that sustained both state institutions and the ideologies and sensibilities that underlay oppressive structures of everyday life. “The racism and colonialism of capitalism will always hold us captive in misery, violence, and exploitation,” Adams concluded.80
This was Red Power’s revolutionary essence, but it was met with state funds, bankrolling those within the Indigenous leadership of a decidedly different stand. Lee Maracle insists that as early as 1972 Red Power’s militant tactics had been “usurped by the growing presence of government funded organizations. Fewer people came out to demonstrations organized by Red Power militants. They began to look like fringe fanatics.” In the brief years separating 1968 and the early to mid-1970s, a reversal began to take place.81
Not surprisingly, when the Dene Declaration of 1975 staked out its anti-capitalist/anticolonial demand for sovereignty, it was denounced not only by the usual suspects like the Minister of Indian Affairs but also by Harold Cardinal. The “buckskin curtain” lowered not only on acknowledgement that conditions on reserves were deplorable but also, apparently, on the revolutionary aspirations of the Dene, whose document was dismissed as an example of “left-wing thinking that is perhaps much closer to the academic community in Toronto than it is to the Dene.” As Coulthard’s discussion of this kind of dismissal suggests, there was at work in the vehemence of the repudiation of an alliance bridging Indigenous activism and socialist supporters, fusing the anti-capitalist and anticolonialist sensibilities of a radical opposition, a refusal to countenance the possibility that First Nations peoples could embrace a politics of rejection and resistance without being led to it by white New Leftists. In the words of one conservative journalist, “A bewildered Canada [is] gradually waking up to the fact that a radical socialist philosophy [has] taken hold of the native peoples in the Mackenzie Valley. How is that these territorial natives whose politics up until now were generally considered non-existent should suddenly emerge with such advanced left-wing inclinations?”82
This kind of ignorance in defence of capitalism and colonialism, cavalierly assuming that Indigenous peoples were devoid of politics until they were indoctrinated by New Leftists, clearly conditioned a certain kind of blissful obliteration of the bowl with one spoon. This was the intellectual equivalent of doctrines like terra nullius, suggesting that First Nations existed as a tabula rasa as far as political thought was concerned: not only lands but Indigenous minds and the practices they orchestrated were deemed empty.83
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, not known for either its sensitivity or its shyness in opting for surveillance, seemed to have a slightly better understanding of the situation, seeing in Native studies programs a recruiting ground for anti-capitalist and anticolonial activists. One report bemoaned “the gravitation of Caucasian persons who are militant dissidents in their own right, to the various native organizations,” some of which the so-called intelligence apparatus of the state considered the equivalents of “international terrorist organizations.”84
The forces arrayed against a coming together of anti-capitalist and anticolonial activists in the post-1973 years were thus considerable, even daunting. If the Dene Declaration rallied to its banner union and left-wing political support, both of these currents would fall on increasingly hard times in the 1980s and 1990s; little improved in the opening decades of the 21st century. The climacteric of a metaphorical “1968” receded, as labour and the far left were driven to retreat or fragmented into a state of disorganization. Pockets of coherent resistance remained, of course, and coalesced in new mobilizations, especially prominent in the rise of an environmental movement. Indigenous protest lived to fight again and again, drawing to it supporters from a non–First Nations, often anti-capitalist, left wing. Yet the possibility of reinvigorating 1960s and 1970s radicalization, while striven for, remained more of an ideal than an actuality, in part because within a state-sponsored Indigenous leadership there was resistance to Red Power sensibilities. This conservatism grew more and more entrenched over years of moderate brokering with the state, some of which appeared to result in gains in the courts and elsewhere.85
As the rhetoric of recognition morphed into a state-sponsored political facade of reconciliation, erected as a wall behind which federal and provincial governments gathered their ideological and programmatic forces of obfuscation and, at times, obstruction, Indigenous peoples rallied to defences of land and demands for restitution, redress, and relief. Revelations about residential school abuses, not only psychological and physical but sexual, surfaced with increasing regularity from the mid to late 1980s. Reporting of widespread mistreatment of boys at a non-Indigenous orphanage in Newfoundland run by the Christian Brothers of Ireland in Canada seemed to legitimize the public discussion of the abysmal exploitation of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit youngsters – male and female – at the hands of those running custodial institutions, including religious administrators and teachers.86
In 1990 a special adviser to the Minister of National Health and Welfare on Child Sexual Abuse shocked a gathering of the Canadian Psychological Association. In a statement that made national news through a Globe and Mail report, he declared that Indigenous boys and girls within the residential school system were violated in ways and numbers not yet recognized. So widespread was this exploitation that scrutiny would indicate “100% of children at some schools were sexually abused.” At the end of the year, Phil Fontaine, a rising mainstream Indigenous leader who would later serve three terms as head of the Assembly of First Nations (afn), spoke publicly about the sexual and other forms of abuse he and many students at the Fort Alexander School in Manitoba suffered, victims of Oblate priests. A Royal Commission later followed up with the establishment of an Aboriginal Healing Foundation, leading to payments of $350 million to some 7,000 abused residential school survivors. A Truth and Reconciliation Commission was prodded into being, Prime Minister Stephen Harper issuing a 2008 apology for the “sad chapter” residential schools constituted in the book of Indigenous-state relations. More money was paid out. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission ascertained what had long been known in Indigenous communities, that many residential schools contained unmarked and undocumented graves of children who, taken from their families, never returned home. Medical experiments were conducted on children at some schools, compromising their health and inflicting pain and suffering. In 2021, scientific probes of land near a Kamloops residential school established that as many as 200 unmarked and undocumented graves might be present, and over the course of the next year many other residential school sites were reported to contain such burials. As announcements of these graveyards proliferated in the summer of 2021, 68 churches on or near reserves or former residential schools were vandalized, some burned to the ground.87
All of this captured the attention of Canadians and galvanized support for the rhetoric of reconciliation. But Indigenous girls and women continued to be murdered or go missing. Land defenders from Oka, Québec, to Ipperwash, Ontario, to Lake Gustafsen in northern British Columbia seized disputed territories in the 1990s, confronting provincial police forces and rcmp in armed standoffs that led to deaths of police and young First Nations militants. Blockades, occupations, protests, and other confrontations continued into the 21st century and included the lobster fishing dispute of 2002 on the Mi’kmaq Burnt Church First Nation; the 2006 clash of Six Nations militants and the Caledonia Citizens Alliance over a 40-hectare housing development on ground Indigenous people claimed was never surrendered to the Crown; 2009 Mohawk encampments opposing Cornwall’s customs facilities; and a series from 2006 to 2009 of land seizures, protests, bridge closures, and highway and railway blockades organized by militant Mohawks of the Tyendinaga reserve, many of which led to warrants for the arrest of a leading figure, Shawn Brant, whose political past included work with the radical Toronto-based Ontario Coalition Against Poverty. Militancy of this kind stood in stark contrast to the more conventional and state-recognized leadership of the Assembly of First Nations, which opted for more staid, symbolic marches, appeals to Parliament, and sit-downs with government officials. afn leaders were said to have co-operated with the rcmp in monitoring the outbreak of direct-action Indigenous protest in 2007.88
Mi’kmaq protectors of the water and their non-Indigenous allies battled a Texas-based international oil conglomerate, the rcmp, New Brunswick’s Aboriginal Affairs Secretariat, and the Assembly of First Nations Chiefs in New Brunswick in a 2013 protest against fracking that involved hunger strikes, a petition signed by 20,000 people, vandalized vehicles and equipment, highway blockades, and scores of arrests. Weapons were visible, pointed at rcmp officers, and Molotov cocktails lit up confrontational nights. The mobilization took on the trappings of a sovereignty crusade. A Warrior Society demanded documented proof that the Mi’kmaq had actually sold, ceded, granted, or extinguished title to New Brunswick lands, as well as evidence that they ever consented to historic developments, events, and enactments going back to the Loyalist settlements of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Capital was not pleased, the Texas oil company eventually concluding that “the necessity of the Crown to effectively execute its obligations to the province’s First Nations … remains a primary concern for us.” New Brunswick’s legislature needed to “do more to advance” capital’s interests.89
