A new book says the Canadian government withheld food from Indigenous people in the late 1880’s, sometimes to the point of starvation, in order to make way for a national railway through Saskatchewan.
Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life, by University of Regina professor James Daschuk, says First Nations people living in the Cypress Hills area had no choice but to move up to North Battleford when the government denied them food.
He says many First Nations people wanted to stay and set up communities for hunting and trapping in the area but were given little choice.
“Government officials used food as a means to coerce the Indigenous people to leave the Cypress Hills where a lot of them were camped out and wanted to set up reserves and they were forced to go north into around Battleford, away from the area of imminent settlement,” he says.
Daschuk adds by withholding food, the government created malnutrition in several families and played a role in the later major outbreak of tuberculosis.
He says some of the negative aspects of the railway will likely not be surprising to Indigenous people but he does hope it opens the eyes of the non-Aboriginal community as to what actually went on as part of Sir John A. Macdonald’s “national dream.”
Clearing the Plains is published by the University of Regina Press.
The book will be officially launched at the University of Regina’s Aboriginal Students’ Centre this coming Thursday at noon.