The Crimes of John A. Macdonald Were Illegal In His Day, Too
Perpetrators shouldn’t be excused because they lived in the past
In Canada in 1919, it was illegal to take a human life. It was also illegal to kidnap human beings, including children. It was furthermore illegal to commit sexual assault, again including against children. It was illegal to subject human beings, (yes, including children), to inhumane conditions where they were guaranteed to die in large numbers.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise. Canada has always been a nation of laws — it’s one of the reasons we think of ourselves as such awesome people. And the crimes listed above have been illegal from the dawn of time — in fact they violate laws that date back as far as the Code of Hammurabi, humanity’s earliest known body of law and one of the oldest examples of written text, dating back almost 4,000 years. Every major religion also carries similar directives on moral behaviour which have been consistently laid out for hundreds of generations.
Put simply, not just Canadian but human law and morality have always prohibited therape, murder, kidnapping and abuse of children. This includes the Canada of the 19th Century — and of 1919.
In that year an influenza pandemic spread worldwide, claiming perhaps five percent of the world population — if that were to happen today, it would mean up to 350 million deaths. Particularly hard-hit by the plague were Canada’s residential schools, where aboriginal children had been placed as part of an ongoing program of genocide. Conditions at these schools were already deplorable, with death rates among the children, even without an epidemic, routinely posting nightmarishly high levels — students had a 30%-60% chance of dying within five years of being admitted. When struck by the influenza pandemic, the already crushing death rates skyrocketed.
After losing five students in two days, the principal of the Industrial School at Red Deer, Alberta wrote a desperate letter to the Secretary of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Ottawa:
For sickness, conditions at this school are nothing less than criminal. We have no isolation ward and no hospital equipment of any kind. The dead, the dying, the sick and the convalescing are all together.
The Bureau of Indian Affairs was likely unmoved. After all, they managed a vast, nationwide organization that was allegedly intended to “civilize” the people of the first nations (called “Indians” in those days), in order to integrate them into the colonizing society. If thousands of children died in the process, well, too bad. A more skeptical view would point to the death toll as the real goal of the system, rather than any utopian“civilizing” outcome. The message from Red Deer was just one of many letters, memos and reports over the decades expressing horror at the cruelties of the residential school system. All were ignored and suppressed.
Canada’s residential schools are a blot on Canadian history. For more than a century, thousands of indigenous children were brought to these religiously-run schools against their will. Once at these schools they were often subjected to the most barbaric treatment imaginable, ranging from verbal, physical and sexual abuse to intentional starvation, denial of access to families, and, put simply, death in huge numbers — while poor record-keeping (and intentional cover-ups) mean the exact numbers will never be known. The result has been culturally catastrophic, creating rampant addiction, abuse and abandonment as the survivors and their offspring struggle to overcome the legacy of suffering.
As Isadore Day, Ontario regional chief, recently put it:
How terribly sad that this horrible legacy continues to impact our present generations, as so evident in the current suicide crisis of our children and youth. The vast majority of us as First Nations people across this land can speak of the direct impacts of this dark legacy. Yes, many of us have lived in the direct darkness and shadows of the evil that was so evident in so many of those schools.
In recent years, Canadians have made (sometimes halting) efforts to confront this history. It is extremely difficult, because a central part of Canada’s self-image is decency. We are nice people in a very nice country, the envy of the world. And what could be more indecent than a genocide that targets children?
As Canadians come closer and closer to the truth of their past, there has appeared a push-back that takes multiple forms, particularly the notion that we should not judge those who founded and ran the residential schools by our moral standards of today. This opinion has become more loudly stated now that the stain genocide has reached the nation’s first prime minister and semi-founding father, John A. Macdonald.
Now, Macdonald has always been a controversial figure. A well-known alcoholic, he is best remembered for his infamous Yeltsin-like stunts and pratfalls (in just one example he once vomited at a political debate). He also was caught up in a huge corruption scandal, from which he managed a subsequent political comeback. These facts alone make his later lionization rather dubious, despite his role in the creation of Canada at confederation in 1867. Far less well known, however, is his role as author and champion of Canada’s most heinous crime, the creation of the Indian Act. The goal of the Act is best described by the late prime minister himself:
The great aim of our legislation has been to do away with the tribal system and assimilate the Indian people in all respects with the other inhabitants of the Dominion as speedily as they are fit to change.
