The antagonism existing between the customs, intellects and lives of the two races, and the despondency consequent upon the changed life of the Indians are important factors in frustrating attempts for their amelioration in the present and the Great Beyond…Enlarged knowledge relating to reserves and missions, with the history of the conquest of countries and the training of races, will dispel despondency and create brighter hopes for the ultimate civilization of the Red Race. -John McLean, 1889
If apartheid were measured by results rather than intent, we would have it on reserves today. -Aboriginal writer and businessman Calvin Helin[1]-2008
In Canadian courts notes written in the course of duty by certain witnesses at or near the time of the happening of the events described in those notes- such as police notes- enhance the credibility and the truth and reliability of the testimony of those witnesses who refer to them. Because of the use of those contemporaneous notes their oral evidence is often preferred over the evidence of witnesses who testify about those same events based on distant memory or secondhand knowledge, where, in the latter case, evidence-tainting issues of calculated self-interest and bias are much more likely to be factors.
Canadians are experiencing this latter case with respect to the way our political, media and academic elites, both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, are characterizing Canada’s past attitude towards and treatment of its Aboriginal peoples. We are constantly being bombarded with biased, distorted and/or false accusations, with rarely any supporting facts given, that our Euro-Canadians ancestors had nothing but contempt for Aboriginal peoples and their cultures, and that their treatment of them was nothing short of genocidal land and culture stealing.
John McLean’s The Indians of Canada[2], completed in 1889 to respond to requests “to send information on the Northwest tribes to the British Association, the Smithsonian Institution and other learned societies”, is an erudite, spiritually generous, balanced, contemporaneous account of what the situation was like then. This fascinating book, a call for ultimate racial and civic unity between the white “race’ and the “Red Men”, its patent fairness and sincerity giving it a constant ring of truth, exposes the shallowness and falsity of the essentially blood libel nature of today’s elites’ self-interested narrative of theft and genocide.
McLean, a Christian missionary, spent nine years with the Blood Indians of what is now Alberta, learning their language, customs, and “wonderful mythology and traditions.” He wrote his book, fully describing these manners and customs, in the hope that “the reader of these pages will have their ideas changed, as mine have been, by coming into contact with the Red Men, through their languages, literature, native religion, folk-lore, and later Christian life.”
McLean had a Euro-Canadian and Christian cultural bias, which he makes no bones about. Notwithstanding his respectful and indeed, sometimes reverential, extensive description of all aspects of Aboriginal culture, he accurately saw it as an essentially “earlier historical stage” iteration of humanity’s cultural evolution, then experiencing its agonizing End Days. He sadly concluded that notwithstanding its strengths and beauties, it embodied an unworkable way to live in the increasingly settled and industrial world of 1889.
His belief that if Aboriginals “learned the lessons of man’s equality, the brotherhood of man and the fatherhood of God, as revealed to them by Christian teaching, they would become strong and independent”, would be criticized by today’s ahistorical, “Indian Industry”[3], race-obsessed profiteers and dividers. However, that belief had been the core of Christian proselytizing to Aboriginals since the time of the Jesuits 250 years before that, and on its own merits, as evidenced by the fact that the majority of Aboriginals today profess the Christian faith, had/has a lot going for it. It was a sincere, good faith reflection of the times, a belief promulgated by, and which was the lived experience of, thousands of decent and honorable non-Aboriginal men and woman, (and Aboriginal men, see below), who, to improve, even to save, the tragic situation of the “red man”, whose ancient ways and means were fast and irrevocably disappearing, gave greatly of themselves in the service of it.
If the reader of McLean’s book still can’t accept the Christian slant of it and the assumption of Euro-Canadian cultural superiority throughout it, he/she must still be persuaded of the book’s essential truth and worth by its deep scholarship about and respect and compassion shown towards its Aboriginal subjects and their rich cultures.
