Indigenous Peoples and Canada

Please note:

Some of these resources touch on or deeply explore very difficult and painful aspects of how Canada as a nation has treated - and continues to treat - Indigenous peoples of this land. The information may be hard to read or watch, and may bring up painful emotions, memories or concerns.

Please take very good care of yourself while you interact with this information.

Consider watching or reading with someone you trust, someone you can take with about how these issues make you feel.
If you need to stop, do so.
Plan for some self-care after viewing or reading if you have reason to think that this may impact you emotionally, mentally or physically.
Pay attention to how you are feeling as you watch, listen and read.

If you need help, if things you encounter here bring thoughts of harm to you, please reach out for help. If you don't know where to go or who to contact, check out resources on the Healthy Minds, Healthy Bodies, Healthy Learners page.

If you come to this information for the first time, or if it makes you uncomfortable because it challenges your beliefs, please approach it with an open mind.

Understanding where we come from collectively is part of ensuring that we do not repeat the mistakes of the past; it will help us to see what we do in the present more clearly, and to work more effectively for a future where we do not continue perpetuating historic and current injustices into our shared future as treaty nations.

If all of this is new to you....

Indigenous Issues 101 by Chelsea Vowel

8 Key Issues for Indigenous Peoples in Canada by Bob Joseph

One of the text books that I have been most thrilled to access for my classes is the anthology Indigenous Writes, a collection of essays by Métis public intellectual, language teacher, activist, and author Chelsea Vowel. This particular page of her website is a series of blogs which in many cases are similar to the essays in the collection, and represent an excellent starting point for learning about Indigenous issues.

Author, trainer and entrepreneur Bob Joseph helps to coach non-Indigenous Canadians in their interactions with First Nations (collectively) in Canada. In addition to offering his coaching services, he's written two books about what he has learned in his work, and speaks to share his observations and learning.

Indigenous Issues 101
Since I began this blog, I have endeavoured to create resources for people unfamiliar with specific aboriginal topics. I like to call them Indigenous Issue Primers, because they are introductions to topics you could spend a lifetime specialising in.

8 key issues for Indigenous Peoples in Canada
Eight of the key issues that are of greatest concern for Indigenous Peoples in Canada are complex and inexorably intertwined - so much so that government, researchers, policy makers and Indigenous leaders seem hamstrung by the enormity. It is hard to isolate just one issue as being the worst.

Reflecting on terminology

A rose by any other name is a mihkokwaniy.
It is always eye-opening to go outside the comfortable confines of this blog and read what questions (or assertions) people are releasing into the ether. As frustrating (and sometimes hilarious) as it can be to surf around, reading these questions and assertions, it does help to clarify for me the kinds of information that people lack.

Aboriginal Identity & Terminology
Introduction In a field of complex and contentious issues, understanding Aboriginal identity in Canada is one of the most challenging tasks. Perceptions of Aboriginal identity can be complex. Definitions may have legal implications that often operate in surprising ways.

Indigenous Peoples pre-contact

Secrets from the Ice - The Nature of Things: Science, Wildlife and Technology
A mystery is emerging out the Yukon ice: human hunting tools hidden for as long as 9,000 years have started to melt out. And each new find is another piece to the puzzle of who these people were. Greg Hare is the archeologist who was there for the recovery of the very first artifact in 1996.

What Happens When an Archaeologist Challenges Mainstream Scientific Thinking?
This article is from Hakai Magazine, an online publication about science and society in coastal ecosystems. Read more stories like this at hakaimagazine.com. What I remember most about Jacques Cinq-Mars the first time we met was his manner-one part defiance, one part wariness.

Closest-known ancestor of today's Native Americans found in Siberia
Indigenous Americans, who include Alaska Natives, Canadian First Nations, and Native Americans, descend from humans who crossed an ancient land bridge connecting Siberia in Russia to Alaska tens of thousands of years ago. But scientists are unclear when and where these early migrants moved from place to place.

A New History of the First Peoples in the Americas
The miracle of modern genetics has revolutionized the story anthropologists tell about how humans spread out across the Earth. Europeans arriving in the New World met people all the way from the frozen north to the frozen south. All had rich and mature cultures and established languages.

