Brotherhood to Nationhood

George Manuel and the Making of the Modern Indian Movement

Peter McFarlane, Doreen Manuel

• Publisher: Between the Lines
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781771135108
• eBook ISBN: 9781771135115
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Charged with fresh material and new perspectives, this updated edition of the groundbreaking biography Brotherhood to Nationhood brings George Manuel and his fighting tradition into the present.

George Manuel (1920–1989) was the strategist and visionary behind the modern Indigenous movement in Canada. A three-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee, he laid the groundwork for what would become the Assembly of First Nations and was the founding president of the World Council of Indigenous Peoples. Authors Peter McFarlane and Doreen Manuel follow him on a riveting journey from his childhood on a Shuswap reserve through three decades of fierce and dedicated activism.

In these pages, an all-new foreword by celebrated Mi'kmaq lawyer and activist Pam Palmater is joined by an afterword from Manuel's granddaughter, land defender Kanahus Manuel. This edition features new photos and previously untold stories of the pivotal roles that the women of the Manuel family played – and continue to play – in the battle for Indigenous rights.

Part I: The Neck of the Chicken

I get the neck of the chicken

I get the rumble seat ride

I get the leaky umbrella

Everyone casts me aside

Cab Calloway song and George Manuel party piece

Chapter 1: Paradise, Paradise Lost, 1960

Is that what you people are afraid of—that the Indians will be a self-supporting nation?

­George Manuel to the Joint Committee on Indian Affairs, May 26, 1960

George Manuel limped into the oak-panelled hearing room on May 26, 1960 and set his battered briefcase down on the table.

At his side was Genevieve Mussell, a non-Native woman who had gained Status through marriage and who served as his vice president on the Native Rights Committee of the Interior Tribes of British Columbia.

In front of him, framed by the Red Ensign on one side of the room and a portrait of the young Queen Elizabeth II on the other, were a dozen MPs and senators who had been given the task of reforming Canada’s Indian policy.

Manuel had been preparing for this meeting for the past two years. He and a group of activists had travelled the British Columbia interior, spreading the gospel of resistance and recording their peoples’ grievances. The result was a one-hundred-page brief detailing the desperate straits of British Columbia Indians and criticizing the Department of Indian Affairs (DIA) for a century of crimes and misdemeanours.

The parliamentary committee had allotted Manuel only two hours to express a hundred years of frustration. Even in that limited time, the MPs and senators would not be an easy audience. The Joint Committee had been sitting for a year and the members were clearly bored by the endless parade of witnesses. Noel Dorion, the MP who was chairing the hearings, had begun to focus his energies on merely keeping the process moving—in, out, next—with a minimum of discussion.

When Manuel took his seat in the witness chair that morning, Dorion didn’t think he would pose much of a problem. George was wearing a new blue suit that the people of his community had bought for him, but the fabric was stretched uncomfortably across his boom man’s shoulders. Dorion had also noted that the Shuswap Indian had entered the room with a pronounced limp, and Dorion was obviously unimpressed by the figure he cut; he assumed that the white woman had been brought in to speak for him and offered her the floor.

Mussell, a strong backer of Manuel, reacted with surprise to Dorion’s invitation. Mr. Manuel, she told the committee, would be speaking for himself. And speak he did. The smile left his face and Manuel began in a slow and deliberate voice coloured by a strong Shuswap accent. By the time he finished, he had stretched his allotted two hours into two full days of testimony, and he had delivered the most sweeping indictment of the government’s Indian policy the committee had heard.

Manuel described how the lack of an adequate economic and land base on the reserves was driving young people into the slums of the city.

He told them how inadequate social services left old people living in dirt-floor huts with only $22 a month in support payments. He told them that police harassment was so serious that in some communities the Chiefs intentionally let the roads deteriorate so they would no longer be passable for RCMP patrol cars. He berated Colonel H.M. Jones, the director of the DIA, for hiring as Indian agents retired military men who had no knowledge of or sensitivity to Indian peoples. Finally he called on the John Diefenbaker government to repair the damage by funding Indian organizations so they could help Indian peoples rebuild their shattered lives and re-emerge as “self-supporting nations.”1 In the colonial complacency of the 1950s, the suggestion that the goal of Canada’s Indian policy should be to help the First Nations win back their economic and political independence sounded heretical. The buzzwords at the time were “assimilation” and “integration,” which meant moving people from the reserves into towns and cities where they would eventually disappear as distinct peoples. Dorion quickly chastised Manuel, warning him that he was “wandering all over the map” with his self-supporting Nations comment, and reminding him that the topic at hand was Indian reserves, not Nations.2 But Manuel refused to back down. He continued to make his case, shifting his tone with his arguments—moving from thoughtful discourse to humour to the occasional flash of anger to the simple plea that the government of Canada look at the disaster it was wreaking on the lives of his peoples.