In the Prime Minister’s words “assimilate the Indian People” we find the roots of our national genocide, as assimilation is a gentler term for extermination (since by joining the colonizing culture, aboriginal people would have to abandon their own).
The Indian Act aimed to achieve that goal through methods that can only be described as criminal. The act effectively stripped all first nations people of citizenship and civil rights, mandating how they lived (and where), up to and including who they could or could not marry, forcing them to apply for permission to leave their reserves, denying them the vote, and creating the torture centres we call residential schools. And as Canadians are finally discovering, those schools were frequently murderous, brutal centres of abuse and tragedy, with children routinely subjected to physical and sexual violence and denied the most basic medical care.
The goal of the Act was very much in keeping with colonial attitudes expressed worldwide at the time — colonial nations, whether they were butchering villagers in Central Africa, torturing political prisoners in Southeast Asia or subjecting farmers to famine in the Indian Subcontinent, consistently proclaimed their mission to be that of civilizing the “others” who populated so much of the world. This racist worldview has roots going back millennia, easily to be found in ancient Greece or Rome.
The stated goal was to “elevate” the native peoples, to “civilize” them by Western standards, after which they would receive their rights. In Canada, John A. Macdonald created a brutal, genocidal machine designed to destroy a people whose very existence was an obstacle to the project of building a nation. Macdonald and his successors made sure that Canada’s aboriginal people would be fed into that death machine for generations. It was done on purpose, not by accident. It was premeditated. And it was horribly effective.
Looking back from the vantage point of the 21st Century, it’s hard not to be baffled by all this. How could they have done it? In what moral universe could any of it, even a tiny, microscopic percentage of it, have been acceptable? Surely it was “the times.” It was a different era. It was a different century. They weren’t as evolved as us, right? They weren’t as educated, they weren’t as connected. Of course it would be totally unfair to judge them by today’s standards. Right?
No. They broke their own laws. They violated their own morals. And the resulting confiscation of land made some folks an awful lot of money.
As was stated at the beginning of this article, humanity’s body of laws and morals made Canada’s treatment of its first nations people completely unacceptable. There has never been a cultural context in Canada wherein this brutality was allowable. Indeed the question has never been whether people in the past “saw things differently,” or “had different morals.” The real question is whether those legal and moral values should be applied to everyone.
And this is the missing element. A key part of the colonization process is the dehumanizing of the oppressed and exploited. The targets of brutality are described as many things — in the case of Canada’s aboriginal people they were described as savages, brutes, pagan barbarians and so on. Throughout history it is a fundamental truth of almost every society to have a class of people who are not considered “people” at all.
Once you strip away a person’s humanity, you guarantee they will be subject to hatred and violence. Once you make them the Other, you will inevitably make them monsters. After that, survival instinct kicks in — monsters must be destroyed.
If, in the 19th Century, a Canadian government agency had started entering Canada’s cities, abducting non-native children and dragging them off to religious residential schools to be beaten, raped and killed, the outcry would have been extreme. No one would have stood for it. Those kids were human. They were “normal.” It is impossible to conceive of something like that happening.
It is interesting to note that right around the time the Indian Act was passed, Canada was launching its public school system, one aimed at educating all the nation’s children. All its citizen children, that is — aboriginals weren’t citizens and were therefore subject to their own, savage “education” system.
One nation, two peoples, two very separate paths. All made possible by a process of dehumanization that persists to this day. Just as the “civilized” and “enlightened” Canadians of previous generations were able to justify brutality in the name of decency, so do the Canadians of today. With words, in minimizing, justifying and dismissing the crimes of the past, with deeds, by shrugging off the suffering and brutality that continues to this very day, as these very words are written and read.
Everything John A. Macdonald said and did was done by choice. None of it was inevitable. He could have listened to the opposing voices if he had so desired. He could have set our nation on a different path. Instead he chose to build the machine. He chose blood. And cursed his nation with a burden of shame and criminality that we can never escape, no matter how hard we try.
There is no magical civilizing wall separating the past and present — there is simply the continuity of history. It is time for Canadians to wake up and embrace a new national identity that accepts and embraces our crimes, resolves to reconcile with those we have wronged, and never, ever forgets or minimizes those crimes.
It is time for a national identity based on truth.
