Nunani: Now and then (Part four)

RACHEL ATTITUQ QITSUALIK

We’re a naive generation.

In our hubris, we assume that we have achieved a level of political savvy that puts us beyond the need to study history. We have come to believe that we, unlike any generation before us, are tolerant and wise. We tend to call our new gospel, “political correctness.”

We have become pretty smug, proving our goodness by openly decrying injustices of the past, the totalitarianism, the sexism, the racism. And in doing so, we have become comfortable with the idea that we are better than generations before us, that we have politically “arrived,” and that history has no lessons to offer. Why study the deplorable deeds of those before us? We know that everything leading up to now has been nothing but an extended tale of horror and exploitation, so why not focus on tomorrow? And then there is that excuse of the laziest mind: “History is written by the conquerors, so there’s no point in studying it, because it’s all biased anyway.”

Yet I say that history, any history, is useful for one great reason: if you can teach yourself to recognize what is broken, you can then fix it.

Aboriginal peoples, as exploited peoples, particularly need to adopt this approach. Inuit are no exception.

How many aboriginal people, Inuit included, know about the events of the Lakota War? All should know, because the Lakota War is a model for most aboriginal-federal relations.

In America, the tensions that mounted between settlers and Native Americans throughout the 1800s, are no mystery. As settlers pushed west, they increasingly intruded upon the traditional lands of numerous Indian tribes, which resulted in skirmishing back and forth.

But such damaging colonization of the American West was greatly accelerated by the American Civil War, which divided the whites between North (the United States of America) and South (the Confederate States of America). Think of how the Indians must have felt. It would be like having two strangers trying to kill each other in your living room. The United States won the war, of course, but was nevertheless left with a severely divided nation.

So, in order to get back on its feet, economically and politically, the government began to redouble its efforts to colonize the west — to assert its “sovereignty.” The first thing it realized was that there were too many Indians, so it had to find a way to reduce their numbers. In 1866, General Philip H. Sheridan proposed a systematic program to wipe out the buffalo, upon which the Indians depended, summing it up with the statement, “Kill the buffalo and you kill the Indians.”

I get a chill when I think of this and remember the old Canadian documents I’ve read, full of statements like, “Without the dogs, the Eskimo will adapt to settlement life.” Or, “Since the family is the basic unit of Eskimo culture, separation of parent and child is the key to assimilation.” And, as with the U.S., the federal government’s overarching excuse for its forced relocations and its dismantling of culture was always, “protecting Canadian sovereignty.”

In the American West, the rush of settlers carried there by new railroads, and impelled by government financial incentives, only accelerated tensions with the Indian tribes. The tribes of the plains were large at the time, and were skilled fighters. Years of lucrative trade with whites had armed nearly all of them with horses and rifles. When they fought, they packed enough of a sting that the government was forced to sign treaties with them — land claim agreements, if you prefer.

The U.S. and the Lakota, one of the largest of the plains tribes, signed the Fort Laramie Treaty in 1868. This treaty set aside traditional lands for the Lakota, and the federal government was obligated by treaty to protect those lands from white settlers. The land claim included some of the areas the Lakota considered most sacred to them, and the area was thought by the U.S. government to be pretty useless for farming or development. It seemed like a pretty good deal for both sides.

It was not to last. In 1874, George Armstrong Custer, having no regard for treaties with Indians, announced the presence of gold in the Black Hills area — the most sacred part of Lakota territory.

It started a gold rush.

(Continued next week.)