June 18: Blackfoot Country
The way that “George” Sikappi Yellowhorn found out that he was going to begin attending Residential School was when his mother woke him up early one morning, just shy of his seventh birthday. After eating breakfast, Sikappi’s mother began to dress him up. He asked why, quite confused. He was told by his mother that she had received a letter from the Indian Agent informing her that her son was to go to school, or else the RCMP would seize him for the same. Every detail of the morning is spelled out when Sikappi tells the story.
June 18: Blackfoot Country
The way that “George” Sikappi Yellowhorn found out that he was going to begin attending Residential School was when his mother woke him up early one morning, just shy of his seventh birthday. After eating breakfast, Sikappi’s mother began to dress him up. He asked why, quite confused. He was told by his mother that she had received a letter from the Indian Agent informing her that her son was to go to school, or else the RCMP would seize him for the same. Every detail of the morning is spelled out when Sikappi tells the story.
“It was a late November morning, it was snowing and really dark and grey out,” he explained. “I remember how dark and grey it was. The priest came around to pick us up on a sleigh, after my mother had dressed me up. I didn’t want to go. When I was on the sleigh the priest picked me up in, it was [about three feet off the ground], so I jumped off and ran away. The priest chased me and caught me, putting me in a tight headlock, dragging me to the school like that.”
“The first thing they did was take me downstairs, and took off all of my clothes. Then they started to dress me up. The shirt was a heavy coarse thing, like canvass. They buttoned that up and put me in “proper” pants, and even these boots. While I was being cleaned up, they washed my hair with coal oil. Then they cut off all of my hair. After that they took me to the dorm room and locked me in there for one full night.”
I asked him if this was punishment for trying to run away. “No, that’s what they did to all the new kids, but they told me it was because I was crying. When they let me out, the first thing they did was teach me how to confess and ask forgiveness.”
The details of the abuses he suffered during the years he was under the direct control of this Catholic residential school, designed to assimilate away the Indian in him for a white person, would take a book to do them even partial justice.
The point of using physical punishment for any deviation—speaking your language, not taking to religion and the God’s of Christ, not taking orders immediately—all were part of the strategy followed by colonialism of removing any independence from the thoughts, behaviors and attitudes of Indians. In Blackfoot Country (that spans most of today’s southern Alberta, part of BC and Montana in the United States), the ideological brainwashing of the population was on all levels and continues to this day with notions of “status” reinforcing a position in the psychology of nation members as conquered and without rights.
The very existence of the “rights” of Canada in Blackfoot Country—even in Canada’s own narrative—simultaneously follow a tale that is disputed and do not even uphold themselves to their own story. The disputed story is the origin of Treaty Seven—a treaty that many Blackfoot traditionalists and others state was never signed. The original has disappeared from Britain; When it was requested of the Crown in England by Blackfoot seeking to read the document, they were told it did not exist. They were also told that they were in the right to claim their land as unceded—but that it was up to Blackfoot to do something about it.
More important is that the clauses in Treaty Seven, like all treaties, that claim to extinguish the national rights of a population are the legislation of non-existence; such a concept cannot be legislated, even with 100% of the population signing on a dotted line.
Psychological warfare on a population can be described as trying to put the consciousness of the colonizer into the hearts of the colonized, and using brute force and fear as a means to do it. There also, however, has to be a side show manipulation along with fear to reinforce “the good” in their conquered status. Yellow Dust Woman, an elder of the Blackfoot Nation, described how “treaty day” went on the reserve before it was cancelled: Everyone in town would come out, line up, and sign a contract saying that “you are receiving this $5 as a payment for being an Indian of Treaty Seven under the Indian Act”. The government of Canada, for the same $5 and ideological gains, still holds such ritual in the Arctic North and elsewhere, with all the pomp and even a traditional redcoat RCMP officer handing out candy.
Aside from this exercise in brainwashing the youth, such exercises help to “positively” reinforce the submissiveness that beatings, sexual abuse, needles through tongues to punish those who spoke their own language, near starvation levels in the diet all do “negatively”. Another “positive” reinforcement for Blackfoot and other Indians to go through on the basis of surrendering their identity was the massive privilege involved in becoming a member of the band council mandated by the Indian Act. While Indians who stand on their land are mandated approximately $500 with four children through the welfare system set up through the Assembly of First Nations and subordinate councils, such as the Peigan First Nation Band Council, the same woman can gather $1,300 by leaving the Reserve. The goal, of course, is to encourage as elsewhere, the abandonment of being with the land and your Nation. However, if you become the “official voice” of a Nation though the “proper and legitimate channels” and become a member of the red-bureaucracy (created and administered by the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, “according to the Indian Act”), your income becomes $48 525 per year, and you can spend travel allotments of, on average, over $20 000 (The document shown is unverified).
Through the colonizers mind frame, the band council sees opportunity for “more revenue” and “collaborative projects” with Canada all the time. Much like in Kanehsatake, the Indian Act chief structure is slowly pushing ahead with ideas to swallow up what is left of the Peigan Reserve, turning it instead into a “municipality”. The beginning signs are there, literally: new road signs and other markings that have historically been one small physical symbol of the difference between Indian Country on the Rez and the community next door of Brockett.
