Part Five - Oak River

DANCING WITH GHOSTS: A CROSS-CULTURAL EDUCATION

PART FIVE - OAK RIVER

OAK RIVER INDIAN RESERVE

Driving from Manitoba to British Columbia, if you exit #1, the Trans-Canada Highway, at Maple Creek near the Saskatchewan/Alberta border, and head south and west, provincial road #271 takes you to historic Fort Walsh in the Cypress Hills. After Manitoba had entered Confederation as a province. After the Boundary Commission had surveyed the 49^th parallel. After the trans-continental railroad had been promised to BC. After the mounted police had been created to drive the American whiskey-traders out, Inspector (later Superintendent) James Morrow Walsh established Fort Walsh, for the North-West Mounted Police, in 1875. In1876-77, after defeating General Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, Sitting Bull and five thousand Lakota Sioux followers, pursued by vengeful US cavalry, sought refuge across the Medicine Line under the protection of Queen Victoria. James Walsh became famous as the “Mountie” who, with half a dozen men, rode out to meet the frightful Sioux. The fort was also a gathering place for Big Bear and his people during the starving winters, the years they were wandering, refusing to accept a reserve, because the chief could see that the spirit of the treaties, the promises made to bands who had accepted reserves were already being ignored.

    Near the entrance to Fort Walsh there is a bronze statue. Two men on two horses. One of them seems to be in police uniform and pillbox hat and the other is an Indian. The most striking aspect of the statue at Fort Walsh is the obvious sense of equality between the two subjects, each in perfect control of a fine horse, each looking the other in the eye, each raising a hand in greeting almost as if they are going to give each other a high five.

     This statue exemplifies that moment in Canadian history when the Whites represented by the police force and the First Nations represented by the anonymous rider evocative of the Sioux leader met as equals, as Whites and First Nations also did at the treaty-making negotiations.
     Representatives of the two cultures identified grievances, exchanged proposals, reached respectful agreements concerning access to land, mutual occupation, lands reserved for Indians, for assistance in adjusting to the loss of the buffalo and to the anticipated railroad, the apprehended immigration, to a new way of living in an ancestral homeland. They met as equals until they made those marks on the papers.

     The statue reminds me again of my home town, Oak River, and the Oak River Indian Reserve, renamed Sioux Valley Dakota Reserve. Were these people at Sioux Valley the remnants of Sitting Bull's followers? No, it turns out; relatives but not descendants. Lakota and Dakota are slightly different dialects. Sitting Bull had stayed in Canada for only a few years, around Fort Walsh and then Wood Mountain in southeastern Saskatchewan. Walsh, who had met him at the border and had attempted to negotiate with him as an equal deserving of respect, had failed to deliver. The chief wanted to stay; the prime minister wanted him out. The two men, Walsh and Sitting Bull, developed a powerful friendship, but the Superintendent was unable to accomplish the orders he had received from Ottawa, to talk the chief and his Sioux followers into going home. And Sitting Bull was unable to convince Ottawa that he and his people were deserving refugees, former allies of the British since the War of 1812, fleeing a vengeful enemy, needing asylum.

     In the end, Ottawa decided that Walsh was too friendly with the Sioux chief and transferred him to a different post. Sitting Bull and his people found themselves without allies and with no options, victims of the same passive aggressiveness used to pressure Big Bear and his Cree people. Ignore. Stall. Withhold assistance. Let them starve. Sitting Bull's Sioux would not be given a reserve in Canada. Eventually he returned to Dakota Territory, to Standing Rock Reservation. He worked for a short time in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. In 1890, he was murdered on the reservation by federal agents who feared he was about to lead his people to the Ghost Dance.

     James Morrow Walsh resigned from the Mounties and became a successful businessman in Winnipeg. He then founded the Dominion Coal Company, headquartered in Brandon, Manitoba, with contracts to supply coal to the railroad. He served a short term as Commissioner of Yukon Territory. When he retired to Ontario, he built himself a mansion named Indian Cliff in Brockville.

So, if there is no connection to Sitting Bull, how was the Oak River Reserve in Manitoba a Sioux reserve? How could I be so ignorant of the history of my own home town, not to mention my province and my nation? I have since learned that the Dakota, who have about seven reserves in southern Manitoba, have never signed treaty with the Canadian government, and that their reserves, at least the first two, were established before Sitting Bull's arrival.

