One of the enduring myths about life in the Americas before it was “discovered” by Europeans is that the entire “new world” was sparsely populated by nomadic tribes of simple-minded hunters and gatherers. This myth holds that these people had no permanent attachment to any specific piece of land, they did not live in permanent
My primary objective in the first few posts in this series is to explore how Canadian natives changed from being autonomous self-governing people to becoming subjects of the British crown? This change in status is extremely important. By the time of Confederation (1867) natives – at least in Eastern Canada – were no longer free
As I suggested in a previous post, the Indian Residential School issue in Canada is a fairly good focus for a discussion of what went wrong with the dominant white culture’s relationsihp with Canadian natives. While the Residential School issue really belongs to the previous two or three generations of Canadians, the problems that school
In this series of posts I consider some of the historical, political, anthropological and philosophical background to Canadian “native” issues. Along the way I touch on some interesting things I have recently (and not so recently) discovered about the native Indian presence in Canada. (Note: I use the term “native” to cover those people normally
