NDP MP Charlie Angus was so moved by a recent book he read on the historical mistreatment by government of Indigenous people living on the prairies that he wrote a song about it.
The book is Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life by University of Regina professor James Daschuk and the song is called Four Horses at the Great Divide.
The northern Ontario MP was in Regina yesterday to record a video for the song and he says Daschuk’s book opened his eyes to a dark part of Canadian history he was previously unaware of.
“I was so blown away reading Clearing the Plains because I thought I was a student of Canadian history,” he says. “And we’re taught all the time about how boring our history is and ours was a country of good government and everybody was nice and you realize that there’s a bigger history.”
The song was recorded by Angus’ band Grievous Angels and will soon be available on Itunes.
Clearing the Plains is a chronicle of a Canadian government strategy in the 1880’s to withhold hold food from Indigenous people living in the Cypress Hills region, sometimes to the point of starvation, in order to move them out of the area and make way for a national railway.
The strategy was implemented by Sir John A. Macdonald’s Conservative government.