     It is a question of identity, of how a people identify themselves, and of how they resist attempts by others to determine who they are, to limit their rights, to make them smaller than they really are, before they disappear altogether. Sioux is a French word, a name given to the Dakota by rivals or former enemies. Word origins [dictionary.com] suggest that the French shortened Nadouessioux from the Ottawa Ojibwa Chippewa, an Algonquian dialect. Two meanings are ascribed to the term: "speakers of a foreign language" or, alternatively, "little snakes," as opposed to the Ojibwa name for the Iroquois, which translated as "big snakes." The name Dakota, to a Dakota speaker, means "the people who are relatives, friends, allies." The Dakota claim to have inhabited this territory on the great central plains, now part of Manitoba, “since time immemorial.” Place names in nearby Northern Ontario such as Sioux Lookout and Sioux Narrows confirm their presence long before Confederation. They were part of the western confederacy of First Nations allied with and armed by the British during the War of 1812, uniting to halt American western expansion the way the British were attempting to halt northern intrusions. The Sioux settled on land around the headwaters of the Mississippi River, in what is now Minnesota, but they occupied a territory determined by the migration routes of the far-ranging herds of buffalo upon which the plains lifestyle depended.

     However, in the eyes of the former Lieutenant-Governor of Manitoba, Alexander Morris, the Sioux had no claim to territory nor any historic relationship as allies of the Crown which Canada was obliged to honour. Morris briefed the Governor General, the Right Honourable the Earl of Dufferin in 1880: “The Sioux in the Dominion are refugees from the United States, the first body having come over some fourteen years ago. [1864] A large influx of similar refugees have recently fled to the Dominion from the same country, as the issue of the recent war between the United States and the Sioux.” [1876]

     Refugees, and therefore, without rights. How convenient.

     A Dakota friend in Winnipeg tried to tell me this story twenty-five years ago--what happened, how the Sioux arrived and chose to stay in south and western Manitoba even before Confederation. It is a story of violence and massacres and mass hangings, but its significance never registered at the time. I never realized how it was connected to the Oak River Reserve or even to the history of Red River and the province of Manitoba.

     According to Canadian government officials, the Dakota, as refugees, as American Indians who had moved north of the 49^th parallel, were not considered entitled to land in Canada. They could have been recognized as indigenous, having hunted there since time immemorial. They could have been welcomed as thousands of refugees from American policies have been welcomed before and since, as United Empire Loyalists, as escaped slaves travelling the underground railroad, as resistors to the war in Vietnam, although none of these people were indigenous, HBE, here before Europeans. However, the Dakota/Sioux were considered dangerous and untrustworthy because of what had happened in Minnesota in 1862 and later because some of them supported Sitting Bull in his defensive war against the American cavalry in the 1870s. Furthermore, the Dakota were traditional enemies of other First Nations living within Canada, especially those in the Northwest Angle where three boundaries meet, at the Lake of the Woods. Policy towards the Dakota/Sioux in the treaty-making years of the 1870s was basically one of rejection based largely on fear of what Alexander Morris referred to as "this warlike race."

     Minnesota adjoins Manitoba. Before you cross the border at Emerson, you have to decide. Do I want to enter Minnesota or North Dakota? In 1818, Great Britain and the United States agreed that the boundary between the territories they each claimed would be the 49^th parallel, but the borderline was not surveyed until 1874. The 49^th parallel bisected the ancestral hunting grounds of the Dakota Sioux, but the Sioux were not the concern of the Boundary Commission.

     In 1858, the Sioux signed treaties with the American government before Minnesota joined the United States as a state. In 1862, while the American government was pre-occupied with the Civil War, the assistance promised the Dakota in the treaty they had signed before statehood did not materialize; food was scarce; pleas were ignored. “Let them eat grass,” was the answer the chiefs received as they petitioned for help, for the contracts to be lived up to, for the other side of the agreement to be honoured. The Sioux were desperate, and angry, feeling rooked. If the terms of the treaty were not being lived up to, then the authority under which settlers entered was no longer valid and permission for them to move into Dakota ancestral territory was revoked. Homesteaders were targeted as the Sioux attempted to reclaim their territory. Although there is no mention of the Dakota War in either of my American history textbooks, sources suggest that possibly one thousand to twelve hundred settlers were killed.

