Sir John A. Macdonald, Genocidal Maniac

Have Canada’s First Nations been generally mistreated in the building of the Canadian nation?

No.

Sir John A. Macdonald in particular has been accused of this. He was, in fact, generally well-disposed towards the Indians.

Statues like these in Montreal and Kingston are now regularly splashed with red paint, supposed to represent the blood on Macdonald’s hands. He has been removed from the Canadian ten dollar bill.

In earlier days, Macdonald was held in higher regard.

One common charge is that he deliberately starved the Indians in the West of Canada.
Political corruption may have been involved. In this contemporary cartoon, Macdonald gives money to the Commissioner for Indian Affairs, and the latter pockets it instead of feeding the Indians.
Money supposedly going to Indian welfare really going to bureaucrats and more bureaucracy is a continuing problem.
The opposition in Ottawa was more hostile to spending money on Indians, who were supposed to be made self-sufficient by the treaties. Macdonald was, in this, the Indians’ chief advocate. Peter Jones, perhaps the most prominent Canadian Indian leader of the time, was a key Macdonald supporter.
  • Frog Lake Massacre
  • Map of the Batoche battlefield
  • Battle of Batoche
  • Battle of Cut Knife Hill
  • Battle of Fish Creek
  • Big Bear
  • Gabriel Dumont
  • Captured rebels.
The next common charge against Macdonald is that he made war on the Indians, by sending in troops against Louis Riel’s Northwest Rebellion.
This, however, was the natural duty of a national leader faced with an armed rebellion. Moreover, conciliatory approaches had failed: he had declared a general amnesty after the Red River Rebellion, and now the Metis were rebelling again.
While we today are inclined to see it all as a white-aboriginal conflict, it was not necessarily seen this way at the time. In Quebec, it was seen as a Protestant-
Catholic religious and French-English linguistic conflict. And most Metis and most Indians at the time supported the government.
The flag of the provisional government of Saskatchewan. This illustrates that the conflict was not considered by those involved primarily European-aboriginal. It was the “English” against the French and Irish…
One serious charge against the Macdonald government and the traditional Canadian Indian policy is that it sought to keep Indians on reserves.
For some years, Indians actually needed written permission, as here, to leave the reserve.
This is an obvious case of segregation, of trying to prevent Indians from integrating into the mainstream. It is also in violation of treaty, which allowed Indians to hunt and forage freely on crown land.
The government’s defense was that the Northwest Rebellion demonstrated the danger of allowing Indians to move freely.

Another charge is that the residential schools funded by the federal government were meant to suppress Indian culture.

But these schools were created in fulfillment of treaty obligations, at Indian request.

That most Canadian of institutions, the Mounties, was founded by Sir John A. largely to protect the Indians of the West from predatory traders.
Far from disparaging Indians, Canadians have generally been intensely interested in them, even if often misled by the romantic hype.