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Alberta's slave crop
58 Plays5 years ago
When something terrible and racist happens you often see well meaning folks go on about how “This isn’t us,” or “This isn’t Canada.” But when you scratch the surface and dig into the history of Canada you quickly find that’s not the case. In this episode we dig into Alberta’s not-so-secret and extremely problematic past with guest co-host Bashir Mohamed.
Further reading:
- St. Albert Fire and Rescue Chief Suspended For Wearing Blackface At Party In 2016
- Officials apologize after staff member at Alberta Christian school appears in blackface for event
- Twitter thread on how Prince Rupert made his fortune (hint: slavery)
- Cheryl Foggo: My Home Is Over Jordan – Southern Alberta’s Black Pioneers
- Bashir Mohamed’s Twitter thread on Calgary’s little known race riot
- Canadaland: Two Centuries of Blackface in Canada
- Human rights struggles of black Canadians too often overlooked. (CBC story featuring Bashir)
- The Grab-A-Hoe Indians: The Canadian State and the Procurement of Aboriginal Labour for the Southern Alberta Labour Industry
- 'You had no choice': Indigenous Manitobans shed light on exploitative farm labour program that ran for decades
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Bashir Mohammed
00:00:19
Speaker
Friends and enemies, welcome to The Progress Report. I am your host, Duncan Kinney. We're recording here in Amiskwachee, Wisconsin, otherwise known as Edmonton, here in Treaty 6 territory, and we are so lucky to have our first returning guest. Bashir Mohammed is a writer, researcher, historian, now playwright, I believe? Add playwright to the CV?
00:00:38
Speaker
Yeah, just just one play just one play but still play right you can put it on the LinkedIn profile now and Bashir is an expert at digging up these kind of incredible nuggets of black history kind of here in Alberta and You know things that we just wouldn't be talking about wouldn't be discussing It wouldn't have become part of the discourse if Bashir wasn't doing the work that he was doing and we're so grateful to have him on But you're welcome to the show. Yeah, thanks for having me again so
00:01:03
Speaker
I think the very first place we have to start off is the extremely obvious one, right? And that is...
00:01:10
Speaker
Justin Trudeau's blackface.
Impact of Trudeau's Blackface Incidents
00:01:11
Speaker
The reaction to Justin Trudeau's blackface, especially from kind of comfortable white liberal types, is to say that like, this isn't Canada. This isn't us. And that type of reaction is just kind of hilariously wrongheaded, right? It's funny because like the, so I guess the best way to explain this is the guy who wrote the melody for O Canada
00:01:35
Speaker
was a minstrel performer who performed in Blackface. So minstrel shows are as old as O Canada. They're recorded as coming into Canada as early as 1841, and Blackface has continued. Like just a few weeks ago, the St. Albert fire chief was in Blackface.
00:01:51
Speaker
Or he was in blackface in 2017. Yeah a couple years ago. Yeah blackface, and it just came out after the desert But but like this is Canada right yeah You know we've built a violent settler colonial state kind of on the back of racism And that's one of the kind of subjects that we're going to be exploring today, but but specifically the subject of blackface I think is one that's worth digging into
00:02:13
Speaker
and you know we've got at least three incidences of you know our idiot failson prime minister putting on blackface and it spurred the conversation on this right and and before we even get to the further kind of details and exploration of this it's worth just saying out loud that dressing up in blackface or brownface is an intentionally dehumanizing act done by white people to belittle black and brown people and that
Historical Roots of Blackface in Canada
00:02:41
Speaker
It's racist, it's wrong, don't do it. If you know anyone who is thinking of even ironically doing a Justin Trudeau and blackface costume, just smack the fucking shoe polish out of their hand and just don't do it.
00:02:53
Speaker
The amazing thing about him was he kept saying that he was just over enthusiastic about costumes. But if you look at the high def video that came out, he even blackened his knees. So that takes some commitment. He knew exactly what he was doing. Yeah, Justin Trudeau's commitment to blackface is something that I wish he held for giving indigenous people clean drinking water or something. This is a real passion project for him. Yeah, and I think something to note too is
00:03:22
Speaker
just how he kind of reacted afterwards like he had a press conference where he said all the right things and everything and I'm saying that sarcastically and then what I found interesting was how Jugmeat kind of played into this as like the only like racialized you know person running for prime minister it was it was interesting how he basically had to accept like Trudeau's apology and like had to not appear frustrated or angry or anything and I thought that was for me it wasn't so much like
Media's Political Focus on Blackface Scandal
00:03:49
Speaker
The black face, but I think also how he reacted that made me more disappointed and all that. And so do you think Canadians give a shit? Like, do you think this is going to matter in the end when it comes to selection? Like when it comes to like, you know, white Canadians and everything, I don't think they see it as like that big of a thing. Like already we moved on to like multiple news cycles. And I think there was a poll that came out recently that showed that attention or like outreach on this really waned and like the weeks after.
