Aboriginal People and Other Canadians: Shaping New Relationships

Chapter 2 Aspects of the History of Aboriginal People and their Relationships with Colonial, National and Provincial Governments in Canada

Chapter 2 Aspects of the History of Aboriginal People in their Relationships with Colonial, National and Provincial Governmentsin Canada Martin Thornton The official attitude of the Canadian government towards Aboriginal people has become one of reconciliation and an acceptance of past wrong-doing. Not only has this required some agreement between Aboriginal people about what was wrong in this collective history, but it has also required a methodological understanding of how the past should be perceived and analysed in what is not an exact science. This reconciliation of historical problems and historiographical approaches is exactly what was attempted and put forward in the findings of the Canadian Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) published in five main volumes in 1996. By January 1998 the Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, the Honourable Jane Stewart, was to accept the findings of the Royal Commission and acknowledge the sad history of the treatment of Aboriginal People in their relationship with the Government of Canada (Stewart, 1998).1 Why evoke the hoary problems of the past at all? As if to answer this question and the historiographical question that has perplexed many a young school student bored by his textbook and/or history teacher: why study history? The Report of the RCAP included the eloquent riposte: ...the past is more than something to be recalled and debated intellectually. It has important contemporary and practical implications, because many of the attitudes, institutions and practicesthat took shape in the past significantly influenceand constrain the present (RCAP, 1996a, p. 31). 7 Martin Thornton In also accepting that interpretations of history vary with historians, the Commissioners entered into the controversial area of what is objective historical truth.2 Both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal historical traditions would appear to involve the creation of myths, although the oral tradition in Aboriginal culture is particularly noted. The non-Aboriginal historical tradition in Canada is clearly different from Aboriginal approaches towards studying and using history. Having been educated in a tradition of conservative diplomatic history, where the emphasis on scholarly documentation and archival written records isparamount, the contrast with Aboriginal perspectives on historical research could hardly be greater. Where the western social, scientific and humanities approach is for objective distancing from an issue or event, Aboriginal perspectives tend to create an involvement in the past, an approach of empathy and a view that human beings are not necessarily at the centre of the universe. The Report of the RCAP accepted the methodological problem at the beginning of its research and discourse, noting: ...the Aboriginal historical tradition is an oral one, involving legends, stories and accounts handed down through the generations in oral form. It is less focused on establishing objective truth and assumes that the teller of the story is so much apart ofthe event that itwouldbe arrogant to presume to classify or categorize the event exactly or for all time (ibid., p. 33). These differences were compounded by western historians, in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, dismissing the oral tradition as merely myth and legend. Subsequently, substantial Canadian Aboriginal history has been based on government records, economic and military reports and religious documents generated largely by European males and analysed largely by European males. A lack of familiarity withNorth American Native cultures and languages compounded the problems (Edmunds, 1995, p. 721). Non-Aboriginal authored histories of Aboriginal people were overtly and inadvertently mythic. A view that the western academic historical approach is in some ways non-mythic can also be challenged. The history of Euro-Canadians is beset with problems of myth creation. Some Canadian historians have written about the mythic nature of Canadian identity, includingthe problem of defining Euro-Canadian identity and 8 Aspects of the History of Aboriginal People in their Relationships with Colonial, National and Provincial Governments in Canada what it means to be a Canadian (Reid, 1997; Morton, 1972; Mandel and Taras, 1987).3 These historians acknowledge that they have been involved in a western historiographical discourse that creates myths. Historians can, and often do, disagree widely about interpretations of the past and the Report of the RCAP could hardly be expected to reconcile perplexing historical contradictions. It would nevertheless appear that two or more mythic historical traditions may in fact have been at work in Canada, but the Euro-Canadian approach based on documented findings has dominated. As a consequence ofthis bias, the Aboriginal populationhas often been kept at the...