That first day he spoke for almost six hours, and while he did the mood in the room gradually changed. The objections from the MPs and senators became fewer and fewer, and even Dorion began to lean forward in his chair. By the time the marathon session ended on the second day, the parliamentarians were listening to the Shuswap leader with genuine respect. Whatever they thought of his ideas, they recognized that they had met a man of vision and deep conviction and few believed they had seen the last of George Manuel.

The source of the vision that took Manuel to Ottawa that spring, and that would take him to the four corners of the world during the next two decades, was not derived from political theory. It was rooted in his own knowledge of who he was and where his Shuswap people had come from.

Yet in many ways the story of the Shuswap Nation could have been told by a Carib Indian in the sixteenth century, a Maliseet in the seventeenth, a Huron in the eighteenth or a Plains Cree in the nineteenth. But for the Shuswap people, the full weight of the European occupation didn’t come until the 1860s when Manuel’s own grandfather was in his twenties.

Manuel brought with him to Ottawa, and to all political struggles, the memories of the old man who had grown up in a world where the Shuswap were a free people living on the lands the Old One had given to them when the Earth was still young.

* * *

During the hearings, one of the MPs referred to reserves as “glorified concentration camps.” Manuel bristled at the statement.3 He reminded the politicians that most reserves were the remnants of vast national territories, and he told them that the lands were “rich in memories and traditions.”4 In his case, those memories were reinforced every time he fetched a pail of water from the river in front of his house and passed the deep circular excavation where his grandfather Dick Andrew had lived in a kekuli, the traditional Shuswap pit-house.

The kekuli reminded him of just how recently the Europeans had usurped the land. When Andrew was growing up during the 1840s and 1850s, all the lakes and streams and all the mountains and valleys still had Indian names. The Shuswap lived off the natural abundance of the land and still followed their ancient rhythm of life with the thirty-seven Shuswap bands travelling between summer and winter hunting and fishing grounds. In between, they came together in the spring and fall for informal national assemblies to arrange marriages with members of other bands, allocate hunting and fishing areas and discuss relations with the neighbouring tribes and with the newly arrived fur traders.

The closest trading post to Andrew’s Neskonlith band was Fort Kamloops, seventy kilometres west at the meeting of the South and North Thompson rivers. Twice a year the people of Neskonlith paddled south to trade their stockpile of furs, dried salmon and dried meat for European goods like firearms, knives and axes.

If the Chief found that the prices at Kamloops were not attractive enough, he would lead his people to other posts in Gale or Hope where they could strike a better deal. Overall, the trade was profitable for the Shuswap, and they treated the whites as shopkeepers who were free to carry on their business on Shuswap territory as long as they stayed within carefully proscribed limits.

The calamities of contact for the Shuswap people began in 1861 when smallpox, the scourge that had wiped out millions of North, Central and South American Indians in the previous three centuries, arrived in British Columbia.

After taking a terrible toll on the coast, the epidemic spread into the interior. Estimates of the death rate among the Shuswap run as high as three-quarters of the population; in some cases, whole villages were wiped out.

The Chief of Andrew’s Neskonlith band led his people into the hills to avoid contact with the most badly infected areas. Still, the losses were devastating, with almost half the band succumbing to the disease.

After the epide...

Table of contents

• Praise
• Epigraph
• Foreword: Dr. Pamela Palmater
• Preface: Peter McFarlane
• Preface: Doreen Manuel
• Note on the 2020 Edition
• Part I: The Neck of the Chicken
• Part II: Building the National Movement
• Part III: Indian Shogun
• Part IV: Final Days
• Epilogue
• Afterword: Kanahus Manuel
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright