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21 The racist Liberal who stole Western Canada
65 Plays5 years ago
Meet Frank Oliver, the man who tried to block black people from coming to Canada, created modern western Canada by stealing massive amounts of land from Indigenous people and personally profited from the whole thing.
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Further reading:
- First Nations Land Surrenders on the Prairies
- Frank Oliver and the Michel Band
- A tax-eating proposition : the history of the Passpasschase Indian Reserve
- Details on land surrenders from the Government of Canada
- No Means No: Erminskin’s Resistance to Land Surrender
- Frank Oliver and infantile Edmonton
- Remains of 28 First Nations people reburied after nearly 50 years in storage
- Order-in-Council P.C. 1911-1324 — the Proposed Ban on Black Immigration to Canada
- Paul First Nation History: Sharphead Band at Wolf Creek
- The Curious Case of the 1908 Enoch Surrender
- The Yards: Canada 150 and some tougher history for Edmonton
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Frank Oliver
00:00:15
Speaker
Friends and enemies, welcome to The Progress Report, I am your host Duncan Kinney. We're recording here in Amiskwichiwa, Skigan, otherwise known as Edmonton, here in Treaty 6 territory, and today we're doing a podcast on a real bastard. There's really no other way to put it. This person is simultaneously an incredibly important and influential person in early Western Canadian history, and also a huge piece of shit.
00:00:38
Speaker
An out-and-out racist, he used every possible trick to steal land from indigenous people and to use that land to enrich himself and his family and his friends and his business partners. He also used his power and influence as a cabinet minister to marginalize and discriminate against black and Ukrainian and all sorts of other non-British people. A prominent publisher and journalist in early Edmonton, he was one of the most powerful politicians in the history of early Western Canada. And he has his name splashed all over Edmonton.
Impact on Indigenous Communities
00:01:05
Speaker
And this man's name is Frank Oliver.
00:01:08
Speaker
To help me explore and bring down Frank Oliver's many crimes, we have Jodi Kalahu-Stonehouse from the Michelle First Nation. She's currently the Executive Director of the Natumawin Education Foundation and producer of Achimawin, an indigenous radio program on CDSR's every Friday morning at 9am. Jodi, welcome to The Progress Report.
00:01:29
Speaker
It's good to be here. My English name is Jodi Calhoun-Stonehouse and I am from the Michelle First Nation. And we are a band of Mohawk and Cree peoples.
00:01:47
Speaker
Mohawk, all the way out here in Alberta. That's right. We came from Ganoaghe, my Jopan, so all my grandfathers and great-grandfathers were La Voyageurs. And they came from Ganoaghe starting in the 1700s. And as they brought settlers and explorers like Anthony Henday and Alexander McKenzie West. Dudeney, maybe?
00:02:08
Speaker
That I don't know if I would have to explore further. They brought families out here and we ended up settling. There's thousands of Iroquoisan people in Alberta. Awesome. Yeah. And the subject of Frank Oliver. This is someone who you and your family have a bit of personal history with, right?
00:02:28
Speaker
It's kind of interesting the history of Frank Oliver and our people. You know, I remember as a small girl driving by Oliver Square, you know, coming in from a small town, the country roads, being in the big city was exciting. And there was always some sort of comment around Frank Oliver, but it was never derogatory. It was never mean-spirited, but there was always something there. And I didn't know what that something there was.
00:02:56
Speaker
until I started doing research in my undergrad.
00:02:59
Speaker
Hmm, interesting. And so there was just vibes, but there was no like actual like, oh, that bastard, she spit on the ground, Frank Oliver. It was just like that guy. Well, and I think what happened with the Indian residential school and sort of the erasure of people's memories that what had happened and taken place had happened with a small few, the men prominently. And then as time went on, people forgot.
00:03:28
Speaker
But as I did the research and had more conversations and asked questions, there are quite a few people who do remember what he did and how he related with our people.
Frank Oliver's Political Career
00:03:39
Speaker
And he has benefited and he profited and benefited greatly off Indian people's lands and not just the Michelle Band.
00:03:48
Speaker
Oh yeah, we're going to get into it. One thing white people, especially empires, are really good at is keeping records too, so we are able to go back into the historical record and see what was done.
00:04:01
Speaker
So, okay, so we've talked about Frank Oliver, we've kind of set him up as this villain, but let's give you the kind of historical context on Frank Oliver. And feel free to jump in at any point, Jody, if you've got any personal details you think you need to get out there. But he was originally born in Peel County, just west of Toronto. His parents were farmers, and he was apparently a wasp.
00:04:21
Speaker
As a young Frank Oliver, as a young man, Frank Oliver apprenticed at a printer at a newspaper in Brampton. There eventually he eventually worked for the Globe before it merged with the Globe, before it merged with the Mail and became the Globe and Mail. And the Globe back then was an out and out liberal paper. Back then newspapers were quite often just tied to political parties. And it was then that his biographers say that's when he became kind of an out and out liberal.
00:04:47
Speaker
And one of the big liberal political projects back in those times was, you know, quote unquote, Western expansion. And Frank Olber really took that to heart and he ended up moving to Winnipeg and working for the newspaper there back in the 1870s. This was before the transcontinental railroad had gotten built.
00:05:06
Speaker
And even in Winnipeg, he still kept moving west. Eventually in 1876, he moved up, loaded up some carts and ended up going to Edmonton. He chose Edmonton actually because he thought it was a likely spot for the eventual transcontinental railroad to go through. He set up a telegraph office and a small newspaper and eventually named it the Edmonton Bulletin.
00:05:26
Speaker
But in 1882, Frank Oliver's carefully laid plans went to shit as the route of the railway changed and the Transcontinental Railway instead ended up going through Calgary and Rogers Pass.
