11. The Treatment of Aboriginal People in Canada during the 20th Century: Assimilation, Genocide and the Question of Intent

The United Nations definition for the term genocide requires that the accused party acts with “intent to destroy” another group. The question of intent provides the foundation for examining how assimilation and genocide are two possible difference elimination strategies that were employed by the Canadian government during the 20th Century against Native Canadians. Comparing the colonial setting that defines the Canadian case with the civil war setting that preoccupied the 1992 Bosnia genocide effectively highlights similarities between the two case studies. The similarities provide the opportunity to explore whether the condition of intent can be proven in such intricate environments, and whether or not the international community should give such heavy consideration to intent during the classification process for genocide.

Access to Maternal Health Care for Native Canadians on Reserves in Northern Canada

The history of abuse and isolation of Native Canadian populations has created a gap in maternal health care, resulting in infant mortality rates (IMRs) of 12 per 1000 births for on-reserve populations compared to 5.8 per 1000 births for the general Canadian population. This discrepancy is deemed a population health issue, as Native Canadian people constitute roughly 3% of the Canadian population, but have infant mortality rates similar to other third world countries. Currently, there are multiple government and non-government organizations in charge of providing maternal health care for on-reserve populations. A lack of a unified communication system linking these organizations creates a gap in the delivery of services and compromises the prenatal care in Native Canadians. The current method of caring for high risk pregnancies on Northern Canadian reserves is to fly the mothers out of their home community to a hospital that is both far away from their families and completely foreign to them. This practice contrasts with the cultural norms of the Native Canadian population, where expecting women receive antenatal care from elder women within their community. New models of care, in which midwives are the primary providers of antenatal care within a given community, have recently been implemented in Northern Quebec and other isolated areas of Canada. The midwives work with women elders of the community to provide a full system of maternal care. These new models show great promise in improving our current system of maternal health care for Native Canadians by providing more efficient and accessible antenatal care while also incorporating cultural norms of the communities.

Engendering Nationality: Haudenosaunee Tradition, Sport, and the Lines of Gender1

The Native game of lacrosse has undergone a considerable amount of change since it was appropriated from Aboriginal peoples beginning in the 1840s. Through this reformulation, non-Native Canadians attempted to establish a national identity through the sport and barred Aboriginal athletes from championship competitions. And yet, lacrosse remained a significant element of Aboriginal culture, spirituality, and the Native originators continued to play the game beyond the non-Native championship classifications. Despite their absence from championship play the Aboriginal roots of lacrosse were zealously celebrated as a form of North American antiquity by non-Aboriginals and through this persistence Natives developed their own identity as players of the sport. Ousted from international competition for more than a century, this article examines the formation of the Iroquois Nationals (lacrosse team representing the Haudenosaunee Confederacy in international competition) between 1983-1990 and their struggle to re-enter international competition as a sovereign nation. It will demonstrate how the Iroquois Nationals were a symbolic element of a larger resurgence of Haudenosaunee “traditionalism” and how the team was a catalyst for unmasking intercommunity conflicts between that traditionalism—engrained within the Haudenosaunee’s “traditional” Longhouse religion, culture, and gender constructions— and new political adaptations.

“It’s Our Country”: First Nations’ Participation in the Indian Pavilion at Expo 67

This paper traces the history of Aboriginal people’s participation in national spectacle and argues that the Indian Pavilion at Expo 67 was unique in its assertion of the portrayal of Native/Newcomer relations. Historians have interpreted the impact of the Indian Pavilion as an event that awakened non-Native Canadians to both the plight of Aboriginal peoples and their increasing unwillingness to suffer in silence. The controversy over the contents and general argument of the Indian Pavilion followed soon after the release of the two-volume Hawthorn Report on the social and economic conditions First Nations faced, and operated just as the federal government was initiating a series of talks with First Nations leaders to forge a new policy towards First Nations. At the same time, there is little evidence that the Indian Pavilion, whatever succès de scandale it enjoyed, had a lasting impact on public opinion or policymakers. Where the experience of mounting, operating, and defending the Indian Pavilion did matter, however, was with First Nations themselves. Whether causation or coincidence, the newfound confidence and pride that underlay the creation of the Indian Pavilion was completely consistent with the positive demeanour of Aboriginal political leaders from the late 1960s on.

The Mobilisation of Native Canadians During the Second World War

Historians have paid scant attention to the compulsory conscription of men under the National Resources Mobilisation Act (NRMA) in Canada during the Second World War. This paper uses the mobilisation of Native Canadians as a case-study to determine the depth and extent of human resource mobilisation policies between 1940 and 1945. Government mobilisation departments and agencies relied on a remarkably decentralised and permissive administrative structure to carry out the NRMA mobilisation mandate. These organizational traits were exacerbated by active Native Canadian opposition to conscription and other factors, such as the geographic isolation and poor health of many Native men. As a result, a patchwork of disparate, inconsistent and ineffectual mobilisation policies affecting Canadian Indians was adopted during the course of the war.