Ancient DNA reveals complex migrations of the first Americans
"Where do I come from?" That's perhaps one of the most fundamental questions for humanity. Now, three studies of ancient and modern human DNA are offering some intriguing answers by providing a detailed new look at the complex peopling of the Americas. Once modern humans left Africa about 60,000 years ago, they swiftly expanded across six continents.

One of the most contentious issues around the concept of a migration across a land-bridge is the fact that for many years this concept was framed as though (a) the land that served as a "bridge" was a sort of narrow pathway that functioned as funnel from the Eurasian continent to the North American continent, and (b) that there was a single, massive, one-way movement from Eurasia (specifically the region around Siberia) over to what is now North America and then eastwards and southwards across the continent.

There are several problematic issues with this premise.

First of all, what used to be known as the "Beringia Land Bridge" is now more accurately referred to as the Beringia Plain. It ranged in size depending on sea levels, but at its largest it could have been as big as Australia. Certainly more than large enough to be considered "land" on which people lived, rather than a corridor of space simply travelled through briefly on their way 'elsewhere'.

Secondly, the notion that any and all ancestors of the First Peoples of this land mass we currently refer to as North America (and South America) live on and/or travelled across/through the Beringia Plain denies other archeological evidence that demonstrates that there were other peoples already in other regions of the Americas who may have/likely arrived by boat, meaning they were already using tools to build sea-worthy vessels for transport and hunting at sea, prior to the dates once assumed to be 'fact' for the Beringia Land Bridge theory.

It is worth noting the following: the fossil record that all archeologists are working from is still relatively tiny when you compare it to the number of humans and other animals that have lived and died over the span of life on the planet. In many ways, even with all of the technological advances, we are still speculating on a tiny, tiny piece of evidence. It is as if they are trying to imagine the picture on a 1,000,000,000 piece jigsaw puzzle with only a few hundred pieces. As technology continues to advance and more discoveries are made - particularly with climate change and changes to the permafrost, new information will become available but much has been permanently lost to erosion and decay.

It is also worth noting that in modern times, we have a misapprehension about what we call "myths". In modern times, there is the assumption that the word "myth" is synonymous with the words "untrue" or "false" or "fictional". That was not, however how the stories and tales we know as "myths" were originally seen or understood. Prior to the advent of the Western 'scientific' thinking (which I put in single-quotes because looking back now, we know how flawed much of that so-called science was flawed), there was far less concern with the picky details of facts. What was more important in many societies were underlying truths that guided people in making choices that made them effective members of their communities, held them accountable to the laws and standards of their societies and explained their understanding of their experience of the world. Very often, as modern scientists begin to compare traditional stories and "myths" with emerging information about the ancient world, they find that there are patterns of truth that emerge from the stories that match the archeological, geological and ethnoarcheological records.

Thus, when we encounter First Peoples who say that their people have always been here, on the land, there is no way to say that they have not been. Ancient ancestors may have moved across the land over vast periods of time, but if that was happening in tiny increments over decades, centuries and millennia as they followed the available prey animals and plans they needed to survive , they were still "home". It was rarely a case of immigration or emigration as we conceive it in a modern sense, or even in an early colonial sense. It was simply life and survival on and with the land and the organisms on the land.

It seems that with each new discovery and piece of information, the overall picture becomes more complex and more fascinating; what it does NOT do is deny the truth of traditional stories that content that there have been people on this land. Their truth is that they have been here as long as their cultures and their societies have existed. "Here" was simply larger than it is now.

A Sunken Bridge the Size of a Continent | Hakai Magazine
The planet was cold. Vast sheets of ice extended over the northern half of North America and parts of northeast Asia, forming treacherous frozen barrens. In between, death lurked in many forms. Massive predators-giant short-faced bears, Beringian cave lions, scimitar cats, gray wolves-prowled the steppes and green valleys, hunting for prey.

Most archaeologists think the first Americans arrived by boat. Now, they're beginning to prove it
ON CEDROS ISLAND IN MEXICO- Matthew Des Lauriers got the first inkling that he had stumbled on something special when he pulled over on a dirt road here, seeking a place for his team to use the bathroom.

The meaning of the word Myth
The word 'myth' has generally come to identify any story that is believed to be a work of fiction; however, when analyzing myths and legends, it is important to understand the evolution of the word and how, using the word as it was originally understood, it is crucial to the unraveling of our human origins.