00:05:39
Speaker
And for someone who we'll see kind of later on, he pretty much got whatever the hell he wanted in this life. This little sidestep in his history is very welcome to see. But also at this point, it's also at this point that Frank Oliver becomes something of a famous or infamous civic booster of Edmonton. And he really does his kind of level best to turn Edmonton
00:06:01
Speaker
into a big important city in kind of Western Canada. At this point, he starts serving in various elected positions, using his newspaper as a bully pulpit to both rail against out of touch Ottawa, as well as to kind of pump up his own business interests. And boy, howdy does not sound familiar railing against Ottawa and Alberta. It's a long and storied business tradition of doing that here.
00:06:26
Speaker
Well, I think one of the things to imagine when Frank arrived here is this territory was known as Pehonan, the gathering place. So this was already a thriving place where indigenous peoples were coming to trade and bringing meats and hides. I mean, the fort was successful here. This was a place of economic boom.
00:06:50
Speaker
And he used his influence with the Liberal Party to push for Edmonton to become the capital city of Edmonton, largely based on this, the fact that Edmonton was this thriving hub, even though the railway didn't come through at that time.
Racist Policies and Systemic Racism
00:07:02
Speaker
And it was also at this point in his career that he made it very, very clear who he was working for as an elected official. And again, he was working for right, rich, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants.
00:07:13
Speaker
And that's where we come to the part of Frank Oliver's career where we get into the racism part. There's really no other way to frame it. Frank Oliver was an out and out racist. He opposed immigration from Ukrainians and Dukubors. He called the Slav population a quote unquote millstone around our necks.
00:07:33
Speaker
Uh, uh, I no doubt, um, he was sounds a bit like the Don Cherry of his day. I'm sure he used lots of editorials where he used the 19th century equivalent of you people in them. Um, but to get a feel for kind of Frank Oliver's immigration politics and policies, I think we should turn to one of Canada's most mediocre and long running television dramas. Jodi, are you familiar with Murdoch mysteries? Oh, yes. Who is it?
00:08:01
Speaker
You watch every episode, you can't get enough. Do you know that Murdock Mysteries is in its 12th season? No. Wow, that's impressive. Who is watching it? That is the question, I think. OK, to be fair, I heard about this because my partner was watching Murdock Mysteries. My partner turns on Murdock Mysteries and kind of knits and doesn't pay attention. It's just like one of those procedurals that you don't really have to pay attention to. But yes, this clip that we're going to play is from the 12th season.
00:08:28
Speaker
Nice. And Frank Oliver appears in this episode. He's at a political rally kind of giving a speech. He's set up as this nativist politician holding a rally. And the plot of the episode isn't super important. It's very kind of ripped from the headlines. The authorities are rounding up Greek immigrants and deporting them on trumped up charges. But I think it's a really interesting clip. And let me play it for you right now. This new act will ensure Canada remains a country for Canadians.
00:09:01
Speaker
Canada is a country made up of the King's loyal subjects and that is the way it will remain for as long as I am alive! Thank you! Thank you!
00:09:19
Speaker
Oh, is that what Frank sounded like? That's an actor playing Frank Oliver. But I mean, yeah, he just kind of shows up as this tangential racist politician in this mediocre Canadian television drama. Unfortunately, there's no actual recordings of Frank Oliver that we can turn to. He definitely wrote a lot. He did. And speaking of his writings, I don't know that in his interaction, he was that explicit of a racist.
00:09:47
Speaker
I remember doing some archival research on articles he'd written in the bulletin and coming across one where he had written about how he'd attended a Sundance ceremony in the territory with the Cree people west of here and I found it very fascinating
00:10:04
Speaker
The way in which he wrote the article was positioning himself in a very intimate position, which meant he wasn't an observer. He wasn't an onlooker. He was a participant at the center of the action, which meant the people had trusted him and welcomed him and embraced him. So clearly he wouldn't have been speaking like that to them. So I think he was rather intelligent, scheming, and thought he was doing the right thing.
00:10:32
Speaker
And it's at this point, he gets elected to all sorts of elected positions. He becomes a man of power and influence, who definitely who leaders of indigenous nations would be going to to talk to right as as, you know, as this powerful representative of the government, like you'd have to deal with this guy.
00:10:49
Speaker
Right. He was the crown. Yeah. And so it's in this context that he gets this is so he's around in Alberta, obviously, before Alberta becomes a province and he's he serves as as an elected official of the Northwest Territories. But in 1905, when Alberta becomes a province, he is also elected as an MP serves as an MP from 1905 to 1911.
00:11:06
Speaker
During his time as an MP. He is I believe the minister of the interior as well as the some type of like Superintendent of Indian Affairs essentially the like chief elected official in charge of what all the Indians what of all the Indians? Yes, the white man in charge of all the Indians that was him And that was the time he we have two illegal land surrenders and it was during that time when he was MP and
00:11:32
Speaker
Yeah, and during this time, he's extremely prolific at doing these indigenous land, these reserve surrenders, which is a thing he absolutely pushed hard as a political project. But to even get back to the racist stuff,
00:11:47
Speaker
He fully supported efforts of British Columbia to restrict Chinese and Japanese immigration, equating them to pigs. In editorials on this subject, he's quoted as saying, we are here for ourselves and not for them.
00:12:03
Speaker
Um, again, I, and again, when you start reading and you go through and read his historical record, he does tend to kind of not be a direct out and out, like a cross burning KKK racist, but he is explicitly clear who he's working for as a politician and what his, where his, um, kind of economic and political interests lie. Right. Um, one of his most famous or infamous pieces of legislation was that he tried to bring in a proposed ban on black immigration for one year.
