Upgrading Canada's Ancient Apartheid

Segregation That Settler Colonialists Can Live With

Upgrading Canada’s Ancient Apartheid: Segregation That Settler Colonialists Can Live With

Aerial view of Shamattawa, 2020 (credits: Austin Grabish/CBC).

In a recent Winnipeg Free Press column Tom Brodbeck remarks, “Considering the extreme harm colonial governments in Canada have perpetrated against Indigenous people over the past 150 years, one would think this country could at least provide First Nations with clean drinking water.”

Brodbeck is specifically referring to the remote reserve of Shamattawa in northern Manitoba. Shamattawa is one of the most-challenged reserves in Canada and has been notoriously plagued with social pathologies for decades. Only accessible by air or winter road, providing any sort of materials and services is costly and logistically difficult. Yet, as Brodbeck notes: “Economic development is lacking on reserves. In many cases, it is virtually non-existent.” Shamattawa is a case of the latter.

Brodbeck doesn’t make the connection between location, the reserve system and why economic development is negligible. If everything costs more to ship it to Shamattawa, then anything Shamattawa produces from those materials will cost more than similar goods produced elsewhere. The local market is small and population growth outside of residing band members is limited by laws concerning use and occupation of reserve lands and the disposition of the band council, which controls housing and membership. 

Indian reserves exist because they are a feature of Canada’s ancient apartheid, a benevolent segregation of Indians from the settlers to places where the Indigenous people could continue their traditional ways in lands reserved for them. This was conceivable at a time when Canada was sparsely populated nor entirely confederated. The separate status of being ‘Indian’ stems back to the Royal Proclamation of 1763. Both Canada and the United States have essentially grandfathered in this British jurisprudence. The U.S., however, has no remote reserves like Shamattawa.

Brodbeck decries: “There is no urgency by the federal government to solve the drinking water problem in Shamattawa, only finger pointing about why a faulty water treatment plant installed there still hasn’t been fixed after years of deficiency.”

The deficiency appears to involve the water intake becoming clogged with ice and damaged at various times of the year.

The ‘faulty water treatment plant’ was built between 2021-2022. Upgrades and expansion to the plant seem to have commenced shortly afterwards as well as repairs: “The community completed repairs to their water treatment plant, with support from Indigenous Services Canada. However, the repairs were unsuccessful in addressing the water treatment issues. Additional expansion and upgrades to the water treatment plant and water main distribution are nearing completion. Local and technical issues have delayed the project.” 

The new water treatment plant under construction at Shamattawa (credits: Indigenous Services Canada).

The foregoing announcement was dated Aug. 2, 2024. Brodbeck complains about things not being fixed but omits that the ISC is trying to correct the deficiencies. Shamattawa First Nation filed a class action suit awgainst the federal government which has since been joined by 59 other reserves. The bands are seeking “compensation and a court order that the federal government provide safe drinking water and proper funding for water systems on reserve.”

“You have 59 communities with literally thousands of people waiting to get after Canada to be accountable for the service they have to deliver,” explained Shamattawa’s Chief, Jordna Hill. “They say the federal government is responsible for Indians and Indian land, everything in there, and as far as that matters Canada is not doing their job if they have to be in court.”

Like many chiefs and activists, Brodbeck regards First Nations as nations when it suits his rhetorical purposes but in practical reality, First Nations are pitiable wards of the Crown. If First Nations do not have a literal right to clean water, they at least deserve it because of all the harms that Canada has inflicted upon them since Confederation.

“First Nations, such as Shamattawa located in northern Manitoba, are forced to suffer with unclean water, causing people to get sick and in some cases develop rashes. The lack of clean drinking water weighs heavily on the mental health of that community and makes it extremely difficult to lead productive lives.”

Then comes feeling sorry for an inherently generous people whose beneficence was rewarded with federal perfidy by an invading power. 

“In many ways, Canada has made little progress in fulfilling its obligations under the numbered treaties negotiated mostly in the late 1800s. Those nation-to-nation agreements spell out how Indigenous and non-Indigenous people are to live together in peaceful co-existence and mutual respect, while sharing the fruits of the land First Nations have lived on for thousands of years.”

Brodbeck provides a good example of how someone can internally reconcile the view of Shamattawa as a virtual sovereign autonomy with the remote reserve’s utter dependence on Canada to exist. Where actual documents and facts fail his rhetoric, Brodbeck resorts to clubbing readers with rote pity.

“Instead, colonial governments and settlers have benefited from the rich resources of the land, while displacing and marginalizing Indigenous people and disrupting their way of living. Worse, colonial governments have attempted to eradicate Indigenous people through coercive assimilative policies over the past 150 years — policies governments today say they regret and for which they have apologized.”

Assimilation isn’t eradication; assimilating someone presupposes their continued existence. Brodbeck is regurgitating one of the oldest talking points of Indigenous exceptionalism: assimilation was an unequivocally harmful and evil thing that was imposed on Indigenous people. Assimilation is vilified without nuance or qualification because the central foundation of aboriginal special interest rhetoric is cultural distinctiveness. Drawing no distinctions between cultural and civil assimilation, activists and advocates like Brodbeck, project a value of lethal toxicity for assimilation when it involves Indigenous people: that their physical, mental and social well-being is inextricably relative to the degree to which they retain and practice their traditional culture.

