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The result were acts which today could be seen in hindsight as genocidal — the deliberate starvation of peoples to clear them from the land. This might be seen as part and parcel of a larger colonial project of the Victorian era which saw millions dead in Ireland and tens of millions in British India, where natural droughts were perverted by the hands of colonial administrators into famines. Macdonald repeated this pattern on the Canadian plains, starving his fellow humans into submission.

Why did he do it? Primarily because his national dream was a European settler dream — it was not an aboriginal dream.

Professor James Daschuk, in his seminal work Clearing the Plains, signals the “outright malevolence” of the Macdonald government in bringing about the starvation of Plains Indians, to “starve uncooperative Indians onto reserves and into submission.” In 1885, rebutting criticism by the Liberals, Macdonald stressed that food was refused “until the Indians were on the verge of starvation, to reduce the expense.”

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Why then are we choosing to celebrate the life of a man who did those terrible things to aboriginal peoples? Why do we not seek to offer a full narrative of the man; the good and the bad that he did?

Macdonald built Canada — but he built a particular type of country, one which in 1867 took over control of aboriginal affairs from the British crown. Henceforth the partnership ideal between political communities was swept aside in favour of a wardship or “guardianship” relation which stripped aboriginal peoples of their political rights, granted them some civil rights but effectively set the institutional conditions by which many live today.