00:12:30
Speaker
through an order in Council. This never ended up becoming law, but we do have the document itself, and we'll link to it in the show notes. But the purpose of the order was to ban black persons from entering Canada for a period of one year because it read, quote, the Negro race is deemed unsuitable to the climate and requirements of Canada.
00:12:50
Speaker
This is back at a time when Frank Oliver was actively trying to encourage immigration to Canada, mostly immigration from as many white people as possible. And one of those efforts led him to advertise in the United States.
00:13:07
Speaker
He wanted Americans to come to Alberta. White Americans. White Americans, yes. When black Oklahomans showed up, Frank Oliver freaked the fuck out and instituted this order in council. But this was at a time in Oklahoma's history when there was just violence and lynchings of black people, and these people were literally refugees.
Manipulation of Indigenous Land Rights
00:13:30
Speaker
And Frank Oliver sought to ban them from entering our country and using his power as a minister to stop that from happening. And even though this never became law, it was quite clear. And there's numerous other instances of Canada's racist immigration policy towards black Americans. And you can kind of dig into the details there. But even though the ban never came into effect, there was all sorts of ways to restrict them, usually through medical means or by hook or by crook. They kind of kept as many black people out as they could.
00:13:59
Speaker
It sort of felt like he had this economic lens. If you weren't going to contribute to the prosperity of this territory, then I'm going to ban you and outlaw you from this territory.
00:14:12
Speaker
Yeah. And as much as he tried, he definitely, that was his explicit political project. But the thing is that capitalism needed cheap labor. And so a lot of Eastern Europeans and non-British subjects ended up coming to Alberta simply because we're building railroads, we're building cities from scratch, essentially, right?
00:14:30
Speaker
Capitalism needed cheap labor, and as much as Frank Oliver tried, all that cheap labor couldn't come from Britain. The sons. Scotland. The sons of Britain. Yeah. And so it is an interesting contradiction that immigration Alberta actually drastically increased at the time, but it was as racist as it could still possibly be, the policies around it.
00:14:50
Speaker
But Frank Oliver's racism was by no means reserved for non-British immigrants, as we kind of already touched on his specialty and really his real passion in life was stealing land from Indigenous people.
00:15:08
Speaker
and really wanting Indians to live white. That was the objective, that we should live in John Locke's structure of property right regime, really dismantling this collective identity notion. So not only did he want our land, he also wanted our identity to be a similatory. And not a lot has changed over time since that, which is kind of sad.
00:15:35
Speaker
I did a bit of research. It doesn't look like he directly overlapped with Duncan Campbell Scott at the Department of Indian Affairs, but they must have known each other. How could they not have? And if you're not familiar with Duncan Campbell Scott audience, please go Google him. Kill the Indian and the child. Yeah, he's a fascinating figure in both the history of settler relations with indigenous people, as well as really, really awful Canadian poetry.
00:16:04
Speaker
Well, and the Indian residential school, that was his push. Yeah. He was, I mean, he was the primary bureaucrat and like bloodless, like wire rim glasses guy who was responsible for setting up in reservation. Sorry. Residential schools, residential schools. But he also made an entire career of writing poetry about the noble. I've never read his poetry. But his poetry was almost exclusively about either Indians who had died or Indians who were about to die.
00:16:31
Speaker
E. Wow, what a fascination here. Which really speaks to how he viewed the Indigenous folks as this noble savage that was going to be extinct because of all of the things that Canada was doing and the things that he was personally doing to make them extinct. But he viewed them as a bygone relic and not as a living, breathing people. But we're getting off the topic. Dunklecabin Scott, a real fascinating figure in
00:16:56
Speaker
But it's not that off subject because if he started that sort of thinking and belief system, of course, that's where Frank Oliver would have driven his policy from is that same thinking, that same belief system of we need to make them like us.
00:17:15
Speaker
And Frank Oliver, frankly, didn't even like the pre-residential school system, the industrial school system, right? He thought it was a waste of money. And the industrial school system has a whole bunch of, there's a bunch of history there that we really haven't reckoned with either as well, right? So that was before the Indian residential schools and they, from our reserve, the Kalahu Reserve, they took
00:17:37
Speaker
my great-great grandparents and all their siblings, and they took them to Dunbow, which is by high level, so over 300 kilometers away. And there they were taught things like sewing and gardening, like how to be white, how to be a mechanic. How to get a job in white society. That's how these industrial schools were framed. Totally. And again, just kidnapped these children from their parents and their families and the place that they had known that their entire lives.
00:18:05
Speaker
Frank Oliver, I don't have the quote in front of me, but in my research I do remember him speaking dismissively of these industrial schools as a waste of money.
00:18:13
Speaker
Um, but yeah, so, so Frank Oliver, where Frank Oliver really distinguishes himself and where it really comes into his own is he uses again, every tactic available to him as a minister, as a politician, as a journalist, as a publisher to essentially encourage and make these, uh, reserve surrenders happen.
00:18:36
Speaker
He increased payouts. So it was he had a way of he changed the law so that payouts can increase from 10 to 50 percent. So this was a way to pay off the chiefs of the decision makers in order to get them to reserve to surrender lands. He whipped up racism against indigenous people through his newspaper explicitly.
00:18:56
Speaker
He quite often lied to the people who he was dealing with in order to get them to surrender land. So the context specifically that we're gonna bring up later is like indigenous people wanting seeds and farm equipment, stuff that was guaranteed by treaty. They were going to Frank Oliver and saying, give us this stuff. And instead of just giving it to them as the treaty said, he would be like, well, give us some land and we'll give you this stuff. He withheld it.