Scientific and Indigenous Perspectives of the "New World"
Bob Joseph There has been much discussion in the scientific community about how and when Indigenous Peoples populated the Americas. One prevailing theory is that Indigenous Peoples arrived by crossing a land bridge sometime around the end of the last ice age, 10,000 to 12,000 years ago.

Early Colonization

Colonization
timeline This timeline includes events related to colonization in Canada Colonization First Saint-Jean-Baptiste Celebrations in New France The earliest record of Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day celebrations in the colony of New France appears in the Jesuit Relations of 1636. The tradition has its origins in pagan Europe with the lighting of bonfires to mark the summer solstice.

Royal Proclamation, 1763
What is the Royal Proclamation? The Royal Proclamation is a document that set out guidelines for European settlement of Aboriginal territories in what is now North America. The Royal Proclamation was initially issued by King George III in 1763 to officially claim British territory in North America after Britain won the Seven Years War.

Colonization
When the European powers set their sights on North America, some three hundred years after the so-called discovery of the continent (which for them was the "New World"), it became a location for French and British settlements. The process of assuming control of someone else's territory and applying one's own systems of law, government, and religion is called colonization.

Royal Proclamation of 1763
The Royal Proclamation of 1763 was issued by King George III on 7 October 1763. It established the basis for governing the North American territories surrendered by France to Britain in the Treaty of Paris, 1763, following the Seven Years' War. It introduced policies meant to assimilate the French population to British rule.

The Indian Act

and other related documents and policies

Government Policy
Canada and Aboriginal peoples continue to struggle with a history of legislation and policy designed to terminate Aboriginal cultural and social distinctiveness in order to assimilate Aboriginal peoples into colonial life and values.

Clicking on the button below will take you to the Government of Canada Indigenous Services website. The site includes links and subpages on a number of policies of the Canadian Government that relate specifically to Indigenous peoples of this land. Like the link to the right, this would be considered a primary source.

Clicking on the button below will take you to the Government of Canada Justice website, where they house the digital copy of the Indian Act, because it is a series of legal documents. This is what is referred to as a primary source.

Indigenous Services Canada

The Indian Act at the Government of Canada website

21 Things You May Not Have Known About The Indian Act
"The great aim of our legislation has been to do away with the tribal system and assimilate the Indian people in all respects with the other inhabitants of the Dominion as speedily as they are fit to change." - John A Macdonald, 1887 Since publication in June 2015, this article has had 303,000+ views.

The White Paper 1969
In spite of all government attempts to convince Indians to accept the white paper, their efforts will fail, because Indians understand that the path outlined by the Department of Indian Affairs through its mouthpiece, the Honourable Mr. Chrétien, leads directly to cultural genocide. We will not walk this path.

Constitution Act, 1982 Section 35
What is Section 35 of the Constitution Act? Section 35 is the part of the Constitution Act that recognizes and affirms Aboriginal rights. The Canadian government did not initially plan to include Aboriginal rights so extensively within the constitution when the Act was being redrafted in the early 1980s.

What a landmark Supreme Court decision means for Métis, non-status Indians | CBC News
On Thursday, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that tens of thousands of Métis and non-status Indians are now the responsibility of the federal government. Métis writer and educator Chelsea Vowel breaks it down and helps us make sense of the ruling.

Residential Schools

The Residential School System
Residential Schools Two primary objectives of the residential school system were to remove and isolate children from the influence of their homes, families, traditions and cultures, and to assimilate them into the dominant culture. These objectives were based on the assumption Aboriginal cultures and spiritual beliefs were inferior and unequal.

The 60s (and 70s, and 80s, and 90s and ongoing ...) Scoop

Sixties Scoop
The Sixties Scoop & Aboriginal child welfare In the case of Aboriginal mothers, stories of government involvement in family life often go back generations. The legacy of removing children from their families and communities, first through the residential schools, and then through the child protection system, continues to impact the lives of these mothers, their children and their grandchildren.

As A Métis Woman, I Always Think About the Possibility Of My Children Being Taken Away - Chatelaine
In a country with a long history of forcibly removing Indigenous kids from their families, I have to. "She is so cute! I want to steal your baby." "Oh, what a doll! I'm just going to take her home with me." "Are you sure you want to keep her?