Unsettling Canada

A National Wake-up Call

Arthur Manuel, Grand Chief Ronald M. Derrickson

• Publisher: Between the Lines
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781771135573
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

A Canadian bestseller and winner of the 2016 Canadian Historical Association Aboriginal History Book Prize, Unsettling Canada is a landmark text built on a unique collaboration between two First Nations leaders.

Arthur Manuel (1951–2017) was one of the most forceful advocates for Indigenous title and rights in Canada; Grand Chief Ron Derrickson, one of the most successful Indigenous businessmen in the country. Together, they bring a fresh perspective and bold new ideas to Canada's most glaring piece of unfinished business: the place of Indigenous peoples within the country's political and economic space.

This vital second edition features a foreword by award-winning activist Naomi Klein and an all-new chapter co-authored by law professor Nicole Schabus and Manuel's daughter, Kanahus, honouring the multi-generational legacy of the Manuel family's work.

1 The Lay of the Land

THERE IS NO DENYING the beauty of the land. From the hills above Neskonlith—the community where I was born and grew up and where I served as band chief from 1995 to 2003—you can see the blue waters of the Shuswap lakes, the dry scrubland of the valley, and the cooler hills shaded by stands of ponderosa pines. Below, the South Thompson River empties from the lake and winds westward through the valley toward Kamloops, where it joins the North Thompson and flows to the Fraser and down to the sea.

This is British Columbia’s Interior Plateau. The land my people have shared for thousands of years, and still share with our ancient neighbours. Our Secwepemc territory spreads north to the Dakelh lands, south to the Syilx (Okanagan) lands, west to the Nlaka’pamux, St’at’imc, and Tsilhqot’in lands, and to the east by the Ktunaxa territory, where the Rocky Mountains rise to the sky, marking the boundary between the Interior tribes and the Nakota and Cree peoples on the Great Plains.

The village itself is moulded around a wide bend in the river. From the hills above, you see a handful of houses and the band office, and on the west side of the river, the gas station and store. Along the riverbank are small gardens, and now, after many decades of grasslands, the hayfields have been replanted with the help of the new sprinkler irrigation system.

Further upstream, where Little Shuswap Lake empties into the river, is the town of Chase. It began to form around the lumber mill built just before the First World War. We have generally had peaceable relations with the people of the town, with only occasional flashes of open conflict. But even when it is peaceful, there has been a steady note of racism from across the river. Our parents and grandparents faced open Jim Crow and were forbidden access to most services in the white world. The only restaurants that would serve us were the Chinese restaurants; for the rest, Indians would be stopped at the door or, even more humiliating, left to sit unserved until they slunk away. My generation felt the sting of blatant racism in a less formal way, but it was still shocking to be confronted by it. A generation later, as chief, I was still dealing with racist acts against our children.

As co-chair of the Global Indigenous Peoples Caucus, reading the statement on the colonial doctrine of discovery at the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, New York City, May 7, 2012

There are, of course, many decent people in Chase, as there are anywhere, but the underlying noise is there. And even the well-meaning people of the town have a difficult time understanding us. To a large extent, we live in separate worlds. They live in Chase, British Columbia, Canada. We live in Neskonlith, Secwepemc territory.

I drove up to the hills above Neskonlith on an afternoon in June 2012. I was just back from New York, where I was serving as the co-chair to the Global Indigenous Peoples Caucus at the United Nations’ Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII), and I was looking for a quiet place to think things over.

Somehow we had gotten our message through the clamour of states that make up the United Nations. We had condemned, as Indigenous peoples, the innocent-sounding doctrine of discovery, which was the tool—the legal fiction—Europeans used to claim our lands for themselves. Even that claim rested on obvious mistruths. The Americas were first portrayed as terra nullius on European maps. But in almost all cases, Europeans were met, at times within minutes of their arrival, by Indigenous peoples. There was an attempt to get around this inconvenient fact by declaring us non-human, but this was difficult even for Europeans to sustain over time. The doctrine of discovery remained because it was a legal fig leaf they could use to cover naked thievery.

In New York, the United Nations report had called this doctrine frankly racist and described it as no more legitimate than the slavery laws of the same era. Most important, the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues’ committee report attacked the ongoing efforts to extinguish our title to the land through force or one-sided negotiations as a continuing violation of international law.¹

I would like to think that we live in a world where enlightenment—like the Permanent Forum statement on the doctrine of discovery—is a warm breeze spreading across the planet, and that with patience and good faith we will finally be warmed by the justice we have been so long denied. But I know that is not the case. At an earlier session of the UN, Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand fought bitterly against the whole world to try to block the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), which eventually passed in 2007 by a vote of 144 to 4, with Canada leading the charge of the rights deniers.²

Nothing we have ever gained has been given to us or surrendered without a fight. When circumstances forced the Europeans to make concessions, as was the case with the parts of the Royal Proclamation of 1763 that recognized Indigenous sovereignty, the next generation would take advantage of a resurgence in its strength to reverse the concessions and try to push us even further into poverty and dependence.

Still, we have not given up and, as my father, Grand Chief George Manuel, often pointed out, the most important gift we have received from our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents is the legacy of struggle. They have opened the trail we now pass along and, in a very real way, set the destination for our journey.

Before we look at where we are today and where we are heading, it is important that we first look at how we arrived at this place. I will briefly describe the process for my Secwepemc people. Among the other Indigenous peoples in Canada and throughout the Americas, there are many variations, but there is one constant: the land was stolen from underneath us.

Europeans made their initial land claim on our Secwepemc lands in 1778 when Captain Cook sailed along the British Columbia coast, more than four hundred kilometres away from our territory. According to the tenets of the doctrine of discovery, all that Europeans had to do to expropriate the lands in a region was to sail past a river mouth and make a claim to all of the lands in its watershed. Our lands, given to us by our Creator and inhabited by us for thousands of years, were transformed into a British “possession,” not only without our consent and without our knowledge, but also without a single European setting foot on our territory.