00:19:22
Speaker
Yeah. And so it's also to remember, it's also important to remember the kind of context of indigenous settler relations at this time, right? Like the Indian agent is in charge. Totally.
00:19:33
Speaker
If you are an Indigenous person, you cannot leave your reserve without the express and explicit permission on a piece of paper of the Indian Age. The pass system. It was against the law. So my grandparents, who had 15 children on the reserve, of course, in order to go to St. Albert to get groceries, they needed the Indian agent to sign the pass.
00:19:54
Speaker
And I have stories, you know, that they used to hop on the train to town, you know, illegally to get groceries. And there was a time when they were starving and they slaughtered a cow on the reserve and those men went to jail because it was a government cow.
00:20:09
Speaker
And so those men went to jail and they were starving. And so it's hard to imagine, like I often struggle, how is it that a group of people who must have been relatively intelligent because they're my family were stuck on a piece of land but felt so disempowered that they couldn't leave to go to the grocery store?
00:20:28
Speaker
And, you know, I remember my mom telling me when she was a little girl walking into St. Albert and there would be signs saying no Indians allowed. So it wasn't, you know, how did we change so quickly from going from this fur trade industry where the indigenous relations and the settlers, they needed each other to stay alive, to have economics thrive.
00:20:50
Speaker
And then the land was depleted and people were starving and folks were coming with bags of flour and we signed treaty. And that $5 a year with the treaty was supposed to sustain a family for an entire year. That $5 is supposed to be able to buy me the flour I need for me and my kids, the blankets we need, the pots and pans.
00:21:14
Speaker
And same with the seeds that were with treaty signing, the rifles, the barbed wire, the farm equipment. And of course we know five dollars does not support a family. It has never increased, even though the expense, the quality of life, how what it costs to live these days has increased substantially.
00:21:33
Speaker
And the cows and plows is still in negotiation because people are saying, hey, we were promised these things, and they never came to fruition. Yeah, Kai and I got a bunch of money out of the federal government for the federal government fucking around with their cows that they were promised. That was just this year, I think. I mean, it's also worth noting that the Indian agents were responsible and supervised for distributing basic human needs, things like housing and food.
00:22:02
Speaker
and, uh, clothing. And this was all with little to no supervision. There was like, you know, an inspector who would come around who knows when. And, uh, these people had wide discretion to do whatever the fuck they wanted as the Indian agent. And ultimately all of these people would report like their boss was Frank Oliver. Right. So that was another point of leverage he had over, over the reserves that he was dealing with.
00:22:24
Speaker
And there's these, you know, the shameful dirty little secrets around, well, there was also women who had no husband who may have died and or there was husbands who came from Britain and ended up going back. So there was these women with children and that sex work began with the Indian agent in order for mothers to be able to provide for their families.
00:22:49
Speaker
So there's this legacy of violence between indigenous women and white men happening here between an Indian agent and women stuck on the Indian reserves.
00:23:02
Speaker
And the details of the land surrenders are numerous and thanks to numerous scholars and academics and historians and the living memory of the people who have experienced and the oral histories of the people who remember experiences directly, we do know by and large what Frank Oliver was up to.
00:23:22
Speaker
And I've got a quote here from, this is from a paper called First Nations Land Surrenders on the Prairies and is written by Peggy Martin McGuire, prepared for the Indians Claims Commission in Ottawa for September 1998. This is about the Papa Chase Reserve. This is land that is primarily now Millwoods. But here's the quote.
00:23:50
Speaker
The 1891 Papa Chase sale. Only nine individuals bought land, none of whom were from the area. All were most likely speculators. The government was questioned in the house for allowing this result to happen. In the Enoch-Sony Plains surrender of 1902, 80% of the land went to two Edmonton merchants who were friends of Frank Oliver. Only 12 quarter sections went to local purchasers apparently interested in farming the land.
00:24:15
Speaker
So these land surrenders, it was funny, there wasn't really a lot of appetite from farmers to farm the land. The land was still relatively plentiful for white people, so it ended up being largely purchased
00:24:30
Speaker
by speculators. In the relative absence of real early demand for surrendered land based on land value, another factor in creating demand was the sense of discomfort many non-native people felt about having Indians near their settlements. This was particularly true of the surrenders in the Edmonton area, where Frank Oliver's Edmonton Bulletin led a vociferous campaign in the early 1880s
00:24:55
Speaker
to remove all Indians to a location farther from the city. This is a direct quote from the Edmonton Bulletin by Frank Oliver. Now is the time for government to declare the reserve open and show whether this country is to be run in the interests of the settlers or the Indians.
00:25:13
Speaker
It's interesting, in 1904 and in 1906, he had two quarter sections of land from the Michelle. And that was the big push, because Michelle is located just west of here, Kalahu, it's also known as.
00:25:29
Speaker
And it was close to the city and it was good farmland. And so that was the big push is we want the resources and we want the Indians off the good farmland. And in those sales, those transactions, they were never paid for. And so in order for us as a First Nation to take that as a comprehensive land claim,
00:25:49
Speaker
In Canada, you need two things. One, a group of Treaty Indians, which we are, over 1,400 Treaty First Nations, and second, own Crown Land. Well, in 1958, we're the only First Nation in Canada to completely surrender their entire reserve. So based on that, we don't have the rights to go after those two claims where Frank Oliver essentially stole those pieces of property and never paid for them.
00:26:13
Speaker
Yeah, and the enfranchisement of Michelle First Nation in 1950 is a really, again, fascinating example of white supremacy in action with Indigenous people. And enfranchisement was always an explicitly Canadian policy for settlers to deal with Indigenous people. Ultimately, the goal was to have
00:26:34
Speaker
Indians stop being Indians and start becoming white people. And if you wanted to become a white person, you had to take a test and renounce your language and renounce your culture and swear in pinky swear to never become an Indian again. And even then, you still had to be like go through some sort of process and then you'd be stamped and franchised.
