Two generations ago, historians wrote of European saints and Indian savages. In the last generation, too many scholars had been writing about Indian saints and European savages. The opportunity for our generation is to go beyond the calculus of saints and savages altogether.
David Hackett Fischer, Champlain’s Dream
A case can be made that the single most important aspect of the North-West Rebellion in northern Saskatchewan was what didn’t happen: the Indians did not join forces with Riel. A small number of Indians did rise up, though surprisingly few. Of these, all but a handful did so not as allies of Riel but for their own purposes and in their own way. If, instead, there had been a general uprising among the 25,000 or so Plains Indians as well as of the Métis, the consequences would have been a prolonged war, the loss of a great many lives, extensive destruction and a severe cost to the country. To suppress such an insurgency, Canada would almost certainly have been forced to appeal to London for military aid, and quite possibly to Washington as well.
Macdonald was well aware of the danger. In letters he wrote in the months between Riel’s return in the summer of 1884 and the start of the spring rebellion, he refers often to the “risks of an Indian war.” The possibility that the few hundred Métis of South Branch would take up arms was to him little more than an annoyance. Once the crisis broke, though, he acted swiftly and decisively to reduce to the minimum any possibility of a widespread Indian uprising.
Yet the role the Indians played, or did not play, in this pivotal episode in Canadian history has received comparatively little attention. The only full descriptions are in Prairie Fire, by historians Bob Beal and Rod Macleod, and in Loyal till Death, by historians Bill Waiser and Blair Stonechild (himself an Aboriginal).* In effect, Riel has taken up all the oxygen in the room. What follows is an account, deliberately excluding the actions of Riel and the Métis, of the role of the Plains Indians before, during and after the North-West Rebellion of 1885.
The decisive event in the history of the Plains Indians during the last quarter of the nineteenth century was the vanishing of the buffalo almost to the point of extinction. This happened with terrifying and bewildering speed, over little more than a decade, a blink of an eye in the record of any people, from roughly the mid-1870s to the mid-1880s. In terms of biological catastrophes throughout the North and South American continents, no equivalent exists but for the collapse of the northern cod stocks of Newfoundland, which in the late 1980s and early 1990s dropped to just 1 per cent of their once vast scale.
Until this disaster occurred, the Plains Indians had enjoyed one of the highest standards of living of any Aboriginal people on the continent—and higher than that of Scottish Highlanders or Irish peasants. The buffalo were the foundation for their way of life, these once near-limitless herds providing the Indians with a seemingly inexhaustible source of high-quality fresh meat and from which came long-lasting pemmican, as well as warm winter robes and teepees made from hides, water bottles from the animals’ bladders and a host of bone artifacts ranging from needles to snowshoes. At the very same time that the buffalo were reduced to extinction by over-hunting, European Canadians began to move rapidly across the flat and treeless prairies in a way that hadn’t been possible in the more challenging terrain of the eastern U.S. and Canada; right after them came railways, liquor supplies, towns, and weapons the Indians could never match. Virtually overnight, an entirely new, technology-based socio-economic order enveloped the Indians’ way of life, threatening to send it the way of the buffalo.
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 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 made 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.* To compound the challenge, the Plains Indians were nomads, following the game as it moved. Everywhere, nomads, whether the Aboriginals of North America, the Aborigines of Australia, the Bedouin of North Africa or the Roma of Europe, have always been exceptionally resistant to modernization or to being remade into bourgeoisie.
For all of the country’s Aboriginals, but most acutely for the Indians of the Plains, this is the great tragedy of Canadian history; and it is one that is not yet ended. Macdonald happened to be in office at the time when the disasters touched off by the disappearance of the buffalo were set in motion. It therefore became his responsibility to find palliatives that might, with great difficulty and only over considerable time, enable Aboriginal people to regain their centuries-old confidence and pride—to become again, as they had been for time immemorial, a free people, self-sufficient and at one with their environment.