00:04:18
Speaker
Yeah, I think I think Jagmeet Singh is already on his like third like racist indignity Since since this blackface thing is broke, right? Yeah. Yeah, it's wild the whole like Jagmeet Singh thing is is interesting to see because he's kind of put in this awkward position where he can't really react any other way like the person who told him to like look more Canadian like who leaned in and whispered in his ear he couldn't do anything else because anything else would make him Unlike a prime minister while Trudeau
00:04:43
Speaker
Can literally not tell anyone about blackface from multiple elections and then be fine after a week or two Yeah speaks to a huge like double standard exactly right and I think it's also worth examining the media and how both how they covered it as well as their even their ability to cover it right like the the picture that went out kind of when the campaign started of the liberal campaign plane and it was
00:05:05
Speaker
almost uniformly white faces as for journalists on that plane, right? Yeah, and it really spoke to a lot of the questions that were asked. Like I remember when the story broke, I was watching the live press conference and a lot of the questions like were based around like politics, like, do you think voters will care about this?
Minstrel Shows' Historical Context in Canada
00:05:21
Speaker
Do you think
00:05:21
Speaker
You know, this will hurt your electoral chances. Um, and it wasn't so much about like what actually happened if he understands why blackface is racist. Uh, what this says about his record on like racial justice, for example, what the media didn't do and what, what Canada, the conversation that Canada didn't have after this was like, what the fuck is blackface? Like, where does it come from? Like, why is it bad? Like, what can you tell us about its origins? Like, where does blackface come from? And, and like, how did it end up in Canada? Cause it didn't start here.
00:05:50
Speaker
The Blackface was popularized in minstrel shows. Some minstrel shows were white actors who basically painted their faces black and their goal was to mock black people. So there'd be like musicals, there'd be like theatre shows for example. I mentioned, oh and they're very popular. So like in Canada
00:06:08
Speaker
The guy who wrote the melody, he was a Mr. Performer in Edmonton, James Ramsey. If you don't know, it's the new Enbridge building. There's the James Ramsey building. James Ramsey also performed in Blackface. Mayor William Henry, Mayor of Edmonton from 1914 to 1917 performed in Blackface. And then to speak about kind of the legacy, we all know about the Jim Crow laws. That term actually comes from a minstrel show called Jump Jim Crow, which was about a physically disabled black slave. And it was about mocking that person.
00:06:38
Speaker
This is huge in our legacy, not only in America, but also in Canada. From what I understand, these, these minstrel shows were started in like Boston, New York, Philadelphia, in the, in the kind of Northeast of the United States. Yeah. And it was essentially, it was like the movies. It was like going to a rock and roll show. It was, it was, it was the, the, the thing you did at the time as a white person. Yeah. And the interesting thing is like now, you know, everyone's like, everyone knows minstrel shows are bad and everything, but there's this like assumption that back then it was like morally okay. But like in, in 1841, like when, when the shows came to Toronto.
00:07:08
Speaker
The black community there opposed it.
00:07:10
Speaker
And I guess to speak about films like Birth of a Nation, for example, when it came to Calgary, black residents in Calgary also opposed it. So I think that's also something important to address. It was wrong then, and it's wrong now. And there's an excellent interview with Cheryl Thompson, who's a scholar on blackface, essentially one of the only ones that exists in Canada, on Canada land, where she talks about blackface and its popularity in Canada, kind of where it comes from. Let's listen to that clip.
00:07:39
Speaker
What does that have to do with us? So think about all the American media that you consume today. You're not really processing what does Game of Thrones mean to me as a Canadian, right? You just know that this is an American show that you love a lot. The Mitchell Show at that time, it's the same idea. Like, they're just like, these are American imports that are so entertaining. We love them. They're not processing that the mere fact that you love this means that in the context of Canada,
00:08:07
Speaker
You have the same racial framing of where black people should be placed in your society. Yeah. But did it serve the same purpose? We're always interested in whatever showbiz America is up to. That's where the glossy glitzy stuff comes from. That's where we'd rather watch that stuff. And the same was true back then. So Toronto was a place where touring companies would come.
