Reading Assignment

“Persecution, bad faith and chicanery”35 (May, 1921)

A remarkable story, containing allegations of persecution, bad faith and chicanery by the government of Canada, in regard to the relations of this country with the Indians of the Blood Reserve, is told by Mr. R. N. Wilson, of Standoff, Alberta, who is in Ottawa on behalf of the Indians in an effort to get some of their numerous wrongs redressed. Mr. Wilson describes himself as an Indian trader who has known these Indians intimately for the past forty years. He was originally a member of the R.N.W.M.P.36 when in 1881 he met his first Blood Indian. He was sent in 1882 on duty to the Blood Reserve, where he learned to speak the language of those Indians, and after securing his discharge from the force in 1884 opened up a general trading store at Standoff, adjoining the reserve in southern Alberta, in which district he has resided practically ever since, and always in business associations with the Indians, more than thirteen years being spent in the Indian service of the government, from which he resigned in 1911.

“I am merely a friend and neighbor of the Indians,” said Mr. Wilson when he showed a Citizen representative a power of attorney from the head chief of the Blood tribe and credential signed by two hundred Blood Indians, including all of the chiefs and comprising two-thirds of the adult male residents of the reservation, authorizing him to act for and represent them in urging their complaints upon the attention of the government. […]

ADVENT OF HON. MR. MEIGHEN

In the course of the interview, sometimes quoting from a memorandum which he has prepared in an effort to ventilate this subject, Wilson contended that the [Treaty] made by the Dominion government with the Blood Indians explicitly gives the Indians the personal and exclusive use of their lands until and unless they voluntarily surrender it, and that this was not questioned by any government of Canada until Hon. Mr. Meighen became superintendent-general of Indian affairs in 1917. That year marked the abandonment by the Indian Department, at least as [far as] the Blood reserve was concerned, of the traditional Canadian policy of Indian administration, and it marked the end of the prosperity of the Blood Indians, who from that time forward were not permitted to enjoy the peaceful possession of their reserve as guaranteed to them by treaty.

The Bloods, who are one of the most important Indian tribes in Canada, were the principal [stock] raising Indians of the Dominion, as well as being the second [most notable] farming tribe in the country when in 1918 the department abandoned its policy of advancing Indians on their reserve in favor of a policy of Indian reserve excision in the interests of covetous white men. In February, 1918, during an official campaign of pressure, the Blood Indians asked to vote on the proposed [sale of] about 30,000 acres of their reserve, a question which they had voted down in the preceding [year]. By enrolling as voters a [group] of boys under age, by purchasing votes with tribal funds and favors, and by intimidating Indians, a small majority in [favor] of the land sale was shown, which was immediately protested by the head chief on the grounds of bribery, intimidation and fraud.

COERCIVE MEASURES

“A few illustrations will show the dangers to which Indians are exposed when a government official considers that it is ‘up to him’ to secure land from them by hook or crook. The first measure taken to force the Indians to sell land was to stop the development of their farming enterprise, to appropriate and use for other agency purposes the funds upon which the farming extension was dependent, and to inform the Indians that no more land would be broken up for new farms until they sold part of the reserve. Thus in 1916 and 1917, when Western Canada was being ‘stumped’ by public speakers urging greater production37 of grain, the Blood Indians, while they had a good crop from their old land, were not permitted to respond to the greater production appeal, though they had the land, machinery, horses, plenty of willing men and the necessary capital to operate their traction breaking plow outfits. The irony of the predicament of the Blood Indians in 1917 will be appreciated upon reading the closing paragraph38 on page 1049 Hansard of April 23rd, 1918, in which Mr. Meighen says: ‘We would be only too glad to have the Indian use this land if he would; production by him would be just as valuable as production by anybody else. But he will not cultivate this land, and we want to cultivate it; that is all. We shall not use it any longer than he shows a disinclination to cultivate the land himself.’

“The land surrender matter was constantly mixed up with other agency business, Indian after Indian being made to understand that fair and ordinary treatment at the hands of the department was dependent upon signing a pledge to vote ‘Yea.’ For instance, one of the opposing faction, an honest, hardworking Indian, was told: ‘If you come down here (to the agency) and vote against the surrender, your family will starve next winter,’ while another opponent of the land sale was offered an appointment of minor chief if he would change his vote from ‘Nay’ to ‘Yea,’ a minor chief’s medal being held up before his eyes during the conversation.

“The ration house maintained on the reserve by the department for the double purpose of assisting the destitute and providing a medium for the distribution of the beef and flour of the self-supporting Indians, was during this period turned into a vote-getting machine. Aged and infirm Indians who had for years been on the department’s ‘permanently destitute’ list had their rations shut off entirely and were forced to become beggars in order to live, while able-bodied Indians prominent among the ‘land seller’ faction were to be seen carrying out of the ration house sacks of beef heavier than they could handle without assistance.”

