Two Members of the Bolshevik Tendency

Nationhood or Genocide: The Struggle of the Native People Against Canadian and American Imperialism

First Published: Canadian Revolution No. 4, Novemeber/September 1975

Transcription, Editing and Markup: Malcolm and Paul Saba

Copyright: This work is in the Public Domain

The authors acknowledge with thanks the contributions which Native Marxist-Leninists and other Native people have made to our understanding of the Native struggle in Canada.

I. Introduction

II. History

III. The Present

IV. Stalin’s Definition

V. National Minority?

VI. The Native Question and Our Movement

VII. Implications

VIII. Conclusion



O, it’s written in books and in songs

That we’ve been mistreated and wronged. Well, over and over I hear

these same words From you, good lady, from you,

good man, Well, listen to me if you care where we,

stand And you feel you’re a part of these ones.

–Buffy St. Marie[1]

Canada has popularly been known as a nation without racism. In the present era of social discontent and upheaval, this mythology about Canadian brotherhood and respectability is finally being exposed to the world for the lie that it is.

More than any other single group, the people who have suffered from racism in Canada have been the Native people. They are invisible to the masses of Canadian people. When they scream at the top of their lungs on Parliament Hill, they get a bit of attention in the press; then they are forgotten again.

The reason for this, of course, is that the problem goes so much deeper than racism. Racism, always, is a symptom, and a tool to divide and confuse. The question of Native people in Canada is a national and a colonial question. British and French colonialism in Canada, which later developed into Canadian imperialism, have descended upon an alien people; stolen their land, forbidden them their way of life, herded them into concentration camps, nurtured a mammoth bureaucracy to keep them in chains, surrounded them with colonists, driven them into the harshest and most barren climates, and sucked everything possible from them in the way of land, labour and resources. In the process, it has created the opposite side of the dialectic as well: welding them into a nation, which is steeling itself for a struggle of national liberation, knowing full well that the bourgeoisie will do anything to keep them in chains, knowing full well that the example of a free Native nation within Canadian borders would undermine the credibility of Canadian bourgeois rule to the Canadian working class, and having suffered so much misery and oppression that their determination to struggle for their sovereignty will know no limits.

The bourgeoisie knows this all well, having recently called the Native struggle the “principal threat to national stability” in the present period[2]. The Native people, too, know it. But the masses of the Canadian working class, and their most advanced revolutionary elements, do not yet know it so well. And so, it is to the Canadian working class and to its advanced detachments that this article is primarily addressed. This article will advance a line on the Native question: the line that Native people are being welded into a nation in their struggle against imperialism and genocide, in their struggle for survival.[3] It is also, however, a plea to the Marxist-Leninist movement to stop ignoring the Native question; to stop just crying limply, “We support your call for justice,” and instead to try to understand the question in its totality and as an integral part of the struggle for socialism in Canada. Our movement must understand what “justice” really means for Native people, and what “genocide” really means as well. It must understand the necessity of educating our own working class in full measure about the Native struggle for national liberation.

A. Before Contact

We always had plenty; our children never cried from hunger, neither were our people in

want.... If a prophet had come to our village in those days and told us that the things

were to take place which have since come to pass, none of our people would have

believed him.

–Black Hawk [4]

Before European contact, there were hundreds of Native groupings across Canada with widely varying forms of language, customs, and social organization. With the exception of inhabitants of coastal British Columbia, however, they all shared in common the fact that they were based on egalitarian modes of production, without a ruling class.[5] The simplest of Native groups were hunters-gatherers; this included the Maritime Natives, all Inuit groups and most Natives in the Prairies and the harsher Northern climates. Where agriculture was used, as in Southern Ontario and Quebec, the social organization became correspondingly more complex, and leadership was hereditary but still accountable to the people.[6] Descent was traced through the mother.[7]In coastal British Columbia, the lush and abundant food resources, particularly the river salmon runs, enabled people to develop highly complex sedentary societies with elaborate ranking systems and the beginning of slavery. Until European contact, however, slaves were used for service functions only, rather than production.[8]B.C. differed too from the rest of Canada in that the ragged mountainous terrain isolated people from each other to a tremendous extent. Out of the ten language families which existed across Canada before European contact, six were found in B.C. alone (remember, a language family is such as Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, etc.)[9]

Native people in Canada shared in common many things despite their mutual isolation. The position of women was everywhere productive.[10] While religious observances differed widely, the belief in the one overriding Great Spirit and in the Unity of All Things was common to Native people throughout Canada.[11] Attitudes toward nature and to the oneness of man with nature were likewise held in common. Above all, Native groups all had a fundamental attachment to their land. They believed that land belonged to everybody, and could not be bought or sold. The land was the source of all nourishment, the provider of all necessities, the core of the religious experience, the lifeblood of the tribal identity. To rip a Native person from his land, one might as well have ripped a limb from his body, for the land was integral to his very Nativeness.[12] So affirmed Chief Frank Tfelehye in his promise to the bourgeoisie last August, to blow up any pipeline built in Native territory. “You are plotting to take over from me the very centre of my existence,” he said. “You are stealing my soul. ,By scheming to torture my land, you are torturing me.”[13] Without the land base he was a lost and wandering soul in an incomprehensible world.

Thus the stage was set for a fundamental contradiction between Native people and the European settlers who coveted Native land to an ever-increasing and insatiable degree. The two social systems – an egalitarian form of property ownership and a rising capitalist system which needed to divide and deplete that property – collided irreconcilably. Colonialism in Canada could thrive only by breaking the back of the Native way of life.[14]

Thus it has been over the issue of land that the greatest contradictions between the Native people and the Canadian state have appeared. The Native could survive without the hunt, he could survive without a ceremonies and the traditional modes of dress; he could adapt to jobs, to schools, even to Christianity if he had to. But when the European coveted Native land, he faced a showdown. Above all, it seems, if the Native had his land base, he knew that he could endure the other hardships which colonialism was visiting upon him.[15] Consistently, and to the present day, Native cries for justice have taken various forms, but one above all: LEAVE US OUR LAND!

B. The Fur Trade

And yet where in your history books is the tale

Of the genocide basic to this country’s birth?

–Buffy St. Marie [16]

The four-hundred year pattern of genocide in the name of capitalist profit was begun with the search for furs.[17] After dipping their big toes into the waters of the fish trade of the Atlantic Coast, French colonists began to explore the land and offer objects in exchange for beaver pelts. Says one writer,

In 1534 the Indians along Canada’s eastern coast already knew what the whites sought in North America. Cartier, in that year, described how Indians held up a beaver skin attached to a stick, indicating their willingness to trade. They also kept their women-folk out of sight.[18]

Along with the colonizers came their ideologues, the Jesuit missionaries. Soon the British too were exploring, and the Hudson’s Bay Company was founded in 1670 and established trading posts up into the eastern Arctic as well as more and more into the plains areas.[19] In 1784 the North-West Company was founded and competed with the Hudson’s Bay Company, but the amalgamation of the two in 1821 ensured the virtual monopoly of the Hudson’s Bay Company over the fur trade right across Canada.[20] On the Prairies it had a legal and official monopoly over all forms of trade, serving in effect as the law itself in that hinterland; in the East, its monopoly was legally limited but those limits were not enforced.[21]

Native people were at this time not pushed onto reserves because it was in the objective interest of the Hudson’s Bay Company to keep them fluid, nomadic, and engaged in hunting.[22] This pattern continued in Canada’s northern reaches right up until World War II, as the objective conditions were quite comparable.[23] Yet, during this fur trade epoch, the Hudson’s Bay Company was providing Natives with supplies which they had no way of producing themselves: most significantly, guns and ammunition.[24] Within a generation, the complicated and lifelong skill of shooting the bow and arrow was unfamiliar enough to Native people that they were totally dependent on the Company for their survival as hunters.[25] The Company used this dependence to the utmost, threatening them with withdrawal of supplies for the long winter if they did not comply with any one of hundreds of regulations. The worst violation by a Native person was any barter, however insignificant, with a trader who was not a servant of the Hudson’s Bay Company. If a Native person was caught gathering cranberries for an independent “white” trader, or hanging around a Jesuit mission which was providing some food, the Hudson’s Bay Company threatened to cut off all supplies for the winter for his tribe. Thus the Company was able to pay Native people the most insignificant pittance for the precious furs. This pittance kept Native people at starvation levels within walking distance of Company trading posts.[26]

A key tool of the Hudson’s Bay Company thievery of furs was the liquor trade. Bourgeois history has it that the Company policed the prairies to suppress the liquor trade because this stopped the Native people from hunting effectively.[27] This is a bourgeois lie: the Company did pass a few weak resolutions against the liquor trade in the nineteenth century, but for the two centuries before this they were the kings and monopolists over the Canadian liquor trade.[28] They imported huge quantities of rum and brandy from Europe and sold it to Native people, often diluted with water, for a fortune. To add to the profit of the liquor itself, Company traders chose to intoxicate Native people at prime hunting times so as to take their furs and hides – often representing months of hard work – for nothing.[29] The use of alcohol to oppress the colonized and profit colonialism was identical to the use of opium in nineteenth century China.[30]

Having gained legal sovereignty over the vast West and North, the Hudson’s Bay Company then sold these territories to the newly Confederated government for 300,000 pounds plus permission to retain 50,000 acres around the various trading posts.[31] Needless to say, the Native people never saw a dime of this fortune, and so the Company had simply sold the Crown stolen land. To this day the Hudson’s Bay Company retains a cruel monopoly over Native lives in vast sections of northern Canada.[32] The Company had made 20,000,000 pounds in the fur trade.[33] Much of this was sent back to England, but much was reinvested in Canada as well. Add this to the enormous profits on alcohol, most of which stayed in the colony, and we can understand why the Hudson’s Bay Company was the stepping stone of a number of magnates into the land, railroad, steamship, and banking businesses in Canada, businesses which were to become the backbone of the Canadian bourgeoisie (particulary the banks, which are among the most concentrated in the world).[34] Thus we can see that the exploitation of the Native people formed the basis, the primitive capital accumulation, of modern Canadian capitalist concerns.[35]

The history of the Hudson’s Bay Company can be compared with striking similarity to the British East India Company. Marx says:

The English East India Company, as is well known, obtained, besides the political rule in India, the exclusive monopoly of the tea-trade, as well as of the Chinese trade in general, and of the transport of goods to and from Europe.. . .The monopolies of salt, opium, betel and other commodities, were inexhaustible mines of wealth. The employees themselves fixed the price and plundered at will the unhappy Hindus. . . Great fortunes sprang up like mushrooms in a day primitive accumulation went on without the advance of a shilling. (Capital 7:704, Moscow 1971).