Macdonald made many mistakes and paid far too little attention to his ministerial duties, principally because he was applying most of his time and energy to the railway—to his project, rather than to one inflicted on him. Yet, while clearly he could have done better, Macdonald was unquestionably the best available man for a task that, at its core, was near to impossible. So his involvement with the Indians—as with Riel and the Métis—became his tragedy.
Macdonald’s attitudes towards Indians, and his policy prescriptions for them, derived from two sources. His formal Indian policy was essentially British Indian policy. While pre-eminently practical—to gain military allies, first against the French and then against the Americans—it was also remarkably enlightened. One major cause of the revolt by the Thirteen Colonies in 1763 was that the British redcoats prevented American colonists from stealing Indian lands. British Indian policy had two key facets: to protect Aboriginal people from destructive contact with settlers, and to civilize them, or to bring them up to the level of the newcomers in the way they lived and in their religious beliefs. Although idealistic, these two objectives directly contradicted each other, creating a tension left unchanged by later Canadian legislation such as the Gradual Civilization Act of 1857 (enacted by Macdonald) and the Indian Act of 1876 (enacted by the Mackenzie government).
The other source for Macdonald’s Indian policy came from direct contact with the people themselves. Far more than any other public figure of the time, he knew Indians personally. As a young lawyer he had defended several in criminal cases and had sung in a local Mohawk choir. As was then most unusual, his early friends included mixed-bloods such as the Reverend Peter Jones (Kahkewaquonaby) and John Cuthbertson. He maintained this attitude all his life, sending his granddaughter, Daisy, to a school in Ottawa run by a Métisse, Abby Maria Harmon. As prime minister, he became a close friend of Canada’s most successful Indian of the time, Peter Martin (Oronhyatekha), a medical doctor and founder of the Independent Order of Foresters who named his son John Alexander after him.*
Macdonald knew more about Indian policy and the Indians themselves than any of his predecessors, or any of his successors until Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin a century later. He was superintendent general of Indian Affairs (its minister) for almost a decade, from 1879 to 1887; for much of that time he was also minister of the interior. Throughout his entire second term, he was responsible for the Mounted Police. In May 1881, Macdonald wrote to Edgar Dewdney, his top official in the West: “Indian matters and the land granting system form so great a portion of the general policy of the Government that I think it necessary for the First Minister, whoever he may be, to have that in his own hands.”
On one occasion, Macdonald developed a policy initiative that, had it lasted, might have made a measurable difference to the evolution of relations between Canada’s Aboriginals and its European population. His proposal was built on the premise that the two peoples had to trust each other. This small epiphany is a rare shaft of light in a long and bleak chronicle.
In February 1885, a month before the rebellion broke out, Macdonald put a Franchise Bill before Parliament. As one reform of the electoral system, he suggested a way both to “protect” Indians and to “civilize” them. Indians, he declared, should be granted the right to become enfranchised—to gain the vote and so become full citizens—but without, as in the past, having to give up in exchange any of their special rights as Aboriginals, either those gained by treaty or by the Indian Act. Opposition criticism was ferocious, one Liberal MP saying it would “bring a scalping party to the polls.” Another called it Macdonald’s “crowning act of rascality,” claiming he was doing it only to win Indian votes. Macdonald’s motives may not have been pure, but any votes he gained would have been more than cancelled by those of outraged western settlers. Despite a conspicuous absence of enthusiasm among Conservative MPs, Macdonald piloted the measure through successfully. In his major speech in May 1885, he advanced a deft argument. The runaway slaves who had come to Canada by the Underground Railway, he said, “although unaccustomed to freedom,” got the vote as soon as they came to Canada—and no one had objected to that. The Indians, in contrast, “who had formerly owned the whole of this country, were prevented from sitting in the House and from voting for men to represent their interests there.”
