Multiculturalism: Fraud or Scam?
by modern living editor Jason Capodimonte
If every Canadian had a buck for every time he or she had been told Canada was a multicultural nation, we'd all be in the highest income tax bracket. So it is hard to understand why Canada has a long history of giving the shaft to a people who would seem to be the embodiment of multiculturalism.
Most Canadians can't even pronounce this people's name. For this people is the Métis, known to anglophones as the May Tea. The s is pronounced in French, and in Canadian French the e and the i are most frequently short. Of course, foreign pronunciation needn't guide ours, but with everyone poncing up their pronunciations of Muslim and Quebec these days, you'd think we could make an effort for these Canadian exemplars of multiculturalism.
The word Métis is derived from the Latin mixtus meaning mixed, and the name refers to a people of mixed blood. So of course until recently the rest of us commonly referred to them as half breeds.
Métis call themselves Mechif, but that seems to be beside the point to the rest of us.
Anyway, the Métis people are descended from the offspring of French, Scottish, and English fur traders who married Cree, Ojibway, and Saulteaux women. Their culture therefore dates back to the seventeenth century, and they seem to have been recognized as a distinct culture since the mid-eighteenth century. Their language, also called Mechif, was for a long time important in defining their culture, although today the number of Mechif-speakers has been estimated at less than 1,000.
Mechif has two dialects, one combining French nouns with Cree verbs, and the other combining French and Saulteaux. Roman Catholic nuns who arrived to teach Métis children decided they should speak "good" French instead and proceeded to teach generations of Métis children that their own language was inferior, which probably accounts for the small number of Mechif-speakers today.
The Métis were renowned as traders. Métis operated extensive trading networks using York boats and Red River carts on carefully maintained trails (their Red Wing Trail, for example, ran from Fort Garry to St. Paul, Minnesota). Many Métis were buffalo hunters, often fighting the Sioux for hunting grounds. The railways finally killed the Métis trading networks after steamboats failed to (Métis just bought steamboats), and white people killed all the buffalo.
Non-Métis aren't taught much about Métis. I emerged from my schooling with the impression that Métis were all the offspring of a white father and an aboriginal mother, which is of course wrong. I was taught about Louis Riel, but chiefly as a means of demonstrating a) the power of the Orange Order in Ontario, and b) the utility of the Canadian Pacific Railway in putting down pesky aboriginal "rebellions."
Anyway, the rest of us don't even condescend to acknowledge the Métis as a First Nation. Until 1982 we didn't even acknowledge them as aboriginal. That was convenient for us, since our treatment of the Métis may not have been exactly consistent with the rules the Royal Proclamation of 1763 laid down for the acquisition of aboriginal land.
In this proclamation the Crown, alleging fraud and abuse by private purchasers of aboriginal land, reserved to itself the right to purchase this land. Furthermore, it specified that the land must be purchased "at some public Meeting or Assembly of the said Indians."
What happened to the Métis is that between 1870 and 1900 successive "scrip commissions" issued scrip to the Métis which entitled them to purchase a stated amount of Crown land. Some scrip (land scrip) was registered to specific individuals, while cash scrip was payable (in land at $1 an acre) to the bearer.
Although scrip was issued pursuant to agreements negotiated with Métis leaders, many Métis have long claimed that the issuing of scrip was quickly subverted and simply served as a means to take their land from them, with the Canadian government looking the other way.
According to these Métis, the cash scrip was quickly sold for cash to whites, including agents whose tent offices were set up next to the offices issuing scrip, while land scrip was easily obtained fraudulently by whites who had no trouble forging the signature many Métis used, an X. What historical research has been done has substantiated the Métis claims. For example, Frank Tough found that most of the land purchased with scrip issued in northern Manitoba was purchased by non-Métis.
Given that the scrip commissions were set up following the first Riel "Rebellion" to discharge the Crown's territorial obligations to Métis I suppose none of that is surprising.
Oh, the Proclamation of 1763 also said that all licensed traders should be able to trade with aboriginals. So of course the Métis spent decades afterwards with the Hudson's Bay Company on their backs trying to prevent them from trading with the North West Company. The high point of this relationship was probably the establishment by Lord Selkirk of the Red River Colony. Selkirk was majority owner of the Hudson's Bay Company. Among the highlights of the Red River Colony was the Pemmican Proclamation of 1814.
Food was scarce, and the governor of the colony issued a proclamation banning the export of food from the colony. The Métis, naturally enough, didn't consider themselves under the rule of the Red River Colony. In 1816, a party of Métis stole some pemmican from the Bay and was on its way to sell to the North West Company when at Seven Oaks it was fired on by by Colonists, whom the Métis defeated. A Royal Commission absolved the Métis. Nevertheless, I recently saw a National Film Board – that's National Fim Board – cartoon short about the Red River Colony which depicted the Métis as unshaven thugs.
By 1821 the Crown had had enough of the warfare between the Bay and the North West Company (which helped out its trading partners following the battle of Seven Oaks by destroying Fort Douglas for the second time) and forced them to merge. The Métis started to get along with the Bay (Cuthbert Grant, leader of the Métis at the battle of Seven Oaks, became an important Bay official), but as late as 1849 the Métis and the Red River settlement were going at it.
And eventually came the two "rebellions" and the scrip commissions. I put quotation marks around "rebellion" because at most one of these events was a rebellion. The Riel Rebellion of 1870 was clearly not a rebellion at all.
What Riel had done was realize that between the time the Hudson's Bay Company withdrew from Rupert's Land and the time the Canadian government was empowered to move in and start governing, no one was in control of the Red River valley. So he set up a provisional government which the Canadian government was quite happy to negotiate with, the result being the Manitoba Act, by which Assiniboia entered Confederation as Manitoba.
However, as a Canadian military expedition headed west to establish Canadian authority in the North-West territories and Manitoba, Ontario Protestants started getting heated about Riel's reckless, high-handed, and completely unnecessary execution of Thomas Scott, and started demanding that the expedition put down the Métis "rebellion." Riel considered his options and took a powder.
And then came the scrip commissions, and many Métis ended up living on road allowances and squatting on vacant lots. Alberta distributed land among Métis in the 1930s to give them some stability, but Saskatchewan and Manitoba are still thinking on it.
So that's how serious Canadians are about multiculturalism. For sure the Métis are multicultural – if you originated in six cultures and speak a hybrid language you are by definition multicultural. And for sure the rest of us don't give a rat's ass.
Multiculturalism in Canada in reality seems to mean only two things. As another article here implies, it means first of all being in possession of a licence to provide service to speakers of non-official languages and then slowly, with the approval of regulatory agencies, increasing the services you provide in official languages. Secondly, it means an excuse for disbursing public money in the hopes that people will be grateful to the party disbursing it.
We must all be proud. Well, many of us are.
Posted August 7, 2003; revised February 26, 2004
Multiculturalism: Fraud or Scam? © Coolth, 2003
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