In general, Marx comments:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black skins, signalled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation.(Capital I: 703)

During this period, Native was pitted against Native in many ways. Bourgeois history likes to foster the idea that intertribal wars and hostilities were always present among Native people and in fact among all tribal peoples (“warlike savages”), and that class society therefore did mankind a benevolent service by coming along and imposing a little bit of law and order on the world through the advent of the State. This is wrong. Native people did compete for territory on a small scale, in isolated skirmishes, but for the most part they lived in ecological balance with the rest of their natural world, and few people were actually hurt or killed in intertribal fighting.[36] With the advent of the European, however, the balance of people to resources was so upset that Native people – who had historically found their mode of survival through the small tribal unit – had no choice but to turn against each other in a violent scramble for territory and resources.[37] The English and the French used Native people to help them in their fights against each other, often with the assistance of Jesuit missionaries who persuaded them that the other Europeans were out to destroy Native people.[38] Natives were pushed farther and farther West, and the pressure of population on resources was aggravated by the steady disappearance of fur-bearing animals because of the insatiable appetite of the Hudson’s Bay Company and the mother country.[39] This suffering in the Native community was compounded by problems of alcoholism, malnutrition, starvation, and lack of clothing. In a lower level of physical stamina, they were now highly susceptible to a whole slew of European diseases, particularly of course the dreaded smallpox but also other infectious diseases such as measles and tuberculosis.[40] The American prank of offering smallpox-infested blankets as a treaty offering was repeated in Canada as well. Tuberculosis was a leading infectious disease in the Northern reaches which was introduced by the European.[41] Bourgeois mythology likes to paint Native aboriginal societies (along with all pre-class societies) as constantly tottering on the brink of plague and starvation, again awaiting the rise of class society to bring well-being and salvation to the world. A wide array of recent evidence, however, indicates that this is false, and that well-nourished mobile populations are not particularly susceptible to infectious disease.[42] By the time the era of the fur trade was ending, the Native population was reduced to one-tenth its original number.[43]

Yet while Native people were being pitted against each other and wiped out throughout Canada, the opposite side of the dialectic was taking form as well. Colonialism also welded diverse tribes together in a search for an increasingly precarious survival, particularly on the Plains where geographical barriers were insignificant. And so, the classic, globally-known “Indian”[44] was born: feather bonnet, mounted on a horse, wearing mocassiins and buckskin jackets, living in a circle camp of teepees, and hunting the buffalo. Ceremonies, systems of prestige, and technologies merged.[45] The beginnings of Native nationhood (in the Communist sense of the term) appeared when the rising capitalist system of Canada came into contact with Native people.

C. The Treaties

Hear now a bargain was made in the West With her

shivering children at zero degrees Blankets for your

land, so the treaties attest.

Well, blankets for land is a

bargain indeed.

– Buffy St. Marie [46]

As in the United States, the buffalo in Canada was actively massacred in order to hasten the genocide of the Native people. The Red River buffalo brigade was an outstanding commercial enterprise.[47] That, combined with the disappearance of other fur-bearing animals on account of the fur trade, brought Native people to a low point of demoralization around 1875.[48] They broke up into small groups once again, and they turned even more to alcohol, selling their guns, their horses, and the clothes on their backs to get it.[49] Now Christian missionaries at last had their day in the sun, moving into these broken and shivering communities and declaring themselves to be the replacements of the medicine men, the holy men, and the chiefs in positions of authority and prestige. Direct white caste government over the Native social structure was born.[50]

The fur trade was over. (Except in the North.) Now capitalists were going seriously about the business of building their own empires right here in Canada. Instead of furs and hides, the system now needed minerals, timber and farmland, and the labour to realize the value of these things.[51] And so their designs on the Native people changed. All of a sudden they became concerned that in 300 years of “settlement” they had “neglected” to bring Native people the “blessings of civilization”. Why had they been so thoughtless? It was high time to change things.[52] The era of treaties was therefore begun.

Said Alexander Morris, Lt. Gov. of Manitoba and the North-WestTerritories, in connection with the opening of the treaty era:

In consequence of the discovery of minerals, on the shores of Lake Huron and Superior, the Government of the late Province of Canada, deemed it desirable, to extinguish the Indian title. . . .[53]

But to the Native the bourgeoisie did not talk of minerals, but of the blessings of civilization.

“Your great Mother wishes the good of all races under her sway. She wishes her red children to be happy and contented. She wishes them to live in comfort. She would like them to adopt the habits of the whites, to till land and raise food, and store it up against a time of want. . . . But the Queen, though she may think it good for you to adopt civilized habits, has no idea of compelling you to do so. This she leaves to your choice.”[54]

The legal basis for treaties was two-fold: the British north America Act, which gave the Crown authority to deal with the Native people, and the Proclamation of 1763, which stated that all legal title to land rests with the Native people unless it is formally extinguished. This proclamation is the crucial basis for the claims to aboriginal land rights which Native people are using in their struggle to the present day.[55]

Peaceful chicanery and arm-twisting techniques were used during the treaty negotiations, as well as some forms of outright lies, frauds and misrepresentations.[56] The government negotiators gave Native people the distinct impression that they were sent not from Ottawa but from London – such a terribly awesome power across the seas – and that they were not empowered to negotiate the conditions of the treaties.[57] Treaty provisions were presented on a take-it-or- leave-it basis, and the “take-it” was the most humiliating form of pittance imaginable.[58] “Blankets for your land” is a pretty accurate description of what the Native people of Canada were offered. They got a few dollars per year for a family of five, with a bit more for chiefs and headmen; they got promises of agricultural equipment and medicine, which later proved to be outdated, minimal and faulty; they got some flags and medallians with a picture of the Queen.[59] The Canadian state had learned from the American experience, where Native people had been promised a great deal and given nothing. And so, the Canadian state simply promised nothing.

The treaties were negotiated orally, and then Native people signed a parchment (there is evidence now that some of these “X’s” were falsified by the State); then the treaties went back to Ottawa, where they were re-drafted by government lawyers.[60] Phrases like “as long as the sun shines and the rivers flow” were deleted from the original version which Native people considered to contain the holy binding promise of the spoken word.[61] “Our brains are like paper,” said an Ojibway chief. “We never forget.”[62] And they have not, and today when they find these phrases missing from their treaties, Native people consider themselves to have been swindled.[63]

Standing by for treaty negotiations was the North-West Mounted Police, forerunner of today’s RCMP. The NWMP was to replace the Hudson’s Bay Company as law enforcement agency for the bourgeoisie in the West and North; it was created for the purpose of taking lands away from Native people.[64] Said Prime Minister Diefenbaker:

Riel’s life proved a strange contrast of good and evil. In his role as rebel leader and inciter of the Metis and Indians he caused many innocent people to lose their lives. But in that role also, he was mainly responsible for the unsettled conditions which led to the founding of the Force now famous the world over for efficiency in enforcing the law.[65]

Thus we can see that it was in response to the Louis Riel Rebellion of 1869 in what was to become Manitoba that the NWMP was formed. By 1885, the Force had flexed its fingers and was becoming excellent at the task of massacre which was to be used against the 1885 rebellion in Saskatchewan. The Riel rebellions are generally seen as a struggle for democratic rights, but the more perceptive students of the question have seen these uprisings as the beginnings of a national struggle against colonial encroachment.[66] Big Bear, a chief of a large supertribal structure of Native people on the Plains, never signed a treaty, and was imprisoned along with other comrades for participating in the uprising; eight Native people were executed.[67] Resistance continued, for example the resistance led by Chief Piapot of the Crees, against the encroachment of the newly developing Canadian Pacific Railway.[68] “The plunder engaged in by the CPR made the Hudson’s Bay Company look like small-time swindlers by comparison.”[69] Suppressing Native resistance to the blood-stained CPR along with resistance of the growing Canadian working class to the same growing bourgeoisie, the RCMP thus made clear to the world just who was the common enemy of all the oppressed people of Canada.[70]

Native people were given scattered reserves throughout Canada rather than the larger and more concentrated reserves that the United States has granted at first.[71] Canada learned from the bad experiences south of the border. In the United States the large reservations created a strong and united force of Native people and attempts to break the treaties brought war and bloodshed. Those large reservations often inadvertently included precious minerals and timber resources discovered later; the most notable example of this, of course, is the discovery of gold in the holy Black Hills of the Sioux, over which territory the worst Native-“White” war was fought.[72] Canadians wanted to avoid these experiences, and so they deliberately gave Native people small and scattered reserves, thus keeping the growing unity of Native people against colonialism from becoming a threat to the bourgeoisie. The reserves which were set aside for Native people were carefully assessed beforehand with regard to mineral potential, agricultural potential, water, and climate, and chosen to maximize surface contact with non-Native society; therefore, Natives would be more easily Christianized, “civilized” and assimilated.[73]

In the North, the same patterns took place but at a later point in time. The policy of the Canadian state toward Native people in the Northwest Territories and the Yukon was, until World War II, best characterized as a policy of benign neglect. Said the Deputy Minister of Northern Affairs and National Resources in 1957,

So completely did we forget the north that as recently as ten years ago – with the sole exception of the mining town of Yellowknife – there was not in the Northwest Territories one single school. . . that had been built by any government – national territorial, or local.

