Paying the Land — Background
Indigenous Peoples in Canada
The Subarctic Indigenous Cultural Region
First Nations peoples were the original inhabitants of most of the land that is now Canada, occupying almost 2,000,000 square miles of territory south of the Arctic (the Subarctic Cultural Region). There are currently more than 630 First Nation communities in Canada.
Métis peoples are of mixed European and Indigenous ancestry, and live mostly in the Prairie provinces and Ontario, but also in other parts of the country.
The Inuit primarily inhabit the northern regions of Canada. Their homeland, known as Inuit Nunangat, includes much of the land, water and ice contained in the Arctic region.
Most Aboriginal people of the Subarctic were organized into bands or groups of people who spoke the same language dialect and were related by kinship and common traditions. Most peoples of the Eastern Subarctic belong to the Algonquian language family, while those of the Western Subarctic are generally part of the Athapaskan (or Dene) family. Within each of these major language families, neighboring groups often shared similar ways of life. But since the Western Subarctic is physically more diverse than the east, there was more linguistic and cultural diversity among the Dene than the Algonquians.
Dene groups include the Dene Nation (Tlicho, Chipewyan, Gwich’in, Dene Tha' & Dehcho, Sahtú), Tlingit, Tagish, Tahltan, Tutchone, Kaska, Han, Tsetsaut (extinct), Sekani, Dane-zaa and T'atsaot'ine,.
The Dene before European Contact
The Dene typically lived in communities of 25-30 people. Each group moved frequently within a well-defined territory as game supplies changed. A group's size and the nature of its annual economic cycle were strongly influenced by the availability of local resources. The Tutchone, Dene of the Yukon Plateau, and others west of the Rocky Mountains, gathered along rivers during the summer to catch and dry salmon. The Chipewyan and Dene living north of Lake Athabasca, moved to the edge of the barren grounds to follow the caribou herds.
Adjacent bands frequently shared hunting resources, especially if they faced food scarcity. Sharing resources rather than the accumulation of wealth was emphasized among individuals and communities because it provided collective insurance against shortages. However, rich sites such as lakes or rivers where fish could be taken regularly were usually exploited by the same band year after year. During the summer, when food was abundant, several local bands often resided together.
Most Subarctic bands did not have formal chiefs before European contact. People aligned themselves with individuals who manifested leadership and took the responsibility for specific tasks such as trading, war, or communal hunting. Their authority did not generally extend beyond these tasks. European fur traders, however, attempted to establish chiefs and to endow them with considerable power, in order to have better control of the Aboriginal population associated with trading posts.
Most adult men and women participated in decisions that affected the band. Families or individuals who did not agree with a particular decision were free to join another band or camp, or to act on their own for a time. Subarctic people were noted for the value they placed on personal autonomy as well as for the flexibility of their social organization. These characteristics helped them respond to the opportunities and limitations of their environment.
Kinship ties among Subarctic peoples could be passed through the mother (matrilineal), father (patrilineal) or both (bilateral). Matrilineal kinship ties existed among Pacific coast region Dene, bilateral ties were characteristic of the people of the Mackenzie River region, and both bilateral and patrilineal bonds united the Algonquian speakers. Normally, people who had regular contact used kinship terms, in part structured according to generation (e.g., the eldest people become grandfather or grandmother), to address and refer to one another. Kinship relations often determined membership in groups and regulated marriages. In addition, groups west of the Mackenzie River were organized into clans, and also in some cases by dual divisions (moieties) similar to those of West Coast Nations. These divisions served primarily to ensure hospitality and protection to clan members who might be visiting from other camps or bands, to fulfill certain ceremonial obligations (e.g., cremation and/or burial of the dead and reciprocal feasts) and to regulate marriage through a requirement to marry outside of the clan.
Since subsistence necessitated mobility, Aboriginal peoples of the Subarctic had limited material possessions. They traveled lightly and preferred to make heavier tools and implements as they were needed rather than carry them from place to place. Success in hunting depended on accurate knowledge of animal behavior. They taught children to be self-reliant, observant and resourceful and were expected to learn the habits of game animals and to find their way through large areas of difficult terrain. They learned these skills by listening to long hours of practical narrative accounts and mythological tales and by rehearsing special trapping and hunting songs and innumerable riddles. Among many groups, both boys and girls were sent on vision quests to obtain power from animal helpers or the spirits of natural places. Individuals who were successful hunters were acknowledged to have gained the respect and trust of the animals.