McLean shows that respect and admiration throughout. He asserts at the beginning that “due credit must, therefore, be given to the Indians for the intelligence, experience and sagacity displayed in all that belongs peculiarly to the native civilization.” Regarding their orators, whose eloquence, he writes: “has its source in the heart, is illuminated by the imagination, strengthened by intelligence and guided by reason”, he further writes: “Good voices, keen intellects, independence of spirit, and love of liberty characterize many of the speakers among the Indian tribes”.
As to the essential Aboriginal character he writes:
Underlying the blanket of the red man beats a noble heart, that shows true affection for his own kin, can be moved deeply by a brave action, and is true to the principles of honor, justice and truth. Under the warcap there exists a keen intellect, educated in the arts and sciences of the native civilization.
McLean’s objectivity is confirmed by his relentless criticism of the conduct of many of his fellow Euro-Canadians towards Aboriginals:
Honesty of purpose, and strict adherence to promises, characterize many Indian tribes, until the influence of the fluctuating and immoral paleface injects evil thoughts and tendencies into the minds of the untutored red man.
His book is filled with fascinating and illuminating facts.
For instance, the reader learns that the federal government’s attempts to restrict the potlatch was not done for the purpose of destroying Aboriginal culture. This practice, a reflection of the ancient Aboriginal cultural practice of lavish gift-giving to attain higher status and respect in the eyes of others, was feasible when Aboriginals were independent and had their own means of self-support, so that what was given away could be replenished. But with the collapse of their old ways and their tragic, new-found dependency on the federal government, it made sense to discourage the deliberately self-impoverishing potlatch.
We learn of the unusually high incidence of blindness amongst ancient Aboriginals, “arising from the smoke of the lodges, uncleanness, the habitual use of paint, and hereditary diseases.”
We learn of the many Christian missionaries who learned the native languages and invented script for them, so that they could be preserved, and yes, so that the words of the Bible could be taught more effectively. McLean, an expert on native languages himself, closes his book with the Lord’s Prayer printed in Cree syllabic.
McLean’s objectivity was not confined to criticisms of his fellow non-Aboriginal Canadians. He was equally unsparing in his criticisms of many aspects of Aboriginal culture.
He writes of the brutal and callous mistreatment of women, who were traded, bought and sold for horses:
Amongst the Blackfeet, marriage is simply a bargain between the suitor and the young woman’s father, for a certain number of horses…In the good old days when the buffalo were abundant, the more wives a man possessed, the richer he became…When the husband became angry with the wife he beat her with impunity; when he wished her no longer he sold her, and when she was found guilty of adultery, her nose was cut off.
He describes in detail Aboriginal practices of constant war-making, human sacrifice, scalping, slavery, ritual torture, blood-drinking, banishment, cannibalism, polygamy, kidnapping and forced adoption. Clearly, they were as much migrators and conquerors amongst themselves as present day Aboriginals accuse Euro-Canadians of having been towards them.
The fact that none of these practices would be countenanced by Aboriginals today shows just how irrevocably lost genuine pre-contact Aboriginal cultures are- lost to and overwhelmed by the irresistible attractions and advantages of Euro-Canadian culture, including in the case of women, the advantages of being protected by the rule of law against such mistreatment as described above.
For about 250 years prior to 1889 the Aboriginal peoples of Canada had enthusiastically embraced the profound, culture-transforming influences of the materially advanced Euro-Canadian culture. Over that time, with their adoption- cultural appropriation- of the horse, brought to North America by the Spanish, the gun, the metal knife, the copper pot, cloth, and all the other myriad, life-easing accoutrements of Euro-Canadian culture, and with their willing absorption into the prevailing Euro-Canadian mercantilist culture, they steadily, unconsciously, gave up their old cultural ways and means. By the 1880’s, with the onrush of white settlers brought by the railroad, and now confined by treaties to reserves, little remained of their old nomadic, hunting and gathering warrior cultures. In this regard McLean writes:
The vast tracts of land are gone, game is becoming scarce, diseases of various kinds have been introduced, and the Indian brooding over his loss bewails his loss of independence, and his heart is in the ground.