Perhaps the most penetrating two symbols are one you see and one you do not; Blackfoot Country, the real territory that extends vastly beyond the few reserves, see billions of dollars of resources flow out every year. South on the “Old Man River” that flows through Brockett and the Peigan Reserve from the south there is a dam. Since the construction of the dam, from which no royalties are paid to the nation, the river has become poisoned; places where elders swam as children are now not safe to drink even after many minutes being boiled. Also South, West and East of the Peigan Reserve are many “new” windmills, producing clean energy, yes-- without any revenues or power going to the people who see these giant towers on their land. However, due to a threatened litigation, even though Canada claims that Blackfoot land is territory of Alberta, what you don’t see on the South end of the Peigan Reserve is an oil well.
Just East of the Peigan Reserve, there is a tourist attraction called the “Head Smashed in Buffalo Jump”, an interpretative centre operated by the government of Canada and that generates just under a million dollars in revenue annually. Though the government uses Indian faces on staff making minimum wage and greeting the public, the revenue is not controlled by Blackfoot. And while the operation has been given color with token employees, tourist pamphlets put out by the Canadian government about the “attraction” included referencing Blackfoot as a “past people”. Yet, the entire story told by tour guides to tourists from goodness-knows-where is written by non-Blackfoot, and elders of the Nation point to many glaring inaccuracies. These inaccuracies don’t cause revenue losses, so they are not addressed.
Legal challenges, though hard to win in the colonizers courts, have served the struggle for sovereignty in Blackfoot Country. In Blackfoot territory claimed by the United States, Blackfoot have been able to exclusively use their own license plates that read “Blackfoot Nation”. This is no small feat; it establishes a de facto representation of the rights of Blackfoot to administer their own affairs-- the same, and perhaps more important, right to issue ID has also been won and recognized with identification at the border.
In Blackfoot Country, one of the most important rights of this nation, as with every nation and with a strong modern analogy to occupied Palestinian lands, is the right to move freely within the nation unmolested. What both colonial governments-- the United States and in Canada—want is to have the Bureau or Department of Indian Affairs issue the “permit” and “status card” to the nationals, determining who can and cannot be considered a member of the nation for them. This basic issue also reinforces the submissive place for Blackfoot at the hands of the colonizer. Well, the easiest way to gain rights is to use them, and then watch someone try to take the right away from you. In this manner, simply showing their own produced identification, Blackfoot have been able to wrest this back from the colonial states within Turtle Island. There is a strong lesson in this action: When, in Canada at least, an indigenous person is able to claim rights while simultaneously challenging the legitimacy of the Indian Act, this changing of the basic relation of a sovereign population vis a vis the colonizer is “Standing as who you really are,” explained Yellow Dust Woman.
“People here need to stand together and say clearly who they are,” she said. “We are not status Indians, we are Blackfoot.” Traditionalists such as herself have been legally advised that this route to establishing real self-determination would be a nearly air-tight legal challenge to how Canada maintains the situation. “We have to stand together, but people are afraid… they are afraid of having their welfare taken away, afraid of what will happen to them if they do.”
This is the whole point of both the phantom stories and promises surrounding Treaty Seven, and the need to reinforce submission through the police, the courts, the Indian Act and the Indian Act chiefs and councilors. The apartheid legal structures that exist and don’t appear in this short article are vast. Sikappi, after finishing dealing with Residential school then had to constantly deal with every manifestation of racism you can imagine. Just in the territory where he grew up and lives today, he estimates being arrested 50-60 times. Many of the men arrested, when the police took to beating them up, would immediately reference their attacks at the hands of residential school priests and nuns for how to deal with it: the sooner you close your eyes and wait, and admit it hurts, the faster the sadistic one on the other end will be satisfied and stop.
“In boarding school, we were tough guys at first, but we got smart and learned to cry right away,” and yes, they would stop—for now. But the beating would always come again. So today, though the United States government doesn’t molest Blackfoot who use their own license plates, the Canadian government is proceeding with charges against Yellow Dust Woman for doing the same. For a number of years, not producing her status card but her own identification, and standing in the colonizers courts, Yellow Dust Woman has presented her case for using the plates a simple question of who holds jurisdiction. The government continues, like a security blanket, to clutch to the structures of a treaty process that has lost legitimacy over the years but continues to dominate all discourse for relations between Canadian and Blackfoot peoples. Herein lies the importance that both Yellow Dust Woman and Sikappi place on understanding that there is no such legal treaty as “Treaty Seven”.
Sikappi needed to produce his birth certificate, for some reason housed in Edmonton and stating erroneously that he was born there, in order to receive a government cheque worth $10—his pension. He was supposed to go to Lethbridge, one and a half hours drive away from where his home is. Eventually, without enthusiasm, he went to the government office with a now-secured Birth Certificate. They only glanced at it, not paying particular attention. The woman behind the counter asked Sikappi to produce a signature that he had, indeed, received the ten bucks. Before signing, he was told that a witness was needed if he couldn’t properly sign his name.
“So, is what you are saying,” Sikappi asked her “that I need a witness to sign beside my “X” if I can’t write it in English, in order to be legal?”
“Yes,” she replied.
“So without a witness such a document is not legal?” he clarified. “Well, treaty Seven was supposedly marked with an “X”, and there is no witness,” he answered, adding “Treaty Seven is not legal by your own rules.” With no joke having been recently told, the woman behind the counter still saw it fit to laugh.
As more Blackfoot speak this form of direct truth, for a time there will probably be less laughter—but as it becomes clear why this is not a joke but a truth so plain it speaks to how decolonization will happen, more real smiles and laughter can be exchanged, among equals.