Macdonald didn’t just enact the measure but continued to promote it. In August 1886, he wrote to an Indian leader, Peter Edmund Jones (the son of the famous Peter Jones), that his objective had been “to place [Indians] on a footing of equality with the white brethren.” He assured Jones that the Franchise Act would not “affect or injure the rights secured by treaty or by the laws relating to the Red Men of the Dominion,” and concluded, “I hope to see some day the Indian race represented by one of themselves on the floor of the House of Commons.”
In fact, this measure lasted only to 1898, when it was scrapped by the Laurier government. One Liberal MP told the House then that it had been “an insult to the free white people of this country to place them on a level with pagan and barbarian Indians.” It was not restored until 1960, by John Diefenbaker—by then too late to penetrate the walls of mistrust between Aboriginals and European Canadians.
This imaginative initiative has all but vanished from the Canadian historical record. It extended a kind of citizenship-plus to Indians, giving them a higher status than that enjoyed by European Canadians—if only to a small number, because like all others who possessed the vote, they had to own a minimum amount of property. Many chiefs opposed enfranchisement as a threat to their authority. Yet it is seldom mentioned, or it is described as applying only to the peaceable Indians in the East. The exact opposite was the case. After introducing the measure in the Commons in March 1885, by which time the rebellion had already begun, Macdonald was asked by the Opposition critic, David Mills, whether it would “include Indians in Manitoba and British Columbia.” Macdonald answered, “Yes.” Mills then asked, “Poundmaker and Big Bear?” referring to the chiefs of the most belligerent of the Indian bands. Again, Macdonald answered, “Yes.” It was then that Mills made his “scalping party” comment. Only later did public outrage at a slaughter of whites by Indians cause Macdonald to yield to political necessity and limit the measure to eastern Indians.*
A number of Macdonald’s more general comments about Aboriginal people at the time possessed this same uncommon understanding, especially in contrast to the prevailing opinions of his day. They too are all but absent from the historical record, despite being preserved in plain sight in the pages of Hansard. Macdonald’s attitude to Aboriginal people can be compared to the views about French Canadians he expressed back in 1854—that if they were treated “as a nation,” they would respond “as a free people usually do, generously.”†
Debates of substance about Indian affairs were rare in the House of Commons, because almost no Aboriginals had the vote. The government’s attempts to convince the Plains Indians to change from hunters to farmers, however, roused considerable interest and criticism among MPs, especially the program that provided agricultural implements, farm instructors and some supplies of basic foods to help Indians on reserves make the transition to farming. Complaints about costs were incessant. Opposition critic Mills said that Macdonald’s food policy was “tending to make the Indians a dependent population instead of civilizing them and making them more self-reliant,” while Edward Blake, the party leader, warned, “We are training the Indians to look to us for aid … [and] teaching them to rely on us for everything.”
In 1880, a new Department of Indian Affairs was established, with Macdonald as its minister. He spoke twice that session, once on April 23 on the department’s spending estimates, and again on May 5. He made three cardinal points: that Indians possessed certain inalienable rights; that they were not whites, and in a fundamental sense never would be; and that successful change would take many decades. About the key issue of special rights for Indians, he was explicit. In theory, he said, it could be argued that it would be better if the Indians were assimilated and “disappear[ed] from the continent,” so “the Indian question would cease to exist.”* But, he continued, “We must remember that they are the original owners of the soil, of which they have been dispossessed by the covetousness or ambition of our ancestors. Perhaps if Columbus had not discovered this continent—had left them alone—they would have worked out a tolerable civilization of their own.” The only certainty was that “the Indians have been the great sufferers by the discovery of America and the transfer to it of a large white population.”