This was undoubtedly the view of oil and natural gas companies looking to develop pipelines in the North as well. They drew on the rcmp to thwart blockades established by anti-pipeline Wet’suwet’en peoples in British Columbia in 2019, a struggle that highlighted the fractured nature of Indigenous communities, many of which had long since opted into energy development and embraced the capitalist transformation of their lands. The ironic consequence of the Berger Commission, not surprisingly, was that the state and capital worked extremely hard to divide the Indigenous peoples of Denendeh, hiving off the roughly 4,500 Inuvialuit of the western Arctic, buying them out with cash payouts and economic enhancement funds totalling $62.5 million, granting them title to 91,000 square kilometres of territory of which 78,000 excluded gas/oil/and mineral rights. Eventually an Inuvialuit Development Corporation would oversee 30 corporations, whose combined revenue in 1999 approached $150 million, with annual profits of $1.6 million. In addition, the Inuvialuit partnered with the Gwich’in Tribal Council and the Sahtu Pipeline Trust, representing Dene peoples in the Yukon and certain regions of the Northwest Territories, including Great Slave Lake, in an Aboriginal Pipeline Group that supported oil and natural gas development. Outside of this group was the Dehcho First Nations, representing thirteen Dene and Métis communities in the Northwest Territories, whose stand was more anti-capitalist, who lacked agreements with the colonial state, and who were not congenial to pipeline development on their territory, which comprised roughly 40 per cent of the land mass that would have been affected by the 1970s proposals that Berger was tasked with assessing.90
The state and capital thus managed to weather the anti-capitalist/anticolonialist climacteric of “1968.” They shifted their approach to Indigenous peoples from one of generalized “contention to negotiation and enterprise,” not unlike the way they had reoriented toward organized labour in the immediate post–World War II years. There might still, of course, be occasions – such as Oka, Ipperwash, Lake Gustafsen, and Elsipogtog – when confrontation took a nasty, repressive turn, and for each band placated and co-opted, there would be another alienated, drawing the short reconciliation straw. With labour largely domesticated and disciplined by capital’s and the state’s intransigence amid neoliberal austerity, and the far left less and less of a factor in Canadian political life as the 1960s and 1970s gave way to the 1980s and 1990s, what remained of an earlier anti-capitalist/anticolonialist moment lived on among those sectors of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples willing to struggle in rekindling the ethos and practice of direct-action resistance. These forces, like the wildcat workers of the mid-1960s, ended up confronting not only capital and the state but also the bureaucracies and institutions within the Indigenous political mainstream that benefitted from state largesse and bought into the politics of recognition and the rhetoric of reconciliation. A militant minority of Indigenous activists occupied the same precarious terrain that a militant minority of the working class once inhabited.
For all the promise of capitalism’s offerings, First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples lived within the cauldron of colonialism to their detriment. As Berger predicted, capital’s northern profits carried in their wake a plethora of pathologies. In 1991, as money rolled into Inuvailuit coffers, and organizations like the Indian Resource Council cuddled up to capital, 42 per cent of Indigenous peoples were dependent on social welfare, compared with 8 per cent of Canadians as a whole; the Indigenous unemployment rate was roughly 25 per cent, about 2.5 times that of the national average; and life expectancy for Arctic Indigenous peoples was a decade or more less than for their non-Indigenous counterparts. Suicide rates for Inuit youth were among the highest in the world. In Nunavut, between 1999 and 2003, there were 122.4 suicides per 100,000 people, ten times that of the overall Canadian population. Those taking their lives were often troubled by alcohol and substance abuse or fear of incarceration as a consequence of an impending court date. The damage inflicted in the residential school system was recycled throughout generations of those subject to abuse and cultural genocide.
Official rcmp statistics acknowledged, in 2014, that between 1980 and 2012 more than 1,200 Indigenous girls and women may have gone missing or been murdered. Indigenous feminist activists claimed the figure could be as high as 4,000.
Institutional racism, which on occasion manifested itself in deaths of those in custodial care, pervaded the very organizations and agencies that supposedly offered Indigenous peoples protection, bodily care, and rehabilitation: police services, hospitals, prisons. Royal Commissions in the 1990s estimated that government expenditure on matters relating to First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples would increase by $2 billion a year over the course of the late 1990s, most of this allocated to land claims settlements. If this seemed like a large expenditure, it was a sound business practice, perhaps saving the state what some researchers estimated would be in the neighbourhood of $10 billion, when the costs of Indigenous services, restitution, and reversion of particular lands were taken into account. Colonialism and capitalism, threatened for a brief time by the climate of radical political opposition that arose in the 1960s, survived rather well into the 21st century.91
Indigenous peoples nonetheless had sufficient fight in them to launch Idle No More in 2012, a mobilization that, like the rejection of the state’s White Paper in 1969, was born of a refusal to accept a federal government’s legislation, this time the Jobs and Growth Act. This bill, an invasive reconstruction of 60 previously passed pieces of legislation, threatened to undermine treaty rights ensconced in the Indian Act and significantly weakened various environmental laws that twinned capitalist and colonial for-profit exploitation of land, resources, and waterways. Mushrooming throughout Canada and the world, Idle No More proclaimed, as had Red Power in the 1960s, that a pan-Indian movement of resistance could indeed step outside of the boundaries of Indigenous-state relations that Coulthard described as a snare of “vacuous gestures of accommodation.”92
As impressive as was the Idle No More uprising, which continues, albeit with far less fanfare than a few years ago, it cannot alone sustain the anti-capitalist, anticolonialist politics of opposition desperately needed at the current, threatening conjuncture. The climacteric of the 1960s needs to be reconstituted. Nothing less than a rebuilding of militant movements of labour and the left will suffice. That difficult task will not take place without due attention to the demands and needs of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit peoples. Those same peoples will need to frontally address the concerns and struggles of their counterparts in trade union, unemployed, antipoverty, feminist, socialist, and other progressive, potentially anti-capitalist and anticolonial resistance movements. Without a re-envisioning of the revolutionary purpose that has historically surfaced, albeit rarely, in Indigenous and non-Indigenous alliance around intransigent opposition to the inseparably entwined structures of capitalist and colonial subordination, the opponents of these systems of debasement will remain divided and, consequently, weakened in their resistance, limited in the transformative possibilities they must, together, bring into being. Centuries of history from 1500 to the present indicate how daunting is the task before those who recognize the dire necessity of this anti-capitalist, anticolonial politics. The current moment is nonetheless one that cries out for the realization of what has so often seemed unattainable.
1. The quotes from Voltaire, commonly cited in many sources, can be found in Paul R. Misencik, George Washington and the Half-King Chief Tanacharism: An Alliance That Began the French and Indian Wars (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014), 33–34; George F. G. Stanley, New France: The Last Phase (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1968), 269. The English pamphleteer is quoted in Eric Williams, Capitalism & Slavery (New York: Capricorn, 1968), 114.
2. Brown quoted in R. T. Naylor, “The Rise and Fall of the Third Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence,” in Gary Teeple, ed., Capitalism and the National Question in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), 36, with the quote on nation-building and whiteness from Barrington Walker, “Immigration Policy, Colonization, and the Development of a White Canada,” in Karen Dubinsky, Sean Mills, and Scott Rutherford, eds., Canada and the Third World (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 51. See also Carl Berger, “The True North Strong and Free,” in Peter H. Russell, ed., Nationalism in Canada (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1966), 3–26.
3. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 9.