00:26:53
Speaker
So we're to completely enfranchise the entire band. And so, yeah, Michelle is this is this not just individual First Nations folks, but this is an entire reserve in franchise. And there is I know there's a lot of dispute about how that happened and who and how it all worked out. Right. It wasn't exactly the most fourth runner with the proper way to frame it as. But it definitely wasn't all the way kosher.
00:27:17
Speaker
No, not at all. My grandfather was the chief at the time, Roderick Callahoo. And so I'd done a lot of historical research around what was happening during that time. And I found binders and binders of letters written by settlers surrounding that area.
00:27:33
Speaker
And they were so hurtful. And I just remember crying as a young student reading those letters because now those names are family names that claim Métis status. They claim to be connected to the Michelle. But back then there was this huge division not wanting to be associated with Indians. And that racism was so hurtful and it starved of people off the land.
00:28:00
Speaker
And this policy of enfranchisement, I know it's a bit of a diversion, but it is, I think, emblematic of kind of indigenous settler relations. Do you know when the policy of enfranchisement was officially rolled back? So they only made it a year long so that they could enfranchise the Michelle, and then they changed back the Indian Act the year after. So that would be 1956 to 1958.
00:28:25
Speaker
But even just the concept of individual people being individual Indigenous folks. Not sure when they changed the individual act. I think it didn't happen until officially get removed from the books until the 2000s.
00:28:37
Speaker
So one of the underlying theses under all of this work by Frank Oliver is what we were talking about this commerce, the idea that white people would use the land for more productive, more economic uses. And there's a quote here that I think kind of really, really illustrates that.
00:29:01
Speaker
Um, you know, after Oliver was successful in kind of expelling and getting the land surrender of the Papashes, um, the quote in the newspaper after this, after he had essentially won and gotten his way, was that these lands had become a tax paying, not a tax eating proposition.
00:29:21
Speaker
Which is so fascinating to think about. Whose land is it anyway? It's infuriating, Duncan. He was quoted as telling an Department of Indian Affairs official that it was useless to try to make farmers out of Indians.
00:29:40
Speaker
Well, and it's fascinating he should say that because there was lots of documentation about how we were known as thriving farmers. But we're Haudenosaunee people, so we came with this knowledge of the land where gardeners, we were growing tobacco and corn and beans and squash, the three sisters, that's integral to our identity.
Consequences of Oliver's Policies
00:29:59
Speaker
And so we were thriving farmers. And that's when he started stopping the payments of the seeds, stopping the equipment, stopping the fencing.
00:30:09
Speaker
because we were becoming more successful than the typical farmer. And then they started a co-op, right? That farmers would sell their product to, except Indians were not allowed. So there's all these systems that interwove around the benefiting of settlers and the exclusion of Indians. So there's a bunch of land surrenders and reserve surrenders that I want to get into specifically. And we may as well start with the one that you're most familiar with, the Michelle Band.
00:30:38
Speaker
Frank Oliver had identified it as one that held good farmland that he wanted to get his hands on. The Michelle First Nation website kind of explicitly goes into detail around how Frank Oliver eventually got his hands on the land. What can you tell us about this whole process and what do you know about it?
00:30:59
Speaker
So I think it's one thing to think about land is this big thing, empty void thing. But when we think about land, the berry patches where my grandmothers and great-grandmothers have gone, those were our property boundaries. That's how we identified territory and navigated it with other Indian groups, where we hunted, where we picked berries.
00:31:25
Speaker
And we would meet at places such as like the Lac St. Anne pilgrimage, which many of you have heard of. Folks from the north with the dené would come with caribou and cloudberries. And so thinking about land in sort of this John Locke checkerboard model was not in our frame of reference. Like that's not how we understood land.
00:31:48
Speaker
And we didn't speak English. We were just, we're talking first generation of industrial students coming out from the industrial school at Dunbow. We're still imagining land in the way of how we lived on it, berry picking, hunting and harvesting, picking medicines, being on the land. And so to have someone come
00:32:11
Speaker
with a very different idea of how land should be occupied and how land ownership title property regime should be implemented in itself. There was a lot of head bunting and I think when he took
00:32:27
Speaker
those parcels of land from the Michelle First Nation. I don't think the people at that time understood fully what he was doing, signing those illegal agreements, because they were not legal. He had no right as the Indian agent at that time. Because as an Indian agent, his job on behalf of the queen was to look after us. Taking our land is not looking after us.
00:32:56
Speaker
So that was his role, his primary role. So I think there's two things at play. One, his own agenda personally, and two, the world in which we understood land and property rights regimes were very different. And so it wasn't until much later, I think, that we were able to figure out
00:33:15
Speaker
Oh, this is what it actually means. This is the implication and has been the implication for our families. It means we don't have property to raise our children or grandchildren on. We don't have access to that fishing hole, to those berry patches. I don't think it was an immediate conscious thing that we recognized, oh, that's his land now, because we didn't come from that worldview.
00:33:41
Speaker
And Frank Oliver again used all his tricks, you know, after considerable pressure from Frank Oliver and numerous other Indian department officials, an auction was set up and documents were signed. Frank Oliver personally oversaw the Michelle First Nation auction. And again, it was procured through kind of the promised farm implements and horses, things that by rights should have been provided by treaty, right? And
00:34:06
Speaker
And at this auction sale that was personally supervised by Frank Oliver, 8,200 acres of Michelle Land sold in four hours at a price of $9 an acre, three quarters of which went to speculators. Those two primary speculators were both political allies of Oliver and liberals in the Laurier government.