Macdonald doubted that assimilation would ever succeed. He agreed that a small number of Indians had made a successful transition to white society, but “the exception proves the rule.” Specifically, he rejected the U.S. policy of encouraging assimilation by allowing Indians to own outright a personal share of reservation land rather than all of it being owned collectively. The consequence would be, he said, that “the Indian gets his deed and by some injurious or unfortunate process sells or leases his land and becomes a vagrant without property.” Instead, said Macdonald, he accepted the general rule “that you cannot make an Indian a white man.” The source for this belief, he said, was an Indian chief, who had told him, “We are the wild animals; you cannot make an ox out of a deer”—or, as Macdonald rephrased it, “You cannot make an agriculturalist out of an Indian.”*
In a later intervention in the Commons in 1885, Macdonald provided his estimate of how long it would take for Indians to reach the stage when they would be able to blend in with whites while still remaining Indian. “There is only one way, patience, patience, patience,” he said. “In the course of ages—it is a slow process—they will be absorbed in the country. You must treat them, and our children and our grand-children and our great grand-children, must treat them in the same way, until, in the course of ages, they are absorbed in the general population.” At the time this commentary is being written, one direct great-great-grandson of Macdonald, now in his nineties, survives. His great-great-grandfather had it just about right.
Unfortunately, Macdonald’s understanding of Aboriginal people was not translated into effective action. An opportunity did exist, but only briefly. The buffalo disappeared far faster than anyone had anticipated, and the difficulty of teaching warriors and hunters to settle for being farmers proved to be formidable. Farm instructors often turned out to be failed farmers themselves, and the Indians, accustomed to “country food” they had shot or trapped themselves, found processed food such as bacon almost inedible. It was excruciatingly difficult for Aboriginals, for centuries warriors and hunters, to abandon all that to become sedentary farmers scraping at the soil. The government, like all administrations in its day, had no notion that it should subsidize the indigent and unemployed. Macdonald shared fully the prevailing fear of creating a permanently dependent underclass. So he vacillated, temporized and clung to the hope that things would somehow sort themselves out.
They didn’t. As early as 1879, an Oblate missionary to the Blackfoot reported that many on his reserve had been reduced to “eat[ing] the flesh of poisoned wolves” and that some parents were sleeping in the open in below-zero temperatures to escape the constant crying of their children, for whom they could do nothing. An 1882 study by a Mounted Police officer described one Cree band as “literally in a starving condition and destitute.” One winter, a large gathering of Indians near the Mounted Police outpost at Fort Walsh survived only because the policemen shared their own rations with them. The next year, the department closed Fort Walsh. After Lawrence Vankoughnet, Macdonald’s departmental deputy minister, toured the desperate region in 1882, he imposed a series of spending cuts, including laying off many of the farm instructors.
Macdonald knew what was going on. Edgar Dewdney sent him an accurate description of some 1,300 Indians near Calgary being “in a very destitute condition and many on the verge of starvation.” Thomas White, the able editor of the Montreal Gazette, whom Macdonald would soon appoint minister of the interior, advised him that many Indians now believed that “the treaties are made simply as a means of getting possession of the country.” Thereafter, the Indians of the Plains endured what became known as the Great Famine. Three Cree chiefs, all known as moderates, sent Macdonald a despairing appeal: “If we must die by violence, let it be done quickly,” they wrote.
Despite the tensions, misunderstandings and failures, the North-West Mounted Police retained the trust of a great many of the Plains Indians, but after the uprising, this relationship was never the same again. (photo credit 27.1)
But Macdonald continued along his ambivalent path. Although his department’s unofficial operating slogan was “work or starve,” he admitted the obvious truth that “we cannot in conscience let them starve.” One year, he claimed that the transition to farming was succeeding; the next year, he admitted the progress had been illusory. He proclaimed that his officials were “doing all they can, by refusing food until the Indians are on the verge of starvation, to reduce the expense.” But he also told MPs, “It is better to feed them than to fight them.” Western opinion pressed down on him, and the Saskatchewan Herald complained that the Indians were being “encouraged to believe that the Government would do everything for them.”