4. Crucial discussions that I deliberately, for now, bypass include the relevance of Marxism to the experience of Indigeneity that was so usefully broached in Glen Coulthard’s stimulating Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), and that was subsequently and respectfully critiqued in John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Hannah Holeman, “Marx and the Indigenous,” Monthy Review 71, 9 (February 2020), https://monthlyreview.org/marx-and-the-indigenous. The discussions of settler colonialism that Coulhard, again, addressed and that have animated so much scholarship, notably the pioneering writings of Patrick Wolfe and Lorenzo Veracini, I beg off confronting for the moment. See Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (London: Cassell, 1999); Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8 (2006): 387–409; Wolfe, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race (New York and London: Verso Books, 2016); Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Veracini, “The Other Shift: Settler Colonialism, Israel and the Occupation,” Journal of Palestine Studies 42, 2 (2013): 26–42. The issue of settler colonialism has been usefully explored in a recent introduction: Sai Englert, Settler Colonialism: An Introduction (London: Pluto Press, 2022). Debate now swirls around new turns taken with the critique of “autochthonous claims” of Indigenous sovereignty put forward by Nadita Sharma, Home Rule: National Sovereignty and the Separation of Natives of Migrants (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), and congruent arguments in Mahmood Mamdani, Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020). For the controversy around such interpretive positioning, now long-standing, see Bonita Lawrence and Enakshi Dua, “Decolonizing Antiracism,” Social Justice 32, 4 (2005): 120–143; Nadita Sharma and Cynthia Wright, “Decolonizing Resistance, Challenging Colonial States,” Social Justice 35, 3 (2008–09): 120–138; Rita Kaur Dahmoon, “A Feminist Approach to Decolonizing Anti-Racism: Rethinking Transnationalism, Intersectionality, and Settler Colonialism,” Feral Feminism 4 (2015): 20–37. See also Robin D. G. Kelley, “The Rest of Us: Rethinking Settler and Native,” American Quarterly 69 (June 2017): 267–276. The increasingly influential interpretive framework of “racial capitalism” is obviously also relevant to discussions of settler colonialism. See, among many possible texts, Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (London: Zed Press, 1983); Jodi Melamed, “Racial Capitalism,” Critical Ethnic Studies 1 (Spring 2015): 76–85; Nathan McClintock, “Urban Agriculture, Racial Capitalism, and Resistance in the Settler-Colonial City,” Geography Compass 12 (May 2018), https://doi.org/10.1111/gec3.12373; Owen Toews, Stolen City: Racial Capitalism and the Making of Winnipeg (Winnipeg: ARP Books, 2018); Heather Dorries, “Racial Capitalism and the Making of Settler Colonial Cities,” Geoforum 132 (June 2022): 263–270; and the forthcoming collection of essays and lectures by Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition (Chicago: Haymarket, 2023). But see, as well, Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (New York and London: Verso Books, 2022).
5. Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, esp. 161–173.
6. Brenna Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 81.
7. Chief Gary Potts, “Teme-Augama Anishnabai: Last-Ditch Defence of a Priceless Homeland,” in Boyce Richardson, ed., Drum-Beat: Anger and Renewal in Indian Country (Toronto: Summerhill Press/Assembly of First Nations, 1989); Shiri Pasternak, Grounded Authority: The Algonquins of Barrier Lake against the State (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), esp. 99–125; Charles R. Menzies, People of the Saltwater: An Ethnography of Git lax m’oon (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016), esp. 33–34, 96.
8. For a sympathetic commentary on the much-maligned Morgan, see Franklin Rosemont, “Karl Marx and the Iroquois,” Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion 4 (Chicago: Black Swan, 1989): 201–213.
9. Lewis Henry Morgan, Ancient Society; or, Researches in the Lives of Human Progress from Savagery, through Barbarism to Civilization (New York: Henry Holt, 1877), 446; Morgan, League of the Ho-dé-nos-sau-nee, or Iroquois (Rochester: Sage and Brother, 1851), 138–142, 329; Morgan, “Untitled Review of Bancroft, Native Races of the Pacific States,” subsequently retitled “Montezuma’s Dinner: An Essay on the Tribal Society of North American Indians,” North American Review 122 (April 1876): esp. 281–285.
10. Baron de Lahontan, New Voyages to North America (1703; Chicago: A. C. McClung, 1905), xxxv; Peter Linebaugh, Red Round Globe Hot Burning: A Tale at the Crossroads of Commons & Closure, of Love & Terror, of Race & Class (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019), 275; Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (London: Verso Books, 2000), 68.
11. Paine quoted in E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Pantheon, 1963), 87.
12. Gustavus Myers, A History of Canadian Wealth (1914; Toronto: James Lewis and Samuel, 1972), 46–47.
13. Quotes from Michael Bliss, Northern Enterprise; Five Centuries of Canadian Business (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1987), 35; Harold Adams Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada: An Introduction to Canadian Economic History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), 35; W. L. Morton, The Canadian Identity (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975), 28. I am suggesting that Robin Fisher, in Contact and Conflict: Indian-European Relations in British Columbia, 1774–1890 (Vancouver: ubc Press, 1977), probably tilted too far in his approach to the early maritime fur trade. See, as well, E. E. Rich, “Trade Habits and Economic Motivation among the Indians of North America,” Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science 26 (February 1960): 35–53.
14. William Blake, “London” and “America: A Prophecy,” in Geoffrey Keynes, ed., Blake: Complete Writings (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969), 216, 196.
15. The above paragraphs draw on many writings, not all cited here. Most decisive is Peter H. Russell, Canada’s Odyssey: A Country Based on Incomplete Conquests (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), 46–47. For rather benign views of the Royal Proclamation, not without recognitions of the problematic substance of the document, see E. A. Heaman, Civilization: From Enlightenment Philosophy to Canadian History (Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022), esp. 39–54; Elizabeth Mancke, “The Age of Constitutionalism and the New Political History,” Canadian Historical Review 4 (December 2019): 620–637; Mark D. Walters, “The Aboriginal Charter of Rights: The Royal Proclamation of 1763 and the Constitution of Canada,” in Terry Fenge and Jim Aldridge, eds., Keeping Promises: The Royal Proclamation of 1763, Aboriginal Rights, and Treaties in Canada (Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015), chap. 6. See also William Wicken, The Colonization of Mi’kmaq Memory and History, 1794–1928: The King v. Gabriel Sylliboy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012); Miles Howe, Debriefing Elsipogtog: The Anatomy of a Struggle (Halifax: Fernwood, 2015), 22–47.
16. Alain Beaulieu, “‘An Equitable Right to Be Compensated’: The Dispossession of Aboriginal Peoples of Quebec and the Emergence of a New Legal Rationale (1760–1860),” Canadian Historical Review 94 (March 2013): 1–27; Donald B. Smith, “The Dispossession of the Mississauga Indians: A Missing Chapter in the Early History of Upper Canada,” Ontario History 73 (June 1981): 67–87; Isabel Thompson Kelsey, Joseph Brant, 1743–1807: Man of Two Worlds (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1984); John Clarke, Land, Power, and Economics on the Frontier of Upper Canada (Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001), 139–141.
17. Leo A. Johnson, History of the County of Ontario, 1615–1875 (Whitby, ON: Corporation of the County of Ontario, 1973), 20–37; Smith, “Dispossession of the Mississauga,” 67–87.
18. Duncan Campbell Scott, “Indian Affairs, 1763–1841,” in Adam Shortt and Arthur G. Doughty, eds., Canada and Its Provinces: A History of the Canadian Peoples by One Hundred of Their Associates (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1920), 5:707, 5:717–718.