00:34:27
Speaker
Um, but as you mentioned, those people didn't actually pay. They didn't not only did, uh, was the land essentially stolen from them, but they didn't even like, like literally stolen from them. Like there wasn't even like the exchange of, of cash and just the document signed. Yeah. Right. Just the document signed. And under the Indian act, those sales ought to have been canceled. They were illegal. It was illegal to sell parcels of land off an Indian reservation because title was collective and not under the John Locke property regime.
00:34:57
Speaker
And so when we talk about like stolen land and land back, like there's the broad context of like white people just showing up and just taking over, but there's the like very explicit and illegal, like even by our own laws land that was stolen, right? And we can't take it to court to refute this at this point because we're not recognized by the state as a legal Indian band any longer.
00:35:21
Speaker
because of the enfranchisement. So it's all this weaving of policy and legislation that continues to dispossess Indigenous peoples of their lands and resources. The second reserve surrender that I want to talk about is probably one that's gotten a lot of, we in Edmonton and Alberta have talked about it a lot in the past 10 years, and that's the Papas Chase. And this is thanks kind of to the incredible work of Calvin Peruno, the Chief of Papas Chase. But again, Frank Oliver led
00:35:51
Speaker
a campaign that led to the eventual surrender of the Papa Chase lands to the crowns in 1894. Again, he used his newspaper as a bully puppet to whip up anti-Indigenous sentiment. Again, often framing his arguments around white people putting the land to productive use.
00:36:11
Speaker
This is a quote from Frank Oliver in regards, strictly in regards to the Papas Chase. It is well known that an Indian reserve located near a town is a cause of trouble and general demoralization to both whites and Indians. And quote, now is the time for the government to declare the reserve open and show whether this country is to be run in the interest of settlers or the Indian. That's the quote from earlier. But again, it was in, it was about Papas Chase.
00:36:33
Speaker
Well, and that wouldn't have been so far from Edmontonians minds because the Hudson's Bay Reserve had already been dissolved. So they had seen and experienced in their own time watching a group of Indian people lose their land. So that wouldn't be so far fetched for Papa's chase now to be also removed. And again, the land we're talking here is this huge chunk of South and Southeast Edmonton. It's like most of the University of Alberta all the way to Millwoods.
00:37:00
Speaker
Yeah, like it's it is Edmonton is like truly built on like stolen land on stolen indigenous land. Right. And and Calvin Bruno and the existing Papa Chase have fought for recognition. Right. Like they have I think they're officially members of the AFN now and they do have a land claim. But I don't know where what its current status is. But it is worth again realizing that again Edmonton is on explicitly kind of stolen land.
00:37:29
Speaker
I mean, again, Frank Oliver did this all over Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba. But the one that I definitely wanted to talk about was the sharp head. And this was the view you brought this up in our kind of pre talk. I never heard of the sharp head before. But what can you tell us about the sharp head before I kind of get into it?
00:37:49
Speaker
Well, it's taken a long time for, you know, whether it's the Michelle or Papa's Chase or the Sharp Head, for our own people to start to unravel, how did we get here? What is the issue? And so there recently was the repatriation of the graveyards of Sharp Head. And to not only have your land stolen, but the bodies of your ancestors removed.
00:38:17
Speaker
particularly in our worldview, we're not to disturb those. That's part of the process of being alive here is you honor those ancestors by where you are. So it was really disruptive and it was a really powerful moment for many of the people who ended up being relocated to either Alexander, to Enoch, to other communities around the urban space, to come back to the sharp-head place and to come back
00:38:47
Speaker
to knowing, yeah, we did have a place, we did belong somewhere, because the legacy of the Indian residential schools taught us to be ashamed of those things, one, but also the erasure of where they were, who we were. And so that's the beautiful thing about the Sharp Head repatriation, is it was the starting, the seed planting of a people starting to remember
00:39:10
Speaker
who they are, where they come from. And Frank Oliver was one of the men who started to mobilize the destructuring and demobilization of that landscape and those people. Yeah, so there's the story about there was like 28 bodies that were found on doing some utility was doing electrical work, I think putting in power lines or something like that. And these these these remains were found
00:39:34
Speaker
And it was the Sharp Head Burial Ground. And this was a huge to do. It was a big story back in 2014. And someone who spoke out quite a lot about this was Kurt Buffalo. He's the former chief of Samsung Cree. He's a Sharp Head descendant. And there's this 2014 APTN story that we'll link to in the show notes. And the context around the Sharp Head is that they were declared extinct.
00:39:59
Speaker
in 1887, right? And declaring Indian bands extinct was another favorite tactic of white people and settlers to essentially grab their lands, right? And there's no doubt that the sharp head had gone through a lot of shit. Like the quote from Kurt Buffalo here is that he talks about
00:40:22
Speaker
all of the people that were dying as an actual planned event. His quote from Kurt Buffalo is, it was engineered. It was a forced extinction. That is a huge tract of land, bigger than we have here in the four nations. That piece of property is prime real estate. Those four nations he's referring to are the four nations that make up Musquechese, the Montana, Ermanskin, Sampson, Cree, and Louisville.
00:40:42
Speaker
Again, Kurt Buffalo, another quote, based on oral accounts, the sharp head people were given disease infested blankets and given contaminated meat to eat. This contributed to the high number of deaths and exodus to neighboring First Nations. We know that the land wasn't properly surrendered and that it was genocide, unquote.
00:41:01
Speaker
And the beautiful thing about our people is that we're nomadic. So for sharp-head families to go to the bobtail tribe or to go to Louisville or Montana to go visit their relatives was a very normal thing for us. We lived on the land. We followed the buffalo. We followed the waterways. We were always moving very active people on this land.