The suffering was real and widespread. The number of Plains Indians declined—from about 32,000 in 1880 to some 20,000 five years later, according to Blair Stonechild, though this annual death rate of nearly 10 per cent seems high. The principal cause of Indian deaths was European diseases such as smallpox, scarlet fever and whooping cough. The shortage of warm winter clothing due to the lack of buffalo robes was also a factor, as was the effect of “multiple insanitation,” in the phrase of one missionary, caused by the exchange of well-aired teepees for closed huts on the reserve. And without doubt some young Indian males simply lost the will to live in a world where no opportunities existed to prove their manhood. All things considered, as Beal and Macleod point out in Prairie Fire, “The policy the North-West Indians so detested was not so much a policy of John A. Macdonald’s government as it was a policy of the Canadian people.”
Public opinion indeed played a major part in the government’s behaviour. Quite unlike Canadians today, nineteenth-century Canadians felt no guilt about their country’s treatment of Indians. Rather, they felt great pride in Canada’s policy and practice; and they were quite right to do so.
At this time, Canadian Indian policy was far superior, in effectiveness and sensitivity, to American Indian policy. As the Halifax Chronicle put it, the policy and treatment here were “humane and successful,” while in the United States the approach was of “war and extermination.” The Globe similarly described American policy as “a dark record of broken pledges, undisguised oppression and triumphant cruelty.” A great many Americans thought exactly the same way. A report to the House Committee on Indian Affairs concluded admiringly that Canadians would be “known in history as having striven to do justice to the aborigines,” and a study for the U.S. Board of Indian Commissioners described Canada’s system as “immeasurably superior to our own.”
Most important, Indians agreed. Their name for the border was the Medicine Line, meaning that above it there was healing. Except for the Loyalists, all the major moves of population north into Canada were by Indians, beginning with the Six Nations and followed by groups such as the Potawatomis, Chippewas and Ottawas. The most recent arrival was Sitting Bull, who, after his victory over General Custer at Little Bighorn in 1876, led his warriors across the border because they would be safe there, protected by the law and the North-West Mounted Police.
Today, by contrast, it’s quite possible that American Indians are in the better state. Contemporary cross-border comparisons are curiously difficult to find, but a 1988 study by the Lakehead Centre for Northern Studies in Thunder Bay found that the health and education levels of Canadian Indians were “considerably lower” than of their American counterparts, as were the numbers of them in the labour force. In other words, in Canada many more Indians, proportionately, were imprisoned in the dependency trap.*
The results of any nineteenth-century cross-border comparison would have been quite different. The defining difference was that Canadians did not kill Indians; in the course of the nineteenth century, some forty thousand American Indians were killed, principally by the U.S. Army of the West; above the Medicine Line, the only deaths were the small number killed during the North-West Rebellion. The difference can largely be attributed to the Mounted Police, who arrested many more whites than Indians—the exact opposite of the situation below the border. Not until 1879 was an Indian here arrested for the murder of a white. The police suppressed the liquor trade, which had devastated Aboriginal people below the border.
At the level of official policy in the United States, the “removal” of Indians from land ceded to them as reservations under treaties went on continually. In Canada, in contrast, Macdonald told an inquirer as early as 1867 that Indian reserves “cannot be dispossessed nor can the property be alienated from them without their consent.” He responded the same way in the middle of the North-West Rebellion, informing a correspondent that although “Indian reservations will prove to a certain extent obstructive of settlement … this cannot be helped.” It was his duty, he said, “to protect the Indians and sustain them in their rights.”
Personal attitudes really expressed the difference on each side of the Medicine Line. In Canada, few would have said, as did General Philip Sheridan, the commander of the U.S. Army of the West, “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” * In the United States, no Indian said, as did Chief Crowfoot of the Blackfoot, that he had decided to take treaty in 1877 because “The Police have protected us as the feathers of the bird protect it from the frosts of winter.” Some differences were less agreeable. In the United States a strong pro-Indian lobby existed, severely criticizing governments for the “removal” of Indians from land they possessed in law and for the widespread corruption in the Department of the Interior. In Canada, debate of any kind, let alone criticism, was rare. As a result, once Canadians were in a mood to give up the high ground, they did so quickly—and silently.