In the early 1800s, European traders and advance men like Simon Fraser did begin to show up on our rivers. For the first fifty years, they were seen and treated as guests on our lands. We had more or less friendly relations. We traded with them, we shared food with them, and we often helped them on their journeys through our territory. On a personal level, we tolerated their eccentricities and they tolerated ours.

But gradually, the numbers of these uninvited guests began to increase, and they began to act less and less like guests and more and more as lords. It was a process that Indigenous peoples around the world have experienced. The strangers arrive and offer trade and friendship. The Indigenous population responds in kind. Gradually the strangers begin to take up more and more space and make more and more requests from their hosts, until finally they are not requesting at all. They are demanding. And they are backing their demands with garrisoned outposts.

In the case of the people of the Interior Plateau, we are fortunate to have a document from our ancestors that describes the precise pattern of usurpation. This declaration, which is known as the Laurier Memorial, was presented to Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier on August 25, 1910, by the Interior chiefs when the prime minister was visiting Kamloops on an election campaign stop.³

It was prepared in the months before in mass meetings by our chiefs and people, who wanted to ensure that Canadians knew that we clearly remembered the betrayals of the previous century and that we demand redress in the current one. We called it a memorial because it represented, in a very precise way, our collective memories of our history with the settlers.

Europeans first came to the Interior Plateau looking for things they could pick up and cart away, as they did around the world. In this case, it was precious metals. The following are excerpts of what our chiefs told Laurier about their initial experience with Europeans:

At first they looked only for gold. We knew the latter was our property, but as we did not use it much nor need it to live by we did not object to their searching for it. They told us, “Your country is rich and you will be made wealthy by our coming. We wish just to pass over your lands in quest of gold.”

Soon they saw the country was good and some of them made up their minds, to settle it. They commenced to take up pieces of land here and there. They told us they wanted only the use of these pieces of land for a few years, and then would hand them back to us in an improved condition; meanwhile they would give us some of the products they raised for the loan of our land.

Thus they commenced to enter our “houses,” or live on our “ranches.” With us when a person enters our house he becomes our guest, and we must treat him hospitably as long as he shows no hostile intentions. At the same time we expect him to return to us equal treatment for what he receives.

It soon became apparent that the settlers were not offering equal treatment, and they were not planning to leave. On the contrary, their numbers were increasing. This led to growing unrest in the 1860s at a time when the route to the newly discovered Cariboo gold fields passed along the Fraser River to the Thompson and North Thompson rivers, directly through Secwepemc territory. The trickle of prospectors grew into a full-blown gold rush. With the unrest putting this new mining wealth at risk, James Douglas, the governor of the small colony on the coast, sent an emissary to meet with Chief Neskonlith to try to defuse the situation.

Chief Neskonlith, who was known as a tough and uncompromising leader, had been chosen to speak for the four bands around the Shuswap lakes. At the time, our people were under great stress because European diseases were sweeping through our country. First smallpox, then waves of measles, influenza, and tuberculosis. But even with our people in a weakened state, Neskonlith was forceful with the colonial representative. He told him that the encroachments on our land had reached an intolerable level and we would not accept any more European settlement. The emissary understood that this was not a bluff. But he had no financial or other resources that he could offer a deal with. So he simply asked Chief Neskonlith what the necessary lands were for his people and the other three Secwepemc bands.

Neskonlith showed the essential area on the emissary’s map. Together they marked out the territory for exclusive Secwepemc use; today, this area is known as the Neskonlith Douglas Reserve 1862. On this map, our land area totals almost a million acres; the emissary agreed this territory was for the exclusive use of our people. Chief Neskonlith then went out and staked the land where non-Secwepemc settlement was to be forbidden.

But as Indigenous peoples around the world have discovered, a deal is not a deal when it comes to settler governments. No restraint was placed on settlers moving onto our lands. In fact, colonial powers began to give away 160 acres of our land, free of charge, to each settler who applied. At the same time, in an astounding act of racism, the authorities allocated only 20 acres for Indian families. Our forests were then handed over to the control of the lumber companies. Our million acres was gradually, without our consent or even notification, whittled down to barely seven thousand acres scattered in small strips across our territory. The Interior chiefs told Laurier in 1910 that they had been betrayed by the government.

[The settlers] have knocked down . . . the posts of all the Indian tribes. They say there are no lines, except what they make. They have taken possession of all the Indian country and claim it as their own. . . . They have stolen our lands and everything on them. . . .

After a time when they saw that our patience might get exhausted and that we might cause trouble if we thought all the land was to be occupied by whites they set aside many small reservations for us here and there over the country. This was their proposal not ours, and we never accepted these reservations as settlement for anything, nor did we sign any papers or make any treaties. . . . They thought we would be satisfied with this, but we never have been satisfied and never will be until we get our rights.

Bitter insult, the Interior chiefs told Laurier, was added to injury when the settlers not only invaded our territory, but also began to treat us as trespassers and bar us from the lands that had been ours since time immemorial.

Gradually as the whites . . . became more and more powerful, and we less and less powerful, they little by little changed their policy towards us, and commenced to put restrictions on us. . . . They treat us as subjects without any agreement to that effect, and force their laws on us without our consent and irrespective of whether they are good for us or not. . . .

In many places we are debarred from camping, traveling, gathering roots and obtaining wood and water as heretofore. Our people are fined and imprisoned for breaking the game and fish laws and using the same game and fish which we were told would always be ours for food. Gradually we are becoming regarded as trespassers over a large portion of this our country.

Indigenous peoples from around the world recognize this process of slow, lawless confiscation of their...