     As a result of the attacks on settlers, at least sixteen hundred Dakota men, women, and children were rounded up by American forces and interned. Hundreds died in the internment camp. Three hundred Sioux men were tried, convicted of murder and rape, and sentenced to death. President Abraham Lincoln, who understood conflict of interest, commuted the sentences of all but thirty-eight men, asserting that he would not “trade hangings for votes.” On December 26, 1862, in Mankato, Minnesota, thirty-eight Sioux men were hanged.

     A mass hanging of men trying to feed their starving families. Men forced to retaliate by a government deaf to their concerns, negligent in its duties. The American government then annulled the treaties, abolished the reservations, and expelled the Dakota Sioux from Minnesota, forcibly transporting some to Nebraska and west to Dakota Territory. Some of those expelled from Minnesota made their way the short distance farther north, into territory which they had always hunted, as far as the Assiniboine River in what would become Manitoba. The original group of starving refugees stopped at Sturgeon Creek where it enters the Assiniboine River, six miles west of the Red River colony and the Forks. Through Hudson's Bay Company officials, they were offered emergency food supplies in 1863 and encouraged to move farther west, to the White Horse Plains, away from the White settlement. They were refugees, yet more than refugees. Refugees coming home, to territory now "claimed" by their former ally, the British Crown. Allies, yet viewed with suspicion, with fear.

     When the new Lieutenant-Governor, William McDougall, was sent by Ottawa to represent the Crown in the proposed new Canadian colony of Red River in 1869, he had to travel through Minnesota and Dakota Territory. He saw the devastation; he knew the fear. Then he was met by armed Metis at the border and refused entry because the residents of Red River did not recognize any authority of Ottawa over their homeland where, they insisted, they had rights.

     After the Red River Resistance, after the List of Rights demanded by local residents, presented by Louis Riel and his provisional government, was accepted in Ottawa and Manitoba entered Confederation in 1870 as a province, as opposed to a colony, with the rights of local people guaranteed, government officials continued to negotiate treaties and ponder what to do with the Sioux who had remained living and working along the Assiniboine River west of the Forks. A treaty with the Chippewa of the Northwest Angle cleared the way, as one of the terms those Indians agreed to was to live in peace, including peace with their former enemies, the Sioux, rivals who occupied territory in which both groups hunted.

     After Manitoba was created, the Sioux again petitioned for land and for help to establish themselves as farmers. Alexander Morris, the new Lieutenant-Governor, acknowledged that, after Manitoba joined Confederation: "the Sioux were found living quietly in tents, in the parishes of Poplar Point, High Bluff, and Portage la Prairie . . . Immigrants from Ontario had begun to settle in that section of the Province, and the settlement rapidly increased. The Sioux were found very useful, and were employed as labourers, cutting grain, making fence-rails, and ploughing for the settlers. They also endeavored to gain a subsistence, by killing game and fur-bearing animals, and by fishing." [Morris, "The Sioux In the North-West Territories," The Treaties of Canada With the Indians Online] After he was appointed Lieutenant-Governor, Morris responded to the repeated requests from the Sioux for reserve land by assuring them that whatever help they would get would be “as a matter of grace and not of right.” Morris goes on to document: “The ancient feud [between the Chippewa and the Sioux] was buried. In 1874, two reserves were allotted the Sioux, one on the Assiniboine River, at Oak River, and another still further west, at Bird Tail Creek. These reserves were surveyed, the former containing eight thousand and the latter seven thousand acres.” He adds that the Church of England established a mission at the Oak River Reserve and the Presbyterian Church at Bird Tail Creek.