At this traumatic time in their history, the Indians of the Plains possessed one priceless asset other than their own extraordinary stoicism and capacity for endurance. They had three exceptional leaders—the Cree chiefs Big Bear (Mistahimaskwa) and Poundmaker (Pihtokahanapiwiyin or Pitikwahanapiwiyin) and the Blackfoot chief Crowfoot (Isapo-Muxika). To step sideways into counter-factual history, or might-have-beens, it’s impossible not to wonder what might have happened had these three ever been able to talk directly to Macdonald about what was going on, and whether, as a result, the historical record just might have been greatly changed.
Of the trio, two, Poundmaker and Big Bear, can usefully be described here, with the portrait of Crowfoot reserved for later. In the view of the Toronto Mail, Poundmaker resembled one of James Fenimore Cooper’s “noble-looking” heroes with “black and piercing eyes.” A white friend, a schoolteacher, remarked that “his bearing was so eminently dignified and his speech so well adapted to the occasion as to impress every hearer.” Poundmaker’s particular qualities, besides his record as a warrior, were those of eloquence and intelligence. He made his first appearance in history during the negotiation of a treaty with most of the Cree leaders at Fort Carlton in 1876, discomfiting the Canadian team by bursting out, “This is our land. It isn’t a piece of pemmican to be cut up and given in little pieces back to us.” Most of the Cree leaders agreed to sign the treaty after securing a pledge that a medicine chest would be stationed on each reserve and a written promise of food rations should “any pestilence or general famine occur”; Poundmaker likewise signed, but refused to settle on any reserve for three years, because, as he said, he could not see how he would be able “to clothe my people and feed them as long as the sun shines and the waters flow.” An encounter with Governor General Lorne, who was touring the West, changed his mind. During their long talks, Lorne was amazed to discover that rather than telling him about war-making and hunting, Poundmaker held him captivated by his commentaries on politics and on spiritual matters. In turn, Poundmaker came to recognize, as he told his people, “the whites will fill the country.… It is useless to dream that we can frighten them, that time is passed.” He now chose a reserve, in northern Saskatchewan, and made a serious attempt at farming; it did well briefly but then failed. Thereafter, he and his band endured the Great Famine.
During this time in their history, by far the hardest ever, the Indians of the Plains had one priceless asset: three exceptional chiefs (clockwise, from top left), the Cree leaders Poundmaker and Big Bear, and Crowfoot of the Blackfoot. The odds against them were still too long to be overcome. (photo credit 27.4)
Big Bear was like Poundmaker in some ways, in others quite different. He most certainly was not noble-looking, but rather was short, wrinkled and plain ugly. Neither, although a superb horseman, did Big Bear have a record as a warrior. He was, though, unusually intelligent, and in particular possessed of exceptional cunning. Dewdney’s impression of him was of “a very independent character, self-reliant and appears to know how to make his living without begging from government.” A white friend described him as gifted, with “a keen intellect, a fine sense of humour, quick perception and splendid powers of expression, and great strength of purpose.” One of Big Bear’s most highly respected skills was his ability to read dreams. His own most powerful dream concerned his going out to hunt buffalo and spotting a coyote that was laughing at him. Looking more closely, he realized that the coyote was laughing not at him but at a prairie lily from which was spouting a fountain of blood that soon covered the earth around. The vision Big Bear was recounting was of what lay ahead for the Cree.
To avoid that fate for his people, Big Bear came up with an idea that conceivably might have changed the course of history: that his people should “not fight the Queen with guns. We should fight her with her own laws.”
