The Wipe-Out of Canada’s First Nations
Weekend Edition May 2-4, 2014
Genocide on the Northern Plains
The Wipe-Out of Canada’s First Nations
by CHARLES LARSON
The sad, depressing reality chronicled in James Daschuk’s tour de force, Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life—describing the extermination of Canada’s First Nations—is the mirroring American readers will observe the same situation in the United States. The clichéd expression of “the vanishing American Indian” is no figment of one’s imagination but the result of centuries-old policies of racism, greed, and the march of Western civilization into the North American continent, with little or no regard for indigenous peoples, the rightful owners of the land. Perhaps the most startling figure in a book replete with shocking details is the speculation, made fifty years ago, that “the indigenous population of North America at contact with Europeans might have been 90 million people.”
That’s actually part of the opening sentence of Daschuk’s book and although he admits that there are many people who question that figure, even if it was half that number, we are talking about a truly horrendous Holocaust. Again, although the figures are not precise, the United States has 2.9 million Native Americans today and Canada’s Indian population is one million, but people counted today in both of those categories include many with mixed-ancestry. Ignoring the ninety million figure, Daschuk adds in that opening paragraph of his book, “scholars would probably agree that the severity of population decline and the suffering unleashed on the indigenous people of America were unprecedented….”
Most of us are familiar with part of the story: disease, starvation (game depletion), broken treaties, alcohol—not a pretty list of causes. Nor does Daschuk deny the fact that North America was a “disease-free paradise before the arrival of Europeans.” It wasn’t. There was even an indigenous form of TB likely to bring death to native peoples, but not the virulent form they encountered after European arrival. But the list is much more extensive than TB: smallpox, whooping cough, measles, syphilis, influenzia, scarlet fever, and, of course, alcohol which is not a pathogen but did its own number on people with horrendous results. What Daschuk provides in his study is specific examples for given locales, such as the initial infection of smallpox in some communities: seventy percent. One lengthy paragraph will explain the context:
“Arrival of the French in (Portage la Prairie), the transportation corridor east to New France, and contact through cooperation and conflict over access to resources created the ecological conditions that sparked the virgin soil epidemic of smallpox along the boundary waters and interlaces of Manitoba. Within a decade, the regional map would be fundamentally and permanently altered in the aftermath of disease. Historical geographer Paul Hackett traced the origins of the epidemic to a ship that unleashed the pathogen in Boston in 1729. From there, it spread through the English colonies, eventually arriving in Montreal, where it killed 900 people. For smallpox to have spread halfway across the continent, certain criteria had to be met. Without large urban centres in the interior, and with vulnerable populations dispersed across a vast region of the eastern and central woodlands, the virus needed speed to remain viable; the human hosts who served as unwitting carriers of the virus must have travelled swiftly. The incubation or prodromal stage of the disease lasts from nine to sixteen days after infection. Those who carry the germ become infectious between thirteen and twenty days after inhalation of the virus, and the disease is spread through the exhalation of infected individuals. According to historian Steadman Upham, ‘The total infection period can last a little more than three weeks (a mean of 26.75 days) and terminates with either the patient’s recovery or death.’ It has long been recognized, however, that the smallpox corpse is a potent and continuing source of infection.”
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/05/02/the-wipe-out-of-canadas-first-nations/
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