00:08:27
Speaker
But did that mean something different to Canadians than it did to Americans? Because it was a different kind of anti-black racism in Canada and at a different scale. Did we understand it the same way? Well, the way I like to describe that is think about the railroad, right, and the sleeping car porters.
00:08:44
Speaker
So the sleeping car porters were black men who were cast with serving white passengers on the train overnight. The sleeping car was not just domiciled in America, it was in Canada too. So that same archetype of the African American or black male serving, wearing white gloves and smiling and being happy was across the country. So what that means is that in the psyche,
00:09:11
Speaker
of the white Canadian is this same desire to see black people in positions of either service and or as comedic foils of some kind.
00:09:22
Speaker
You should do an episode on the brotherhood of sleeping car porters in Canada. Like they're unionizing efforts. I don't know if you know much about it. Yeah. Yeah. No. And that's where the very first, uh, black lawyer in Alberta was the daughter of a sleeping car porter, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, uh, they like organized and raised money for her to go to the university of Alberta. She actually received an award. There's a photo of her with the union reps too.
00:09:42
Speaker
What's her name again? Uh, Violet King. That's right. Her daughter's still kicking around too in the US. But to go back to the blackface thing, like essentially it's, its existence in Canada was good old, you know, American cultural imperialism. As you said, and as you've already brought up the Alberta has a long and extensive history of blackface and minstrel shows as well. I mean, even beyond the, the shit that we just talked about, right? Like the, the St. Albert police chief or the, or a fire chief fired the St. Albert fire chief. Yeah. Or the, um,
00:10:11
Speaker
the teacher at some Christian school in Sherwood Park last year, beyond your usual Halloween idiot dresses and blackface, there is just historical blackface within Alberta that is just in our archives, which is in the kind of stuff in the work that you do,
Blackface Incidents in Alberta
00:10:26
Speaker
right? Yeah, and it's interesting, too. I have a lot of white people tell me growing up a relative wore blackface, or maybe they wore blackface, and they thought it was harmless.
00:10:37
Speaker
I think a problem with a lot of these discussions is people see blackface and then they automatically assume that we want to shame them and everything. I don't speak for every black person, but I know that shame is not a useful emotion to feel. What actually needs to happen, like what Trudeau needed to do, was show action through policy, show action through caring about racial justice issues that are still happening, showing you understand this is a problem, because guilt and shame won't really do much.
00:11:07
Speaker
And, but I still go back to the photos that you've dug up, right? And, and, and like, you know, we've had the former mayor of Edmonton a hundred years ago performing in blackface, not just, not just dressing up in it, but actually like going on stage. Yeah. Yeah. Like a top hat, I think in the photo. And the one that sticks out to me is something you dug up from the Glenbow archives. It's a picture from 1935. It's from the Kiwanis club in Edmonton. Oh yeah.
00:11:29
Speaker
It's the one it's got five men, four of them who are in blackface, all looking directly at the camera smiling. They're all wearing white rimmed glasses. They've got comically large novelty bow ties on. They're fully dressed in tuxedos and tails. They all seem to be kind of plump, middle-aged, comfortable, successful men. This was a thing that upper middle class and upper class white people did.
00:11:55
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah, it was huge. And like, it's definitely like photos are that are really like creepy too. Like, I don't know if you reminded me of like a Halloween film, but yeah, like it was very popular amongst the upper class. Like James Ramsey was huge in Edmonton. I mentioned him before. He has a building with his name on it. There's actually a plaque by the way, with like a bunch of history on James Ramsey, but nowhere there is this actually mentioned.
00:12:15
Speaker
And just as an aside, the Kiwanis Club does give out an award every year called the Top Cop Award, but that's neither here nor there. It wasn't just Kiwanis, though. Rotary liked to throw a minstrel show, too. And that parades. And yeah, minstrel, they'd have minstrel parades. There's this headline that from something that you dug up. Here's the headline from this 1920s Edmonton news clipping. Rotary minstrel parade was big noonday attraction with real display of merriment. The subhead read,
00:12:42
Speaker
parade eclipsed all former efforts in burlesque grandeur and general foolishness. This was, this was fucking going in the movies. Yeah. And the whole point about general foolishness is interesting because like that's how they viewed black people as like silly, as like not serious, as lower than them.
