From TheGlobeandMail.com

NDP MP releases song about John A. Macdonald's treatment of aboriginal people

GLORIA GALLOWAY - Dec. 03 2013

Charlie Angus says there were no spoken words to adequately express his reaction to a new book that outlines Sir John A. Macdonald's efforts to starve First Nations off the plains to make way for a national railway. So the New Democrat MP from Timmins, Ont., who is also a professional musician, wrote a song.

Four Horses, which was released Tuesday in conjunction with his new album, Great Divide, is a tribute to Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics, Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life, a critically acclaimed book by Saskatchewan university professor James Daschuk.

"This book completely blew everything I thought I knew about Canada away," Mr. Angus said in a telephone interview. "What this book really shows is the poison in the relations that went wrong" between First Nations people and the government.

Clearing the Plains outlines Macdonald's plan to "starve unco-operative Indians onto reserves and into submission." It explains the devastating effect that his policies had on First Nations after the bison herds collapsed due to overhunting.

According to the book, the First Nations thought their treaty with the government would provide them with food but, instead, whole communities were starved until they succumbed to disease.

The song and the book, which made The Globe and Mail's list 100 top reads of the year, come as the federal Conservative government prepares for a year-long celebration in 2015 of the bicentennial of Macdonald's birth.

Mr. Angus said there is much to celebrate about Macdonald and his role as the founding father of Canada.

But Canadians also need to come to terms with "the policies that tried to destroy a people. And Mr. Macdonald has been able to escape all that because we write our history as boring, that all our people were well-meaning and boring," said Mr. Angus who hopes the song will help young First Nations activists better understand what happened to their people.

"Sir John A. was not just prime minister," he said. "He assumed the role of Indian affairs minister. People who made efforts to alleviate the famine, people who tried to hold on to the treaty, were replaced by yes men, by bureaucrats who cut off medical support.'"

Mr. Angus said Canadian school children are taught that when the Sioux, who were being murdered by U.S. troopers, crossed the so-called "Medicine Line" marking the western border between Canada and the United States, they met good governance and concern in Canada. But the book makes it clear that was not the case, he said.

"So that's the whole line of the song: Forget what you were taught about the Medicine Line," said Mr. Angus. "This book completely blew my mind and I really felt that, as a politician, words are so devalued in the way we talk now, that the only way I could put something together was in a song."

Mr. Daschuk who, like Mr. Angus, is from Timmins, said he is humbled and honoured by the song.

"I didn't set out to attack John A. Macdonald," said Mr. Daschuk. But the health of the plains First Nations started to deteriorate within two years of the signing of the treaty. It was "the ethnic cleansing of indigenous people from western Saskatchewan," he said. "It got them out of the way of the railway."

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When Canada used hunger to clear the West

JAMES DASCHUK - Jul. 19 2013

Twenty years ago, Saskatoon scholar Laurie Barron cautioned that stories of sexual and physical abuse at Indian residential schools should be taken with a grain of salt; he thought they were just too horrific to be believed in their entirety. But national leader Phil Fontaine's public admission of his abuse, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal People and the haunting testimony presented recently to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada have brought the horrors of the residential school system to the forefront of our consciousness. We are often shocked, but we really shouldn't be surprised.

Nor should we be surprised by the revelations in Dr. Ian Mosby's articleabout the medical experimentation on malnourished aboriginal people in northern Canada and in residential schools. Rather than feed the hungry among its wards (even adult "Registered Indians" were not full citizens until 1960), government-employed physicians used pangs of hunger to further their research into malnutrition, in a plot reminiscent of theTuskegee experiment on African-Americans with syphilis, whose conditions were monitored rather than treated.

Researching my own book forced me to reconsider many of my long-held beliefs about Canadian history. A professor of mine at Trent University once explained that Canadian expansion into the West was much less violent than that of the United States', because in that country, "the person with the fastest horse got the most land." By contrast, in the Dominion's march west, the land was prepared for settlement by government officials before the flood of immigrants.

What we didn't know at the time was that a key aspect of preparing the land was the subjugation and forced removal of indigenous communities from their traditional territories, essentially clearing the plains of aboriginal people to make way for railway construction and settlement. Despite guarantees of food aid in times of famine in Treaty No. 6, Canadian officials used food, or rather denied food, as a means to ethnically cleanse a vast region from Regina to the Alberta border as the Canadian Pacific Railway took shape.

For years, government officials withheld food from aboriginal people until they moved to their appointed reserves, forcing them to trade freedom for rations. Once on reserves, food placed in ration houses was withheld for so long that much of it rotted while the people it was intended to feed fell into a decades-long cycle of malnutrition, suppressed immunity and sickness from tuberculosis and other diseases. Thousands died.

Sir John A. Macdonald, acting as both prime minister and minister of Indian affairs during the darkest days of the famine, even boasted that the indigenous population was kept on the "verge of actual starvation," in an attempt to deflect criticism that he was squandering public funds.

Within a generation, aboriginal bison hunters went from being the "tallest in the world," due to the quality of their nutrition, to a population so sick, they were believed to be racially more susceptible to disease. With this belief that aboriginal people were inherently unwell, their marginalization from mainstream Canada was, in a sense, complete.

For more than a century, Canadians have been accustomed to reports of terrible housing conditions on reserves, unsafe drinking water, dismal educational outcomes and, at least in Western Canada, prison populations disproportionally stacked with aboriginal inmates. Aboriginal leaders and young people such as those who embraced the Idle No More movement have been calling for Canadians to fundamentally acknowledge the injustices and atrocities of the past and fix the problems that keep indigenous Canadians from living the same quality of life as their non-aboriginal neighbours.

As the skeletons in our collective closet are exposed to the light, through the work of Dr. Mosby and others, perhaps we will come to understand the uncomfortable truths that modern Canada is founded upon - ethnic cleansing and genocide - and push our leaders and ourselves to make a nation we can be proud to call home.

Dr. James Daschuk is the author of Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation and the Loss of Aboriginal Life, an assistant professor in the faculty of kinesiology and health studies at the University of Regina and a researcher with the Saskatchewan Population Health and Evaluation Research Unit.