Introduction

On 30 May 1969, Lillian Piché—a member of the Saddle Lake Cree Nation—set up a tipi in downtown Edmonton, directly across from City Hall, to protest the lack of available housing for Indigenous people in the city. Some two months earlier, Piché had been evicted from her apartment, along with her four young children, when its ownership changed hands, and she had been unable to find another place to live. Landlords simply would not rent to her.¹ Her protest, which was covered in the national news, shed a clear light on the discrimination that Indigenous people face on a day-to-day basis, particularly in urban areas. Her action also provoked a promise from the provincial government to develop plans for welfare housing.² But Piché was concerned about more than just housing. As she explained, she was also protesting about the child welfare system and about the fact that Indigenous children were forced to attend public schools in which they were taught nothing about their own history.³

Lillian Piché was not alone in her outrage. The 1960s and 1970s witnessed a groundswell of activism among Indigenous groups throughout Canada. Locally and nationally, Indigenous people rose up against the injustices they continued to suffer at the hands of the state and demanded sovereignty over their affairs, including the right to self-government, control over land and resources, educational autonomy, and respect for their cultural and spiritual traditions. As the following chapters attest, and as many people may not realize, Indigenous activists in Alberta stood at the forefront of this struggle.

The injustices that provoked this activism have a long history, of course, but they are not injustices of the past, as Canadians are often encouraged to believe. They were very much alive in the 1960s and 1970s, and they continue down to the present day. In one way or another, the chapters that follow bear on an issue that has yet to be resolved: the relationship of Indigenous peoples to the nation-state of Canada. At least since 1830, when officials of the British Indian Department embarked on a policy of “civilization,” Canada has steadfastly sought to “get rid of the Indian problem,” as Duncan Campbell Scott so famously put it. The state’s preferred solution has been the eventual assimilation of Indigenous peoples into the dominant society—to pursue its goal “until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic.”⁴ This overarching objective has, over the years, given rise to policies designed to promote enfranchisement, to laws curtailing the rights of Indigenous peoples to practice their cultures, to residential schooling and subsequent educational policy, to a child welfare system designed to separate Indigenous children from their families, and, in 1969, to the Canadian government’s White Paper on Indian policy, the release of which coincidentally overlapped with Piché’s protest.

As the ultimate fate of the White Paper illustrates, Indigenous people have long resisted these tactics of assimilation and have repeatedly asserted their right to self-determination. For many First Nations, including those in Alberta, the struggle for sovereignty is inextricably bound up with treaties. Together, three of the eleven numbered treaties comprise most of the territory that is today Alberta: Treaty 6 (negotiated in 1876) extends across the central portion of the province, Treaty 7 (1877) spans southern Alberta, and Treaty 8 (1899) covers the northern half of the province. These agreements remain centrally important to treaty Indians, but their interpretation is a matter of contention. The federal government regards the written text of these documents as authoritative. The assumptions are that these versions represent an accurate transcription of what was agreed upon during negotiations, that the meaning of the words is perfectly clear, and that both parties must therefore have understood these words in precisely the same way. In contrast, in interpreting the meaning and intent of the treaties, Indigenous knowledge holders rely on oral histories of the negotiations, from which it is clear that the government’s assumptions are unwarranted.⁵

In these treaties, the federal government made certain promises, which it has persistently shown itself reluctant to honour.⁶ In the understanding of First Nations, a treaty is an inviolable trust, one that confers continuing obligations on both parties, and the government’s failure to respect the spirit on which treaties are founded has long provoked frustration and a sense of betrayal. Another major thorn in the side of First Nations has been the Indian Act. First passed in 1876, the act is still in existence, although it has undergone numerous amendments. Although in recent decades a number of its more blatantly discriminatory provisions have been repealed, over the course of its history amendments to the act have (like the act itself) served to restrict the rights of individual Indians, to curtail the power of band councils, to limit the number of those legally recognized as Indians, to mandate enfranchisement under certain circumstances, to appropriate additional land and resources from reserves, and to tighten the control of the state over decisions affecting the lives of First Nations.⁷

By way of an example, in 1920, an amendment to the Indian Act made it easier for the government to enfranchise, on its own initiative, Indians it found “fit” to become British citizens. Once enfranchised, Indians were required to relinquish their Indian status and hence their rights under treaty.⁸ The same amendment made it compulsory for Indian children aged seven to fifteen to attend school. Although the amendment did not specify a particular kind of school, very often a residential school was the only one available, given that the government had gradually withdrawn financial support for on-reserve day schools.⁹ When the Indian Act was revised seven years later, in 1927, it became illegal for anyone to accept payments from Indians in return for helping them pursue legal claims or raise money to do so—a provision that effectively barred Indians from hiring a lawyer.¹⁰ But this is but a tiny sample of a list that seems endless.

Like government arrogance, Indigenous political action is nothing new. It dates back at least to the time of the Red River Resistance, in 1869–70, when the Métis fought against Ottawa’s plans to annex the territory in which they lived. First Nations engaged in localized political agitation as well, sending petitions and/or representatives to Ottawa, usually in response to violations of treaty rights or government efforts to encroach on reserve lands. The first effort to form a nationwide organization came in 1919, with the founding of the League of Indians. Although it ultimately failed to coalesce at the national level, it had an active presence in both Alberta and Saskatchewan in the form of the League of Indians of Western Canada.¹¹ During the 1920s and into the 1930s, the league fought for improvements to education and living conditions, as well as for the protection of reserve lands and in defence of treaty rights. The 1930s also saw the founding of the Metis Association of Alberta. Under the leadership of Joe Dion, Malcolm Norris, and Jim Brady, L’association des Métis d’Alberta et des Territoires du Nord Ouest (as it was then known) advocated on behalf of the desperately impoverished Métis community, pressing for better education and health care and for the Métis right to self-determination—efforts that culminated in the Metis Betterment Act of 1938 and the subsequent establishment of Métis colonies.