00:13:00
Speaker
I think there's no better way to end this conversation on Blackface with this Justin Trudeau clip. I've always, and you'll know this, been more enthusiastic about costumes than is sometimes appropriate. So Bashir, you've been doing some digging in the crates. This is the thing that you're good at. You're an expert at this.
00:13:22
Speaker
going through i'm a random person well yeah yeah but you dig up more kind of random racist alberta history than anyone else and the thing that you've
1940 Calgary Race Riot
00:13:31
Speaker
dug up recently that you were talking about on twitter one of the reasons why i reached out to you originally was that there was you dug up a race riot that happened in calgary in 1940 yeah it was really interesting because i actually originally came across it through a article sheryl fogo wrote and uh she had like a paragraph on it and she was talking about how
00:13:47
Speaker
A race riot involving between 200 to 300 soldiers went through Harlem in Calgary and attacked a musician's home. So I wanted to dig deeper and actually see news clips and see how this was talked about.
00:14:02
Speaker
And basically, it involved a black musician named Lou Darby, and he owned a dance hall. For context, this is 1940 Calgary. It's World War II, and there's a bunch of soldiers and barracks. And on the Saturday night, one of the soldiers went to the dance hall, and the person he was with was apparently paying too much attention to a black musician. A white woman was paying too much attention to a black musician is what was going on. Yeah, and a fight breaks out.
00:14:30
Speaker
The next day, a soldier, I'm not clear if it was the same soldier, walks into a restaurant where a bunch of soldiers are gathered and basically incites them. And he says he wants to raid N-word joints. And they go, they like march through Harlem town.
00:14:45
Speaker
They enter a cafe, the police show up, and the police are like, no, don't do that. So they march to Lou Darby's house, where they break the fence, they break the windows, and they knock down the door, and inside they find a white soldier. That white soldier married Lou Darby's sister.
00:15:02
Speaker
they found that unacceptable. So they stripped off his uniform, were beating him, and the cops finally showed up and rescued that soldier. Lou Darby was actually in the house, and he was quoted as saying that he had a butcher knife, and he was ready to use it. And as he was being escorted out by the police, the soldier shouted, get him. And a scuffle broke out, and the police ended up taking him away.
00:15:27
Speaker
So while they were beating the shit out of this white guy who had married Lou Darby's sister, Lou Darby was hiding in a closet with a knife. Yeah, he was ready to use it. It was really intense from the way it's described. And the other thing too is the soldiers were pretty intense. One of them threw a rock at one of the cops.
00:15:45
Speaker
What ended up happening was they rallied together, and they wanted to march back through and destroy more black stores. But their commanding officer intercepted them, gathered them, marched them to the barracks, and they were eventually dismissed.
00:16:01
Speaker
And what happened was the next day, the Army launched an investigation. They arrested, I think, one soldier. But I can't actually find what the result of that investigation was. But the end of the story is that most of the soldiers ended up getting off. And so this is 200 to 300.
00:16:19
Speaker
white men going into the like one black neighborhood in calgary with the intent and purpose of of beating up and maybe killing this black person as well as Going and messing with like black owned stores, right? Like this is this is a race riot. There's no way to like call this anything Yeah, yeah, the army later tried to like backpedal and and they like said no it wasn't a riot but like by all definitions if you're breaking windows and all that
00:16:44
Speaker
You know, I'm pretty sure that's a riot. So the other thing too, so they marched through a Calgary neighborhood called Harlem and that's where a large number of the black residents lived. And so they initially marched through it. They got to Lou Darby's house and then their plan was to terrorize it even more. So this was also specifically targeted. It wasn't only Lou Darby, it wasn't only the white soldier.
00:17:07
Speaker
Yeah, and it's a part of our history. Yeah, we need the Heritage Minute on this. Yeah, and it's wild that like not many people knew this.
Prince Rupert and the Slave Trade
00:17:14
Speaker
I actually did like a Twitter poll before and I think like only like two or three percent of people actually heard about it.
00:17:20
Speaker
Four percent heard about it. There you go. And so what's next for you on this story? Are you still going to try and dig into military records? Are you going to be looking for other secondary sources or even primary sources? If anyone's still alive or related to Lou Darby or who knows what, right? Yeah. My goal is to see what the army actually wrote on this. And I know like in previous riots, they have wrote in reports. It's actually World War I.