The north was left to the missionaries, the fur traders, the Eskimos and the Indians.[74]

In particular, one bourgeois scholar notes:

Indeed, much of the Canadian government’s inactivity in the north prior to World War II may have been the result of a more or less conscious policy of not disturbing the pattern of native life which had been created by the fur traders and missionaries. The post-World War II period, however, brought increasing awareness of the inadequacy of the fur trade as a source of income for the native population and of the mission system as a source of education, medical care, and welfare services. Above all, it became obvious that the long-run prospects for improving conditions of life for the native people of the north could not be separated from the question of general economic development of the northern territories.[75]

Why had they been so thoughtless? It was high time to change things. Thus the bourgeoisie set out in the 1950’s to “saving the native population. from the debilitating effects of living on unearned income.”[76] Said the Commissioner of the Northwest Territories of the northern population, “With proper training and adjustment they can contribute greatly to the development of northern Canada in the years to come.”[77]

Again, as the fur trade declined and “development” moved in, the bourgeoisie set out to turn Native people into good beasts of burden. Hence instruction in employable skills was introduced into the North by the bourgeoisie after World War II. Their skills at hunting and gathering were outliving their usefulness.

Back to the South. In Canada, more emphasis was placed on the process of breaking people into the new role of labour force for the rising capitalist system than was placed in the United States. In Canada land was vast but cheap labour was difficult to recruit, whereas the Americans had the opposite problem: tight land, and a more easily accessible labour force. The problem in both countries, however, was that the Native was not easily broken in as a beast of burden. This is a problem encountered by colonial bourgeoisies throught the world in their contacts with peoples from classless societies. Only where the bourgeoisie has found peoples who were experienced at tilling the soil – and not just tilling it themselves, but tilling it from dawn till dusk in order to produce a surplus for an authority – has it successfully harnessed aboriginal populations for the purposes of slavery. Thus, the Aztecs, the Maya, the Incas, and the Africans of the West Coast were successfully enslaved; the Australian, the Maori of New Zealand, and the North American Native sickened, died, and otherwise refused to adapt to being used as slaves. In the United States, the African was therefore imported over a long period to supply the labour needs of the growing system. But Canada never developed a slave trade, and the forces of the Quebecois were insufficient to serve the needs of the growing system. Hence the bourgeoisie reasoned that the Native was “tractable, docile and willing to learn”;[78] and that, with proper instruction and Christian training, a slave mentality could be instilled. The bourgeoisie was wrong.

To many Native people, agriculture itself was a profound threat to the freedom of their Nativeness. Tilling the soil was women’s work (a profound comment on the productive role of women!), and male hunters resisted engaging in it.[79] Big Bear, the proud chief of the Plains who was to engage in the Louis Riel uprising, led the move of the Plains Natives to resist this imposition on the old way of life.[80] But the situation was anything but uniform. Many Natives, including a number of wise and prominent leaders, took the position that their people would not be able to survive without the buffalo unless they learned agriculture. They therefore wanted the new State to help them learn these skills so that they could cope with living under European civilization rather than be destroyed by it. Poundmaker, Red Pheasant, Starblanket, and Mistawasis were among the leaders who wanted their people to learn agriculture.[81]

Yet these chiefs wanted to learn the new way for the survival of their people, not for their exploitation. They wanted agriculture to be practiced on the reserve, on a self-sufficient basis. Clearly the bourgeoisie could not be satisfied with this: the bourgeoisie could only be interested in what surplus-labour the Native could provide for the ends of the growing system. And so, the Canadian state adopted a simpler policy toward the Native assimilation. Through assimilation it was thought that the Native would simply be absorbed into the mainstream of Canadian life: which meant, of course, into the bottom of the workforce, where he belonged. Native people were therefore denied the rations which had been promised them to survive the harsh winters,[82] as well as the agricultural equipment and instruction which had been guaranteed them by treaty.[83] They had been blackmailed. They had been lured onto the reserve in order to clear the way for the growing move to expansion and settlement, and now they were being lured into the labour force as disarmed, frightened and starving people. The first lure worked, but the second lure did not. The Native people were determined to cling to the bit of land which was still theirs, even if it neant hunger, nakedness and police rule.

In British Columbia, at the time of Confederation, Native people constituted 80% of the population.[84] The resources were vast and seemingly limitless; it appeared at first that the settlers and the Native way of life could exist side by side. Yet reserves were assigned for Native people just to make sure that the most valuable land was available for the bourgeoisie and not “wasted” on the “Indians”. Even the original assignments of reserves were not good enough for the bourgeoisie: the province began to complain that the Natives had gotten land which was too good for these unproductive aboriginals. Missionaries had some success in turning small groups of Native people into industrious, obedient Protestants for a while, but the old way of life still had to be outlawed by police action. The most significant example of this was the Potlatch, an all-important ceremony in which surplus goods were systematically destroyed. The Canadian Protestant mind could not cope with such extravagance.

The fact was, however, that in the pursuit of activities such as minimg, forestry, agriculture and the fur trade, it appeared at first that the Native people and the settlers of B.C. could co-exist. Native people were successfully employed in some of these industries, or else the activity of the settlers did not interfere with the Native society in this vast expanse of province. But the growing bourgeoisie could not suffer such peace on earth and goodwill to men in silence. It had to hit the Native where it would hurt him the most: in his precious and seemingly bottomless fishing sources. Fish! The truly profitable industry of the Pacific frontier. Commercial fisheries grew, and rules began to regulate how much and where Native people could fish. They would not comply; this was their ancestral birthright.

To some extent Native people began to participate in the fishing industry as employees. It was easier to teach Native people in B.C. to participate in capitalist industry, because there was less pressure on resources and hence more time to make the transition. But this success was only partial and temporary. The contradiction between being an employee for the bourgeoisie and being Native was too antagonistic. And so the bourgeoisie began to actively recruit and import Chinese, Japanese, Newfoundlander, Norwegian, Scottish and other European labour to replace the Native people in the fisheries. Soon reserves in B.C. were to look like reserves everywhere else in Canada.

This attempt by the bourgeoisie to assimilate Native people into the Canadian labour force at large is found consistently in Canada wherever the fur trade has drawn to a close. After Native people outlived their usefulness as hunters-gatherers, they have been expected to fulfill roles corresponding to the succeeding historical epochs: slavery, serfdom, and proletarianization. Wealthier settlers tried to use Native people as domestic slaves, but this was never very successful.[85] We shall see soon that the colonial administration tried to extract a surplus from Native people by putting them into the position of serfs, but not much surplus could be extracted in this fashion. And, of course, there has been the consistent attempt to make them into a cheap reserve labour army. The bourgeoisie has been explicit in its designs on Native people: to lead “the Indian people by degrees to mingle with the white race in the ordinary avocations of life.”[86] We will see from a discussion of the Trudeau-Chretien White Paper that the bourgeoisie has not changed one iota in its designs on Native people, nor have Native people backed down in their determination to keep their land and stay Native.

It will be remembered that the American bourgeoisie, in its search to kill every Native around so that the land could be freed, engaged in active and consistent massacre against the Native people. Yet, when the dust was settled, the American bourgeoisie was finding that the cost of killing one Native was higher than the cost of letting him die off through simple neglect. And so, said General Pratt of the American Cavalry: “Feed the Indians to America. Americans will do the assimilating and annihilate the Indian problem.”[87] In Canada, the policy of assimilation had slightly different motives (i.e., cheap labour), but the results on state policy were the same. Said Sir John A. Macdonald, “These impulsive half-breeds have got spoiled by this emeute (disturbance), and must be kept down by a strong hand until they are swamped by the influx of settlers.”[88] This was to become the practical policy of both countries for the 100 years to follow. For those Natives stubborn enough to want to cling to their own land, the Indian Act was devised in Canada.

D. The Indian Act

Now that the pride of the sires receives charity, Now

that we’re harmless, and safe behind laws.

–Buffy St. Marie[89]

Following upon the heels of the treaties was the Indian Act, an official piece of colonial legislation which reads like colonial legislation the world over.[90] As Native people were making poor slaves and they kept on practicing agriculture on the reserves as if it were meant for their own survival instead of for the purpose of procuding a surplus for their conquerors, the new Canadian bourgeoisie simply could not let this situation go on.[91] And so, the Indian Act of 1880 was written, in the spirit of “The term person means an individual other than an Indian.”[92]

The Indian Act established a feudal relationship between the colonial administration, in the person of the Indian Agent, and the Native people living on the reserve. The Indian Agent was the living representative of the bourgeoisie to the Native people, and it was to him that the fruits of their labour were owed. In exchange, they got the right to live on their own land, which is exactly the privilege which serfs have. Says Robertson:

The legal system of land tenure under which Indians function is not unlike the feudal system, and the levels of administration can be compared to feudal ranks. The Indian Affairs Branch is the lord of the manor. The Indian agent is the local manager. The lord has total control over the lives of his serfs, who neither own their land nor rent it. They are ’crofters’ permitted to live on the land and farm it, but not for their individual benefit. The lord or manager tells them what to plant and when to sow and harvest; he provides the equipment; he tells them when to sell the crop and at what price. He can, if he wishes, tell them to plant nothing as all. Thus, the Indians, on their own reservations, actually work for Indian Affairs. The revenue from their work goes to the Minister, as the lord is called. Often amounting to millions of dollars, these funds are kept by Indian Affairs to be spent at the Minister’s pleasure. The Minister draws up “projects” on which to spend this money, plans for model villages, schemes for economic efficiency and even proposals to move people from one part of the country to another.

