Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life by James Daschuk (review)

James Daschuk’s work has gained considerable favourable attention, from academics and non-academics alike, for its vast temporal scope, its similarly broad source base, and its discussion of the scope of European disease and marginalization of Aboriginal peoples within the formative years of a nation. Indeed, Daschuk suggests a national narrative that acknowledges the “chasm between the health conditions of First Nations peoples and mainstream Canadians.” (p. ix) Daschuk’s project, which began two decades ago as his PhD dissertation, has grown out of connections to public health and economic history research: connections that speak to a theme of interconnectedness among diverse First Nations-government interactions over time. Yet Daschuk also seeks to distinguish his work from policy-focused studies of the marginalization of Aboriginal peoples, focusing instead on the economic and environmental conditions that worked together to reinforce disparity. He argues that Europeans increasingly exploited these conditions, even while realizing that Aboriginal peoples were suffering as a result. The book is therefore also a call for a re-evaluation of existing narratives in Canadian historical consciousnesses.

Clearing the Plains considers the regions that would become Rupert’s Land and later western Canada. One of the particular strengths of this work is that through this broad perspective, it highlights both change and continuity in Indigenous peoples’ interactions both before and after European contact. In so doing, the work supplements well the notion in contemporary Aboriginal history scholarship that contact itself may not always have been the momentous turning point that European observers assumed it to be. Daschuk’s analysis begins with an overview of changes in disease and environmental conditions prior to contact; in particular, major climate change beginning in about the thirteenth century sparked upheaval and adaptation, and these new interactions formed the basis for a number of the distinct cultural groups as they exist today. Furthermore, these changes also sparked a need for water, game, and resource management, reinforcing the networks of natural resource interests upon which Europeans acted and, increasingly, intruded. It was, he argues, the deliberate, corporate action on the part of newcomers that created wholesale change by supporting preventable disease and poverty among Aboriginal peoples.

Indeed, the very networks that facilitated trade both before and after Europeans’ arrival also became vectors for disease, even while they facilitated the fur trade and some Aboriginal peoples benefited from it. Fur trade concerns required middlemen to fill gaps in the sparsely-populated northwest, and Daschuk argues that the new interactions forced by the fur trade and by the first smallpox epidemics created ethnic hybridization and territorial expansion among some groups. And while Daschuk does not make this explicit, these events also suggest that these first European interventions in the northwest sparked events that would provide the background for government interventions, in turn solidifying European ideas of territory and culture in the post-Confederation period. Until the mid-eighteenth century, Daschuk notes, equestrianism and direct links to global trade had been the main networks for conveying introduced disease. As the influence of the fur trade expanded into new regions (the plains, for instance), it also created new conditions for contagion. These were not merely two-sided interactions between Aboriginal peoples and newcomers; rather, economic and demographic changes also created power shifts among Aboriginal peoples.

Significantly for scholars considering the antecedents of contemporary Aboriginal peoples, Daschuk’s discussion of late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century smallpox epidemics indicates that when middlemen roles and regions were suddenly left open, they paved the way for the emergence of peoples as they exist today. When these shifts were occurring, European and diverse Aboriginal interests alike became threatened by the conflicts that sprang up. A particularly vivid example is that of the A’anin, who were less affected by the smallpox epidemic because they were marginal to the fur trade, handling only in low-value wolf pelts and opting to keep beaver populations high for water...