19. J. I. Little, State and Society in Transition: The Politics of Institutional Reform in the Eastern Townships, 1838–1852 (Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997), 19; Robert C. Lee, The Canada Company and the Huron Tract, 1826–1853 (Hamilton: Dundurn, 2011); Anatole Browde, “Settling the Canadian Colonies: A Comparison of Two Nineteenth-Century Land Companies,” Business History Review 76 (Summer 2002): 299–335; Leo A. Johnson, “Land Policy, Population Growth, and Social Structure in the Home District, 1793–1851,” in J. K. Johnson, ed., Historical Essays on Upper Canada (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1975), 32–57.
20. Population figures from standard sources, among them Bliss, Northern Enterprise, 36, 110; Harold Adams Innis, The Cod Fisheries: The History of an International Economy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), 136.
21. Innis, Fur Trade in Canada, 19, 392.
22. Innis, Cod Fisheries, 136; Sylvia Van Kirk, “Many Tender Ties”: Women in Fur Trade Society, 1670–1870 (Winnipeg: Watson & Dwyer, 1980); James Daschuk, Clearing the Plains: Disease, Political Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life (Regina: University of Regina Press, 2014), esp. 48–50, which contains the quote relating to overtrapping.
23. Bliss, Northern Enterprise, 135–136.
24. See, for instance, Daniel Samson, The Spirit of Industry and Improvement, 148–150, 195–196, 243–245, 268–271; L. S. F. Upton, Micmacs and Colonists: Indian-White Relations in the Maritimes, 1713–1867 (Vancouver: ubc Press, 1979), 92–93; Andrew Parnaby, “Indigenous Labor in Mid-Nineteenth-Century British North America: The Mi’kmaq of Cape Breton and the Squamish of British Columbia in Comparative Perspective,” in Leon Fink, ed., Workers across the Americas: The Transnational Turn in Labor History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 112–117; Wicken, Colonization of Mi’kmaw Memory, 95–130.
25. Note the suggestive statement in Charles R. Menzies, “Capitalist Expansion into laxyuup Gitxaala,” Forrests and Oceans for the Future: Discussion and News (blog), 26 January 2020, https://www.blogs.ubc.ca/ecoknow/2020/01/capitalist-expansion-into-laxyuup.gitxaala, and backgrounded by the detailed discussion in Menzies, People of the Saltwater. See also Myers, History of Canadian Wealth; Stanely B. Ryerson, Unequal Union: Confederation and the Roots of Conflict in the Canadas, 1815–1873 (Toronto: Progress Books, 1968), as well as labour histories addressing developments in central Canada, such as Bryan D. Palmer, A Culture in Conflict: Skilled Workers and Industrial Capitalism in Hamilton, Ontario, 1860–1914 (Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1979), 3-31.
26. Among a library of books and articles that could be cited with respect to the developments in the above paragraph, see Robert C. H. Sweeny, Why Did We Choose to Industrialize? Montreal, 1819–1849 (Montréal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015); Michael B. Katz, The People of Hamilton, Canada West: Family and Class in a Mid-Nineteenth-Century City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975); Michael B. Katz, Michael J. Doucet, and Mark J. Stern, The Social Organization of Early Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982).
27. Toews, Stolen City; Maureen Lux, Medicine That Walks: Disease, Medicine, and Canadian Plains Native People, 1880–1940 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001); Daschuk, Clearing the Plains; Coulthard, Red Skins, White Masks, 12. Quotes at the end of paragraph from Adam Gaudry, “Fantasies of Sovereignty: Deconstructing British and Canadian Claims to Ownership of the Historic North-West,” Native American and Indigenous Studies 3, 1 (2016): 47.
28. Again, the writing is voluminous. The above paragraphs draw on, among many sources, Cole Harris, The Reluctant Land: Society, Space, and Environment in Canada before Confederation (Vancouver: ubc Press, 2008), 439–440; Barry M. Gough, Gunboat Frontier: British Maritime Authority and Northwest Coast Indians, 1846–1890 (Vancouver: ubc Press, 1984), 166; Robert A. J. McDonald, Making Vancouver: Class, Status, and Social Boundaries, 1863–1914 (Vancouver: ubc Press, 1996), 4–7; Rolf Knight, Indians at Work: An Informal History of Native Indian Labour in British Columbia, 1858–1930 (Vancouver: New Star Press, 1978); John Lutz, Makúk: A New History of Aboriginal-White Relations (Vancouver: ubc Press, 2008); Lutz, “After the Fur Trade: The Aboriginal Labouring Classes in British Columbia, 1849–1890,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, n.s., 3 (1992): 69–84; Steven High, “Native Wage Labour and Independent Production during the ‘Age of Irrelevance,’” Labour/Le Travail 37 (Spring 1996): 243–264; Parnaby, “Indigenous Labour,” 109–135; Charles Menzies and Caroline F. Butler, “The Indigenous Foundation of the Resource Economy of BC’s North Coast,” Labour/Le Travail 61 (Spring 2008): 131–149; Menzies and Butler, “Working in the Woods: Tsimshian Resource Workers and the Forest Industry of British Columbia,” American Indian Quarterly 25 (June 2001): 409–430; Menzies, People of the Saltwater; Alicja Muszynski, Cheap Wage Labour: Race and Gender in the Fisheries of British Columbia (Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996).
29. Quotes relating to Toronto in the depression of the 1850s and railway workers’ disorder from Rev. Henry Scadding and John Charles Dent, Toronto – Past and Present – Historical, Descriptive, a Memorial Volume for the Semi-Centennial of 1884 (Toronto: Hunter and Rose, 1884), 212–213; Jesse Edgar Middleton, The Municipality of Toronto: A History, vol. 1 (Toronto: Dominion, 1923), 264. Myers, History of Canadian Wealth, remains an invaluable exploration of the beginnings of railway construction in Canada.
30. Poundmaker quoted and railways discussed in terms of Indigenous dispossession and dislocation in Daschuk, Clearing the Plains, 99–186.
31. George F. G. Stanley, “The Indians in the War of 1812,” Canadian Historical Review 31 (June 1950): 145–164.
32. See Fred Landon, Western Ontario and the American Frontier (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1967), 164–166; Ronald Stagg and Colin Read, eds., The Rebellion of 1837 in Upper Canada: A Collection of Documents (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1985), lxiii, 239–242, 426–429; R. Alan Douglas, ed., John Prince: A Collection of Documents (Toronto: Champlain Society, 1980), xxvi–xxvii, 28–31.
33. See, for instance, the extensive discussions of colonial documents in Heaman, Civilization, 155–337.
34. Quoted in Ryerson, Unequal Union, 294. See also E. Palmer Patterson, The Canadian Indian: A History since 1500 (Don Mills, ON: Macmillan, 1972); J. R. Miller, Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens: A History of Indian-White Relations in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 109–111; D. A. Nock, A Victorian Missionary and Canadian Indian Policy: Cultural Synthesis vs Cultural Replacement (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1988), 4.
35. Joyce A. Green, “Towards a Détente with History: Confronting Canada’s Colonial Legacy,” International Journal of Canadian Studies 12 (Fall 1995): 91–92.
36. Miller, Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens, 160–169; Sheldon Krasowski, No Surrender: The Land Remains Indigenous (Regina: University of Regina Press, 2019); Arthur J. Ray, Indians in the Fur Trade: Their Role as Hunters, Trappers, and Middlemen in the Lands Southwest of Hudson’s Bay, 1660–1870 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974), 227–229; Jean Friesen, “Magnificent Gifts: The Treaties of Canada with the Indians of the Northwest, 1869–1877,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, ser. 5 (1986): 41–51; Frank Tough, “Aboriginal Rights versus the Deed of Surrender: The Legal Rights of Native Peoples and Canada’s Acquisition of Hudson’s Bay Company Territory,” Prairie Forum 17 (1992): 125–150; Alexander Morris, The Treaties of Canada with the Indians of Manitoba and the Northwest Territories and Kee-Wa-Tin, Including the Negotiations on Which They Are Based, and Other Information Relating Thereto (Toronto: Willing and Williamson, 1880).