00:41:27
Speaker
And so we may, our family may not have been at camp when you came to visit. That's a very likely thing because we would be busy on the hunt, visiting family, doing ceremony, doing the things that we did as indigenous people on the land. And so yeah, that's also part of it. Understanding the way in which we occupied the land was very easy for the removal because they couldn't see us. We didn't have towns like you have towns.
00:41:55
Speaker
Our villages were easy to take down in a day. Yeah. And the sharp head, the Michelle and the Papa's chase are all examples. I mean, the ones we're going to talk about after this, as far as I know, they haven't been declared extinct, but those kind of three that was used in various contexts and through legal means to kind of like push them aside so that they didn't
Legacy and Reconciliation Efforts
00:42:14
Speaker
have.
00:42:14
Speaker
kind of legal standing like in modern day. But now, I mean, we can talk about these other reserve surrenders like the Enoch, Stony Plain. I mean, Stony Plain is just a suburb of Edmonton. I mean, I don't think people think of it as a reserve, right? Right. But again, the Enoch, Stony Plain surrender was the successful purchasers were friends and business partners of Frank Oliver.
00:42:46
Speaker
And, you know, as atrocious as it may seem that friends would benefit friends, it's disheartening to see that that's still a reality in this territory. When we think about politicians lifting and benefiting, hiring, contracting,
00:43:07
Speaker
That is a government strategy to ensure that a same group of particular people thrive. And it would be interesting to see how many of the descendants of those folks are actually players in the economic system still in this territory.
00:43:22
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I think that's ripe territory for a graduate thesis or a PhD. But the Enoch-Sony Plain one, again, it's just one of these corrupt ones that I think we just have to talk about. This quote is, again, from the First Nations Land Surrenders on the Prairies, written by Peggy Martin McGuire and prepared for the Indian Claims Commission in Ottawa in 1998, and again, which we'll have a link to in the show notes. But at Enoch-Sony Plain, the offers of three conservative associated businessmen were bested by John MacDougall and Richard Secord.
00:43:51
Speaker
Haha! Richard C. Cord!
00:43:54
Speaker
And these were liberal businessmen and friends of then MP Frank Oliver. These purchasers who acquired some 70% of the land for sale submitted bids that largely matched the confidential valuation obtained by departmental officials. In a number of cases where a policy of confidentiality was in place, the supposedly confidential upset price or minimum price acceptable appears to have been disclosed to well-placed insiders in advance of the sale. Exactly. Richard Secord.
00:44:23
Speaker
and Frank Oliver, like you drive around the city of Edmonton and you see the residential areas named after these men. And these men prospered substantially off indigenous people. Their families thrived because of illegal sales of Indian lands. And Indians starved. They literally starved them off the land so that they could be wealthy men in this country.
00:44:51
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, again, I mean, this is, we're going to get into this, but his name, Frank Oliver's name is splashed all over Edmonton. Frank's sea court, his name's all over Edmonton. Uh, and let's get to that, but I think it's just worth wrapping up everything that Frank Oliver tried to do. So during his six year term of Austin, this is, this was only all these land surrenders were done in six years. He had, there were 24 major surrenders of reserve land.
00:45:14
Speaker
and 36 and many more were attempted. Hundreds of thousands of acres of Indian lands were permanently alienated, and Frank Oliver never doubted that he was just doing the good work of Canada, the good work of God. These were surrenders from Alexander, Michelle, Stony Plains, Sampson, Louis Bull, Pagan, Wabaman, and Blackfoot reserves in southern Alberta.
00:45:37
Speaker
In Saskatchewan, we have surrenders in the Pasqua, the Kaki, Kakiwistuwaha, the Kawesis, the fishing lake, the Swan Lake, the Little Bone, the Muscoopating, the Ki, the Ki-Kisi. You're gonna have to excuse me on some of these names, but I'm trying to list them all off. The Ki-Si-Kus, the Mistwasis, the Musco-Kwegan reserves in Saskatchewan, and in Manitoba, Swan Lake and St. Peter's reserves. This is just in six years Frank Oliver was able to obtain surrenders from all of those different First Nations.
00:46:07
Speaker
It's pretty devastating when I look at the homeless population in the city of Edmonton. The homeless population isn't just a particular population that got there. They are actually descendants of folks who were homeless. So these adults or old people were raised by their parents in homelessness. And so the generations of suffering is often rooted, I would say, more often than not, rooted in these illegal sales.
00:46:36
Speaker
And when we talk about land back, right? And when you see that on a billboard or a poster or sign at a protest, like this is what we're talking about. Exactly. This is exactly what we're talking about. And again, what you're saying, like what was lost as a result of Frank Oliver? The damage that he did to First Nations in Western Canada is almost incalculable, right?
00:47:00
Speaker
It's one thing to imagine losing, let's say, a piece of land or your property, but when your relatives are also connected to that, and the only group of people who speak the same language as you, and the only group of people who practice the same sense of spirituality and connectedness to the land as you,
00:47:20
Speaker
are there and no longer, your families no longer can be there. It's not only depriving you of your physical well-being, but it does something to you emotionally and spiritually. It like degrades at you as a human being.
00:47:36
Speaker
And so when I think about, you know, what has happened with these illegal sales and when you drive around and see, you know, the sea cord settlement, which is a very prestigious place to live in the neighborhood or the Frank Oliver swimming pool, I see pictures of Indians walking the streets with their shopping carts. I see images of Indians starving to death.
00:48:01
Speaker
because that level of prestige and prominence was far more important than the value of the Indian life. And when you read the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's calls to action, there's an entire section on commemoration. And you drive through Edmonton, you walk through Edmonton, you'll see so many things named after Frank Oliver. We have Oliver's school.