Becoming essentially wards of the new Canadian state, they faced a tragic, cultural catastrophe of the highest order, with, as McLean writes, “their glory faded, and day of conquest gone”.
McLean writes further of this world-ending, cultural catastrophe with poignant, elegiac eloquence:
Long years before the advent of the white man upon the continent, the highways of the New World were the trails of the red men. The rivers were the highways for those who travelled by canoe, and many scenes, strange and sad, were enacted on these waters. Over the mountains and prairies these singular pathways led to distant campfires, and the homes of hostile tribes. Through the forest they led, unmarked by tree, mound or stone, the keen eye of the red man, and the instinct of the race easily guiding safely toward his destination. These constituted a singular network over the continent, and many started on their journey from their campfires and lodges who were destined never to return.
Could these scenes of former years be revived, what strange emotions would fill our hearts. The men have gone, and much of their history has died with them. The fires that burned, the tales of adventure that were told, are things of the past. The railroads follow the old trails, and the remnant of the red race have receded from the haunts of civilization. The well-beaten paths are almost obliterated, and a sigh escapes our lips at the thought of the decay of the civilization of the pioneers of the white men.
John McLean’s contemporaneous assessment of this tragic demise of a people and their culture- his account of this universally common historical occurrence[4]– has been confirmed by numerous historians since 1889.
Dr. Diamond Jenness, Canada’s greatest historian on this subject, in his The Indians of Canada[5], the standard textbook on the subject for several decades, wrote:
The civilized world is intolerant of (primitive) peoples, whom it has neither the time nor the patience to protect and train for three or four generations until they can bridge the gap between the old conditions and the new. So the world is strewn with their wreckage….
He described the ills that contact with modern Europeans subjected Canada’s Aboriginals to – alcoholism, smallpox, typhus, tuberculosis, the destruction of their hunting and fishing grounds (by themselves and by non-Aboriginals), and perpetual inter-tribal warfare, conducted with European weaponry, over an ever-shrinking land and food base- a tragic but inevitable series of events, painful to read.
Of the effect of Christianity Dr. Diamond wrote:
…the nature worship of the Indians was too vague, too eclectic, to withstand the assault of a highly organized proselytizing religion like Christianity, or to serve as a rallying ground for the bands and tribes that struggled without guidance to adjust their lives afresh. The epidemic of smallpox hastened its downfall, for in those days of trial and suffering that would have tested the strength of any religion the Indians called on their deities, their guardian spirits and their medicine men in vain…When the missionaries of a dominant race can invoke the aid of economic interests, they meet with little resistance from ill-organized religions. Although most of the tribes still cling to some of their old superstitions and beliefs, all of them very quickly transferred their allegiance to one or the other of the Christian churches….
Of alcohol he wrote:
Whiskey and brandy destroyed the self-respect of the Indians, weakened every family and tribal tie, and made them, willing or unwilling, the slaves of the trading posts where liquor was dispensed to them by the keg. Even the fur traders recognized its evils and gladly supported the government when it finally prohibited all sale to the Indians under penalty of a heavy fine. Disease and alcohol demoralized and destroyed the Indians just when they needed all their energy and courage to cope with the new conditions that suddenly came into existence around them.
With the destruction of the beaver resource and the buffalo herds came “war and confusion” between the Aboriginal tribes affected and, by John McLean’s time:
The buffalo herds at last failed to appear and the Indians, dying of starvation, had to accept unreservedly the conditions laid down by the white man…No longer was each tribe a self-contained and self-supporting unit, but from the Arctic to the Prairies and from the Atlantic to the Pacific all alike found themselves enmeshed in the economic system forced upon them from without. One by one they ceded their territories to the invaders, and wherever European colonization was proceeding, submitted to confinement on narrow reserves. The needs of the colonists then became their needs also, and in place of their former self-sufficiency, they were reduced to purchasing most of the necessities of life at European trading stores.