37. Ryerson, Unequal Union; Susan Dianne Brophy, A Legacy of Exploitation: Early Capitalism in the Red River Colony, 1763–1821 (Vancouver: ubc Press, 2022); Max Hamon, The Audacity of His Enterprise: Louis Riel and the Métis Nation That Canada Never Was, 1840–1875 (Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019); Joseph Kinsey Howard, Strange Empire: A Narrative of the Northwest (New York: William Morrow, 1952); Bryan D. Palmer, “Labour Protest and Organization in Nineteenth-Century Canada, 1820–1890,” Labour/Le Travail 20 (Fall 1987): 61–84.
38. RJK, “The Dynamic Year of 1886,” One Big Union Monthly, 23 September 1927, quoted in a fuller discussion of the Knights of Labor in Gregory S. Kealey and Bryan D. Palmer, “Dreaming of What Might Be”: The Knights of Labor in Ontario, 1880–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 18–19.
39. On Thompson, whose stand on Riel and other issues of the 1880s was progressive and ahead of his time, see Russell Hann, “Brainworkers and the Knights of Labor: E. E. Sheppard, Phillips Thompson, and the Toronto News, 1883–1887,” in Gregory S. Kealey and Peter Warrian, eds., Essays in Canadian Working-Class History (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1976), 35–57; Phillips Thompson, The Politics of Labor (New York and Chicago: Belford, Clarke & Company, 1887).
40. On Jackson/Jaxon, see Donald B. Smith, Honoré Jaxon: Prairie Visionary (Regina: Coteau Books, 2007). On Teit, see Wendy C. Wickwire, At the Bridge: James Teit and an Anthropology of Belonging (Vancouver: ubc Press, 2019); Peter Campbell, “‘Not as a White Man, Not as a Sojourner’: James A. Teit and the Fight for Native Rights in British Columbia, 1884–1922,” left history 2 (Fall 1994): 37–57.
41. Macdonald is quoted in Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (trc), Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, vol. 1, Summary: Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future (Toronto: James Lorimer, 2015), 2.
42. For an introduction to the institutional state, see Michael B. Katz, “Origins of the Institutional State,” Marxist Perspectives 1 (1978): 6–23. On developments associated with the poor, see Bryan D. Palmer and Gaetan Heroux, “Cracking the Stone: The Long History of Capitalist Crisis and Toronto’s Dispossessed, 1830–1930,” Labour/Le Travail 69 (Spring 2012): 9–62.
43. See, for Laurier’s quote and its context, Carl Berger, The Sense of Power: Studies in the Ideas of Canadian Imperialism, 1867–1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), 225; Peter B. Waite, Canada, 1867–1893: Arduous Destiny (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1971), 174–281. The prediction of Indigenous disappearance is in Diamond Jenness, The Indians of Canada (1932; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977).
44. Mowat and Inuit relocations are discussed at length in the excellent study by Frank James Tester and Peter Kulchyski, Tammarnitt (Mistakes): Inuit Relocation in the Eastern Arctic (Vancouver: ubc Press, 1994).
45. Joan Sangster, “Criminalizing the Colonized: Ontario Native Women Confront the Criminal Justice System, 1920–1960,” in Sangster, Through Feminist Eyes: Essays on Canadian Women’s History (Edmonton: Athabasca University Press, 2011), 293–325; Vicki Chartrand, “‘Unsettled Times’: Indigenous Incarceration and the Links between Colonization and the Penitentiary in Canada,” Canadian Journal of Criminology and Criminal Justice 61 (July 2019): 76–77; Seth Ademan, “‘More than Stone and Iron’: Indigenous History and Incarceration in Canada, 1834–1996,” PhD diss., Wilfrid Laurier University, 2016, 72, 122; Shelagh Grant, Arctic Justice: On Trial for Murder, Pond Inlet, 1923 (Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2002).
46. J. C. Weldon, “Consolidation in Canadian Industry, 1900–1948,” in L. A. Skeoch, ed., Restrictive Trade Practices in Canada (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1966), 232–236; J. Smucker, Industrialization in Canada (Scarborough, ON: Prentice-Hall, 1980), 88–89; O. D. Skelton, “General Economic History, 1867–1912,” in Shortt and Doughty, eds., Canada and Its Provinces, 9:262.
47. Canadian capital’s concentration in these years is outlined in an extensive literature, on which the above paragraphs draw. See, as examples only, Watt Hugh McCollum, Who Owns Canada? An Examination of the Facts Concerning the Concentration of Ownership and Control of the Means of Production, Exchange, and Distribution in Canada (Ottawa: Woodsworth House, 1947), 9, 12; Libbie Park and Frank Park, The Anatomy of Big Business (Toronto: James Lewis and Samuel, 1973); Don Nerbas, Dominion of Capital: The Politics of Big Business and the Crisis of the Canadian Bourgeoisie, 1914–1947 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013); John Porter, The Vertical Mosaic: An Analysis of Social Class and Power in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965), esp. 231–263.
48. The history of strikes, union organizing, and class struggle placation dealt with briefly in the above paragraphs is outlined in countless studies. See, among many possible sources, Douglas Cruikshank and Gregory S. Kealey, “Canadian Strike Statistics, 1891–1950,” Labour/Le Travail 20 (Fall 1987): 85–146; Bryan D. Palmer, Working-Class Experience: Rethinking the History of Canadian Labour, 1800–1991 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1992), esp. 268–339; Judy Fudge and Eric Tucker, Labour before the Law: The Regulation of Workers’ Collective Action in Canada, 1940–1948 (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2001); Bob Russell, Back to Work? Labour, the State, and Industrial Relations in Canada (Scarborough, ON: Nelson, 1990).
49. The above paragraphs draw on and quote from various sources: Keith Thor Carlson, The Power of Place, the Problem of Time: Aboriginal Identity and the Historical Consciousness in the Cauldron of Colonialism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 255–269; Andrew Parnaby, “‘The Best Men That Ever Worked the Lumber’: Aboriginal Longshoremen on Burrard Inlet, BC, 1863–1939,” Canadian Historical Review 87 (March 2006): 53–78; Knight, Indians at Work, 123–129; Lutz, Makúk; E. Palmer Patterson, “Andrew Paull (1892–1959): Finding a Voice for the ‘New Indian,’” Western Canadian Journal of Anthropology 2 (1976): 63–80; Peter Kulchyski, “’A Considerable Unrest’: F. O. Loft and the League of Indians,” Native Studies Review 4, 1–2 (1988): 95–117; E. Brian Titley, “The League of Indians of Canada: An Early Attempt to Create a National Native Organization,” Saskatchewan Federated College Journal 1 (1983): 53–63; Titley, A Narrow Vision: Ducan Campbell Scott and the Administration of Indian Affairs in Canada (Vancouver: ubc Press, 1986), 105; Paul Tennant, Aboriginal Peoples and Politics: The Indian Land Question in British Columbia, 1849–1989 (Vancouver: ubc Press, 1990), 84–113; Peter McFarlane, Brotherhood to Nationhood: George Manuel and the Making of the Modern Indian Movement (Toronto: Between the Lines, 1993), 29; George Manuel and Michael Posluns, The Fourth World: An Indian Reality (Toronto: Collier-Macmillan, 1974), 36, 63–67; J. R. Miller, Shingwauk’s Vision: A History of Native Residential Schools (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 290–292.
50. Frank Tough, “As Their Natural Resources Fail”: Native Peoples and the Economic History of Northern Manitoba, 1870–1930 (Vancouver: ubc Press, 1996); James Mochoruk, Formidable Heritage: Manitoba’s North and the Cost of Development, 1870–1930 (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2004).