    I do not mean to imply, by citing Morris as the source, that he, or the Government of Canada, or Whites in general had any more legitimate authority over the land in question than did the Dakota who had inhabited it for millennia. Nor do I mean to imply that a border agreed upon by two Euro-centric nations who had not consulted the Sioux should be allowed to determine who the Sioux were and to what territories they did or did not have rights. The centre of the Sioux homeland, around the headwaters of the Mississippi, is a short two hundred and twenty kilometres south of the 49th parallel. (Who knew that there is a Continental Divide in Minnesota, with the Red River, the western border of the state, flowing north to the Arctic, and the Mississippi flowing south to the Gulf of Mexico?) The indigenous people of Minnesota had always left their villages to move within the vast plains as the buffalo moved, before and after White traders arrived, before American colonists revolted, before “Louisiana Territory” was purchased from Napoleon, before Confederation created a new nation, before boundaries were surveyed. Indeed, First Nations in North America had been promised in the Royal Proclamation of 1763 that the White man's boundaries would not apply to them. But the Canadian government refused to acknowledge that this treaty signed by Great Britain applied to Indians in the West. The Canadian government attitude was one of assumed White superiority based on race. The Sioux, like many First Nations in British Columbia, have been negotiating with the British Crown and then the Canadian federal government since 1863.

Sarah Carter's article "Agriculture and Agitation on the Oak River Dakota Reserve,1875-1895," offers much relevant detail. The Dakota who settled at Oak River, she reports, were Santee people, a collection of four groups of the most easterly Dakota who, "in the mid-eighteenth century," were pushed westward from their original home west of Lake Superior where they had lived as "semi-sedentary agriculturalists" in villages. They had grown "corn, beans, squash and pumpkins, fished, gathered wild rice and made maple sugar." They had always hunted and, after moving "to live on the margin of plains culture," they began to participate in the buffalo hunt.

     After the Minnesota uprising which resulted in the mass hanging of Sioux men in 1862, approximately 1500 Dakota Sioux arrived in British territory around Fort Garry at the Forks of the Red and Assiniboine rivers. Within the lifetime of some members, these Sioux had fought with the British during the War of 1812, including the battles for Machilimackinac and Detroit. They had some moral if not legal justification to expect assistance. However, they found themselves virtually abandoned by their former allies. The aboriginal rights and title they may have had seem to have been "extinguished" without consultation or compensation by the International Boundary Commission and later, by the British North America Act.

     The Sioux moved west from Sturgeon Creek to the White Horse Plains and Portage la Prairie. Carter notes that one band of Dakota camped at Turtle Mountain and others, including the followers of White Eagle or Wambdiska, who were later to settle at Oak River, pursued buffalo to the west. The Turtle Mountain Dakota were granted a reserve at Oak Lake in 1877. The reserves at Oak River and at Bird Tail Creek were selected in 1875. "The Dakota reserves were allotted on the basis of eighty acres per family of five," less than one half of the number of acres per family granted to "Canadian" Indians for their reserves. "The Oak River reserve became the home of approximately one hundred families from the bands of White Eagle, the Crow, and Singer."

     As soon as they received their reserve, the Oak River Dakota began to raise cattle, plant root crops, and break the land to grow wheat. They were producing grain for profit within three years. However, their success at establishing themselves as farmers within a grain economy was interrupted after the Indian Act imposed external controls and the Department sent Farm Instructors to teach them how to farm. New departmental policy dictated that Indian farmers would be subsistence farmers only, like European peasants, and would be allowed to farm only with hand tools. The policy ignored the successes the reserve had demonstrated and subverted any ability to compete with other farmers by forbidding the purchase of farm machinery, and by implementing a permit system which interfered with the ability to sell grain to grain buyers, assumed control of income, and skimmed some of the profits.

     Again, Carter documents the attempts of some Dakota farmers to address their grievances, sending letters, petitions, and delegations to Ottawa, attempting to meet with the Minister of Indian Affairs. However, their complaints fell on deaf ears. Factions within the community were played against each other. The "whistle-blowers" were labelled as whiners, too lazy to work, too ignorant to run their own affairs. Carter never uses the terms "ethnocentrism" to describe the departmental attitudes and policies, nor "discrimination" to explain the apparent favouritism towards European settlers. Nor is the term "colonialism" used to describe the governmental efforts to dominate and control from a distance, to make decisions for people who were used to and had already demonstrated their ability to make such decisions, to make the necessary adaptations, for themselves. She never uses the term "racism" to describe the bureaucratic stonewalling. She does note that "It was reported that the Dakota got along well with their white neighbours. They were invited to participate in local agricultural fairs where they paraded in traditional dress to the annoyance of Department officials."