Dr. Jenness’ book makes for grim, pathos-filled reading in places, as exemplified above. Everything he wrote was observed and described by John McLean. Clearly, he was no Eurocentric triumphalist. Rather, he was, like McLean, an honest humanist sadly but in clear-eyed fashion dealing in facts and fact-based conclusions – something that in this area is virtually non-existent amongst our political, academic and media elites today.
So also did Peter Newman, in Caesars of the Wilderness[6], the second of his three-volume series on the Hudson Bay Company. Describing the events surrounding the transfer of the Hudson Bay Company lands to Canada, he wrote:
Least consulted and most directly affected of all were the Indian peoples. As land sales rather than fur barters became the HBC’s prime concern, their traditional way of life lost its raison d’etre, and hunger was the result. Indians begging for food at white settlements became a common sight, as did the sad sight of natives having to subsist on a meagre diet of gophers caught by pouring water down their holes and snaring the tough little animals as they emerged. On April 13, 1871, Chief Sweet Grass and a delegation of Plains Cree from the Edmonton and Carlton House districts came in stately procession to address …the Chief Factor at Edmonton, asking him to transcribe and submit a petition to the Governor at Fort Garry. “We heard our lands were sold and we did not like it,” went the proclamation. “We do not want to sell our lands; it is our property, and no one has a right to sell them. Our country is getting ruined of furbearing animals, hitherto our sole support, and now we are poor and want help-we want you to pity us. We want cattle, tools, agricultural implements, and assistance in everything when we come to settle-our country is no longer able to support us…Indian claims to the grasslands were gradually muffled, and the interracial fur-trade partnership that had shaped day-to-day contact over most of a continent for much of two centuries was irrevocably severed. A native heritage was regarded as a liability, not an asset, as tent towns grew into villages and villages expanded into towns and cities. The buffalo herds were gone, their mournful bellowing replaced by the echoing hoots first of steamboats and then of locomotives….
More recently these events were described by Richard Gwyn in Nation Maker, his biography of John A. MacDonald:[7]
Ottawa’s response to the loss of the buffalo was to pressure Indians to take up farming on their reserves as the only way they could sustain themselves. The scale of the challenge the Indians faced was not understood then, nor is it easy to comprehend it even in hindsight. In essence, the Plains Indians underwent a cultural catastrophe that encompassed every aspect of their lives-not just the material and political, but the social, the economic, the spiritual, the cultural, the psychological; each of these was either shattered or reduced to the redundant, the retrograde or, in the eyes of many outsiders, the comic. It is not easy to identify any people anywhere who have had to cope with so complete and swift an extinction of their way of life other than those defeated in war, occupied and reduced to slavery. Perhaps the best intellectual analysis of this transformational trauma is that by the American philosopher Jonathan Lear in his book Radical Hope. There, he explores the dimensions of a comment make by Chief Plenty Coups of the Crow Nation that, after the buffalo disappeared, “Nothing happened.” Chief Plenty Coups was saying that once the buffalo were gone, his people became like the living dead.
Given this catastrophe, as described at the time by McLean, and confirmed by these later historians, it was McLean’s view that all that was left were “plain matter-of-fact Indians, facing the stern reality that soon, very soon, they will be doomed to earn their bread by the sweat of their brow”, i.e., for Aboriginals not just to survive, but to thrive, they would have to join the new, mainstream industrial economy as farmers, wage-earners or otherwise.
This was the urgent, compelling reason for establishing residential schools. They would provide Aboriginal youth with the education they needed to participate in that new economy. They would help the new generations of Aboriginals integrate into the new world that was upon them. They were established not to rob a people of their culture, as now wrongly and shamefully asserted. Rather, they were established to save a people whose old culture had already been irretrievably lost- whose old culture, as Chief Plenty Coup said, had been effectively reduced to a passive, dependent, anomic state where “nothing happened”.