51. See, among many possible sources, Hugh Shewell, “Enough to Keep Them Alive”: Indian Welfare in Canada, 1873–1965 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 116–144; Lux, Medicine That Walks, 164–165; Barry Broadfoot, Ten Lost Years, 1929–1939: Memories of Canadians Who Survived the Depression (Don Mills, ON: Doubleday, 1975), 139, 299–301; Lutz, Makúk, 261–262; Titley, A Narrow Vision, 50; Robin Jarvis Brownlee, “‘Living the Same as White People’: Mohawk and Anishinabe Women’s Labour in Southern Ontario, 1920–1940,” Labour/Le Travail 61 (Spring 2008): 41–68; Miller, Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens, 220.
52. On the general context of World War II and Indigenous demands, see R. Scott Scheffield, The Red Man’s on the Warpath: The Image of the “Indian” and the Second World War (Vancouver: ubc Press, 2005). On Sioui and the naib, see Shewell, “Enough to Keep Them Alive,” 156–166; Shewell, “Jules Sioui and Indian Political Radicalism in Canada, 1943–1944,” Journal of Canadian Studies 34 (August 1999): 211–242; McFarlane, Brotherhood to Nationhood, 41–42.
53. I draw on Adele Perry, Aqueduct: Colonialism, Resources, and the Histories We Remember (Winnipeg: ARP Books, 2016), although my conclusions are certainly different.
54. On Brady and Norris, see Murray Dobbin, The One-and-a-Half Men: The Story of Jim Brady and Malcolm Norris – Métis Patriots of the 20th Century (Vancouver: New Star, 1981).
55. Dobbin, One-and-a-Half Men; Nicole C. O’Byrne, “‘No Other Weapon Except Organization’: The Métis Association of Alberta and the 1938 Métis Population Betterment Act,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 24, 2 (2013): 311–352; Donald G. Wetherell and Irene A. Kmet, Alberta’s North: A History, 1890–1950 (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2000), 320; James M. Pitsula, “The Saskatchewan ccf Government and Treaty Indians, 1944–1964,” Canadian Historical Review 75 (March 1994): 21–52; F. Laurie Barron, Walking in Indian Moccasins: The Native Policies of Tommy Douglas and the ccf (Vancouver: ubc Press, 1997); David M. Quirling, ccf Colonialism in Northern Saskatchewan: Battling Parish Priests, Bootleggers, and Fur Sharks (Vancouver: ubc Press, 2004).
56. The above paragraphs draw on Barron, Walking in Indian Mocassins, 100–101; Shewell, “Enough to Keep Them Alive,” 169–206; McFarlane, Brotherhood to Nationhood, 43; Lutz, Makúk, 266.
57. Olive Patricia Dickason, Canada’s First Nations: A History of Founding Peoples from Earliest Times (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2001), 310–312; Miller, Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens, 220–222; Tina Loo, “Dan Kramer’s Potlatch: Law as Coercion, Symbol, and Rhetoric in British Columbia, 1884–1951,” Canadian Historical Review 73 (June 1992), 125–165; Shewell, “Enough to Keep Them Alive,” 169–170; Sally Weaver, Making Canadian Indian Policy: The Hidden Agenda, 1968–1970 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), 46; Tester and Kulchyski, Tammarniit (Mistakes). Diefenbaker and Dreaver are quoted in Barron, Walking in Indian Moccasins, 106. “The great darkness” is a chapter in Pierre Vallières, White Niggers of America (1968; Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1971), 121–168.
58. On this wildcat wave and youthful student radicals and labour, see Bryan D. Palmer, Canada’s 1960s: The Ironies of Identity in a Rebellious Era (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 211–241; Peter S. McInnis, “Hothead Troubles: Sixties-Era Wildcat Strikes in Canada,” in Lara Campbell, Dominque Clement, and Gregory S. Kealey, eds., Debating Dissent: Canada and the Sixties (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 155–172; Ian Milligan, Rebel Youth: 1960s Labour Unrest, Young Workers, and New Leftists in English Canada (Vancouver: ubc Press, 2014).
59. The literature on such developments is extensive. See, for an introduction only, Palmer, Canada’s 1960s, 274–278; Martin Loney, “A Political Economy of Citizen Participation,” in Leo Panitch, ed., The Canadian State: Political Economy and Political Power (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 446–472; Kevin Brushett, “Making Shit Disturbers: The Selection and Training of the Company of Young Canadian Volunteers, 1965–1970,” in M. Athena Palaeologu, ed., The Sixties in Canada: A Turbulent and Creative Decade (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 2009), 246–269; Joan Sangster, “Confronting Our Colonial Past: Reassessing Political Alliances over Canada’s Twentieth Century,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, n.s., 28 (2017): 1–43.
60. Again, the literature is extensive. See, as a sample of commentary only, Sean Mills, The Empire Within: Postcolonial Thought and Political Activism in Sixties Montreal (Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), 121–137, 145–150; Palmer, Canada’s 1960s, 353–354; Joan Sangster, Demanding Equality: One Hundred Years of Canadian Feminism (Vancouver: ubc Press, 2021), 286–289; Sarah A. Nickel, “‘We Must Now Take Action’: Indigenous Women, Activism, and the Aftermath of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women,” Labour/Le Travail 89 (Spring 2022): 156–169; Nickel, Assembling Unity: Indigenous Politics, Gender, and the Union of BC Indian Chiefs (Vancouver: ubc Press, 2019), 63–67, 158–161.
61. “1968” is used as shorthand for a broader sense of the radicalism of the late 1960s that, with some shifts in focus, carried into the 1970s. See Bryan D. Palmer, “Canada’s ‘1968’ and Historical Sensibilities,” American Historical Review 123 (June 2018): 773–778; for a local study of the diversity and breadth of struggles animated by such sensibilities, see Peter Graham with Ian McKay, Radical Ambition: The New Left in Toronto (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2019).
62. On state programs addressing Indigenous peoples, particularly in the sphere of employment, see Mary Jane Logan McCallum, Indigenous Women, Work, and History, 1940–1980 (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2014); Joan Sangster, Transforming Labour: Women and Work in Postwar Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 199–232.
63. See H. B. Hawthorn, ed., A Survey of the Contemporary Indians of Canada: A Report on Economic, Political, Educational Needs and Policies, vol. 1 (Ottawa: Indian Affairs Branch, 1966), esp. 45–46; Dick Fidler, Red Power in Canada (Toronto: Vanguard, 1970), 3–4; Shewell, “Enough to Keep Them Alive,” 278–279; Heather Robertson, Reservations Are for Indians (Toronto: James, Lewis, and Samuel, 1970), esp. 27; Ian Adams, ed., The Real Poverty Report (Edmonton: Hurtig, 1971).
64. Harold Cardinal, The Unjust Society (Edmonton: Hurtig, 1969).
65. Cardinal, Unjust Society, esp. 90, with extended discussion in Palmer, Canada’s 1960s, 401–408; Hawthorn, ed., Survey of the Contemporary Indians of Canada, 1:13. For a more recent discussion of “Citizens Plus,” see Alan C. Cairns, Citizens Plus: Aboriginal Peoples and the Canadian State (Vancouver: ubc Press, 2000), which received mixed reviews from Indigenous commentators: Dickason, Canada’s First Nations, 383–385; Dale Turner, This Is Not a Peace Pipe: Towards a Critical Indigenous Philosophy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), esp. 38–56. The Indian Association of Alberta’s “Red Paper” appears under the title “Citizens Plus” in Waubageshig, ed., The Only Good Indian: Essays by Canadian Indians (Toronto: New Press, 1970), 5–42.
66. See Bryan D. Palmer, “‘Indians of All Tribes’: The Birth of Red Power,” in Campbell, Clement, and Kealey, eds., Debating Dissent, 193–210. The post–White Paper policies of the federal government are discussed insightfully as the “colonial politics of recognition” in Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks. For another militant response to this politics, see Audra Simpson’s many discussions of refusal, among them Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); “The Sovereignty of Critique,” South Atlantic Quarterly 119 (October 2020): 685–699; “The Ruse of Consent and the Anatomy of Refusal: Cases from Indigenous North America and Australia,” Postcolonial Studies 20, 1 (2017): 18–33.