00:17:42
Speaker
So this is more of a fun fact. World War I, there was also another riot, but this was started by this really eccentric soldier who ended up going to Taiwan and becoming a Taiwanese general.
00:17:52
Speaker
Anyways, but but that's another Alberta history. Yeah, I mean there's you know, you'd scratch your fingernail a little bit on Canadian history and it's not hard to find what we're talking about. Yeah, I have a conspiracy theory that like people intentionally made our social studies curriculum boring so that like, you know, this stuff wouldn't come up and that we wouldn't understand the legacies of
00:18:17
Speaker
uh these race riots like feeds into this canadian image of like niceness and then you know we're the united states but without all of the like you know slavery and all the bad stuff yeah right and it's it's like you know there's lots of bad stuff here yeah this is again a violent settler colonial state we've on the created on the foundation of just like stealing land from indigenous people yeah um like there's just there's no way to kind of get around that and sugarcoat it right so
00:18:44
Speaker
in the same vein as you, Bashir, I've been digging in the crates and going through some history when it comes to Alberta and Canada, specifically on a subject that we don't associate with Alberta, and that's slavery.
00:19:02
Speaker
So if we're all familiar with our kind of middle school history or social studies, we vaguely remember this dude named Prince Rupert, right? Yeah. Rupert's Land. Rupert's Land, right? The precursor to what would become BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, et cetera, et cetera.
00:19:21
Speaker
And whenever he's kind of described in the media or in these history books, he's kind of described as this rakish, you know, entrepreneur, military officer, you know, this founding father of Canada, right? And really the kind of modern conception of Canada exists because of Rupert. And the way that it exists because of Rupert is that he financed the original expedition to the Hudson's Bay. He financed two ships to come up, sail all the way into Hudson's Bay,
00:19:48
Speaker
park, go out into the wilderness, find a bunch of furs, beaver pelts in this case from what I understand for the most part, and then go back to the UK or England and sell those beaver pelts at a profit.
00:20:01
Speaker
And from the reports, the struggle things we say to it cost 240 pounds to go and finance these two ships and send them up to what was not Canada at the time, but before kind of Proto Canada Hudson's Bay and came back to the UK and ended up making more than 1400 pounds in profit or 1400 pounds total in sales on the first that they brought back a tidy, handsome profit. Right. Based on that successful expedition.
00:20:29
Speaker
Prince Rupert found a Hudson's Bay Company, and eventually the King of England gifted him the entire drainage basin of the Hudson's Bay, created the Hudson's Bay Company. The thing that we don't talk about with regards to Prince Rupert is that before he was financing expeditions to Hudson's Bay to go pick up Beaver Pelt and what have you, he was making his living as a slaver in West Africa. He was a part of, he was a founding shareholder and director
00:20:58
Speaker
of the Royal Africa Company. And before that, the company of royal adventurers trading into Africa was the precursor company. They specialized in gold, silver, and slaving. So essentially, the reason why Canada exists in its kind of modern conception is because this European aristocrat who made his fortunes in slaving
00:21:23
Speaker
Financed a trip what would become Canada with the fortune he made in slaving we Canada wouldn't exist if it wasn't for slavery Yeah, yeah, we also like built slave ships like out on the East Coast too I mean, did you know that like modern-day Canada or Western Canada was essentially birthed by the like the transatlantic slave trade? No, I had no idea about Prince Rupert's like before when we were learning about Canadian history We just kind of started with yeah, you know Rupert's land
00:21:50
Speaker
Yeah, and it's all just kind of like, yeah, the Prince Rupert showed up, and then Rupert's line started, and here we are. Yeah, we don't really examine him as a historical figure. I mean, even in the context of the English Civil Wars, he looms large in all sorts of history, and he invented all sorts of shit. He is this figure who kind of looms in European history, but yes, we do not talk about his history.
00:22:11
Speaker
and the fortune that he made in human misery and traditional chattel fucking slavery. The thing about making a fortune in slavery back in that time is England was still in the slave train at that time, obviously.
Sugar, Slavery, and Modern Agriculture
00:22:24
Speaker
And a big chunk of the slaves that Prince Rupert would have been responsible for trading to the New World, or it would have ended up in Caribbean sugar plantations. These are Jamaica, Barbados, Santo Mang, a place that would eventually become Haiti. And these are some of the most brutal conditions.