But he treats his Indians with charity. They are given the opportunity to be Christianized and educated, and are provided with houses, food, clothing, money for liquor, and medical care. The system is predicated on the Minister’s treating the Indians as a responsible patron would treat inferiors.

Within the last ten years, this feudal system has been influenced by the surrounding capitalist economy sufficiently to make the relation of Indian to Indian Affairs move closer to that of employee to employer. He is a “professional Indian”, and the Queen’s bounty and benevolence laid down in the treaty has become a salary. The Indian is paid to be an Indian and, since in most cases he is living in poverty, he is paid to be a peasant.[93]

Says Carstens, a bourgeois anthropologist, speaking of South African as well as Canadian reserves (and noting that they were both founded by the same British colonial bourgeoisie):

Nearly all reserves belong to that intermediate societal species. . . - peasantry. Most reserve communities have all the characteristics of peasant communities according to Kroeber’s definition of peasants as rural people living in relation to market towns, provided we see them (as Kroeber did) as consisting of class segments of a population that contains urban centres. . . . Peasants, the working class, and people who live in reserves belong to the same social genus in terms of the relationship in which they stand to the dominant segment of their social milieux. They are all “class segments” of society.“[94]

And Dunning says:

For the southern areas those who were principally hunters and collectors clung to subsistence cultivation on a European immigrant model in the nineteenth century until the economics of expansion by the 1930’s prohibited its continuation as a basic economy. And since the late 1940’s for those people who were unsuccessful in obtaining wage labour in surrounding regions, per capita welfare payments became more basic to their sustinence.[95]

And so we can see that the feudal model, of subsistence cultivation plus fealty to the lord, is a good one in application to Native society after the Indian Act took force.

The Indian policy of the bourgeoisie regarded Native people as helpless children, “wards of the state,”in need of protection, and unable to deal with their own affairs in the slightest. It is an official policy of paternalism, repeated by colonial administrations the world over. Based on this philosophy, Indian Affairs made Native people beg for every allowance, for access to their own band funds for a development project, for every permission to sell a pig, accomodate guests, or do anything else. Based on the line that Native people were so incapable of functioning, Indian Affairs “helped” them by handling all their money, and in the process siphoned it off into the bureaucracy and via the bureaucracy into the Canadian system at large. Land, labour and resources were all funnelled from the reservoir of Native life into the belly of the insatiable bourgeoisie.[96] For a general description of this phenomenon, Stalin says:

The struggle spreads from the economic sphere to the political sphere. Restriction of freedom of movement, repression of language, restriction of franchise, closing of schools, religious restrictions, and so on, are piled upon the head of the “competitor”. Of course, such measures are designed not only in the interest of the bourgeois classes of the dominant nation, but also in the furtherance of the specifically caste aims, so to speak, of the ruling bureaucracy. But from the point of view of the results achieved this is quite immaterial; the bourgeois classes and the bureaucracy in this matter go hand in hand”(MARXISM AND THE NATIONAL QUESTION)

Stalin’s description of a ruling bureaucracy can be applied almost verbatim to the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development. (Listen to that title! A clearer statement of the relationship of Native people to Canadian imperialism could not be made.) This Department (which has weasled in and out of different names and classifications for nearly a century) has made specific rulings against freedom of movement, freedom to speak one’s native language, freedom of franchise, freedom of religion, and freedom of education. Children are dragged off to boarding schools where their heads are shampooed with lye soap, they are whipped for speaking their own languages, and they are conscientiously taught to compete with each other and hate themselves for being Native. When they return home, they cannot communicate with their families in the Native tongue.[97]

DIAND is a monster that gets bigger and stodgier with every passing year.[98] It is a rigid caste system whose participation by Native people is severely limited; it is a stagnant pond whose scum rises to the top. Should a bureaucrat show any knowledge of or sympathy with Native people, he loses any chance of promotion.[99] Bureaucrats sent from the metropolis to govern Native people up North are called “Southerners”, a clear reference to the racism of some American Southerners toward the black people of their own communities.

This cesspool pays fancy salaries to the most incompetent and useless strata of the petite-bourgeoisie. Teachers who can’t teach are hired by Indian Affairs to teach Native people; engineers who barely graduated are hired by Indian Affairs to design houses and roads for Northern conditions of which they know nothing. When illiteracy is rampant (only one-quarter of Native people are educated beyond grade six) and houses and roads crack under the cold, and when heat is nonexistent and Native people are forced to tear down walls for firewood, then Indian Affairs blames Native people. “Indians just won’t live right,” Indian Affairs tells the world. “Poverty breeds its own.”[100] In the meanwhile, both the capitalists themselves and the politicians find their needs satisfied. Prefabricated houses built in the south which last two or three winters are a choice example of planned obsolescence, and the bureaucrats of the colonial administration can point to Native people for their failures.[101]

The Indian Act also made ample provision for the assimilation of Native people into the overall society, as it was becoming clear that assimilation was going to be the only “final solution to the Indian problem”. Enfranchisement, as the voluntary relinquishment of Native status was called, was made easy and tantalizing but irrevocable. It brought liquor rights and a small sum of money.[102] Many native people opted for enfranchisement solely for the right to drink, or to travel; then they took their enfranchisement fee, spent it on liquor, and woke up the next morning to the sober reality of homelessness and dispossession. Tensions grew between reserve Natives, who could not forgive their brothers for selling their birthright; and fringe Natives, who settled around the reserves but were not allowed to “trespass” back onto it.[103] Native men could marry whomever they wanted and keep their treaty rights, but Native women could not marry “out” lest they be stripped of their legally guaranteed heritage. Marrying “out” did not just mean marrying a white person, it more often meant marrying a Native person who for some bureaucratic reason had lost HIS treaty rights. Thus not only was the sexism of patriarchal European society written into the colonial legislation, but a built-in mechanism for reducing the number of Treaty Indians was created.[104] Moreover, the pushing of Native women off the reserve and the welcoming of “white” women onto it has created a situation today where even the little power that Native people have within their own reserve structure is being undermined by outsiders. We can see that, by dividing Treaty Indians from non-Treaty Indians, the colonial legislation created one more way to divide Native people from each other and weaken them in the face of colonialism. Who is and who is not an “Indian” in Canada bears scant relation to ancestry or personal identity. It is a question of legal definition.[105]

E. Nationhood in the Making

Yet a few of the conquered have somehow survived.

Their blood runs the redder, though genes have been paled . . .

The wounded, the losers, the robbed sing their tales.

– Buffy St. Marie [106]

The period following the Indian Act has been the period of the making of the Native Canadian nation. It has been called by bourgeois scholars the “period of gestation” (of what they are not quite sure), the period of adaption, or the period of irrelevance.[107] After the great nineteenth century resistance to colonialism led by heroic Native chiefs, active resistance dwindled. Stripped of all power to take destiny into their own hands, Native people resorted to a wide variety of techniques of passive resistance, all geared to maintaining their own independent identity, resisting attempts at assimilation, and drawing firm lines of demarcation between themselves and the nation which was oppressing them. They were the horses who were led to water but wouldn’t drink. They worked at jobs, but resisted leaving the reserves to become a migrant labour force. They tilled the soil, but resisted tilling more than they needed for their own survival.[108] After World War II, when the era of subsistence agriculture was largely passed, they were left with welfare as the only means to survive; this was found preferable to integrating into the dominant society.

They were also engaged in the process of adaptation, sorting through the traits forced upon them or expected of them by their conquerors and adopting those which were not a functional threat to their Indianness. They cut their hair and wore Western clothes and to some extent learned English. They attended Church schools and some Native people actually adopted Christianity, working it into their existing religious framework, although in general Christianity was looked upon as the hypocritical and hegemonic ideology of imperialism. They learned how to continue foraging activities from the base point of their strategic hamlets. Flexibility and adaptability were always traits of the aboriginal cultures, and these traits stood them in good stead to cope with this horrible shock which was Canadian civilization.[109]



During this period Native people were also learning to come to terms with the ruin which colonization was visiting upon them in material terms. They were learning to cope with the lies and trickery by which they had been herded into concentration camps. “You can call them reserves if you want,” said one Native person to us, “but we call them concentration camps.” They were learning to deal with the fact that the bourgeoisie spoke with forked tongue, and that his promises of assistance in the new way of life were just so many flutters in the wind. When there was a drought, there were no crops; when there was a depression, there was no government assistance; when there was prosperity, then phony government experts – the bottom of the barrel – strutted onto the reserves with barren cattle, seed that wouldn’t grow, ploughs that did not plough.[110] It was not difficult to figure out that the government was not interested in seeing the Native person through to develop his own self-sufficiency, but rather to exploit his labour and encourage a helpless dependency on the colonial administration; and to urge him away from the reserve and into a life of migrant, reserve labour. It was not difficult for them to figure out that the Hudson’s Bay Company was still out for blood: dominating the lives of many Native communities in the North, holding such a total monopoly in some areas that the people could not even open their own bakery shop because the Company cornered the market on flour.[111]

What Native people did not yet realize was that the conditions which they were enduring were to be found in almost identical form in countries the world over. They were a colonized Third World people. They were forbidden to develop their own resources; they were denied the tiniest pretense of self-determination; they were kept in the most squalid of human conditions.