67. Palmer, Canada’s 1960s, 379; Vic Satzewich and Terry Witherspoon, First Nations: Class, Race, and Gender Relations (Scarborough, ON: Nelson, 1993), 229.
68. Graham with McKay, Radical Ambition, 143–144, 296–297; Lee Maracle, Bobbi Lee: Indian Rebel (Toronto: Women’s Press, 1990), 131–132, 159–161, 194–196; Myrna Kostash, Long Way from Home: The Story of the Sixties Generation in Canada (Toronto: Lorimer, 1980), 147–165; Howard Adams, A Tortured People: The Politics of Colonialism, rev. ed. (Penticton, BC: Theytus Books, 1999), 75–92; Adams, Prison of Grass: Canada from the Native Point of View (Toronto: New Press, 1975), 188–198; J. W. Warnock, “Red Power: An Interview with Howard Adams,” Canadian Dimension 5 (April–May 1968): 21–23; Scott Rutherford, Canada’s Other Red Scare: Indigenous Protest and Colonial Encounters during the Global Sixties (Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020); Jeannette C. Armstrong, Slash! (Penticton, BC: Theytus Books, 1990).
69. Adams, Prison of Grass, 187; John S. Milloy, A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1999), 211–215; Suzanne Fournier and Ernie Crey, Stolen from Our Embrace: The Abduction of First Nations Children and the Restoration of Aboriginal Communities (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1997).
70. The quote in this paragraph is from Bob Overvold, “The Schools,” in Mel Watkins, ed., Dene Nation: The Colony Within (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 141. There is an accessible distillation of Berger’s two-volume, 500-page report, tellingly entitled Northern Frontier – Northern Homeland (1977) – contrasting the dualism of the North as a capitalist frontier or a place where people lived and had done so for centuries – in John Warkentin, ed., So Vast and Various: Interpreting Canada’s Regions in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010), 476–496, in which Berger declared that the choice before Canadians with respect to pipeline development would determine “whether the North is to be primarily a frontier for industry or a homeland for its peoples.”
71. Many sources could be cited. See, for instance, Watkins, ed., Dene Nation, which reproduces the “Dene Declaration” and contains a statement by Georges Erasmus; Martin O’Malley, The Past and Future Land: An Account of the Berger Inquiry into the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline (Toronto: Peter Martin, 1976); Peter Puxley, “A Model of Engagement: Reflections on the 25th Anniversary of the Berger Report,” Canadian Policy Research Network, August 2002, 1–14; Michael Asch, “Capital and Economic Development: A Critical Appraisal of the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Commission,” in Bruce Alden Cox, ed., Native Peoples, Native Land: Canadian Indians, Inuit, and Métis (Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992), 232–240; Francis Abele, “The Lasting Impact of the Berger Inquiry into the Construction of a Pipeline from the Mackenzie Valley,” in Gregory J. Inwood and Carole M. Johns, eds., Commissions of Inquiry and Political Analysis (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 88–112; Peter Usher, “Northern Development, Impact Assessment, and Social Change,” in Noel Dyck and James Waldram, eds., Anthropology, Public Policy, and Native Peoples in Canada (Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1993), 98–130, esp. 104–111; Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 51–78, 78.
72. Murray E. G. Smith, Global Capitalism in Crisis: Karl Marx and the Decay of the Profit System (Halifax and Winnipeg: Fernwood, 2010), 87; M. J. Webber and D. L. Rigby, “The Rate of Profit in Canadian Manufacturing, 1950–1981,” Review of Radical Political Economics 18 (Spring/Summer 1986): 33–55; Thom Workman, If You’re in My Way, I’m Walking: The Assault on Working People since 1970 (Halifax and Winnipeg: Fernwood, 2009), 1–2; F. H. Leacy, ed., Historical Statistics of Canada (Ottawa: Supply and Services Canada, 1983), F103–120.
73. Leo Panitch and Donald Swartz, The Assault on Trade Union Freedoms: From Wage Controls to Social Contract (Toronto: Garamond, 1993); Yonatan Reshelf and Sandra Raskin, Unions in the Time of Revolution: Government Restructuring in Alberta and Ontario (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003); Charles Smith, “The State, Trade Union Freedoms, and the Impasse of Working-Class Power in Canada,” in Greg Albo, Stephen Maher, and Alan Zuege, eds., State Transformations: Classes, Strategies, Socialism (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2021), 221–245.
74. Robert J. Brym, “Affluence, Power, and Strikes in Canada, 1973–2000,” in James Curtis, Edward Grabb, and Neil Guppy, eds., Social Inequality in Canada: Patterns, Problems, Policies (Scarborough, ON: Prentice-Hall, 2003), 61–75.
75. Lars Osberg, The Age of Increasing Inequality: The Astonishing Rise of Canada’s 1% (Toronto: James Lorimer, 2018); Jane Gerster, “Canada’s Richest People Have as Much Wealth as the Poorest 11.4 Million,” Toronto Star, 3 April 2014, quoted in Tyler A. Shipley, Ottawa and Empire: Canada and the Military Coup in Honduras (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2017), 131; Kevin Carmichael, “The Pandemic Exposed Flaws in Canada’s Economic System: Fixing Them Won’t Be Easy,” Financial Post, 7 April 2021; Dan Darrah, “Canada’s Big Banks Pay Out $19 Billion in Record Bonuses,” The Breach, 3 December 2021; David Milstead, “ceo Pay Up 23% at Canada’s Biggest Companies,” Globe and Mail, British Columbia ed., 4 July 2021.
76. William K. Carroll, Corporate Power in a Globalizing World: A Study in Elite Social Organization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Carroll, “From Canadian Corporate Elite to Transnational Capitalist Class: Transitions in the Organization of Corporate Power,” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 44 (August 2007): 265–288.
77. William I. C. Wuttunee, Ruffled Feathers: Indians in Canadian Society (Calgary: Bell Books, 1971); Peter Kulchyski, The Red Indians: An Episodic, Informal, Collection of Tales from the History of Aboriginal Struggles in Canada (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring, 2007), 152–155; David Newhouse, “Resistance Is Futile: Aboriginal Peoples Meet the Borg of Capitalism,” in John Douglas Bishop, ed., Ethics and Capitalism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 141–155.
78. Cardinal, Unjust Society, 145.
79. See, for instance, Rutherford, Canada’s Other Red Scare; Scott Rutherford, “We Have Bigotry All Right – But No Alabamas: Racism and Aboriginal Protest in Canada during the 1960s,” American Indian Quarterly 41 (Spring 2017): 158–179; Tennant, Aboriginal Peoples and Politics, 139–164.
80. See, in particular, Adams, Prison of Grass, 176–216, 206; Adams, A Tortured People, 177–195; Warnock, “Interview with Howard Adams,” 23. Note, as well, Lloyd Roland Caibaiosa, “The Politics of Patience,” in Waubageshig, ed., The Only Good Indian, 153–154; James Burke, Paper Tomahawks: From Red Tape to Red Power (Winnipeg: Queenston House, 1976).
81. Maracle, Bobbi Lee, 218–219.
82. See the discussion of the response to the Dene Declaration in Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 69–70, quoting Harold Cardinal, The Rebirth of Canada’s Indians (Edmonton: Hurtig, 1977), 15, and the conservative Alberta journalist Ted Byfield, “Wah-Shee and the Left: A Tale of the Territories,” Saint John’s Edmonton Report 4 (23 May 1977). Note, as well, Coulthard, “Place against Empire: The Dene Nation, Land Claims, and the Politics of Recognition in the North,” in Avril Eisenberg, Jeremy Webber, Glen Coulthard, and Andrée Boisselle, eds., Recognition versus Self-Determination: Dilemmas of Emancipatory Politics (Vancouver: ubc Press, 2014), 147–173.