Mr. Wilson says that in this campaign of official duress, the charge was made that trust monies belonging to non-assenting Indians were by the manipulation of official agency records transferred to the credit of “land sale” supporters, thus administering a punishment and a reward with the same pen stroke. “Implements purchased with tribal funds and the property of the whole tribe were used to buy surrender votes, and the agent’s power to assist his Indians with credit orders upon merchants and dealers for vehicles, tents, machinery and the like, was used to a remarkable extent in vote getting. Indians who would not consent to the land sale were black-listed and systematically persecuted. Some of these with money on deposit at the agency, derived from their personal earnings, were not permitted to withdraw their money while they remained on the ‘wrong’ side of the controversy and, contrariwise, other Indians who had no deposits whatever but were ‘right’ in the official estimation were permitted to draw money at the agency as cash advances against future earnings that were not even in sight. As agency cash on hand or in the bank is almost entirely made up of balances from earnings held in trust for individual Indians, the effect of the above discrimination was to give the ‘Yeas’ the use of the ‘Nays’’ money.

LANDS LEASED TO GOVERNMENT’S FRIENDS

“The immense power of the government, which on an Indian reservation is so far-reaching, was during this period exercised to make miserable the lives of the ‘Nays’ and their families while the ‘Yeas’ basked in the sunshine of official favor. The head chief, representing the true majority of the tribe, at once filed at Ottawa charges of fraud, bribery and intimidation and requested the department not to accept the surrender without an investigation of his charges, following which protest no further action was taken by the department with the document, and it was not sent up to the council for acceptance. While the Indians were awaiting a reply from the department to the protest of their chief, they were astonished to see white men appearing on their reserve with many thousands of sheep and claiming the right to do so under leases. Then it developed that the government had peremptorily expropriated and leased out the 90,000 acres which the Indians had so recently declined to sell, and in order to give this arbitrary action a color of reasonableness the executive officers of the department trumped up the utterly false charge that the Blood reserve was empty and unutilized, in face of the fact, well known to them, that there were at that time grazing on the reserve close on to 17,000 head of cattle and horses, belonging to the Indians and an old leasing company that was paying them $10,000 per annum for grazing rights.”

“The Blood reserve was already stocked to its average safe capacity for all the year around grazing in that climate,” says Mr. Wilson, “and the issuing by the department in 1918 of 38 additional grazing leases was an act either of wanton recklessness of Indian rights or of deliberate intention to punish the Indians. If the latter, it was certainly successful.”

Serious reflections are made by him upon the manner in which these leased lands went into the hands of friends of the present government. “Contrary to Mr. Meighen’s assurance to parliament,” he states, “that tenders would be called for ‘in every case where there is time and circumstances permit,’ these leases were let privately, though there was no reason for haste, unless it was a desire to get the land into the hands of certain parties before the public generally knew anything about it. Mr. Martin Woolf, the Liberal M.P.P. for Cardston, in an address in the Alberta legislature that year, charged that the Blood reserve leases were made a political matter of by the Dominion government, and [were] granted to his present and past political opponents. The area covered by these grazing leases included the homes of many Indians who were ordered to vacate in favor of the lessees, while others were dispossessed of their fenced pasture fields. Hay lands used by many Indians, some for 20 and 25 years, and upon which they depended for cattle feed and their own living, were also handed over to the white lessees to be used by them as hay lands.”

“GREATER PRODUCTION”

Mr. Wilson describes vividly how the white lessees were allowed to impose upon the Indians. “While the Indian cattle were kept off the white man’s land, the white man’s cattle and sheep were allowed to graze on the Indian lands. The Indians made strong protests in this connection to the Indian agent of the reserve, but could get no satisfaction. On 16th February, 1918, an order-in-council was passed stating that a special officer would take charge of greater production on Indian lands and would make ‘proper arrangements with the Indians for the leasing of reserve land which may be needed for grazing, for cultivation or for other purposes, and for the 31 compensation to be paid therefor.’ These duties were not performed with regard to the 90,000 acres of leases, as no arrangement of any sort was proposed to or discussed with the Blood Indians, who knew nothing of any intention to place sheep on their reserve until the sheep were actually there in thousands, and those Indians who resided within the area were ordered to vacate their homes in favor of government lessees. As for compensation to the tribe for the lands so leased or to individual Indians for losses sustained by the confiscation of their personal holdings, nothing of the sort was proposed then, or has been during the three years that have since elapsed with the confiscations in full force. When some of the Indians were expressing in appropriate language their opinions of the lack of wisdom in crowding their cattle range with sheep, and their indignation at the rough dispossession to which they were being subjected, the agent sent an exaggerated report to Ottawa, causing the government to fear that the Indians contemplated taking the law into their own hands and expelling the invaders from the reserve, a measure which the Bloods, who are a tractable people, had not even considered. In consequence of the report of the agent, however, a higher officer of the department appeared upon the reserve with three armed policemen and the belated information that the leases had been granted as a war measure and would be maintained by force if necessary, to accentuate which the head chief of the Bloods was told that ‘anyone who even objects to what is being done on the Blood reserve or anyone who advises anyone else to object will be arrested and persecuted,’ which was a considerable threat to make in support of a bunch of predatory leases that were absolutely devoid of moral sanction and of doubtful legality when written. CALAMITOUS LOSSES