European Contact: A History of Dispossession
Over the course of several centuries, the French, British and Canadian governments would sign a series of land treaties with Indigenous peoples. Although the circumstances of each treaty were unique, in many cases, indigenous leaders have consistently maintained that the treaties were agreements to share the land with European newcomers, rather than to relinquish the land. There is significant historical evidence that the colonial signers of these treaties also understood and accepted this distinction. In subsequent eras, however, Canada would argue that Indigenous peoples had surrendered their lands and would use such interpretations to justify dispossessing Indigenous peoples of their land and sovereignty.
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The mid-17th century arrival of French missionaries in New France triggered the first episodes of dispossession of Indigenous peoples. The French signed a series of treaties with Indigenous people in the St. Lawrence valley in order to gain access to the fur trade and other natural resources. |
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By 1763, the British Empire had gained control of France’s colonies. Although the British promised to protect the rights of Indigenous peoples to their lands, the British gradually seized the Great Lakes region, the Maritimes, and Newfoundland and Labrador, where new British colonies would subsequently proliferate. |
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In 1867, the three British North American provinces (Canada, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick) were united into one federation, the Dominion of Canada. Almost immediately, the Canadian government began to develop the economic potential of the territories in the West. In 1870 the government began the first of the Numbered Treaties, which would systematically restrict Indigenous lands and strong-arm Indigenous nations into joining Confederation. |
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Colonization and the dispossession of Indigenous lands still occurs today as the Canadian government refuses to recognize Indigenous sovereignty over the limited lands still in Indigenous hands. To this day, Indigenous communities fight off attempts by outsiders to exploit these lands for commercial purposes. |
During the 1700s, European traders, explorers and missionaries had moved west far enough to encounter the Dene. By the 1900s, the discovery of oil and gold in northern Canada further encouraged white settlement and commercial development in Dene lands. From 1871 to 1921, the Government of Canada signed a series of treaties with various Indigenous peoples as a means of gaining access to lands north and west of Ontario. This forced many Dene peoples onto reserves and eroded (if not eradicated) traditional ways of life. Other instruments of cultural assimilation, such as residential schools and the Indian Act, also negatively impacted Dene society, economy, and ways of life.
The Indian Act
The Indian Act in 1876 consolidated all existing legislation relating to First Nations into one place under the jurisdiction of the newly-created Canadian federal government. It and subsequent amendments and revisions gave First Nations themselves no choice and little input. Although the new country was actively negotiating treaties with individual First Nations in the 1870s, the Indian Act unilaterally made many First Nations people wards of the state.
The Department of Indian Affairs was created in 1880 to administer the act and it remains in force today, though under the name “Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada.” The Indian Act and its bureaucracy ensured them a negative and inequitable experience. By 1939, it also included Inuit in its mandate.
Determination to eliminate any separate Indigenous identity was official Canadian Indian policy for a long time.
Duncan Campbell Scott, Deputy Superintendent of Indian Affairs for Canada, put it bluntly in the speech he gave in 1920:
“I want to get rid of the Indian problem. . . . Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department.”
Scott’s words eerily echo that other well-known quotation by a U.S. administrator, Captain Richard H. Pratt, in 1892:
“A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one … In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”
If you kill the “Indian in him” or her — if you completely rid yourself of not merely, in Scott’s words, “the Indian problem,” but of any communal or individual identification of Indigeneity, but you don’t actually physically kill people — is it genocide?
When we call it something else — assimilation, imperialism, acculturation — do we fail to capture the gravity of willfully eliminating a people as a people, culture, or society? Do we miss the process of cultural genocide?
Conversely, when we use the genocide label for other kinds of killing (e.g., death through neglect, or bureaucratic elimination) do we diminish the weight of the word genocide? Many non-Indigenous Canadians bristle at the notion that a label like genocide applies to Canada, and rarely see ongoing Indigenous issues as the direct legacy of European colonial settlement in North America.
