What Sir John A. Macdonald did to Indigenous people
Tristin Hopper’s 2018 National Post piece cataloguing Macdonald’s Indigenous policies, drawing heavily on James Daschuk’s Clearing the Plains. Core argument: Macdonald didn’t cause the bison collapse, but he systematically weaponized the resulting famine to clear the plains for the railway.
Key policies implemented under Macdonald’s direct oversight:
- Starvation as policy — Indian agents explicitly withheld food to drive bands onto reserves and out of the railway’s path. Macdonald told the House in 1882 that agents were “refusing food until the Indians are on the verge of starvation, to reduce the expense.” A Liberal MP called it “a policy of submission shaped by a policy of starvation.”
- Residential schools — introduced as a nationwide assimilation program in 1883. “When the school is on the reserve, the child lives with his parents who are savages; he is surrounded by savages,” Macdonald told Parliament.
- Pass system — required First Nations to get permission from their Indian agent to leave reserve.
- Criminalization of potlatches and powwows — both persisted well into the 20th century.
- Mass execution — in 1885, eight Cree were publicly hanged at Battleford as a spectacle. Macdonald wrote to Dewdney: “The executions of the Indians … ought to convince the Red Man that the White Man governs.”
The toll: between 1880 and 1885, the population of Plains First Nations dropped from 32,000 to 20,000.
Daschuk’s framing — Macdonald wasn’t a “cartoon racist” but someone who brought the hammer down strategically because Indigenous peoples were an obstacle to his national dream. “He was doing this strategically.”