Excerpts from Will Fergusons "Why I hate Canadians"

“At first, the Native groups were allowed to choose their own reserve lands, but that promise was quickly broken. Good farmland was excluded for the most part, and – devastating to tribal custom – large tracks were disallowed. Instead, Indian bands were splintered among small, unconnected plots of land. When they resisted, the government simply withheld food that was promised under the Famine Clause of treaties. Thus it w as that we coerced, shoved and blackmailed nomadic people into subdivisions and sub—subdivisions.
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The result of this self-cancelling, dehumanizing process? In Canada, one of the wealthiest most prosperous countries in the world, we have created an entire, racially segregated subclass, our very own Third World.” Pg 118

“We keep wishing the problem away. This pattern was well established as far back as 1876, when the Indian Act was first drafted. Reserves were designed to be temporary holding cells, where, it was confidently assumed, Indians would be fully assimilated within three generations. They would be kept segregated and accounted for until they were deemed morally worthy of Canadian citizenship.

This is not editorializing on my part, these were the explicit objectives of the Indian Act. If you were good, if you were very good, you could graduate from being and Indian. All you had to do was give up your identity, move into the mainstream, lose your language, forswear you culture, and you too would be allowed to vote and own your own land. This was called “enfranchisement.”

To be enfranchised, you had to (A) abandon all tribal customs, (B) be judged of good character, (C) be fluent in either French or English, and (D) have passed a three-year probation (just to make sure you didn’t lapse back into savage custom or language). Only then would you be allowed the privilege of not being an Indian. In Canada, the only Good Indian was an Assimilated Indian, and as very few of them accepted assimilations, we had very few Good Indians.

Enfranchisement remained policy until – when? 1900? 1910? 1920? No. The government did not concede defeat and remove enfranchisement from the Indian Act until 11985. Ancient history, that.

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You see, a funny thing happened on the way to assimilation. The two goals of Indian policy, separation and assimilation, were contradictory: they cancelled each other out. The reserves that were meant to segregate Native Canadians gave them a land base that now acts both as a focal point of political activism and a refuge – however shaken, however poverty-stricken. The resurgent Native culture and explosive Native pride comes directly from the reserves, and it is from the reserves that Native Canadians are leading a full-scale counterattack. Apartheid has backfired.”

Excerpts from Will Ferguson’s “Why I Hate Canadians” chapter “Our home on Native Land”