In March 1884, the Saskatchewan Herald carried an intriguing story. It was that Big Bear had “conversed with many of the chief officers of Indian Affairs, but had found that none seems to be ‘the head’—there is always one higher. To settle who this higher power is has now become the one object of his life.… If there is a head to the Department, he is bound to find him, for he will deal with no one else.” That summer, Big Bear convened a grand council of the Cree, and after long discussions about the government’s failure to provide rations and farm implements, he told the chiefs, “What I see is this: I speak for my band as a Chief speaks for his People, but the White agent I speak to isn’t like that. There is always someone higher behind him whom I never see. I say: who wastes a bullet on a tail when he knows at another end the bear’s teeth are waiting?” Instead, said Big Bear, “It is time to talk to that one White than whom there is no higher.”
Macdonald, of course, was the person “than whom there is no higher.” Yet no meeting between him and these three Aboriginal leaders of quite uncommon ability was ever held. Even had it been, it is most unlikely anything would have been accomplished. Macdonald was old and tired, and his gaze was fixed firmly on the railway. Nor is there any certainty the chiefs would have risen to the occasion, Indian decision-making being convoluted and protracted. All that can be stated with certainty is that Crowfoot, the one member of the trio who maintained close relations with Macdonald, ended his life deeply disillusioned at how little he had been able to do for his people. Nevertheless, had the highest representatives of both these two founding peoples ever talked to each other, the chiefs might have learned something—and so might Macdonald.
As the 1880s wore on, evidence accumulated that large numbers of Plains Indians were indeed suffering severe hunger, and at times outright starvation. The department’s principal response continued to be denial. “The Government is doing much to assist [the Indian],” Dewdney reported to Ottawa, adding, hopefully, “After a sharp trial, during which they will doubtless be not a little suffering, let us hope that the crisis will be overcome.”
Macdonald remained as erratic as ever. In 1884, he tried to have it both ways, telling MPs, “The Indian will always grumble, they will never be satisfied … if there is an error, it is in exceedingly large supply being furnished to the Indians.” He was now in full Old Tomorrow mode. His interest was directed principally at what Riel was up to. By September 1884, he had become concerned enough to tell the comptroller of the Mounted Police, “It would appear that the situation is getting serious … with these warnings it would be criminal negligence not to take every precaution.”
In fact, trouble had already begun—but among the Indians. One Indian agent was horsewhipped by a Cree for refusing to distribute rations, and another was stabbed. On Poundmaker’s reserve, a standoff between militant braves and policemen came to the brink of a general riot. By February 1885, Hayter Reed, the most hardline senior officer in the department, was warning Macdonald that the Indians were “beginning to look up to [Riel] as the one who will be the means of curing all their ills and of obtaining all their demands.” A Métis-Indian uprising was now a real possibility.
* In terms of effect on public opinion, the most influential work on the rebellion is the excellent graphic biography Louis Riel, by Chester Brown. In it, only one Indian appears—a minor character, and on only one page.
* The nearest Canadian equivalent to Lear’s book, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation, published in 2006, is the work of the Alberta writer Rudy Wiebe, most particularly his novel The Temptations of Big Bear, which Wiebe has described as “an imaginative report on our land.”
* Despite the uniqueness of Macdonald’s personal dealings with Indians and their far-reaching consequences, only one study has been done on the topic, Donald Smith’s “John A. Macdonald and Aboriginal Canada,” in Historic Kingston.
* The one reasonably extended account is in Olive Dickason’s Canada’s First Nations, in which she writes admiringly, “It speaks volumes for Macdonald’s political expertise that he was able to get the bill passed.”
† The full text of Macdonald’s expression of opinion about relations with French Canadians is contained in volume one of this biography, pages 128–29.
* It’s worth noting that Macdonald used the phrase “Indian question” rather than “Indian problem,” as was common then and for decades afterwards.
* Here, Macdonald was quoting almost word for word a comment made to him forty years earlier by an Anglican clergymen, who had in turn heard it from the chief of an Indian reserve where he was serving.
* Among specifics, the Lakehead Centre found that only 26 per cent of Indians here were high school graduates, compared to 55 per cent in the United States, and that the infant mortality rate was almost twice as high (19 per cent to 10 per cent).
* General Sheridan’s actual original comment was “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead.”