00:22:45
Speaker
when it comes to slavery. I mean, it's all bad. Don't get me wrong. Being a slave was bad in any context. But the stuff you read about the sugar plantation makes your fucking blood kernel. That is the backdrop and the way
00:23:02
Speaker
that Prince Rupert made his fortune, I think it's worth bringing up. But it's also this question of sugar. The slave trade essentially made sugar into the cheap international commodity that it became. When sugar became cheap because of slave labor, it ended up creating entire new industries, right? Like essentially created candy as a whole class of consumable product. It's that kind of brutal history of sugar production enabled by the transatlantic slave trade that brings us
00:23:29
Speaker
oddly enough, to 20th century Alberta. We can't grow sugar cane here, but we can grow sugar beets. Have you ever seen a sugar beet? No, I haven't. So picture the white thing, the white beet-like thing you can pick up out of the ground in Super Mario Brothers 2. Oh, yeah. That's like a sugar beet, essentially. Like a green top white. They're like white. The more you know. Yeah, the more you know. And these things were grown on the prairies in southern Alberta, Saskatchewan, even Manitoba.
00:23:53
Speaker
And before we kind of figured out how to mechanize it and how to use machines and how to use chemicals to do this thing at a huge scale, it was the shittiest of the shit agricultural labor out on the prairies. It was the least favorite thing for people to do when it came to agricultural labor. So what happens? You're a sugar beet farmer. It's the 1940s. You can't get anyone to work on your farm because it's World War II. Most of the workforce is gone.
00:24:20
Speaker
So you call in the government to procure workers who are obligated to work for you by the state. So we're talking about Japanese internees.
00:24:28
Speaker
yep german p o w yeah and you know the japanese uh in term like a lot of them had their stuff taken away too oh that was the entire reason for the project was just was to steal their businesses and their homes and on their all of all of their like accumulated wealth so that they then forced them to work yeah so you had essentially you had two choices oh yeah there was a few things that happened to the japanese attorneys they were there were a bunch of them were shipped to interior of b c we're talking like the kutneys west kutneys um
00:24:55
Speaker
places like Grand Forks, Slocan Valley, that area, very remote part of BC. And they essentially just lived in like internment camps. That's where David Suzuki will spend a few years as a child.
00:25:08
Speaker
The other thing that you could do was that you could get shipped to Southern Alberta and you could work in the sugar beet farms. Couldn't really leave. You were paid as a sort, you were kind of paid, but you didn't really have the option of leaving. And these people didn't actually have the option of leaving until 1949.
00:25:27
Speaker
so like four years after the war they had to stay four years after the war they were officially released and and a lot of them stayed because they didn't have anything to go back to right all of their their houses and their property and their businesses and everything that had been out on the west coast for them had been appropriated by white people
00:25:46
Speaker
So there is actually this fascinating history of Japanese people in southern Alberta who stayed and who made lives for themselves. And Lethbridge has this beautiful Japanese garden. Lethbridge has great sushi. And there is this weird history of Japanese people in southern Alberta that were literally brought there by force.
00:26:09
Speaker
But after World War II ended and after 1949 came around and all that cheap labor went away, sugar beet farmers were looking around and they were like, well, we still need people to do this shitty backbreaking labor that nobody wants to do.
Indigenous Forced Labor on Sugar Beet Farms
00:26:25
Speaker
So they went to the government and the scheme they ended up cooking up with the government was essentially forcing indigenous people to work on these sugar beet farms in the summer.
00:26:34
Speaker
Uh, a lot of what I'm going to say next comes from some scholarship done by a man named Ron Lalibert. He used to be at the University of Saskatchewan. He wrote this document, um, a scholarly article that I'm going to be referring a lot to called the grab a ho Indians, the Canadian state and the procurement of Aboriginal labor for the Southern Alberta sugar meat industry. He wrote it in 2006, the various government agencies, agencies responsible for administering funds to these reserves would freeze their payments in the summertime.
00:27:00
Speaker
and they would say, well, you're not gonna get any money, there's work, go work, and they'd bring up dresses. They'd pretty much have to go work on the sugar beet fields. Here's the line from Ron Lalibert. Once their welfare payments were terminated, the Aboriginal people had basically no other options but to migrate to the sugar beet fields to seek employment as their chances of finding jobs near their homes were slim at best.
