NORTH BATTLEFORD — Michelle Good, lawyer, activist and author, brought her novel, Five Little Indians, with her to an evening of discussion on March 28 at the North Battleford library to celebrate her novel being chosen for the Saskatchewan Library Association’s One Book, One Province.
“One of the things I used to hear, over and over again ... either in the context of litigation, in the context of dispute resolution hearings, in the context of comments and newspaper articles and so on, 'why can't we just get over it?'"
When Good, a member of Red Pheasant First Nation, first heard it, she brushed it aside, summing it up to some “ignorant fool,” but she noticed how often she'd hear it.
"I realized that that anthem of annoyance, if you will, was coming from a deep failure to understand what residential schools were and how they impacted Indigenous communities."
And Good decided to answer the question, wanting to illustrate first that this was not the first thing that happened to Indigenous people in Canada.
"What is the colonial tool kit ... that has been used against Indigenous people around the world, not just here?" Good asked.
Colonialism in Canada
"The real heart of colonialism gets lost," Good said, going back to the very basics, which include her definition of colonialism.
"The policy or practice of acquiring full, or partial political control over another country, occupying it with settlers, and exploiting it economically."
Good believes that residential schools were only an aspect of that colonialism's attempt to overtake Indigenous people and unravel their society, noting that Indigenous people didn't recognize borders and that the American government was intent on killing the buffalo.
"General Sheridan said this, 'Let them kill, skin, and sell until the buffalo are exterminated. Then your prairies can be covered with speckled cattle and the festive cowboy,’" Good said.
Other policies included the the introduction of tuberculosis and forcing Indigenous people to accept treaties that allowed the government to take control of the land of North America.
Good went on to dispel a myth that Canada was kinder to Indigenous people than the American government.
"He (John A. Macdonald) developed a policy that he defined as a policy of submission based on the policy of starvation," Good said, which included signing a treaty and being forced to pick a reserve, placing them under the control of an Indian agent.
"The Indian agents were not distributing rations that were promised in treaty, and they were instructed not to force the purpose of this submission to starvation," Good said, describing the events of the Frog Lake Massacre, which she calls the Frog Lake Incident.
"The Indian agent was basically torturing Big Bear's family," Good said, describing the agent refusing to distribute food and laughing at them. "These were people who were boiling twigs to survive."
"Going back to my note about the violence that we always think we were above," Good said, reading from a letter from General Middleton of the Canadian Militia in 1885. "'If you do not (give yourself in), I shall pursue and destroy you and your band or drive you into the woods to starve,' that's the relationship."
Residential Schools in Canada
"There was this strong move within the church to encourage the establishment of these schools," Good said later in the evening, describing a bishop in Alberta who wrote a letter to John A. Macdonald, saying, ‘We instill upon them a supreme distaste for the native life so that they will be humiliated when reminded of their origin. When they graduate from our institutions, the children will have lost everything native except their blood,' so, again, not my words," Good said.
"So, when you hear people, and there still are people, residential school denialists who say, 'oh, you know, it was a really good intentioned thing that went wrong.' Don't be sold on that, it wasn't."
Later on, speaking on the death toll of residential schools, Good read from a 1907 medical study focusing on the residential schools in the prairies.
"In [the author's] report, he said, 'if he had sought to create a mechanism for the successful transfer of tuberculosis, then we have done that with residential schools.' He went on to say, 'Indian boys and girls are dying like flies. Even war seldom shows us a large percentage of fatalities as the education system we have imposed on our Indian wards'"
When Dr. Peter H. Bryce, the author of this medical study, was promptly fired for his advocacy for Indigenous people, the former superintendent of Indian Affairs responded formally in 1918.
“And he said this, 'It is readily acknowledged that Indian children lose their natural resistance to illness, habituating so closely in the residential schools and that they die at a much higher rate ... but this alone does not justify a change in the policy of this department, which is geared towards a final solution, to our Indian problem.’"
"How many people could think, this is in 1918, this is before the Second World War? How many people would think that the term Hitler used for the Jewish Holocaust came out of Canada, true north strong and free?
"That was the underlying motivation of these schools."
What's next?
Good has a collection of essays coming out May 30 called Truth Telling, 7 Conversations About Indigenous Life in Canada, which she read briefly.
"The urgent demand for truth has become a call to action in itself," Good read warning against letting anthems such as, 'without truth, there can be no reconciliation,' become rote. That also includes 'pre-meditated land acknowledgements' and public gestures acting as tips of the hat without body or substance behind them.”
When asked by someone in the crowd what could be done beyond wearing orange shirts and nodding during land acknowledgements, Good laughed, saying,
"Everybody always asks me that ... you figure it out, we did," Good joked to scattered applause.
Good went on to use the example of the Constitutional Express in the 1980s, led by Chief George Manuel, as Indigenous groups fought to insist on the entrenchment of their rights in the constitution.
"George Manuel had a Grade 3 education," Good said, adding that he survived a residential school and a particularly virulent form of tuberculous in the bones of his legs, and Indigenous people, at that time, were four per cent of the population.
After listing the many systemic problems facing Indigenous people then and now, including incarceration rates, suicide rates, apprehensions, addictions and homicide, Good said, "Nevertheless, we changed the constitution. As a lawyer, I can tell you it's virtually impossible to change the constitution, but we did it. Nobody gave that to us.
"If we can do it, imagine what non-Indigenous people could do with their privilege if they chose to speak?" Good asked.
"So that's what I say. If we can do it, imagine what you could do."