The tragedy continues into the present time. No more than one-third of Aboriginal children ever attended a residential school during the times they were in existence. They produced many successful Aboriginal Canadians, who integrated well into the mainstream culture, while still retaining their Aboriginal identity. Unfortunately, their numbers were never high enough to allow Aboriginals as a whole to resist the inexorable downwards and debilitating cultural drag of the Indian reserve, the main reality of which is, and has always been, segregated, ghetto-like dependency, learned helplessness and anomie.
When McLean wrote The Indians of Canada the reserve system was just getting underway. The situation was confusing and unprecedented for all. Canada was preoccupied building a country. The Aboriginals were in shock. It was too early to assess it properly. McLean made no comments on it.
But now, over 130 years later, we can properly regard its establishment as a huge mistake. Because of it, Aboriginal Canadians are at the bottom of every indicator of social and economic success. This great mistake should be corrected by changing our laws and, in a careful and compassionate manner, phasing the reserve system out. There are lives in the balance.
To ameliorate the present situation of Aboriginals we must first be courageous enough to admit the unpleasant, illiberal reality of it. We must admit that the present attempts to “decolonize” Canada by in effect reversing the course of history by trying to re-invent and re-instate a lost world that never was, is a cruel, self-serving masquerade that, while enriching Calvin Helin’s privileged Indian Industry and a few other alpha Aboriginals, is inflicting great social, psychological and material harm on the vast majority of our Aboriginal peoples. We must admit that the reserve system is a racist failure.
The present legal and political place where Aboriginals in Canada exist, and where their leaders, now constantly spouting their fantasy “nation to nation” talk, are determined to keep them, is a segregated, cultural no-man’s land where their wounded minds will never heal – a difficult, contradictory, cultural demimonde situated somewhere between a lost past and a dysfunctional present, the combination of both, if the status quo persists, leading only to a worsening future.
The only true and effective healing path for Canada’s Aboriginals– the best path for them to recover their lost animating spirit- their orenda[8]– is the path of full social and legal integration with the rest of Canadians. This was John McLean’s vision.
This was the goal of and the idea behind Pierre Trudeau’s 1969 White Paper. Its rejection by Aboriginal chiefs and the acquiescence in that rejection by Canada’s new elite classes, who, turning their backs on 200 years of liberal, Enlightenment history and progress, came to believe, and still believe, that for Canada’s Aboriginals, groups rights based on race should be allowed to take priority over racially indifferent individual rights, even to the point of approving Aboriginals losing the protection of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms on reserves.
This is great mistake in Canadian history continues in front of our eyes, with tragic consequences playing out every day on reserves across Canada.
John McLean was an incurable Christian optimist. He believed that humanity was progressing steadily up an evolutionary ladder, where at the top humanity would find its destiny as a unified cultural whole. He wrote that “red and white are the subjects of one Sovereign and the children of a common Father,” and that that unified cultural whole would be an “ideal race, the result of a union of nationalities speaking a universal language and accepting a common faith.”
His lengthy, learned and illuminating descriptions of ancient Aboriginal culture, particularly their religious and spiritual practices, reminds the reader that humanity, as it then was and still is today- including Canadians of all races and backgrounds- have almost everything fundamental in common, and that the things that make us only appear to be different are just surface matters. They are just myths, unexamined falsehoods and parochial cultural ways, the latter different in form but essentially the same as the ways of all other cultures the world over.
John McLean devoted several pages in his book to the life of Joseph Brant, the great Mohawk leader, who was a strong Christian and who was absolutely loyal to Canada. His advice to his Aboriginal followers was “to live as good subjects, to fear God and to honour the King.” (Italics in the original).
