spoorweg 2

Rewind to 1878... 

when John A. Macdonald, the man who dreamed of a national railway, also began serving as superintendent general [inspecteur generaal] of Indian Affairs.

“In his correspondence, he said he was managing indigenous issues because it was of primary importance to completing the railway project,” said James Daschuk, a professor at the University of Regina. “His goal is to build a railway, but to secure the railway, he had to take care of Indian affairs.”

Between 1871 and 1876... 

treaties 1 to 7 cleared the western path for the railway’s construction. In treaty negotiations with the Cree on the Saskatchewan plains, the government promised humanitarian aid in times of crises, but 18 months later, in 1876, bison were disappearing.

The starving Cree went to the Indian agent for food. From their lands, the hungry Cree were moved onto reserves to the north. The North West Mounted Police were ordered not to feed any “non-treaty Indians” south of the tracks, Daschuk explained during an interview with Canada’s National Observer. On the reserve, the food provided was substandard. “People were so poor, so malnourished and so poorly dressed, and tuberculosis broke out like at a community-wide level.”

Once the tracks had been laid, the railway allowed for mass settlement of the territories across the country formerly occupied by First Nations. “Until the railway, the number of settlers was minuscule,” Daschuk said.

The celebrated moment in the driving of the last spike “signalled the end of freedom for First Nations people,” said Daschuk. From that same year until the mid-1930s, the Canadian government imposed an extralegal and little-known policy of segregation called the “pass system,” which prevented First Nations peoples from leaving their reserves without written consent from government officials.

“For Macdonald, to make sure the railway is complete, he not only subjugated First Nations people, he stomped on them,” said Daschuk.

To this day... 

many First Nations believe they are still being stomped on. 

“The only way we can have rights as Indigenous Peoples really in this country is if we’re living on reserve,” said Roxann Whitebean.

To Thomas Deer, historical and cultural liaison at the Kahnawake Language and Cultural Center, the Canadian Pacific (CP) is “a symbol of expropriation, a symbol of how Mohawks became dispossessed from their land.” Though CP and other railways never received formal permission from the community, the railway extended its line through the Mohawk territory from the 1880s onward.

“CP was pretty wily [sluw] in the way they attained approval,” he explained. “Sometimes, they went directly to Indian Affairs and bypassed the community. Sometimes, they went to community members themselves to lease out land or buy land. They did whatever they could, playing sides off one another to get the approval from the Privy Council to expropriate land for the railway.”

As a child, Deer would play on the CP tracks and oil cars. However, perception of the railway, especially CP, has grown more critical. “People are understanding that railways are accessories to the energy extraction industries that exploit our indigenous communities,” he said.

The government fears losing access [toegang te verliezen] to the land’s resources, Wickham said. “We clearly saw evidence of the government and industry working together on how they could exploit Wet’suwet’en resources and have complete access to them, knowing full well the implications of the decision of the Delgamuukw court case.”

To Wickham, the train cars carrying woodchips and lumber [houtsnippers en timmerhout] have destroyed more than the trees. Local food sources, including fruit, moose and deer, have grown scarcer, she said. The caribou [rendier] have completely disappeared. 

Now she fears that pollution caused by the pipeline will kill the salmon and render the river water undrinkable. “It’s a calculated attack on who we are as a people, our way of living and governing ourselves.”

“They continue to participate in the genocide of Indigenous Peoples through resource extraction and land expropriation,” Whitebean said. “By putting us on reservations, they had free rein to our land and resources. Within the next few generations, we might run out of land within our community.”

[bron]