The Chinese define the Third World as “the developing countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America and other regions.”[112] (Emphasis added.) Marxists categorize the world not by geography or race but by economic conditions. Native territory in Canada is a colony of Canada, it is a Third World colony, and this is true because of its underdeveloped economic conditions, kept that way consciously and deliberately by the bourgeoisie of the First and Second Worlds for the purpose of imperialist profit. In one sense, the entire northland of Canada can be considered Canada’s major colony, or primary resource area. In another sense, the reserves themselves can be considered to be little colonies, or fragments of a colony, of Canada: because of the relationship which Natives on the reserve have to the bourgeoisie via the colonial administration, and because of the specific economic conditions which operate on the reserves. As the colonial nature of Native territory will prove to be key to our analysis of the national status of Native people, it deserves to be gone into at some length.

A. Native Territory: Canada’s Colony

When a war between nations is lost,

The Loser, we know, pays the cost.

But even when Germany fell into your hands,

Consider, dear lady, consider, dear man,

You left them their pride

AND YOU LEFT THEM THEIR LAND.

–Buffy St. Marie[113]

A colony, as Lenin explains in IMPERIALISM, THE HIGHEST STAGE OF CAPITALISM, is plundered by the mother country primarily for its raw materials and cheap labour. It is a primary resource area. Development of secondary industries (agriculture, manufacturing) is severely curtailed. Economic activity is directed by monopoly capitalist concerns with little if any competition tolerated. Few goods produced are kept in the colony; they are sent back to the mother country and then the colony imports its finished goods at extremely high prices. (“It’s all in the freight,” crooned a Bay manager.) Transportation networks are developed when they are seen profitable by the imperialist bourgeoisie, but only to foster the interests of the monopolies and not planned with the convenience or needs of the residents in mind. Finally, a colony is distinguished from a semicolony (or a neocolony) by the absence of self-determination for the population, particularly the aboriginal population.

All of these features are precise and indisputable descriptions of Canada’s northland. The bourgeoisie is fully aware that the Canadian northland is a colony. Said Professor K. J. Rea, a specialist in the economic history of the Canadian north,

It may seem strange that economists use the “underdevelopment” models, the ones that are usually used to describe underdeveloped countries far across the seas, to study a geographical area within a developed country; but we have to use these models to study the North, because no other models work properly. Economically, there is nothing unique about Canada’s northland.[114]

The bourgeoisie defines Canada’s north not only as the Northwest Territories and the Yukon, which are considered the Extreme North and the Far North; but also as those areas of the provinces in which the same economic patterns obtain. Figures 1 and 2 are two interpretations of what constitutes Canada’s northland. Above these general boundaries, the territory is proportionally heavily populated with Native people. It is important to emphasize, however, that we are not even remotely attempting to delineate the boundaries of Native Canada by ourselves. These boundaries may be as far north as the 60th parallel or considerably further south; they may include huge tracts of land in some cases, and in other cases may only be scattered portions which are reserves and Metis colonies. The boundaries of Native Canada will be determined in the process of struggle and struggle alone.

Concretely, how can Canada’s northland be described as to raw materials and economic patterns? The industries in the North which have grown since World War II are mining (particularly gold and silver), petroleum, natural gas, and electric power. These products all are primary raw materials which leave the area and are extracted by the mother country. The industries which have declined since World War II are, primarily, agriculture, manufacturing, and forestry.[115] Since World War II railroads and other modes of transportation have also been developed, because the bourgeoisie has decided that the superprofits from the growing industries justified the enormous costs. Yet, while the growing transportation has fostered the growth of the large mother-country interests, it has stifled the development of indigenous industry rather than encouraged it: for example, foresting has declined because industries can import their fuels more cheaply from the mother country. Consumption goods have been increasingly imported from the mother country, and home-made goods have declined in importance.[116]

Within this vast colony live Canada’s Native people. They are not distributed evenly throughout the colony but have been herded into strategic hamlets so that they are out of the way of the colonizers in their search for plunder. Yet from the economic conditions of the North we can see that most of the settlers are there for specific imperialist interests: they are employed by a mining concern, or as a technician for the petroleum industry, or as an administrator in the colonial bureaucracy, or as medical assistants. Many of they have one foot in home base down south.[117] Many of them are there for only seasonal employment. When a particular industry folds up, many of them return to the warmer climes, as in the collapse of the gold rush of the Yukon.[118]

The Northwest Territories and the Yukon are governed by a territorial administration headed by a Commissioner. The source of the power of this administration is in Ottawa, except in the case of certain minor local decisions.[119] The provinces have self-government, but that government is controlled primarily by southern contingents. The self-interest of the residents of the north is generally as subordinated to the decisions made in the south as it is in the Northern territories. These sections have separate economic conditions but they do not have a separate self-government.

Huddled onto strategic hamlets scattered throughout this vast colony, the Native people find their colonial situation even further exaggerated. We have seen that they totally lack self-determination in the colonial bureaucracy. One bourgeois-liberal scholar describes reserves thus:

The Indians are economically dependent on the dominant group because the reserves are treated as hinterlands – geographical and social areas to be exploited. Primary depleting resources (oil, mining, water, forest products) are exported from the reserves by whites and shipped to the large industrial centres for processing. This has two important results. It prevents the industries being developed on the reserves and it keeps native activities on an agricultural level. It has always been the basic aim of the dominant group to keep the natives oriented toward agriculture. The treaties and the Indian Act itself reveal this. A “two-level” system develops – the colonizers (whites) who own, direct and profit from the exploitation and the colonized (Indians) who are the workers. Native participation in the economic structure is nil or at the level of unskilled, part-time wage earners. The long-term result is that Indians live at “subsistence” level, practising agriculture to survive. They also make up a major portion of the secondary labour pool and profits from raw material production (obtained through cheap native labour) go to the whites.[120]

The same writer goes on to cite Tabb’s criteria for an underdeveloped country and notes that it is exactly comparable to Native Canada.

... low per capita income, high birth rate; a small, weak middle class; low rates of increase in labour productivity, capital formation, domestic savings; and a small monetized market. The economy of such a country is heavily dependent on external markets where its few basic exports face an inelastic demand (that is, demand is relatively constant regardless of price, and so expanding total output may not mean higher earnings). The international demonstration effect (the desire to consume the products enjoyed in wealthier nations) works to increase the quantity of foreign goods imported, putting pressure on balance of payments as the value of imports exceeds the value of exports. Much of the small modern sector of the economy is owned by outsiders. Local entrepreneurship is limited, and in the absence of intergovernmental transfers, things might still be worse for the residents of these areas.[121]

Frideres outlines seven aspects of colonialism and finds them all applicable to Native Canada: the forced entry of the colonizers, the destruction of the aboriginal system of life (political, economic, kinship structure, value systems), external political domination, native economic dependence, low standard social services, racism, and a colour line.[122] Carstens says,

The Indians of Canada who are under the Indian Act and live within the economic, social, and territorial confines of reserves are not wards of the Government as some have argued; they are members of little colonies within the borders of the dominating nation.[123]

Finally, Native territories in Canada are a colony not only in terms of the economic structure but also in terms of the mode of life. Conditions of existence are exactly similar to conditions found throughout the unliberated Third World. For example, a number of diseases are found among Native people which are rarely found elsewhere in North America but which are found commonly throughout the Third World. These include kwash-kior, marasmus (both diseases of severe malnutrition), trachoma, otitis media, and vitamin deficiency diseases such as beriberi.[124] As in the rest of the Third World, death by tuberculosis is found ten times as frequently as it is in non-Native North America.[125] Of infant mortality, Rea says:

. . . While the infant mortality rate in Canada as a whole fell fairly steadily from over 90 (per thousand live births) in the late 1920’s to a low of 27.2 in 1961, the rate in the Northwest Territories not only remained over 100 throughout this period but it was as high in the 1950’s as in the 1930’s.... Appalling as it was by the standards of the western industrialized countries, the Yukon infant death rate appeared almost “civilized” compared with the rate in the Northwest Territories. The latter rate was exceeded only by the rate displayed by such primitive countries as Chile, which had a rate of 127 in 1960, and it compared unfavourably with the rate in the reporting districts of India, which was 100 in 1961.[126] (Emphasis added.)

Death before the second birthday is eight times as high as in the rest of Canada.[127] Severe malnutrition is rampant.[128] The Hudson’s Bay Company keeps Natives on a diet of lard, white flour, and occasional canned goods, in exchange for the precious hunted and trapped game which they bring to the oppressor nation.[129] As a result, heart disease is extremely common, along with all the other problems that go with a devitalized diet.[130]

Mercury poisoning, or Minimata disease, is now developing among Native communities in Ontario and Quebec which rely on fish for their diet. The primary culprit in Ontario is Dryden Chemical Company, which until recently was dumping its mercury into the water and now continues to refuse to compensate the Natives so that they can afford to eat something other than fish. It also refuses to clean out the sludge. Minimata disease is an incurable attack on the nervous system which causes the most grotesque forms of paralysis, convulsions, congenital deformities, and madness imaginable. The government has known about this scourge for years but has been an accomplice through its silence.[131] Now that there is some evidence that Dryden Minimata disease may be infecting the waters of Winnipeg, where members of the dominant nation are living, publicity is becoming more widespread.