00:48:27
Speaker
We have Oliver Poole. We have the community of Oliver itself and Oliver Community League, which is literally just like from where we're recording. Oliver Square. We've got so many commercial, Oliver Square is just this giant drive-in mall that sucks. There's apartment buildings.
00:48:44
Speaker
all these apartment buildings named after Oliver that are in Oliver, right? We've got a monument to Frank Oliver, a relief bus and a plaque with his name on it outside of Hotel McDonald, downtown Edmonton, really in the center of Edmonton, 100th and Jasper Avenue there. This man looms large in Edmonton's history and we haven't really reckoned with his history and what his name means to people like you and your relations.
00:49:12
Speaker
How do we reconcile this? What will it take to reconcile this burden of land dispossession, this burden of land theft? I don't know. I honestly don't know. I thought, is renaming? Yeah, that's one thing we can do. But that doesn't erase the generations of people who didn't get to live together, speak together, feast together, and enjoy life together.
00:49:40
Speaker
So that's going to take some time, some prayer. And I think both sides coming to the table, the city, the citizens, settlers, immigrants and indigenous people, and collectively imagining what is it going to take for us to reconcile this history? What is it going to take for all of us to move together forward in a good way? But I mean, even on the topic of renaming, which I think is a conversation that we should have.
00:50:08
Speaker
You know, Oliver School, this is an Edmonton Public School Board school. Apparently, it was like one of the first things to actually be named after Frank Oliver after he died, and was kind of instrumental in why the community of Oliver ended up being named after him. There was a bit of a process by an Edmonton Public School Board trustee named Cheryl Joyner, who tried to put forward a name change, and it ended up dying on the vine and procedure and committee and stuff. You know, there's this, we can bring this forward again if we want, right?
00:50:37
Speaker
Oliver Community League, I have had discussions with the president and people who serve on the board. I mean, full disclosure, I was on the board of that thing, like, I want to say like seven or eight years ago, before I knew about Frank Oliver, but I mean, it's something that it's an institution that exists. And they've had discussions about it. They commissioned an article from Tim Queringesser that we'll have in the show notes that goes into the detail of who Frank Oliver was and why the community was named after him.
00:51:04
Speaker
I mean, I think there are these public institutions where there needs to be discussion. And again, the Oliver Community People League don't want to just like snap their fingers and change the name. They do want to talk to you and to your relations and to people like you about what it should be named. But I mean, I think the time to have that conversation is now.
00:51:24
Speaker
Yeah, if we don't do it now, it's never gonna happen, right? And so it's kind of the burden of the work that we need to do because of the TRC calls to action. And it's also the burden we need to do for our grandchildren. We need to talk about how this territory was built in a real and honest way so that we can, way we can move forward as citizens of this territory, as treaty relatives in this territory in a much better way than we have.
00:51:51
Speaker
And in regards to the Frank Oliver monument and sculpture of him outside of the Hotel McDonald's, from what I understand, they're gonna build some type of tower there, and they're just gonna get rid of it. But I have been noticing that someone has been putting googly eyes on Frank Oliver. Oh, googly-eyed Oliver. Which is a nice little piece of guerrilla street art that I quite enjoy.
00:52:14
Speaker
It's a very complex issue and the depth of the damage that has been caused by these land thefts is unfathomable. And so there's two pieces that need to happen. One, indigenous peoples themselves, we need to come together and take a look and reflect, okay, what did happen? What has happened? And what have the implications been? We actually haven't had that space to do that healing work.
00:52:44
Speaker
And then the second part is coming in conversation with these organizations, with these institutions on, okay, what do we imagine now being an act of reconciliation?
00:52:57
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, ultimately it's about the type of society that you want to build, right? And do you want to have a society that reckons with its past that deals with how it was created? Or do you just want to fucking not think about it and just watch TV? And that's what we do. We don't think about it, but we have to think about it every day. We don't have a choice, right? That's our reality. It was my mother's, my grandfather's, and it will be my children and my grandchildren until we fix it.
Call to Action and Conclusion
00:53:24
Speaker
Well, I think let's leave it there, Jody. That's a great way to edit. Thank you so much for coming on the program. I really do appreciate it. I think this is a really good and important conversation. If people want to follow your work online or if people want to follow your radio show, now is the time of the show, the program where you can talk about how people can learn about how to support you and follow you.
00:53:43
Speaker
Hi, hi, Nanaskaman for inviting me to be here with you. And I really appreciate the work that all of you are doing here to make this happen and have these conversations. There's no one else really doing this work. And so I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for sharing this story with our with your listeners.
00:54:01
Speaker
I'm at Natamoan Education Foundation. The work I do right now is about lifting indigenous young people into post-secondary institutions so that we can start to do some better work in our communities. Lots of social innovation stuff. If you want to find me, Google me, and I'd be happy to connect. And your radio show.
00:54:21
Speaker
Yes, I produce that, co-host it, share it, mentor lots of young people, so you never know who's going to be on, but it's always going to be amazing and indigenous. And when is it? Friday mornings, 9 to 11 AM on cjsr.com. Sweet. Okay. And if you like this podcast, if you think more people need to hear this podcast, please share it. One of the best ways
00:54:41
Speaker
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00:54:58
Speaker
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00:55:20
Speaker
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00:55:49
Speaker
Dig deep listeners. It's worth it. And if you have any notes, thoughts, comments, things you think I need to hear about, you can reach me on Twitter. I'm at Duncan Kinney. And you can reach me by email at Duncan K at progress, Alberta.ca. Thanks so much to Cosmic Family Communist for the amazing theme. Thank you to Jodie Calhoun-Stonehouse for appearing on the show. And thank you for listening. Goodbye.