The Canadian Sioux

11. The Canadian Sioux Today

171 1 1 THE C ANADIAN SIOUX TODAY When one has visited Sioux communities in both the United States and Canada, a comparison of the condition of the two parts of the tribe, now citizens of separate nations, is inevitable. In such a comparison I would unhesitatingly state that the Canadian Sioux, on the whole, seem to have fared the better. Canadian Sioux homes tend to be better constructed and maintained than their counterparts south of the border, and their inhabitants, if not better off economically, certainly demonstrate a more positive attitude toward their government and the white world in general . The endless complaints about the Bureau of Indian Affairs and its treatment of Indians, a constant theme in conversation with Sioux in the United States, has no counterpart in Canada. There are exceptions, of course, but my evaluation tends to be shared by both Canadian and U.S. Sioux who have had the opportunity to visit both countries. Reasons for the observed differential are harder to come by. Certainly the factors cited by Kehoe (1970:151) are relevant: the lag in Canadian westward expansion as compared with that of the United States, which gave Indian peoples more time to adjust to the alien culture; and the mediating element of the Métis. One is also inclined to credit the greater responsibility which, from the first, the Sioux refugees in Canada were forced to assume for their own survival. During the 1860s and 1870s, the Euro-Canadian settlers and their government simply could not support large Indian populations with rations. It was thus a question of individual initiative for the Sioux refugees. Many died, but many others survived through their own efforts. 172 THE CANADIAN SIOUX The habits of frugality and hard work engendered in the Sioux during these early years on Canadian soil, often as wage laborers for non-Indian farmers and townsmen little better off than themselves, seem to have served the Sioux well in subsequent years. Thus an inspector who visited Birdtail Reserve in 1890 remarked: “I have not on any reserve seen so many Indians so deligently [sic] employed (each one on his own farm) at one time—the most remarkable point being, that as they have no farmer to oversee them they set themselves to work and pursue it with much judgement and industry” (quoted in Meyer 1968:20). Although my interviews and observations during the summer of 1972 were not specifically directed to this question, the same “judgement and industry” evident eighty-two years previously were still quite apparent on many Canadian Sioux reserves. The relatively small population aggregates, as compared to the larger Sioux reservations in the United States, seem to have worked for the good as well. Large surplus populations in rural situations breed poverty on the larger Sioux reservations in the United States. Transportation costs militate against bringing in anything but light industries to make use of this potential labor force. In Canada, on the other hand, the smaller reserve populations have made it possible for the surrounding rural population to utilize, as farmhands and laborers, any unemployed Sioux people not needed in farming and cattle raising operations on the reserve. One might also note that the tracts assigned for reserves in Canada are considerably better for farming and grazing than reservation lands in the United States. In Canada, as in the United States, the smaller reserve groups seem to have fared better than the larger ones. Thus Chief William T. Eagle at White Cap Reserve (population 156) noted that his people were quite well off, earning a livelihood at farming and cattle raising, supplemented by some wage labor for surrounding whites. He admitted that the appropriation of a large part of the grazing land available to the band by the nearby army camp had crippled the band’s cattle raising enterprise, but spoke enthusiastically of an attempt to secure other land in its place. Chief Eagle was proud that White Cap had been designated The Canadian Sioux Today 173 a model reserve a few years previously, and that the band had staged their yearly powwow on their own, without benefit of government grant. Francis Goodtrack, a young man of Wood Mountain Reserve (population 70), was equally positive in his remarks about that reserve’s economic progress. Noting that conditions had been poor in the 1940s and 1950s, he went on to remark: In 1962, for the first time...