Residential Schools — Genocide through Education
forced to attend a Canadian Residential School (1910)
The shadow that most haunts the Canadian psyche is the history of removing Indigenous children from their home communities and compelling them to attend “Indian” residential schools, which led to the destruction of Indigenous individuals, communities, and cultures. Indian Residential Schools led to rampant abuse, rape, neglect, and the death of at least 3,200 children.
Although education programs began much earlier (for instance day schools located in Indigenous communities), the idea of residential institutions for Indigenous children, often located far from their homes, accelerated in the second decade after Confederation. As many as 150,000 children attended some 132 schools before the system was closed in the last quarter of the 20th century.
The system forcibly separated children from their families for extended periods of time and forbade them to acknowledge their Indigenous heritage and culture or to speak their own languages. Children were severely punished if these, among other, strict rules were broken. Former students of residential schools have spoken of horrendous abuse at the hands of residential school staff: physical, sexual, emotional, and psychological. Residential schools provided Indigenous students with inappropriate education, often only up to lower grades, that focused mainly on prayer and manual labor in agriculture, light industry such as woodworking, and domestic work such as laundry work and sewing.
Residential schools systematically undermined Indigenous, First Nations, Métis and Inuit cultures across Canada and disrupted families for generations, severing the ties through which Indigenous culture is taught and sustained, and contributing to a general loss of language and culture. Because they were removed from their families, many students grew up without experiencing a nurturing family life and without the knowledge and skills to raise their own families. The devastating effects of the residential schools are far-reaching and continue to have a significant impact on Indigenous communities. The residential school system is widely considered a form of genocide because of the purposeful attempt from the government and church to eradicate all aspects of Indigenous cultures and lifeworlds.
From the 1990s onward, the government and the churches involved—Anglican, Presbyterian, United, and Roman Catholic—began to acknowledge their responsibility for an education scheme that was specifically designed to “kill the Indian in the child.” On June 11, 2008, the Canadian government issued a formal apology in Parliament for the damage done by the residential school system. In spite of this and other apologies, however, the effects remain.
The Lasting Effects of the Residential Schools
If the schools had operated for only one or two generations, the system’s impact would have been far less destructive. Aboriginal people had been on this continent for thousands of years. They had developed their own distinct cultures, belief systems, laws, economies, and social organizations. These had allowed them to deal successfully with all manner of catastrophe. Initially, children returning from the schools could look to their extended families, and to healers and elders, for assistance in dealing with the trauma of residential schooling. As time went on, those elders and healers passed on. Some were not replaced, and in other cases, missionaries had undermined their role and position in society.
Parents who had gone to residential school had themselves been damaged by the system. As a result, each generation of returning children had fewer and fewer resources upon which to draw.
The intergenerational effect is called “residential school syndrome,” a combination of historical trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder. It is a reality of Canadian society today and understanding the history of residential schools is fundamental to any process of reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples.
The term that Indigenous peoples have embraced to identify their experience is not ex-pupil or residential school alumnus, but “residential school survivor.” The effects of the schools went beyond the 80,000 living former students who directly experienced them because when they came back to their home communities they carried with them a plethora of social problems, dysfunction, and estrangement from their own Indigenous cultures and identities.
The impacts began to cascade through generations, as former students—damaged by emotional neglect and often by abuse in the schools—themselves became parents. Family and individual dysfunction grew, until eventually, the legacy of the schools became joblessness, poverty, family violence, drug and alcohol abuse, family breakdown, sexual abuse, prostitution, homelessness, high rates of imprisonment, and early death.
Recent Events - Unmarked Mass Graves at Residential Schools
The discovery in May of 2021 of the evidence of remains of 215 Indigenous children - students of Canada's largest residential school - prompted national outrage and calls for further searches of unmarked graves.
Since then, more unmarked gravesites have been found, providing previews of investigations by Canada's First Nations into the deaths of residential school students.
A rising tally of these graves – more than 1,300 so far – has triggered a national reckoning over Canada's legacy of residential schools. These government-funded boarding schools were part of policy to attempt to assimilate Indigenous children and destroy Indigenous cultures and languages.