McLean wrote of Brant:
He labored earnestly for the welfare of the Six Nations and sought to prevent the introduction of intoxicating liquors amongst them. The education of his own family and the Indians, the directing of his people towards a life of industry and self-support, and the supply of religious influences, employed the last days of the noble chief of the Mohawks. (Italics added)
Dr. Peter Jones, a famous Aboriginal Christian missionary and Crown loyalist of the mid-nineteenth century, discussed and praised by McLean, summed up one of Brant’s essential messages to his fellow Aboriginals: “Forget sorrow and do your duty.”
More recently, pioneering Indigenous lawyer, and one of the founders of what is now the Assembly of First Nations, William Wuttunee, delivered a similar message to his fellow Aboriginals in his brave book Ruffled Feathers[9]:
Indians can work with the white man in partnership to develop a country which will provide for each of our children a legacy of great value. It is not necessary to separate from the white man, either physically or spiritually. The long period of separation of the two races has now ended.
Let us then unite in spirit, so that each of us can look forward to a peaceful old age in which we can see our children effectively participating in the creation of a new society. Many Indians have already taken the road ahead, to live in the land of the white man. They have paved the way for their brothers and sisters on which they must learn to walk without fear.
The hard knocks of history are pushing the Indian into a new way of life, and he must learn to accept this new challenge with faith and with hope. History has taught a hard lesson, but history will vindicate itself one day when the Indian finally finds his place in Canadian society. (italics added)
John McLean echoed Brant’s and presaged Wuttunee’s message that the noble goal of integration was the only realistic path forward, and that it could be achieved without sacrificing the basic strengths and uniqueness of Aboriginal identity and culture.
They all knew that a culture is enhanced, not diminished, through integration- that culture is born out of exchanges and thrives on differences. They all knew that self-centered, isolating segregation means the stagnation and ultimate demise of a culture, a truth that the reserve system amply demonstrates.
Nelson Mandela said that the first step towards reconciliation is to end apartheid. Tragically, Canada’s privileged Aboriginal elites want to strengthen it, thus failing to do their duty as Joseph Brant and McLean rightly saw it, and thus making reconciliation impossible. (Aboriginal leaders never talk of duties anymore. They only talk of rights and entitlements.)
Octavio Paz, the Nobel Prize-winning Mexican intellectual, in his most famous book, The Labyrinth of Solitude,[10] challenged his countrymen to see themselves as:
a cosmic race… where the old plurality of cultures, postulating various and contrary ideals, and offering various and contrary views of the future, has been replaced by a single civilization and a single future…
and to regard themselves as bound by the idea of living inter-racially, as absolute equals, ina new form of creative participation. This is a hopeful and inspiring idea- an idea that is working in Mexico– an idea that provides a new way for Canadians of all races to view ourselves going into the future together.
Discussing the subject of Aboriginal culture, past and present, more honestly and in the realistic and necessary context of universally-similar human cultures and in the context of world history, as McLean does in The Indians of Canada, reveals Aboriginals, to non-Aboriginals and to themselves, as just typical human beings – typical members of the constantly migrating, mixing, changing, assimilating human family.
It’s irresponsible and wrong that today, Aboriginal culture, ancient and current, is not discussed more honestly, and that what discussion there is of it is so driven and constricted by the censorious dictates of political correctness and, on the part of Aboriginal elites, by such aggressive defensiveness and self-interest.
Despite the plethora of bad laws and policies discouraging it, the healthy and natural process of integration and assimilation of Aboriginals and non-Aboriginals has been happening in Canada for generations, and is, for our Aboriginals, an almost completed process. To necessarily complete that process, we should be trying to change those bad laws and policies. We should be trying harder to healthily relate to each other, not just legally, but politically and socially, as the common Canadian family members we are.
The lives of all Canadians would be enriched if our Aboriginal peoples, instead of being isolated from the rest of us, became an omnipresent, integrated part of our daily lives, where they experience their daily, active living present on equal terms with the rest of Canadians. Our lives would all be enriched if our Aboriginal peoples lived in our neighborhoods instead of so physically and psychically apart from us, (people don’t really care what their neighbor’s race or ethnicity or political or religious views are, so long as they’re good neighbors).
