“Reconciliation Education”- Part 3

Contact between Indigenous People and Europeans in Canada

Mistahimaskwa (Big Bear) (4th from left), a Plains Cree chief, trading fur at Fort Pitt, N.W.T., 1884.

By Igor Stravinsky (Teacher, commentator)

My objective in this series is to expose the yawning gap between what kids are being taught in schools and the verified, objective reality of Indigenous history in Canada. What is being taught in schools serves a political purpose and is thus not really education but rather indoctrination. While the captains of the Indigenous Grievance Industry will reap great benefits from this indoctrination, the rest of us, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike, will suffer. 

In part one of this series, I outlined the socio-economic problems facing Indigenous people in Canada today and identified the official narrative, promoted by the federal government, Indigenous leaders, and their non-Indigenous allies, which is essentially that the problems are the fault of non-indigenous people- the result of racism and colonialism. This simplistic and inaccurate narrative has enriched some, but exacerbated the issues for the majority of Indigenous people at great cost to Canadian taxpayers.

In the second part, I critically examined the claim that pre-contact Indigenous people lived well- sustainably, with little environmental impact, and with a respect for each other and the land, with which their relationship was one of stewardship and symbiotic coexistence. In fact, pre-contact indigenous people in Canada lived short, hard lives. They were made up of hundreds of tribal groups perpetually at war, and extreme violence (including slavery and even genocide) were common. Their low environmental impact was the result of a small, scattered population and a low level of technology.  

In this installment, I will take a look at how life abruptly and radically changed for Indigenous people in the 200 or so years after contact. Students are taught that the Europeans “disrupted relationships across North America”. The implication is that there was a system in place and all things were in balance and working well and that Europeans forced disastrous changes on the Indigenous people who previously needed nothing, were doing great, and would have been fine had they been left alone to continue in the same way indefinitely. 

This false premise- that hundreds of Indigenous groups, who spoke different languages and had very different cultures, were peacefully coexisting and could somehow have continued doing so in spite of the utter reinvention of human existence taking place in the rest of the world, is key to the narrative that Europeans were disruptors. In fact, as mentioned above, life was short and hard and warfare (and torture, murder, slavery and even genocide) were the norm as Indigenous groups competed with one another for resources. This is the common pattern for all human societies throughout all time, why would we think the Indigenous people of North America, who were fully human, would be any different? 

The First Canadians?

No one knows who exactly the first people were to enter North America. Most textbooks still maintain the Beringian Hypothesis which explains the arrival of human as having been facilitated by the existence, in the waning days of  the last glacial maximum, of a “land bridge” (really more like a causeway) which connected Siberia and Alaska at the time, due to much lower sea levels. An ice-free corridor is said to have opened up around then, through which the intrepid newcomers passed into what is now the northern United States, and from there into Central and South America. But new evidence suggests that people were in fact living on the continent at least 22 thousand years ago, at which time such a transit would have been impossible. 

What is absolutely clear, is that people arrived in the continent in waves, and groups that arrived split off into subgroups. The eternal quest for dominance, which had been going on since humans first walked the earth, then continued apace in the new land.

Pre-European conquest

The first people confirmed to have inhabited Canada’s far north were the Dorset People. They are assumed to have arrived by boat because by the time they arrived, about 2800 years ago, the “land bridge” had been submerged for millennia. Travel by foot across the sea ice is not out of the question but would have been perilous and seems unlikely. The Dorset People existed until about 700 years ago, until the arrival of the Thule People (ancestors of the modern Inuit).

The Thule were superior boat builders and had superior tools and weapons. They displaced the Dorset People in a relatively short period of time. It is hard to imagine this was peaceful! This is simply how prehistoric people operated. Those who developed better technology spread and others gave way. By the time Europeans arrived, this kind of thing had been going on in North America for at least 13 thousand years, and probably much longer. Do the Inuit recite land acknowledgements about the Dorset People? 

First Contact with Europeans

First contact between the Indigenous people of what is now Canada and Europeans took place around 1000 CE when Norse People (AKA “Vikings”) established L’Anse Aux Meadows near the northern tip of the Island of Newfoundland. The Norse presence was brief- 10 to 20 years. Unable to peacefully coexist with the natives, they packed up and headed back to Greenland whence they came. 

Later European Contact 

Later European groups set up permanent settlements. These Europeans quickly realized that there was a commodity the Natives could provide that would earn them a hefty profit back in Europe, and the Indigenous people were only too eager to trade that commodity (Beaver Pelts) for European tools and weapons, which were far superior to the wood, stone, and bone implements they had. Indeed, this trade was so lucrative that it changed the whole Indigenous economic system. It didn’t take long for them to become utterly dependent on this fur trade, and Indigenous groups fought each other fiercely for access to the European traders. What resulted is what is now known as the Beaver Wars, during the course of which the Iroquois wiped out the Hurons, Eries, and other Indigenous groups. 

Fashions change. By 1850, Beaver hats were no longer popular in Europe. It had been a good run of over 200 years, but the Indigenous people were in dire straits because they had become economically dependent on the trade. With the population of what would soon become Canada expanding rapidly, and the whole world on the brink of the industrial revolution, reverting back to pre-contact social and economic systems was a non-starter. 

This left the colonial governments, and later the government of Canada, in a bind: There was a population of over 100 thousand mostly illiterate Indigenous people with no viable way to make a living. What to do? These people were suffering terribly, mostly due to infectious diseases spread by Europeans, such as smallpox and tuberculosis, but also from malnutrition and even out and out starvation. 

Had the colonial governments taken their lead from the Indigenous people themselves, the colonists would simply have stepped back and let these people die off. One culture displaces another- that was the preindustrial, premodern way in North America and everywhere else. 

But they did not do that. What they did was totally out of character with anything any human civilization had ever done before. It was something that is in fact the absolute antithesis of the evil that our schools today are ascribing to colonial and Canadian governments. Refusing to acknowledge it is the Indigenous Grievance Industry’s “big lie”.

That will be the subject of my next installment in this series.  

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Thanks for reading. For more from this author, read Is Doug Ford’s PC Government Finally Standing Up to Woke Lies?

BREAKING NEWS:

1. A new long-form essay by Dr. M - Fulcrum and Pivot: The New Left Remaking of Toronto School Policy

2. James Pew has contributed a chapter to the new book Grave Error: How The Media Misled us (And the Truth about Residential Schools). You can read about it here - The Rise of Independent Canadian Researchers

Also, for more evidence of the ideological indoctrination in Canadian education, read Yes, schools are indoctrinating kids! And also, Yes, The University is an Indoctrination Camp!

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