The Dakota of the Oak River Indian Reserve, renamed Sioux Valley Dakota Reserve, descendants of the Minnesota Sioux, accepted this reserve in 1874, before Sitting Bull even arrived, but they have not signed treaties as they are here, in the eyes of White Canada, “as a matter of grace,” not as a right. However, with the passage of the Indian Act, they were subject to its racist impositions. "The Dakota people (Sioux) who settled in Oak River, Manitoba in 1875 were known to conduct 'Give Away Dances,' also known as the 'Grass Dance.' The dance ceremony involved the giving away and exchange of blankets and horses; thus it breached Section 114 of the Indian Act. As a result, Wanduta, an elder of the Dakota community, was sentenced to four months of hard labour and imprisonment on January 26, 1903." ["Indian Act," Wikipedia] For my Grandpa, Harry, to have witnessed Indians dancing on the streets of Bradwardine, it must have been before this date.

     It is a story without any satisfactory denouement, although my old friend from long ago assures me: "We Dakota still hope to establish a 'new relationship' reflecting a more suitable arrangement with the government of Canada." He goes on to add: "Prayers will help us." He carries a pipe, a sacred symbol, and honours the teachings, the ancient rituals and ceremonies of his people. "Prayers will help us today and in the future, for our children and the next seven generations." As the Sioux holy man, Black Elk, put it: the pipe will "help bring peace upon the earth, not only among men, but within men and between the whole of creation," to all people who understand with both the head and the heart. [Brown, p.xx]

     Such an important part of the history of my hometown, my home land. How could I not have known this? How could I not have known how the Dakota survived by keeping a low profile, by acting as ghosts, as if they did not exist, as if they had disappeared, invisible to the newcomers they had helped, for whom they had worked, for whom they had danced?

It seems to me that the moment of encounter represented in the statue at Fort Walsh is the point in time to which we must return, to begin again, back when First Nations and White Canadians met as equals and negotiated with respect contracts which were mutually beneficial and which both sides intended to live up to.

     One hundred and fifty years after the Dakota War of 1862, students at the University of Minnesota have begun a movement supporting "An Overdue Apology" to the native people of that state. An apology which will recognize the injustice and accept responsibility. An apology from the governments representing the settler descendants who were unwitting accomplices to racism and to crimes rationalized by racism.

     If the existing institutions in Canada--government, bureaucracy, judiciary--cannot be cleansed of racists and racist attitudes, ways around them must be found. Perhaps history teaches us that no politicians should be allowed to be involved in any form of negotiations—with nations, with First Nations, with refugees, with employees like doctors or teachers, as there is no way to balance the equation, to remove the conflict of interest from the government side with its weight of tax dollars and its need to curry votes. Perhaps an invitation to impartial international observers to come in and draft a template would be an option. A template which would include some reference to reserve lands, to Crown lands, to natural resources and mineral rights, to respect for Mother Earth, to a return to self-government, self-determination, and to education. Perhaps even to some form of authentic spiritual connection to place. Ways must be found to get back to that original point of contact, nation to nation, person to person, to copy the equation correctly, equal on each side, and begin to work it out from there.

     Going back to the original equation and beginning again, in good faith, reminds me of one final lesson from Grade Twelve Math: “Never say never.” In the words of Van Morrison, a Celtic bard: “Got to go back, got to go back, got to go back, for the healing, go on with the dreaming.” (No Guru, No Method, No Teacher)

The RIGHTS OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLE

The United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People concludes: The provisions set forth in this Declaration shall be interpreted in accordance with the principles of justice, democracy, respect for human rights, equality, non-discrimination, good governance and good faith.

BEYOND FAITH

Although we may be living examples of “culture failure,” that the faith of our grandmothers has not accompanied us into our personal futures, artists like Van Morrison remind us that gurus and methods and teachers are not necessarily necessary. We learn our own lessons, experience our own mysteries, receive messages from the land and from our interactions with the natural and cultural environment. Enough to convince us to believe in the Little People or the Great Mystery, in something beyond the human which communicates with us.