Since these are victimhood narratives designed for mass consumption, the dynamic and aggregate nature of culture isn’t considered and often the advocates repeating these narratives have only skimmed the actual history with bias. For instance, does the use of English necessarily infect the Indigenous user with non-indigenous culture? Could the intake of non-indigenous culture have been avoided once Indigenous families brought radios, TVs and the Internet into their homes? Was it coercive assimilation on the part of Indigenous parents to subject their children to the CBC?

If by coercive assimilation, Brodbeck means Indian Residential Schools, it should be kept in mind that, in their day, the schools were seen as a progressive response to what was an obvious problem with the reserve system back then: they were not economically sustainable in the long run. There was no welfare state and an ethos of ‘teaching the man to fish’ generally prevailed. Consequently this meant providing Indian children with a practical education. There was never an overriding policy of erasing traditional culture and in most cases, parents enrolled their children in these schools according to their own religious denomination. If a parent adopts a Christian faith, are they choosing to assimilate and if assimilation has redeeming value enough for it to be individually chosen, is there a justification for a policy of collective assimilation?

To this writer’s vintage, it is almost unthinkable to imagine liberals making the case for segregation, but this is an exception many are now willing to make for aboriginal people. If assimilation is absolutely off the table, regardless of how impractical or impossible that is, does it necessarily make a case for segregation in one form or another, whether it be parallelism or sovereign autonomy? What other options are there once assimilation isn’t one?

Like many activists and advocates, Brodbeck justifies his low expectations of First Nations by dignifying their pretenses of nationhood and validating their narratives of victimhood. At least since the Royal Commission on Aboriginal People, there has been a garbled notion of regarding ‘First Nations’ as a literal proposition. Sensitivities have been elevated to the level of international dignitaries while social realities on reserve have increasingly reflected the long-understood futility of the reserve system.

Consequently activists and advocates end up speaking out of both sides of their mouths: First Nations are nations like Canada but Canada needs to support them like they are wards of the Crown. As Chief Hill complains: “We are here to ask for equality the way people in Winnipeg and other cities have drinking water. We want the same.” It’s a disingenuous take on equality because Chief Hill doesn’t want Shamattawa to be a municipality like Winnipeg, doesn’t want Shamattawa to have fee simple land like Winnipeg and doesn’t want Shamattawa to fund its own infrastructure through taxing residents like Winnipeg does. Winnipeg doesn’t consider itself a nation on par with Canada; it realizes its position in the context of federal and provincial jurisdiction.

Moans the chorus: “The lack of clean drinking water on reserves is just one of many examples of how First Nations are not afforded the same rights as non-Indigenous people. First Nations do not have access to the same level of health care, education and child welfare services as non-Indigenous communities.”

The Constitution stipulates that First Nations have different rights than non-indigenous people. The reality is that First Nations do have the same rights plus other rights as status Indians and Aboriginal people. The regime of different rights was recognized as a problem half a century ago: “This road, because it is a separate road, cannot lead to full participation, to full equality in practice as well as in theory.”

Written at a time when deficit spending was still abnormal in Canada, the 1969 White Paper recognized the structural deficiencies of treating Indian people as a race apart: 

“Canadians, Indians and non-Indians alike stand at the crossroads. For Canadian society the issue is whether a growing element of the population will become full participants contributing in a positive way to the general well-being or whether, conversely, the present social and economic gap will lead to the increasing frustration and isolation, a threat to the general well-being of society. For many Indian people, one road does exist, the only road that has existed since Confederation and before, the road of different status, a road which has led to a blind alley of deprivation and frustration.”

Faced with the mounting human toll of insisting aboriginal people continue down the road of different status, activists and advocates like Brodbeck bluntly appeal to 

maudlin social justice acolytes. However much everything else about living on Shamattawa might make residents become suicidal, surely they should be able to safely drink from their kitchen taps? The fixation on clean water becomes a symbolic gesture to compensate for the substantive failure of continuing the “special treatment by government and society … (that) has been the rule since Europeans first settled in Canada.”

The irony of Brodbeck et al inveighing against the harms of colonialism is that they are actually perpetuating its oldest policy of benign segregation. No amount of money will alter the basic reality of remote reserves like Shamattawa: it exists simply to sequester aboriginal people in a wilderness setting. 

A March 2023 fire that destroyed several housing units on Shamattawa. Lacking fire fighting equipment that was awaiting repair in Winnipeg at the time, all the community could do was watch and let the fire extinguish itself. (Credits: Jordna Hill).

On March 13, 2023, Shamattawa declared a state of emergency due to a spate of suicides and a massive fire. A few days earlier, another remote reserve declared a state of emergency because of recent suicides. At the time, the late Grand Chief of Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, Cathy Merrick, noted that this was the second time that Shamattawa had declared a state of emergency because of suicides.

"It seems so normal to hear that now, and it shouldn't be," Merrick said. "Hopelessness has taken our people to a place where they don't need to be, and that hopelessness results from the lack of adequate services."

In 1969, the Liberal party in government stated: “No Canadian should be excluded from participation in community life, and none should expect to withdraw and still enjoy the benefits that flow to those who participate.”

What has changed since 1969 is exemplified by Brodbeck. Rendered victims of history, status Indians are excused from participating and all that remains is justifying the bigotry of low expectations with formulations such as ‘intergenerational trauma’.

So goes ‘the honour of the Crown.’