Most of us are familiar with the first part of this line from the popular North American sport of baseball. But seven? What does that mean? How far out can you be?
Our current Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, likes to say that the most important item on the Canadian political agenda is reconciliation with our indigenous citizens. I am not sure how he can in all honesty continue to say that. By his actions, he still belongs to that group of umpires, a.k.a. Canadian politicians, who continue to call "Strike out" against our indigenous neighbors, long after we have reached the proverbial three.
Let me just list some of those strikes. This is for those of you who still like to think that First Nations are getting more than their share in the Canadian economy. It is also for those of you who still continue to say in reference to these people and their stories of what Canada has done to them, "Get over it" or "Move on."
Now, this is a blog and not a formal paper, so I am going to be listing some of the strikes, but not always giving the sources, and certainly not footnotes. Much of this is common knowledge to those who pay any attention to history and current affairs. But are we learning from history?
I had known about a number of these strikes for years and was still sometimes shocked when I actually heard them, or heard of ones I had not known about before. Sometimes it is hard to believe how hard our government, which ostensibly represents us and our indigenous citizens, has tried to "strike out" the Indians (and not the Cleveland Indians either; I think they got permanently “struck out"), to use an older term which is still in use, even by indigenous people themselves at times.
1. Breaking treaties. European settlers began to make treaties with First Nations going back to the 17th century at least. However, they have practically all been broken in more ways than one. In my books, that
is called dishonesty, lying, maybe even cheating. Going back on your promises certainly does not encourage trust. Do we wonder, after nearly 300 years of this and what follows, why are indigenous citizens still do not trust us?
2. Shrinking reserves. We won’t even get into the discussion of how wrong it was to create reserves and force the natives on to them in the first place. When this happened years later in South Africa, the Western
nations eventually saw this as apartheid and took severe steps to essentially force South Africa to change their ways. In all fairness though, sometimes the first Nations, sensing the inevitable with the onslaught of Europeans settlers, were in favor of this so that they could have some land where they could still carry out the ways of life they were used to at the time. However, who were not prepared, in most cases, for how stingy our government was in giving them reserve allotments in comparison to the freedom with which they had lived across the land previously. To make matters worse, the government continued to take steps subsequently to shrink reserve lands to allow more lands for settlers and sometimes to render reserves null and void completely. Where do you go when your home property gets smaller and smaller, and maybe even disappears?
3. Not buying crops. By the middle of the 19th century it was evident that the indigenous people could no longer really carry on their way of life of gathering, hunting and trapping. The government sought to
encourage them to move into agriculture and so promised in the treaties that they would provide them agricultural equipment to help facilitate this change, having already provided them reserve land on which to begin this way of living. However, this was one of those moves that first shocked me when I read about it in the history of Manitoba some years ago. I am not an easily shocked person. Some indigenous people, in spite of the odds, began farming with some good success. However, what did our governments and their representatives do? In too many cases, across the prairies, they refused to buy their crops, to give settlers more of a chance to sell their crops, or maybe paid them less than what settlers were getting paid. The outcome, which the government and Canadian citizens of the time did not really mind, was that many were literally forced into starvation. After all, they were just "the Indian problem."
4. Spreading disease. Not surprisingly, the Europeans brought with them many vectors of infectious illness
that the indigenous people of Canada, not having encountered these illnesses, had no defense against. It
wasn't until years after the arrival of the colonists, that steps began to be taken to combat diseases like tuberculosis, which ran rampant among the indigenous people. That was bad enough. However, many of us know that there were also examples of where diseases were spread among First Nations, if not purposely, at least knowingly. I refer here to the infamous "smallpox blankets." The Indians were becoming needy and blankets were given to them, sometimes as a part of ceremonial protocol, sometimes, ostensibly, to help them out. However, some of them were no one to carry the smallpox virus. In fact, once this deadly virus, who most of us don't even know about anymore, was let loose on the indigenous population, it spread across the continent way in advance of the settlers. Thousands of indigenous people in British Columbia died from this long before settlers reached the province.
5. No lawyers. Our indigenous neighbors do not lack intelligence. It did not take them long to understand that the colonists and their settlers were not to be trusted, as referred to above. When the government
sensed that the indigenous citizens were beginning to look at the use of lawyers to help them fight against the injustices perpetrated upon them using the settlers' own laws, what did the government do? They pass another law forbidding indigenous people from using lawyers! So much for equality.
6. No vote. As if number five did not already indicate significant inequality, not being enfranchised was another mark against the Canadian government. Provisions were made early on for indigenous people to
Become enfranchised, to get the vote, if they wished. But why do they have to show desire to do so? Why was the right to vote not just granted to them like every other citizen of the land? To make matters worse, in the early years particularly, if indigenous people wished to be enfranchised, they practically had to give up all of their other rights! Again I ask, how is that equality?
7. Court battles. This is one area that continues to be a sore spot and which we Canadians should stop engaging in. This is one of the reasons why I essentially referred to Trudeau as a hypocrite, because his
government, while mouthing good wishes towards indigenous people on the one hand, continue to spend millions of dollars that could be better spent for all in the country, on fighting them in the court, on many fronts. We know that some of this occurs with things like land and resource rights, and one could argue that there is some merit in spouting that out clearly, which sometimes involves court cases. However, we also know that where justice has already decreed that indigenous people were entitled to certain compensations, the government spends exorbitant sums fighting that, such as money that was to be paid for residential school survivors and survivors of the so-called "60s scoop" of adoptions of indigenous people by non-indigenous citizens, not only in Canada, but sent across the border into the US.
I could go on, but I think I have given the reader enough of a taste of the uneven playing field with which we settler-colonists "play" with our indigenous neighbors. I will stop at the perfect number of seven, although what we have been writing about here is anything but perfect.
I hope some of you reading this are asking the question, what are we to do about it? I have three answers to that. First of all, reassess your attitude toward our indigenous neighbors. Perhaps you have been judging them unfairly, given what you have just read. Secondly, look further into these and other areas yourselves to see how badly we as a nation and citizens have behaved towards our indigenous neighbors. Thirdly, advocate against all of these injustices by communicating with your government representatives at all levels, to change the rules of the game so that they are fair to all, and no one any longer gets more than three strikes called against them.
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