“Eighteen months of wholesale overstocking of the reserve had the inevitable result of ruining the grass and hay. The local agent warned his superiors of this condition in his May report and again in his report for June, but though there was a six weeks’ cancellation clause in the leases, the lessees had too much pull and were not to be molested. All warnings having failed to induce the government to cancel its ‘greater production’ leases and restore the reserve to the use of its Indian owners, at the beginning of the winter of 1919-20 the sacrifice of the Indian cattle herd began. Six hundred were sold for less than half their normal value, and practically lost to their Indian owners owing to the failure of the officials who shipped them to take the trouble to properly identify the brands on the animals. The individual cattle brands of the Blood Indians are numerals, and at the time that these cattle were shipped the brands were indistinguishable owing to the growth of winter hair, and could not be accurately read by anyone without clipping on each animal the area of the brand, which clipping was not done. The I.D. report for 1919-20 shows the sum of $20,463 from this sale as being held in a tribal account at Ottawa, where it apparently rests yet owing to the fact that the real owners of the money are unknown. Another 400 head of Indian cattle crowded off their reserve by the ‘greater production’ leases were, to save them from starvation, shipped by rail to the Stony reserve west of Calgary, fed there until the following summer, when they were returned by rail, minus a shortage of 150 head, to the Blood reserve, all this cost and loss being imposed upon 32 the unfortunate Bloods rather than disturb the ‘greater production’ lessees who had within twelve months been permitted by the authorities to remove from the Blood reserve thousands of tons of cattle feed, which under any system of fair dealing would have been retained for the use and profit of the Indians.

“In 1919 the Blood Indians had 3,472 cattle; in the following spring the survivors were counted and found to number about 1,200 which, after allowing for the 1,000 sent away, left a heavy shortage that had starved to death on their reserve from which the government had within the year allowed strangers, backed by the police, to remove thousands of tons of fodder. Moreover, the Indians were forbidden to skin animals that had died of starvation, though the hides were worth several dollars each. The Indians believe that the government gave this order to conceal the great losses suffered by Indian cattle through their feed being taken from them by the white lessees.

“The losses were not confined to cattle. Throughout the forty years of their occupation of the reserve, the Blood Indians wintered their horses of all classes by grazing out on the open range, none being stabled except when in use. During this winter of 1919-20, their horses died of starvation in such numbers that by spring no less than 538 fatalities had been reported for record. A deplorable feature of this phase of the calamity was the fact that the work horses were the heaviest sufferers, a total of 454 work horses being reported dead of starvation. Some of the Indians who were farmers lost all of their teams, while many had nothing left with which to either ride, drive or work.

THE “FORTUNATE INDIAN”

“’The Indian is very fortunate,’ said Hon. Mr. Meighen in the house; ‘he has all he had before and now, in addition, he has the rental for this land,’ to which the Indian replies, ‘You have killed my cattle and my horses, by taking from me the grass that I had before, and though three years have passed I have yet to see the first dollar of the promised grazing rental.’

“A large sum of money was received by the department from the grazing lessees, but it has been of no benefit to the Indians as it was kept in a general fund and was mostly wasted by the government in fruitless efforts to repair the damage caused by the ill-advised leases. A reading of the somewhat elaborately camouflaged 33 account in the auditor general’s report for 1919-20, pp. I-13739 and I-18340, will show that $58,807 was expended for cattle management, mainly on imported baled hay, when $15,000 would have been ample had there been no G. P. leases.

“Of their 66 pure-bred bulls, 35 were sacrificed in a sale at 5c or 5 1-4 cents per pound, and 22 of the high-priced animals were allowed to starve to death. One valuable bull was sold for $50 to someone under a fictitious name and reported as ‘old,’ while he in reality was a young animal quite recently purchased for $300.

