Column: First Nations starved to death to make way for railroad

While reading James Daschuk's meticulous account of the Canadian government's policy to clear the plains of First Nations people to make way for the railway and for white settlement, I was reminded of a 1997 essay by Adam Hochschild in The New Yorker. Hochschild is writing about the Kurtz character in Conrad's Heart of Darkness and the murderous means by which he amassed huge amounts of ivory.

Hochschild writes, "Europeans and Americans have long been reluctant to regard the conquest of Africa as having been on the same genocidal scale as the deeds of Hitler and Stalin." No, he writes, we'd much rather see Kurtz and the horror of his soul as the product of one writer's wild imagination, not as the product of European and American so-called civilization. How could we?That's the uncomfortable sort of question that Daschuk asks in Clearing the Plains, and the inescapable conclusion he comes to again and again, with mountains of evidence to back him up, is that we did. Our government did do the same sorts of things as Kurtz. And possibly even Hitler and Stalin. Though we choose not to see it that way; and not in the same way, of course. Daschuk's not talking about ivory or ovens.

What he does is take us step by step from First Nations health, environment and disease before contact with Europeans up to what he calls the "nadir of Indigenous health," the worst condition to which First Nations health was brought, between 1886 and 1891. And he lays a great deal of the blame for what befell Canadian First Nations people, and what continues to befall them, on Canadian government policy, and on the racist, rigid and often petty interpretation of that policy by local government officials.