The average life span of Canadian Native people is 34 years; that of the Inuit in particular, 26 years.[132] It is alleged that women are sometimes sterilized without their consent, a common tactic of genocide against Third World peoples. The shacks, the dirt floors, the lack of sanitation, heat or running water, and the all-pervasive dispiritedness and internecine hostilities: all are thoroughly charasteristic of the colonized Third World. These problems are compounded by alcoholism, which is generally analogous to the gravitation of all oppressed peoples to drugging agents (heroin in Harlem, hashish in the Middle East, cocaine in South America, alcohol in the Soviet Union). The bourgeoisie has concocted the wildest theories as to why “the Indians drink so much”, but one theory we have not seen mention of is, simply, malnutrition. It is known that rats on a vitamin-deficient diet rapidly become alcoholics, but lose interest in alcohol when the diet is made adequate again.[133]

In general, the Native community is the victim of daily acts of violence. Next to respiratory ailments, violent accidents are the single highest cause of death among Native people, these acts being born of alcoholism, neglect, frustration, and unsafe living conditions.[134] These only add to the obvious fact that every child who dies of kwashkior, or every adult who dies at 34 of old age, has died a violent death far more painful than death by a bullet. The violence-turned-inward of colonized peoples has been well documented by Franz Fanon.[135]

Modes of subsistence in Native territories of Canada are strikingly similar to those throughout the dependent countries of the Third World. A portion of the population – particularly as one goes farther North – lives in the aboriginal style of life, depending on hunting, fishing, trapping, and craft production. Yet whereas in pre-contact times the parameters of such activity were narrow, and they were performed for subsistence only, today they are performed largely for trade with the imperialist bourgeoisie.[136] Fish, furs, crafts, and even gathered produce are brought in from wider and wider areas to central trading posts: be these of the Hudson’s Bay Company or the Indian Affairs bureaucracy itself.[137] This is a key form of a growing economic cohesion, or common economic life, which is welding Native people together into a nation. Tribal boundaries lose material significance as Native people, irrespective of tribe, have a common relationship with the imperialist bourgeoisie. Aside from these traditional pursuits, many Native people participate in the labour force as a reserve army. The average duration of employment per year for Native people is 4.8 months.[138] One survey in Saskatchewan of 2,200 Native people showed only 200 having stable, year-round jobs.[139] The Hawthorn Report (a government report, 1966) showed Native per capita income to be $300 (contrast $ 1,400 for non-Native Canadians);[140] nearly half of Natives who are working earn less than $1,000 in a year.[141] Illiteracy is rampant. Forty-one percent of Native people in Canada receive welfare, in contrast to the national welfare rate of 3.7%.[142] Attempts to harness Native people into full-time labour in commercial fisheries and like exploits have failed with the usual consistency.[143]

The bourgeoisie represses Native people with a visciousness and unreproachability not found in advanced capitalist counties except in times of crisis. It is alleged that RCMP officers have helped themselves to rapes and murders, and go away unpunished.[144] In 1971 Fred Quilt was allegedly stomped and beaten by an RCMP officer and the death was ruled as accidental. Fifteen-year-old Michael Muskego was shot and no reprisals were taken.[145] These are only two of the more famous and publicized cases.

We have found the assumption that Native territory is a colony of Canada to be accepted widely throughout all the literature on the North and the Native question: be they bourgeois-conservative, bourgeois-radical, or bourgeois-liberal sources.[146] Said a comtemporary in the era of the Metis rebellions: “The Metis . . . objected to being transformed from a Crown colony to a ’colony of a colony,’ and handed over to the Dominion, bon gre mal gre, like so many head of cattle.”[147] Say Brown and Brown,

Certainly as long as there is a trace of racist policy which exploits and keeps Indian people in a state of subjugation, the police will continue to act as a colonial force. For police are in a sense just the instruments of racist oppression in the North in much the same way as they are the instruments of class oppression in labour disuputes.[148]

and

Apparently the events of the so-called Red River Rebellion and the unrest following it had convinced the authorities that the native peoples were not likely to become loyal servants of their colonial masters.[149]

and, more significantly,

Canadian historians generally agree that an extremely important if not the most important reason for Confideration in 1867 was to serve the needs of the commercial and industrial interests centred in Toronto and Montreal with connections in London. In order to prosper and expand, these companies needed enlarged markets for both primary and manufactured products and, especially in the case of railway and other transportation interests, assurance that trade goods would reach their destination by way of the St. Lawrence route. . . .The plan was to administer the entire North West as a colony of Canada with a governor and council appointed by the federal government. There was not even to be a pretense of self-government; any rights accorded to the inhabitants of the colony would be by the grace and the discretion of the federal government. Not surprisingly the inhabitants, particularly the Metis in the Red River vicinity, objected to this high-handed arrogance. When their objections were ignored, they took up arms and declared a provisional government under the leadership of Louis Riel.”[150](Emphasis added.)

And so emerges a picture of Canadian history which envisioned the vast expanse northward as a colony of commercial interests of the metropolis. The colonized, of course, were the Native people, together with the vast and lush resources amidst which they lived. Canadian history since Confederation has been a history of gradual expansion, gradual encroachment into that territory, eating away at aboriginal rights, building the empire and intensifying the exploitation within the narrowing hinterland.

If we understand the Native question in its fullest implications, then the present confusion which clouds our understanding of Canadian history will begin to dissipate. The expansion to the northland has been used by the Canadian bourgeoisie as a means to establish itself as a power in its own right rather than being overwhelmed by the United States capitalist system to the south of it. Says Zaslow,

In fact, this empty, undeveloped quality of the country northwest of Canada constituted its main attraction to Canadians. Their drive to secure the territories had been dictated to a considerable degree by the increasing inability of the Province of Canada to present opportunities for growth comparable to those offered by the neighbouring United States. The American westward movement, particularly after 1850 when railways began laying open the trans-Mississippean west and California and Oregon beckoned along the Pacific coast, made it imperative for British North Americans to match this advance by expanding west into the territories of the British Crown. Not to do so would expose those lands to the danger of being overwhelmed by the United States and would condemn the people of Canada to their present narrow limits and to a lower standard of living than their neighbours. Expansion became a national duty for Canada, a commitment with destiny.[151] (Emphasis added.)

Said another scholar,

To preserve a ’frontier’, Canadians had been forced to build a nation.[152]

The founding and building of Canadian capitalist society, and the genocide of Native people and the theft of their lands, are one and the same question. All of our theoretical work will be off the track until we start to understand this fact. A correct concrete analysis of Canada depends on it.

But what of the population of Native Canada? Is it not sparse and insignificant, too small to be a key issue in the understanding of Canadian imperialism? No, this is wrong.

Government statistics of “Indians”, although they vary from decade to decade depending on whom the bourgeoisie chooses to include[153], are easy to come by: for 1970 the figures are 1.3% of the overall population of Canada, including 14.8% of the Yukon and 23.4% of the Northwest Territories.[154] To use these statistics, however, is to fall into the trap set by the bourgeoisie of considering every non-registered Native person a “white” person. By these criteria, some Native leaders of the 1974 Caravan were white, as well. Inevitably, statistics on the actual Native population in Canada are going to be estimates, particularly in an attempt to assess the Metis population, whose estimates run from 60,000 to 600,000.[155] The problem is compounded by the fact that many Native people are migrant, or non-registered not only as “Indians” but also as human beings: they are born without birth certificates being issued. The figure which Native leaders use operationally in their estimates of Native population in Canada is about one million people; this estimate conforms to that of Frideres, who gives the percentage of the Canadian population as about 6.5%.[156] This figure includes only those who identify themselves as Native, and not those who are Metis but integrated into the dominant society and identify with white society at large. Another important factor in considering Native population is that they are the fastest growing population in North America, with an annual population increase of 5% and a projected doubling of population within fifteen years.[157]

Information Canada (1971) reports that the Native population of the Yukon is 42.2% of the total, and that of the Northwest Territories is 81.4%; the total aboriginal population of the two territories in the North constitutes 67.9% of its total.158 The 60° line, however, is not a sharp demographic barrier, and Native people continue to form a majority of areas south of that border as well.[158]

It is true, nonetheless, that the northern reaches of Canada are sparsely populated: 90% of the population of Canada lives within 200 miles of the U.S. border. It is true that the colonial territory is not like the banana republics of Latin America or the rice paddies of Asia, where vast armies of human labour have slaved for a pittance. The two types of territories are different because the aboriginal conditions which the bourgeoisie found to exploit were concretely different. Where the bourgeoisie found agricultural, class societies, with dense populations accustomed to exploitation, it took advantage of these conditions and harnessed the labour-intensive, land-intensive system to its own advantage. However, where the bourgeoisie found hunters-gatherers, living in primitive communism, the concrete conditions were different. Hunters-gatherers live in sparsely populated territory with vast expanses of virgin land, but the possibilities of labour-intensive exploitation are limited. And so, the bourgeoisie, being eminently willing to adapt itself to conditions in order to maximize profits, exploits certain types of colonies differently from others. The North is used primarily for its raw materials, which, as Lenin pointed out, was the initial use of a colony to the bourgeoisie. Cheap labour is utilized sporadically, but the bourgeoisie at this point does not depend on it; it is more inclined to import expensive, “reliable” labour from the South [159] and use industries which have a high proportion of constant capital (machines, etc.). This, of course, cuts into the rate of profit. But the raw materials are the property of Canada, whereas they would not be if the bourgeoisie had to pay royalties on property rights to the local population as it does for resources taken from other parts of the world. That fact alone increases its profits immensely. Where foreign capital invests in the North, those companies must pay the Crown gigantic sums for the rights to the minerals, oil, water, natural gas, wood, and other natural resources. This is the significance of the colony to the bourgeoisie. This is why a national struggle in that territory would pull out such an important prop to bourgeois rule in Canada.