Paying the Land — One Telling Moment
In writing this book, Sacco took two trips to Canada’s remote Northwest Territories to interview members of the Dene Nation about their relationship to the land and resource extraction. At the time of his visits, the gas and oil industries had been established in the region for years, but a global petroleum glut had paused operations. Sacco and his guide, Shauna, visited several towns and heard a range of Indigenous perspectives on drilling and fracking. What he found was that the complications surrounding resource extraction were inextricable from larger issues the Dene have been facing for generations. Sacco couldn’t parse the conflicts over oil and gas without understanding the Canadian government’s ruthless program of colonization, enacted via unjust treaties and the residential school system. He also couldn’t understand it without following the Dene’s resistance to the government and their fight to regain control of their land and maintain their independence and identity.
In Yellowknife, the capital of the Northwest Territories, Sacco and Shauna travel to the defunct Giant Mine, a site of gold extraction for more than 50 years. When ore processing stopped there in 1999, it left behind 237,000 tons of a lethal byproduct—arsenic trioxide dust. “Where to put it?” Sacco wonders, before answering, “Well, down the mine of course!” He explains that a remediation project rigged frozen storage chambers deep underground; cascading, angled panels show the pair descending and touring one of them. On the next page, Sacco walks alongside the massive machinery and muses about his journey to meet the Dene. “I will leave here with many unanswered questions about my indigenous hosts,” he writes, “but right now…my biggest query is about my race, about us.” He asks in a series of text boxes laid across drawings of the dark mine, “What is the worldview of a people who mumble no thanks or prayers, who take what they want from the land, and pay it back with arsenic?”
It’s a remarkable moment, a swift and scathing indictment of the people Sacco represents—white, settler, Western. This type of self-critique is rare in mainstream Anglo-American journalism, which adheres to the myth of the reporter’s neutrality or else revels in indulgent subjectivity. But rigorous inward-facing critique is common in Sacco’s work. For him, journalism is about asking questions, relaying information, and uncovering truths, not only about one’s subjects but also about oneself. Throughout his books he exposes the mechanics of his process in such a way that the reader can never forget that their narrator is a biased, privileged outsider. He sees it as a matter of ethics. “The important thing for me isn’t so much objectivity, it’s—I want the journalists to admit their contexts, their prejudices somehow,” he has said. “Objectivity to me is a different word than honesty.”
 Sacco - on the page |
 Sacco - in the world |
Sacco on Paying the Land
Q: You make it clear that it’s not about isolated events. You can’t look at resource extraction and how these communities function without taking a broader more historical view.
Sacco: Absolutely. I went up there with a specific question: how are indigenous people dealing with resource extraction? But the bigger story which began to confront me is that this is a story about colonialism and all the implications of that. If you’re talking about colonialism you have to get into the historical context, the attributes of colonialism that manifest in people’s lives. That leads you to residential schools. Just as it leads you to the land claims issues. The story, not just in the Northwest Territory, of indigenous people trying to claw back something from the governments that have taken away their land. It was a bigger story than I had originally expected. That always happens to me, though. I read a lot about a certain subject. I had read about land claims and pipelines, but then you get there and realize that residential schools are the elephant in the room. Residential schools obviously damaged the culture. The residential schools were meant to damage the culture. I don’t want to mince words – they were meant to destroy the culture. Everything is very related. People who came out of the residential schools told me they were very damaged by them, and they had to reconfigure themselves. At the same time they had to deal with the government over land claims issues and with their own people. There was a lot swirling around. Resource extraction was just a cog in this bigger machine.
Q: And central to this colonial idea is the relationship between genocidal behavior towards people and this exploitation of the land.
Sacco: Exactly. The people didn’t matter much to the government of Canada – or the Dominion of Canada – because it wasn’t a place suitable for settler farming. If you look at what happened in North America – and many other places – what the colonists wanted was land to farm. You can take what John Locke said about how you mix the sweat of your brow with land and that’s property. That’s how they thought of every place they went. This is my property. They didn’t see the indigenous people as “working” the land, even though they were hunting and trapping and fishing and living there. The Northwest Territory wasn’t agricultural land so they didn’t care much about what indigenous people were doing up there – until they found oil and gold. Then it all changes. The Western European structure is based on legalities and making sure you dotted your I’s and crossed your T’s, so you need treaties. You basically have people sign over their land, which they never thought they owned in the first place.
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