Cultural Genocide, Intentionally Planned

(Typical Métis folk home at Green Lake, Saskatchewan. Photograph by Jason Surkan.)

by Rose Bishop [Métis]

from the New Breed newspaper, October 1975

In our contemporary society the “white man” is still trying to figure out just how long Indian people have been in this country. The other night on CBC television news it was reported that a group of archaeologists in the U.S.A. had carried out a study on an ancient Indian village. The study indicated that the Indians’ way of life was not nomadic as was previously recorded, and that the Indians have been here 100 centuries to the “white man’s” three and a half centuries. It was in the early 16th century that the “white man” became familiarized with a foreign country known as Canada today.

This country has been inhabited for centuries by people known as the North American Indians. There were no boundaries before the white man. Therefore we have refused to recognize boundaries that have been set up by these invaders or what we would term as intruders.

The missionaries were of the first groups of intruders to come to Canada to pass on their culture and value system. Some of our people were converted as Catholics and other religious groups. We were taught that our way of life was a barbaric one. That our medicine men who possessed certain powers received help from evil spirits. The missionaries learned to speak our languages and converted our folklore, told stories and found other means available so they could ridicule our culture, our value system and our life. And as a nation of people we were divided and conquered. Once they took away our pride and self respect the cancerous disease of inferiority set in. Since then this malignant disease has spread within our Indian nation.

This type of cultural genocide was intentionally planned by a more aggressive, power-hungry nation of people in order to further exploit a nation of people whose socialistic ideas could not be destroyed otherwise.

Inferiority is still being instilled psychologically into the minds of Indian and Métis people. Making them believe that they are intellectually incapable of using their own minds rationally. Therefore, they leave decision-making to the white teachers. Welfare workers, recreational workers, farm supervisors, you name it, all the way down the line. Decisions regarding their livelihood are left to individuals whose race, values and total life style are different from ours. They have made us believe that they are our saviours. But believe you me if you review your history you will see that in 1881 the federal government gave an annual budget of $359.00 to the Northwest Territories, which included Saskatchewan, Alberta, and Northern Manitoba. About the same time the same government allotted the Canadian Pacific Railway 25 million dollars to build its railway, The fact that only $359.00 was allotted as an annual budget only proves that we had a self-sufficient economy, contrary to what we have been led to believe.

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