B. Native People in Cities

I’m going back, back to the land I love

I’m going back, where skies are big above me

Back to the land I left behind

Back to the pride that I must find

Leave me alone, can’t you see I’m goin’ home.

–Floyd Westerman[160]

Today the number of Native people migrating into urban centres is increasing.[161] Yet let us look at the objective composition of Native people living in cities. Most Native people who move into the cities return to the reserve or near it before long; only 20% of Native people stay in cities beyond five years.[162] There are many reasons for this, the subjective factors intermingling with the objective ones. Employment in the cities is hard to maintain for Native people: their level of education is often too low, their level of conditioning to the 9-5 way of life insufficient. Discrimination is rampant. The unemployment rate of Native people in cities is 68 %!!! – as compared with 65 % on reserves, not counting the fact that the reserve has some fringe benefits such as free rent and access to hunting.[166] Native people will advance explanations such as : “Indians can’t live in the cities. It’s too cutthroat,”[167] or talk of the cultural disorientation brought about by wandering through mazes of concrete.[168] Many Native people who are statistically city folks are really there only for a season, or a year, to hunt and gather the fruits of a job and bring the spoils back home.[169] Many try to cope with city life and fail. The same phenomenon is generously documented with respect to American Natives. Eisenhower thought up a brainstorm of “relocation”, but after the initial training programs most of the reserve Natives returned home.[170]

What is significant in this analysis is to show that to vast numbers of Native people in Canada, city life is a passing experience. Contrast this with national minorities such as Italians, Chinese, and West Indians who immigrate to Canada and generally accept that their future and the future of their children will be made in the cities of Canada. For most Native people, home can be returned to. In other words, for most Native people, the loyalty to the colonized homeland remains primary.

Several studies of Native people in urban areas confirm that Native people as a whole have not been successfully integrated into the Canadian working class.[171] The largest percentage of Native people in cities are welfare receipients, who hold jobs for a few weeks at a time at the most.[172] Their situation is worsening at a faster rate than the worsening of the situation of the Canadian working class as a whole.[173] “Essentially, the Indian lumpenproletariat has been too miserable to be able to develop a solid slum,” says Dosman of Saskatoon.[174]That author sees no hope for Native people in the cities even to integrate into the Canadian working class and sees the reserves as the only possibility of Native survival.[175] “They remain ’home’ for urban migrants, and ensure the possibility of at least going back.”[176] The literature is consistent on this subject.

Yet the bourgeoisie does not give up. Following in the footsteps of Eisenhower’s disastrous “termination and relocation” policy, and in fact modeled after it despite its failure, was the Trudeau-Chretien White Paper of 1969. The paper was entitled “Indian Policy” despite denials that it was official policy.[177] It was written after months of consultation with the top Native reformist leaders and flew in the face of everything they had testified to.[178] Its policy was flatly assimilationist, consistent with the Canadian policy toward Native people since the close of the fur trade. Its goal was “to help bring Indians into a closer working relationship with the business community.” Yes, and what could that possibly mean? It spoke of mapping “a road that would lead gradually away from different status to full social, economic, and political participation in Canadian life,” arguing, “It is inconceivable that one section of a society should have a treaty with another section of a society.. .. They should become Canadians as all other Canadians.”[179] Native opposition to the White Paper was virtually unanimous[180], and in fact was a step in the political unity of Native people which has been building in this decade.

What is the significance of this? It is that Native people have consistently resisted every attempt by the Canadian bourgeoisie to drag them away from the reserve and into the Canadian work force at large. Their primitive communal consciousness, and their sense of peoplehood, have been tremendously tenacious and a threat to the bourgeoisie. Said Dosman:

Should the main recommendations of Ottawa’s White Paper of July, 1969, be implemented, in effect “terminating” the special status of Indians, the reserves will be lost, and the native will be permanently pauperized, a skid row subculture.[181]

It is not as if Native people are not eager to lead full, productive lives as are all oppressed peoples of the world. Say Native leaders:

An aspiration . . . remains common to every Indian I have ever talked to who is on welfare. This aspiration is simply to get off relief.[182]

Contrary to the slurs of white bigots, most Indians are more than willing to work.[183]

But Native people have consistently insisted on working on their own terms: which means, first and foremost, the right to remain on the reserve.

But opportunities on the reservation, other than employment by the tribe, are usually almost nil, and the prejudice of surrounding whites prevents a great many Indians from finding jobs within communting distance to the reservation. Another factor that contributes to Indian unemployment is the generally low quality of education and the frequent language barrier.[184]

Indians gladly accept the challenge – to become participating Canadians, to take a meaningful place in the mainstream of Canadian society. But we remain acutely aware of the threat – the loss of our Indian identiy, our place as distinct, identifiable Canadians.[185]

It is this that the bourgeoisie has been unable to allow. It has been unable to offer the Native person productive work on his own terms – on the reserve, living in the ways promised him by treaty, and for his own benefit rather than for the superprofits of a capitalist. The bourgeoisie has deliberately counterposed the goal of productive labour for Native people to the goal of his maintenance of his Nativeness. Experiments of factories and cooperative projects run on reserves by and for Native people have been tremendously successful. Yet the bourgeoisie curtails opportunities for tribal self-development with an unparalleled vengeance. That is because such self-development is not in the interest of the bourgeoisie; what the bourgeoisie wants is a reserve labour army, a bottom to its labour force, in a migrant and urban context. This is what the bourgeoisie has been unable to wring out of Native people except in the most marginal of ways.

C. Concrete Analysis: Conclusion

For the tribes you’ve terminated,

For the myths you keep alive, For

the land you’ve confiscated, For

the freedom you’ve deprived,

Custer died for your sins, Now

a new day must begin.

– Floyd Westerman [186]

In our concrete analysis of Native people of Canada we have found that the relationship of Native people and their lands to the Canadian bourgeoisie is a colonial relationship in all its major apects. The Canadian bourgeoisie deliberately limits all but the tiniest possibilities of development and self-determination in Native territory so that it can use such territories as primary resource areas and siphon off superprofits via the colonial bureaucracy and the monopoly capitalist concerns. Yet Native people have consistently preferred to remain within the colonial framework than to pick the fruits of the Second World, and have been unwilling and unable to integrate into the mainstream of the Canadian working class. The literature is consistent as to all these points, even to the point that Willliam Wuttunnee, leading Uncle Tomahawk of the Native communisty, chastizes his own people for their childish attitudes about their land and their separateness.[187] Canada does have a major colony: Native territory. It is a part of one colonial system, one colonial administration, with the same rules obtaining throughout.

A. The Fetish of Stalin’s Definition

Here come the anthros, Better hide your past away,

Here come the anthros On another holiday.

– Floyd Westerman [188]

Anthropologists have long been a favorite hate-object of Native North Americans[189] (although there is some evidence that this is changing somewhat[190]). Dissecting, detecting, inspecting and rejecting their way of life, these bourgeois scholars have been the paid ideologues of North American imperialism. For the anthropologists, tools of analysis did not exist for the people but people served the end of their analytical tools.

It should be axiomatic to Marxist-Leninists that when we analyze a situation we first make a concrete analysis of concrete conditions. It should be axiomatic as well that our tools of analysis, such as definitions, are but tools, and are made to serve the cause of the human race in its struggle for liberation. It should be axiomatic that human beings were not born to fit into definitions which exist in an ideal and unchanging form. Such an approach would be what is meant by metaphysics, a methodology proudly carried on by anthropologists and other scoundrels.

Mao says:

In discussing a problem, we should start from reality and not from definitions . . . We are Marxists, and Marxism teaches that in our approach to a problem we should start from objective facts, not from abstract definitions, and that we should derive our guiding principles, policies and measures from an analysis of these facts. (Yenan Forum on Literature and Art, MSW 111:74)

Yet when it comes to Stalin’s definition of a nation, Marxist-Leninists forget all this. As soon as you bring up the subject of the nationhood of Native people, it comes out so predictably you could time it with a stopwatch: “Do they fit into Stalin’s definition of a nation?”

This is not meant to downplay Stalin’s major historical contributions to the understanding of the national question and hence to the liberation of oppressed nations. On the contrary, we will be drawing heavily on Stalin’s theoretical work on the national question, work which was evolved in struggle against Trotsky,Luxemburg,Kautsky, Bauer and others who did not understand the right of nations to self-determination. The least of Stalin’s great contributions to the national question is his “definition.”

MARXISM AND THE NATIONAL QUESTION was written in 1913, at a time when national oppression among European nations was the primary focus of attention for Communists. When we read this essay, we notice that the concrete analysis and examples contained in it are drawn from the history and struggles of European peoples. Its categories and its class analysis deal with nations which emerged from the ruins of feudal empires. To apply those categories without analysis or flexibility to the question of colonial liberation is to make the serious error of European chauvinism which dismisses the entire question of the liberation of tribal peoples of the Third World oppressed by colonialism. We shall see shortly that Stalin agreed fully with what we have just said.

Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Mao all stress in their philosophical writings that to understand any phenomenon we start with concrete analysis of concrete conditions, with the METHOD of dialectical materialism, and not with formulae or definitions. Lenin insists on this principle with particular emphasis when he is discussing the national question.