We would all be enriched if Aboriginal culture, instead of being perceived and summed up by Canadians as an accusing, pointed finger –nothing comes from blame but evil tempers– or as advocacy leverage used by Aboriginal elites’ in their constant, separatist-like power and money claims- was shared with other Canadians in the context of daily, commingled community life, and thus experienced by all Canadians as a positive, felt part of our Canadian community’s day to day life- our great country’s rich, rainbow reality. This is the only way that all Canadians will positively experience the full measure of our country. This is the only proper and true path to “reconciliation”.
We need to re-invent Canada in this profound area of our national life, by adopting John McLean’s version of reconciliation -and that of all the other great liberal humanists- Aboriginal[11] and non-Aboriginal- discussed here- a version premised on universal human equality– so as to finally bring our Aboriginal peoples into our greater Canadian family as fully equal members.
John McLean would say Amen to the following words spoken by Nelson Mandela at his inauguration as Africa’s first post-apartheid President. They apply to all Canadians today and we should all take them to heart and act on them.
To my compatriots, I have no hesitation in saying that each one us is intimately attached to the soil of this beautiful country.
Each time one of us touches the soil of this land we sense a personal renewal.
We are moved by a sense of joy and exhilaration when the grass turns green and the flowers bloom.
The time for the healing of the wounds has come.
The moment to bridge the chasms that divide us has come.
The time to build is upon us.
Peter Best
Lunenburg/Charlottetown/Halifax
September 22nd, 2022
[1] From his book Dances with Dependency: Out of Poverty Through Self-Reliance, Ravencrest Publishing, Woodland Hills, California, 2008
[2] Originally published in 1889 by William Briggs, 78 & 80 King Street East, Toronto, and then a Facsimile edition re-printed by Coles Publishing Company of Toronto in 1970.
[3] British Columbia Aboriginal writer/lawyer/businessman Calvin Helin, the son of a Tsimshian Nation chief, in his book Dances with Dependency, Out of Poverty Through Self-Reliance, (above), has a harsh view of what he calls the “Indian Industry.” Echoing John McLean over 100 years later, he writes:
“If lasting solutions are to be found (to eliminate the “dependency mindset” forged by the welfare economics of the reserve system) the real Aboriginal social and political problems must be discussed openly and frankly…Aboriginal citizens must squarely face the Industry of Non-Aboriginal Hucksters and “consultants”, and those Aboriginal politicians who are openly profiting from this sea of despair and poverty. In spite of what they say, this “Indian Industry” has no real interest in changing a system from which they are profiting.” (Italics added.)
[4] The spider weaves the curtains in the palace of the Caesars,
The owl calls the watches in Afrasiab’s tower. -Lines of a Persian poet on this timeless Ozymandias theme, quoted by Patrick Kinross in his book, The Ottoman Empire, The Folio Society, 2003. Afrasiab is the oldest part of the ruined, ancient city of Samarkand.
[5] Sixth Edition, published by Information Canada in 1963. (Today, there’s no way our history-denying federal government would have anything to do with the publication of such an honest, scholarly book. In fact, with Canadian academia being so intellectually debased and ideological, there’s no way that such a book could be written or published at all today.)
[6] Viking Books, Toronto, 1987
[7] Nation Maker: Sir John A. Macdonald: His Life, Our Times, Random House Canada, 2011
[8] See Joseph Boyden, The Orenda, Hamish Hamilton Canada, Toronto, 2013
[9] Ruffled Feathers- Indians in Canadian Society, Bell Books Ltd. Calgary, 1971 (out of print)
[10] Grove Press Inc. New York, 1985
[11] Why is there not one Aboriginal leader today advocating Joseph Brant’s humanist, integrationist vision of reconciliation?