THE CARDSTON LEASE AFFAIR

“The only ‘greater production’ leasing scheme submitted to the Blood Indians for their consent was a proposition that the government be permitted to lease to white men for farming purposes, for a period of five years, a block of about 10 sections of land (about 6,000 acres) close to the town of Cardston. As this 10-section farming lease was presented to the Indians as a patriotic measure, it was assented to by a large majority led by the head chief, who had opposed the out and out sale of reserve lands. The two conditions then voted upon of particular interest to the Indians were: (1) That all rental proceeds of the lease should be paid to the Indians in per capita distribution of cash; and (2) that all straw grown the leased land should become the property of the Indians for the feeding of their own cattle. After the said 10 sections had been leased by the department to white farmers, and the agent had advised the Indians that the rentals therefrom would bring them during the term of the lease annual per capita payments of about $24, it was arranged that the department should distribute $6 per capita on account. This payments was made on the 30th May, 1918, but before receiving the money the Indians were unexpectedly required to sign a paper which was not explained to them. Some thought that it was a receipt for the $6, but all signed because they were informed by the agent that unless they did so the money would be sent back to Ottawa and no payment made until another year. At the conclusion of the payment, the head chief, who does not speak or read English, was handed a copy of the paper which they had signed, and upon taking this away for translation it then became known for the first time that they had signed another farming lease of a quite different character, cancelling the first one, taking from the Indians the straw and changing the $6 payment on account into a payment in full.

An important point is that this loss of straw produced on several thousand acres of the lessees’ crop was a contributing cause of the disaster which overtook the Blood Indian cattle.

“After being deprived of 75 per cent. or 80 per cent. of their benefits from this 10-section farming lease by the substitution of one legal document for another, the victims expected prompt and full payment of that little which was left to them, the annual $6 per capita, promised in the name of the King to be paid on or about the first of April, but the western officials of the department held back the payment for five weeks in each of the years 1919 and 1920 to enable a government employee armed with a rifle to traverse the reserve and observe the consent of each dog owner, under a threat of shooting his or her dog, to the deduction of dog taxes from the said $6.

“The Indians requested the government to discard the document that was substituted and to settle with them according to the original and only legal one, but the government made no response to their appeal.

SEIZURE OF MONEYS

“The Indians complain that in September, 1918, the year before the principal calamity, the executive officers of the department gathered up on the Blood reserve and sold a mixed lot of Indian cattle, including three-year-old steers, two-year-old steers and young breeding cows, the orders being to ‘take everything that is fat.’ For these cattle the authorities received more than $40,000, the steers in the shipment being sold for $168 each, at the then price of about 14c per pound live weight. Blood Indians, whose private property these cattle were, have not been able to secure an accounting of the $40,000. The owners were bluntly informed that the ‘Indian share’ would be $50 a head, and after a delay of about six months, credits on that basis were carried to some of their accounts. They subsequently learned that about $20,000 of these personal Indian funds had been taken and reinvested in other cattle which were, after long being fed with hay, in turn sold for about $20 a head less than they had cost in the first place, the loss from this absolutely unwarranted speculation with trust monies falling upon the Blood Indians. Another lot of Blood Indians’ cattle were sold for about $15,000 by the executive officers of the department, and of this sum but $2,000 or 43,000 was credited to the accounts of the Indians who owned the money, and no explanation given of the balance, though the Indians learned indirectly that the greater part of the funds had been used to buy cattle, concerning the branding or disposal of which no information was available.

“Thousands of dollars of personal Indian income derived from beef and grain sales and on deposit at the agency in trust for them individually were peremptorily seized for the ostensible purpose of reinvestment in breeding cattle. Protests of the Indians against this unjustifiable use of their private moneys were repeatedly made, but were met with the statement that it was the order of the government and must be obeyed. Some Indians objected that they already had enough cattle, others that they wanted to handle their own money, but protests availed nothing and the cash was arbitrarily deducted from their accounts in single amounts of $300 and more, the total running into thousands of dollars which, after repeated appeals to the 35 government for adjustment, are still outstanding. The laws of Canada seem to provide no method by which Indians can, as a matter of right, secure a hearing of such claims.

SURRENDER AGAIN DEMANDED

“While continuing to avoid discussion of the memorial with the Indians, the government informed them last fall that the only way by which they could free themselves of their misfortunes would be to surrender part of their reserve, from which it was inferred that the 90,000 acres would be kept from them until they did so, and that reparation, if made, would be from the proceeds of their own land. This announcement was followed during the recent winter by the usual preparatory campaign, in which the Indians were made to feel the pangs of hunger, while the many thousands of dollars of their confiscated and misappropriated funds were still withheld from them. At the end of last month, the finances of the Indians being at about the lowest point in the year, it was considered that the propitious moment had arrived for another attack on their land holdings, so the Indian commissioner appeared, accompanied, it is reported, by a force of twenty Mounted Policemen, to record the vote, but the Indians, to their credit, refused to be intimidated by the great display of armed force and voted down the proposition, according to the report, by 144 votes to 99, a majority against the land sale, which would seem to be an appropriate response to the ‘strong-arm’ business methods of a misguided Indian administration.”