From Protection to Coercion

We have seen that, in the struggle that the great colonial powers carried on to ensure their hegemony on the North American continent, war and commerce were indissociable and the First Nations were needed for both of them. Up until around 1820, the fur trade ranked first among the components in Canada’s foreign trade and was of the utmost importance to the very existence of the colony (Bilodeau and Morin 1974, 6). However, things changed in 1814, after the American Revolution and the end of the hostilities between the Americans and the British, because First Nations were no longer needed to wage war. In addition, the fur trade was in decline. As a result, Aboriginal nations lost their position as strategic allies. However, even though these nations were no longer needed for war or commerce, their lands remained indispensable.

Against this backdrop, an extensive assimilation plan was developed. As pointed out by the anthropologists Savard and Proulx, starting in the 1840s, government authorities would in effect endeavour [TRANSLATION] “to acquire the powers necessary to accelerate Indian territorial dispossession and to decrease the number of Indians by way of assimilation into the white man’s way of life. Such objectives required that the government claim the right to determine who was an Indian and, especially, at what time this status would expire.” (Savard and Proulx 1982, 86–87) The two authors indicate that the plan to progressively extinguish the First Nations population of Canada was developed between 1840 and 1867 and that it met cost-reduction objectives. The plan also gave rise to the establishment of a special vocabulary, of which we can still find vestiges today in words such as enfranchisement, registered Indian, non-status Indian, Métis, and treaty Indian. (ibid., 87)

An “Indian affairs” administrative framework was thus established as Aboriginal-occupied lands were progressively appropriated. When the Canadian Confederation was formed in 1867, First Nations were neither present nor consulted. Unbeknownst to them, an even more significant shift had occurred in the administration of their affairs: in discussions on power-sharing between the federal and provincial governments, the federal government obtained exclusive jurisdiction over Indian affairs. In so doing, it acquired the power to enact legislation on “Indians and Lands reserved for Indians” (section 91(24) of the British North America Act). From “protection,” the door was now open to coercion.

The exclusive responsibility of the federal government was set out in the Indian Act of 1876, a law enacted by the Parliament of Canada that established Native persons as wards of the federal government, as pointed out above. In fact, the law enshrined the legal incapacity of Indians in virtually all areas and completely undermined their autonomy.