     For my apartment in Winnipeg, I went to the Winnipeg Art Gallery to find a suitable poster, the way we “decorators” do, composed of colours which we love which will draw every disparate element in the room together. I chose a landscape by an artist whose name I did not recognize, Deryk Houston. It seemed to be an updated “Group of Seven,” say a Northern Ontario scene after a wildfire, done in shades of sand, burgundy, pink, and grey. It hung over the fireplace in my apartment and then upstairs in my first house. Five years later, after moving to the Fraser Valley, after I relocated the poster to my new office in a forestry work camp, a colleague visiting from the valley looked at the picture and said “Oh, the Black Tusk.”

     I said, “How did you know? The title is 'Looking Across to the Black Tusk.' What's the Black Tusk?”

     “Here.” His fingers trace a looming charcoal peak. “The Black Tusk is a mountain,” he says, “on the road to Whistler. If you look out your office window, if you walk to the top of that ridge, you could probably see it from here.”

     At the time, I shivered. Like the boy who drew the running chair which the Elder had predicted. The future is already written, and sometimes we are flashed glimpses, like the wink of a goddess's eye, taunting. And this was not the first time a painting had grabbed me, art had spoken to me, for some inexplicable reason. The Dakota friend who told me the story of the Minnesota Massacres also told me how his mother was a midwife who worked in the nursing home where I was born, in Rivers, Manitoba. As if that wasn't enough, he stopped in to visit one day after I started working in corrections, after I returned from Kingston.

     When I joined the service, I was given the option of training in Kingston, Ontario or Mission, BC. I had very little experience of Ontario so I chose to go to Kingston. Our group was there for almost sixteen weeks and on weekends we from the West would rent a car and tour the backroads, go “antiquing” between Kingston, Trenton, and Ottawa. At a little town called Westport I found a large ( 40 x 60 cm ) framed print I could not resist. It is called “Daughter of the Summer Moon” and is a simple embossed sketch of a female in a flowing daisy-trimmed gown silhouetted by a moon, all gold and white on white. It is possible that it was the title which attracted me. My father had died almost one year before, and his birthday coincided with the summer solstice to which the print alluded. I had it wrapped and tied and I had to lug that awkward parcel around, fragile glass, from barracks to barracks, from small commuter plane to Toronto airport, to overhead compartments, to Winnipeg, and home to my apartment. When my Dakota friend visited, he said: “I see you have one of my cousin's paintings.”

     “What?” I asked in disbelief. “Who?” He was referring to my “Daughter of the Summer Moon.” “I just couldn't resist it,” I tried to explain. “I don't know who the artist is. It says Ioyan Mani but I don't know what that means.”

     “Ioyan Mani. That's her Dakota name, Walking Beyond. She's Maxine Noel,” he from Oak River Reserve tried to explain. “She's my cousin, from Arrow River.” Thirty kilometres west of my home town, Oak River, both on Highway #24. Her family is from the Birdtail Dakota Sioux Reserve. So art speaks and tells me that there are things I haven't dreamed of in my philosophy, that there is Mystery in the world, powers at work in our lives, of which we mere humans remain ignorant. Sometimes they like to taunt us, these mysterious Earth Spirits, to remind us that they are here, even if we cannot see.

And when I finally reached BC and settled into my retreat in a little mountain town called Hope, my neighbour, Mr. Weaver, who lived at the end of Silverhope Road the seventeen years I've been here, is the artist who designed the statue at Fort Walsh in the Cypress Hills.

And when I asked my brother what we should do about Mum's ashes, he looked at me as if I were losing it and said: “Don't you remember? I told you I dealt with them. I took them to the Kettle River. To Ingram Bridge.”

     But this story is not about me. These stories are about one simple Canadian's learning process, about what racism is and about how racism affects our interactions with others. About our Canadian heritage of racism which made the treaty-making process a bait and switch. Which risks making on-going negotiations a sham. About the importance of learning and unlearning. About how it is our duty as Canadians to fix ourselves, to exterminate the beast of racism from our culture by exterminating it from our hearts. By substituting it, I want to say “with Love” but let's just leave it at “with Respect.”

     For the hardest thing for most of us Whites to do is just to “shut up,” to listen. To paddle, not to steer. To enable and support First Nations people to live the independent and self-determined lives of human dignity which they choose to live.

Message via Facebook: “The Past, the Present, and the Future walk into a bar. It was tense.”