(We must) grasp the meaning of self-determination of nations, no( by juggling with legal definitions, or “inventing” abstract definitions, but by examining the historical-economic conditions of the national movements. (“The Right of Nations to Self-Determination,”in LENIN AND STALIN ON NATIONAL COLONIAL QUESTION, Calcutta, p. 14)

The categorical requirement in investigating any social question is that it be examined within definite historical limits, and, if it refers to a particular country (e.g., the national programme for a given country), that account be taken of the specific features distinguishing that country from others in the same historical epoch, (ibid., p. 16)

In this age of imperialism, it is particularly important for the proletariat and the Communist International to establish the concrete economic facts and to proceed from concrete realities, not from abstract postulates, in all colonial and national problems. (Report of the Commission on the National and Colonial Questions, July 26, 1920, LCW 31:240)

The Communist Party, as the avowed champion of the proletarian struggle to overthrow the bourgeois yoke, must base its policy, in the national question too, not on abstract and formal principles but, first, on a precise appraisal of the specific historical situation and, primarily, of economic conditions. (Preliminary Draft Theses on the National and the Colonial Questions, June 5, 1920, LCW 31:145. Emphasis added)

How many comrades have told us their “line” on the Native question by reciting every phrase, every comma, of Stalin’s definition of a nation, without having done one bit of investigation of the concrete conditions of the Native people? How many comrades have held up to us ideal-type nations – say, the nation of France or Ireland, or the black nation in the South – and told us that the Native people could not constitute a nation because they did not sufficiently resemble these ideal types? We can only say to these comrades: Your methods have nothing in common with Marxism-Leninism, and you would do much better to investigate the difference between dialectical materialism and dogmatism than the Native national question or any other question, because all of your work will suffer from this dogmatism. Mao says:

Our dogmatists are lazy-bones. They refuse to undertake any painstaking study of concrete things, they regard general truths as emerging out of the void, they turn them into purely abstract unfathomable formulas, and thereby completely deny and reverse the normal sequence by which man comes to know the truth. Nor do they understand the interconnection of the two processes in cognition – from the particular to the general and then from the general to the particular. They understand nothing of the Marxist theory of knowledge.(On Contradiction, MSW 1:321)

Native people will undoubtedly realize that certain people in our movement, in their dogmatic and idealist applications of Stalin’s discussion of nationhood, are tragicomic parodies of the ubiquitous anthropologists whose main interest in Native people was categorizing them into acceptable and predetermined slots. They will correctly understand that these applications of theory to their struggle are just more forms of Western chauvinism and isolated scholastic debate. Unfortunately, what they may not fully understand is that this is not what Marxism-Leninism is, in its revolutionary essence, and they may reject Marxism-Leninism because they will be unconvinced that it has anything to offer them.

When talking of colonial struggles, Stalin talks of the national question in a different light from that of his 1913 article. He notes in FOUNDATIONS OF LENINISM (1924) that the national question in the epoch of colonialism is different IN ITS VERY ESSENCE. In this later essay, his main point is that the colonial question is IN ITS ESSENCE a national question. We quote at length, and we recommend that before people take a line on the Native question they read and study thoroughly the entire section which we cite, until its implications in terms of the Native question become clear. All bracketed sections and emphases are ours.

During the last two decades the national question has undergone a number of very important changes. The national question in the period of the Second International and the national question in the period of Leninism are far from being the same thing. They differ profoundly from each other, not only in their scope, but also in their intrinsic character.

Formerly, the national question was usually confined to a narrow circle of questions, concerning, primarily, “civilized” nationalities. The Irish, the Hungarians, the Poles, the Finns, the Serbs, and several other European nationalities – that was the circle of unequal peoples in whose destinies the leaders of the Second International were interested. The scores and hundreds of millions of Asiatic and African peoples who are suffering national oppression in its most savage and cruel form usually remained outside of their field of vision. They hesitated to put white and black, “civilized” and “uncivilized” on the same plane. Two or three meaningless, lukewarm resolutions, which carefully evaded the question of liberating the colonies – that was all the leaders of the Second International could boast of. Now we can say that this duplicity and half-heartedness in dealing with the national question has been brought to an end.(Except in Canada–authors.) Leninism laid bare this crying incongruity, broke down the wall between whites and blacks, between Europeans and Asiatics, between the “civilized” and “uncivilized” slaves of imperialism and thus linked the national question with the question of the colonies. The national question was thereby transformed from a particular and internal state problem into a general and international problem, into a world problem of emancipating the oppressed peoples in the dependent countries and colonies from the yoke of imperialism.

Formerly, the principle of self-determination of nations was usually misinterpreted, and not infrequently it was narrowed down to the idea of the right of nations to autonomy. Certain leaders of the Second International even went so far as to turn the right to self-determination into the right to cultural autonomy, i.e., the right of oppressed nations to have their own cultural institutions, leaving all political power in the hands of the ruling nation. As a consequence, the idea of self-determination stood in danger of being transformed from an instrument for combating annexations into an instrument for justifying them. Now we can say that this confusion has been cleared up. (Except in Canada.) Leninism broadened the conception of self-determination, intepreting it as the right of the oppressed peoples of the dependent countries and colonies to complete secession, as the right of nations to independent existence as states.

. . . Formerly, the question of the oppressed nations was usually regarded as purely a juridical question. . . . Leninism brought the national question down from the lofty heights of high-sounding declarations to solid ground, and declared that pronouncements about the “equality of nations” not backed by the direct support of the proletarian parties for the liberation struggle of the oppressed nations are meaningless and false. In this way the question of the oppressed nations became a question of supporting, of rendering real and continuous assistance to the oppressed nations in their struggle against imperialism for real equality of nations, for their independent existence as states.

. . . The tendency towards political emancipation from the shackles of imperialism and towards the formation of an independent national state (is) a tendency which arose as a consequence of imperialist oppression and colonial exploitaiton.(FOUNDATIONS OF LENINISM, Peking ed., 70-73, 78)

Notice that Stalin does not say, “Self-determination is the right of the oppressed peoples of the dependent countries and colonies to complete secession, provided that they fit into my definition of’nation’ which I invented in 1913.”

In the epoch of colonialism, in the epoch of imperialism, a colonial question is by that fact alone a national question. Lenin says,

Liberation of the colonies, we stated in our theses, means self-determination of nations. (A Caricature of Marxism and Imperialist Economism, LCW 23:63)

and refers to “the freedom to secede for colonies and nations oppressed by ’their own’ nations.”(The Socialist Revolution and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination, LCW 22:156) The peoples colonized by imperialism, by that fact alone, have the right to self-determination, up to and including secession. They are not obligated to join hand in hand with members of the nation which oppresses them, in any struggle, for any reason. Nationhood is the path by which this right to self-determination is realized. This is the essential theoretical basis by which we must understand the Native question. Lenin says,

In the United States, the Negroes (and also the Mulattoes and Indians) account for only 11.1 percent. They should be classed as an oppressed nation. (Statistics and Sociology, LCW 23:275. Emphasis added.)

Lenin here groups Native Americans with Black Americans, but as applied to Canada we must see this sentence in terms of Native people alone. What made Lenin make this statement? Did he draw is from abstract definitions, or from a formal list of criteria? No; he drew it from the mode ofoppression of Native and Black Americans. This is because Lenin was not a metaphysician or a dogmatist; he was a dialectician and a scientist. Clearly Native people in America in 1917 did not “fit into” some kind of perfect form, a snakeskin which would give them permission to liberate themselves. Yet Lenin understood the fundamental nature of their oppression. This was his methodology. Lenin says,

For what we are discussing is the logical contradiction between two social categories: ’imperialism’ and ’self-determination of nations’, the same logical contradiction as that between two other categories: labour money and commodity production. Imperialism is the negation of self-determination, and no magician can reconcile the two. (A Caricature of Marxism and Imperialist Economism, LCW 23.40-41)

and says PEKING REVIEW,

Where there is oppression and aggression, there is resistance. The process of invasion and enslavement of the colonies and semi-colonies by colonialism and imperialism is also the process of resistance by the oppressed nations. (On Studying Some History of the National-Liberation Movement, PR 45: Nov. 10, 1972. Emphasis added.)

The dialectical opposite of imperialism is the self-determination of nations. Where there is imperialism, there is created, out of diverse and scattered tribes, nationhood.The one requires the other. The classics of Marxism-Leninism are clear and consistent. Stalin’s “definition” is the wrong tool to use in understanding the right of tribal, colonized peoples to self-determination.

B. The Formation of a Nation: An Historical Necessity

Seminole, Apache, Ute, Paiute and Shoshone,

Navajo, Comanche, Hopi, Eskimo, Cree,

Tuscarora, Yaqui, Pima, Porno, Oneida,

Native North American me. . . .

Cherokee, Muskogee, Fox and Passamaquoddy,

Winnebago, Haida, Mohawk, Saulteaux and Sioux,

Chickasaw, Ojibway, Cheyenne, Micmac and Mandan,

Native North American You.

–Buffy St. Marie[191]

Native people in Canada are being welded into a nation in the process of their struggle against imperialism. Their nation-ness is not a metaphysical perfect form, ready to be examined and analyzed by Communists for all its component parts; it is being created in the process of struggle.

For example, we have heard it said that Native people could not possibly “be” a nation because they are too tribally divided. This is a metaphysical and undialectical approach to the Native question. It looks at the Native situation in Canada statically and not in terms of the direction in which it is moving. The strong - in fact, the powerful and irreversible – trend among Native people in Canada is towards higher and higher levels of unity, towards conscious and active struggle against the historic differences which have divided them. Some of these differences co