Malcolm Norris was acquainted with John Callihoo, who lived on the Michel reserve, in the Edmonton area. A descendant of nineteenth-century Iroquois voyageurs from Québec, in 1937 Callihoo became president of the Alberta branch of the League of Indians and was also a strong supporter of Métis activism.¹² In 1939, the two jointly founded the Indian Association of Alberta (IAA), an organization that went on to become politically influential. The immediate purpose of the IAA paralleled that of the Metis Association of Alberta: to advocate for improvements to the living conditions afflicting the many impoverished First Nations communities in Alberta. But social and economic uplift was not the IAA’s only objective. As historian Laurie Meijer Drees points out, the organization “was concerned, on an everyday level, with treaty rights.”¹³ Firmly rooted in day-to-day life on local reserves, the IAA understood the practical implications of unfulfilled treaty promises and of the government’s refusal to allow Indian bands to manage their own affairs. By 1944, the association was already advocating with Indian Affairs officials in Ottawa on behalf of treaty Indians in Alberta.

Two and a half decades later, the IAA’s strong emphasis on treaty rights would resurface in a new context, in which its views would prove decisive. In June 1969, the government of Pierre Elliott Trudeau released a document titled Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy, 1969, better known as the White Paper. The White Paper proposed to eliminate Indian status altogether, thus bringing a swift end to Canada’s treaty relationship with status Indians. The proposal provoked outrage among First Nations, who were prepared to do battle with the federal government. In 1970, the IAA issued a response to the White Paper, under the title Citizens Plus, in which it outlined a counterproposal. Central to the Red Paper, as it came to be called, was the forceful assertion of treaty rights and a demand for their full implementation. In chapter 1, “Indian Status as the Foundation of Justice,” I examine the strategy used by Harold Cardinal and the IAA to resist the imposition of liberal democratic values, which, in the White Paper, became a political tool used to undermine the special status accorded to Indians—to “get rid of the Indian problem” by legislating Indians out of existence. The Red Paper had a galvanizing impact of First Nations communities throughout Canada, encouraging them to insist on the right to control their destiny and to engage in organized political action in order to effect change,

The White Paper was not the only cause of the upsurge of activism that began in the 1960s—nor, of course, was it the sole manifestation of the government’s aggressive pursuit of assimilation. As is now widely recognized, the destruction of Indigenous cultures was the principal objective of the residential school system, which saw its formal inception in the 1880s and was in place for roughly a century, with the last of the residential schools closing only in 1996. By the early 1940s, however, the Department of Indian Affairs had come to question the effectiveness of residential schooling and began instead to favour a new policy of “integration.”¹⁴ This meant educating Indigenous children together with non-Indigenous children in provincial public schools and, correspondingly, the eventual elimination of separate residential schooling. Despite the shift in rhetoric, however, the goal remained the assimilation of Indigenous children into the dominant culture. Moreover, as John Milloy observes with regard to the gradual abandonment of the residential school system, “The pattern of neglect and abuse rooted in the very bones of the system and the dynamics that animated it, as well as the dearth of financial and moral resources, did not change.”¹⁵

One of the many residential schools was Blue Quills, located near St. Paul, Alberta, not far from the Saddle Lake reserve. In the fall of 1969, the local community learned of the government’s plan to close the school, at which point its former students would be expected to attend classes in St. Paul. Although there had been complaints about the school, neither parents nor the district school committee found the alternative acceptable, and so the community decided to take action. In “Setting a Precedent: The Power of Public Protest at Blue Quills Residential School,” Tarisa Dawn Little chronicles the events that culminated in the 1970 occupation of Blue Quills by local First Nations activists and their allies, who demanded that Indigenous peoples be given sovereignty over their own education. As a result of this mobilization, Blue Quills was transformed into the first community-controlled Indigenous school in the country. Today, University nuhelot’įne thaiyots’į nistameyimâkanak Blue Quills offers instruction to both Indigenous and non-Indigenous students that is grounded in traditional values and pedagogical principles rooted in Indigenous ways of being and knowing.

In “We are on the outside looking in . . . But we are still Indians,” Corinne George highlights the groundbreaking work of the women who created the Voice of Alberta Native Women’s Society and Indian Rights for Indian Women, a national organization with roots in Alberta. In the face of blatantly sexist clauses in the Indian Act, these women fought for their right to retain their Indian status and band membership regardless of whom they married.

As George’s chapter suggests, much of the activism in the province focused on building strong alliances and supportive communities. For Indigenous people in the 1960s and 1970s, “conservatism” was less a position on the political spectrum than a set of social attitudes shared by a great many Canadians, including some who, like Pierre Trudeau, subscribed to liberal values. This form of conservatism survives despite changes in government: it cannot be uprooted merely by an election. Although social attitudes today seem softer, the issues to which Indigenous activists were responding half a century ago suggest that much remains for the future.

Leon Crane Bear