83. Note the discussion in Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).
84. On security state and government officials’ fears that Indigenous militants posed a potential armed threat to Canadian stability, and the consequent monitoring of First Nations protests, like the 1974 Native People’s Caravan and early Native studies programs in Canadian universities, see Rutherford, Canada’s Other Red Scare, 124–144; Terry Pender, “The Gaze on Clubs, Native Studies, and Teachers at Laurentian University, 1960s–1970s,” in Gary Kinsman, Dieter K. Buse, and Mercedes Steedman, eds., Whose National Security? Canadian State Security and the Creation of Enemies (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2000), 110–120; Steven Hewitt, Spying 101: The rcmp’s Secret Activities at Canadian Universities, 1917–1997 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), esp. 146, 156–158, 190–191; Palmer, Canada’s 1960s, 400; Peter Matthieson, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (New York: Viking 1983), 279. This security state monitoring of Indigenous peoples’ activism would continue for decades. See Russell Diablo and Shiri Pasternak, “Canada Has Had First Nations under Surveillance: Harper Government Has Prepared for First Nations Unrest,” First Nations Strategic Bulletin 9 (January–May 2011): 1–23.
85. A court victory of sorts was achieved in 2004, for instance, in Haida Nation v British Columbia (Minister of Forests), a Supreme Court decision stipulating that federal and provincial governments have a “duty to consult” over development projects that affect territories that have never officially been ceded to the Crown. But such victories were always constrained, and in the case of Haida and the “duty to consult,” the Crown is under no obligation to reach agreement with Indigenous peoples, only to undertake “a meaningful process of consultation in good faith.” Nonetheless, between 1973 and 2021 a spate of important decisions in the courts favouring Indigenous peoples – commencing with the Frank Calder/Nisga’a Tribal Council decision recognizing Indigenous title based on occupation of traditional territories – did shift the legal status of First Nations land claims. I am indebted to personal communication from Stuart Rush, 26 September 2022, on such matters. See also Dave Porter, Judith Sayers, and Grand Chief Edward John, “New Day for BC Native Claims: ‘Xeni Decision’ Casts Doubt on Provincial Authority over First Nations Land Dealings,” The Tyee, 12 February 2008, https://thetyee.ca/Views/2008/02/12/NativeClaims/. For all of these legal victories, however, capitalist/colonial courts and the settlements reached within them impose acute limitations on First Nations use of lands recognized as traditional territory. I was enlightened on such matters by an oral presentation of legal scholar Benjamin Isitt: “Capitalist Commodification, Indigenous Labour, and Treaty-Making in Modern British Columbia,” paper presented at Challenging Labour: Working-Class Experiences in Canada, Past, Present, and Future, Mount Royal University, Calgary, 22 October 2022.
86. Michael Harris, Unholy Orders: Tragedy at Mount Cashel (Toronto: Penguin, 1991); Sean Cadigan, Newfoundland and Labrador: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 277–278.
87. On post-1980s residential school revelations, the sources are now abundant. See, as specific statements only, trc, Final Report, 1:90–99; Ian Mosby, “Administering Colonial Science: Nutrition Research and Human Biological Experimentation in Aboriginal Communities and Residential Schools, 1942–1952,” Histoire Sociale/Social History 46 (May 2013): 145–172; Ryan Forbes, “4127 Lost Children and Counting,” KenoraOnline, 4 January 2022, https://kenoraonline.com/, accessed 10 August 2022; Terry Glavin, “The Year of the Graves: How the World’s Media Got It Wrong on Residential School Graves,” National Post, 26–27 May 2022; Brookly Neustaeter, “Residential School Abuses Call for Criminal Charges, Indigenous Leaders Say,” ctvNews.ca, 15 June 2022, https://www.ctvnews.ca/; “Church Fires Are Latest Chapter in Unmarked Graves Scandal,” The Pillar, 1 July 2021.
88. The confrontations alluded to in the above paragraph are well known and the literature on them extensive. Consider the following: Geoffrey York and Loreen Pindera, People of the Pines: The Warriors and the Legacy of Oka (Toronto: Little, Brown, 1991); Tony Hall, “Indian Summer, Canadian Winter,” Report of the Americas 25 (December 1991): 34–37; Arthur Manuel, Unsettling Canada: A National Wake-Up Call (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2015); Ronald Cross and Hélène Sévigny, Lasagna: The Man behind the Mask (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2014); Edward J. Hedican, Ipperwash: The Tragic Failure of Canada’s Aboriginal Policy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013); Shiri Pasternak, Grounded Authority: The Algonquins of Barrier Lake against the State (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017); Boyce Richardson, ed., Drum Beat: Anger and Renewal in Indian Country (Toronto: Summerhill Press/Assembly of First Nations, 1989); Theresa McCarthy, Divided Unity: Haudenosaunee Reclamation at Grand River (Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 2017); Shiri Pasternak, Sue Collis, and Tia Dafnos, “Criminalization at Tyendinaga: Securing Canada’s Colonial Property Regime through Specific Land Claims,” Canadian Journal of Law and Society 28, 1 (2015): 65–81; Tim Groves and Martin Lukacs, “Assembly of First Nations, rcmp, Co-operated on Response to Mass Protests in 2007,” Toronto Star, 15 February 2013.
89. Miles Howe, Debriefing Elsipogtog: The Anatomy of a Struggle (Halifax: Fernwood, 2017); Tyler McCreary and Jerome Turner, “The Contested Scales of Indigenous and Settler Jurisdiction: Unist’ot’en Struggles with Canadian Pipeline Governance,” Studies in Political Economy 99 (September 2018): 223–245.
90. Coulthard sees in these developments “the official end of an at times tenuous and fragile (but nonetheless unified) Dene national self-determination movement.” Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 76. Note, as well, Peter Kulchyski, Like the Sound of a Drum: Aboriginal Cultural Politics in Denendeh and Nunavut (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2005); June Helm, People of Denendeh (Montréal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000); Lorrie Goldstein, “Growing Indigenous Support for Pipelines, Oil Sector, Says Report,” Toronto Star, 22 June 2021; Geoff Dembicki, “How a Conservative US Network Undermined Indigenous Energy Rights in Canada,” The Guardian, 18 July 2022.
91. Robert B. Anderson, Bob Kayseas, Leo Paul Dana, and Kevin Hindle, “Indigenous Land Claims and Economic Development: The Canadian Experience,” American Indian Quarterly 28 (Summer/Fall 2004): 634–648; Usher, “Northern Development”; L. J. Kirmayer, C. Fletcher, and L. Boothroyd, “Suicide among Inuit of Canada,” in S. Leenaars, I. Wenckstern, M. J. Sackinovsky, R. J. Kral, and D. R. Bland, eds., Suicide in Canada (Scarborough, ON: University of Toronto Press, 1998), 187–211; Jessica McDiarmid, Highway of Tears: A True Story of Racism, Indifference, and the Pursuit of Justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Girls and Women (Toronto: Doubleday, 2019); Sherene Razack, “Gendered Racial Violence and Spatialized Justice: The Murder of Pamela George,” in Razack, ed., Race, Space, and the Law: Unmapping a White Settler Society (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2002), 121–156; Douglas Quan, “Ashley Smith Death in Custody Ruled a Homicide,” Windsor Star, 19 December 2013; Adele Perry and Mary Jane Logan McCallum, Structures of Indifference: An Indigenous Life and Death in a Canadian City (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2018).
92. Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 160–163.
How to cite:
Bryan D. Palmer, “The Past Is Before Us: Capitalism, Colonialism, and Canada, 1500–2023,” Labour/Le Travail, 93 (Spring 2024), 247–308, https://doi.org/10.52975/llt.2024v93.012.
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