00:27:18
Speaker
And it wasn't just stopping the welfare payments to indigenous people that forced them to work on these farms. There was also the real possibility that the state would take their children, kidnap their children. A fucked up thing is that the state could take your children to take your children because you didn't go work on the fields. The state would also take your child if you brought them to work in the fields. Yeah. It really speaks to, I think, the Canadian project specifically targeting this group of people and just giving them no option.
00:27:47
Speaker
Like the only, like everything you're describing is like, you know, genocide, it's like targeted violence, you know? And I think that's what shocks me, and it shocks me that I never even learned about that, even though it's well documented from that. Yeah, like there's no shortage of, I mean, of this Ron Lalibert has written extensively about this. There hasn't been really any reporting in Alberta as far as I can see on this issue of like indigenous people being forced to work on tree weed farms, but there has been reporting out of CBC Manitoba on this.
00:28:17
Speaker
Two years ago, there was a story where they actually talked to a woman named Rebecca Bone. She was 50 years old. She's not that old. And she was 13 when she worked on sugar beet farms. She can literally remember being forced labor on sugar beet farms when she was a teenager.
00:28:33
Speaker
And some of the stories, the quotes from this story are amazing. If they had a lot of children, Indian affairs sent local children's aid was workers to apprehend them. Their get out of care free card, a trip to the sugar beet farms. When children's aid came after you, you had no choice recalled Peter Paul Chartrand, who was 13 when they tried to apprehend him from his Camperville home. The sugar beet farm is where I ran away and ran away to, I had to.
00:28:57
Speaker
The irony was ugly. If children ended up on the sugar beet farms or were left behind with child welfare, officials got involved. They would come in and take some of the kids when the parents were gone or a lot of the kids were taken from the community and forced to go and work. And then when they worked, they just took them from there, said Lauren Bone, who was just seven when he first worked upon the farms.
Child Labor in Alberta's Agriculture
00:29:15
Speaker
Did all this blow up because of the child labor aspect or because of like
00:29:19
Speaker
Yeah, so in 1969, we do get it does come to the attention of the wider public through a report and a film done by the CBC. Right. And the cause was taken up by Alberta Federation of Labor and the Canadian Labor Congress and even Grant Notley. But it was it was the two was two pronged. It was the child labor angle and it was the housing conditions. Yeah.
00:29:56
Speaker
The accommodations were spartan. Sometimes there were none, meaning families would sleep in their trucks. Other times, farmers offered tents. Most often, the workers lived on the floor in empty grain bins. I remember the mice in the grain bin, Rebecca Bone said. I was always afraid of them biting us.
00:30:06
Speaker
And the work itself, right? Here's from the CBC story as well.
00:30:13
Speaker
Again, this is the Rebecca Bone, she's 52 years old now, she's 51, this story was written. Yeah, same age as like people's parents. Yeah. And this issue of child labor especially was the reason for the creation of an eventual independent committee. But this quote from Harry Strom, the last social credit premier,
00:30:35
Speaker
Sounds like you have something you want to say about harry strum. Yeah, he's he was notoriously nervous. I remember uh, like he had to have everything planned for him and uh Right before he was going to give a big speech They had him a speech and all it said was all it said was go get him And he freaked out and then the staff gave him like the real speech Anyways, harry strum. Yeah, okay. Cool. Uh, but here's his quote on
00:31:00
Speaker
the child labor, siding essentially with the sugar beet farmers at the time, who were making the case that it was the family's fault that there was child labor was happening. He said, child labor in Alberta's sugar beet fields is the fault of the parents, not the government. The quote from Grant Notley is kind of interesting too, just because of the kind of like modern day parallels too. When the premier says the problem of child labor is the fault of the parents, this is Grant Notley speaking,
00:31:30
Speaker
He's sidestepping the responsibility of the provincial government in this issue. The Premier is technically correct in stating that the workers are independent contractors and therefore unprotected from labor laws, but that still doesn't make the plight which results any more palatable. Hmm, independent contractors, where have you heard that before? Sugar beet farmers just beat Uber to the punch by like 60 years.
00:31:50
Speaker
sugar beet farmers were disrupting the labor market. The thing that surprised me about this is just how much power they had. How can a sugar beet farmer have that much connection to the federal government to get people in prison camps but also labor after those prison camps closed? That speaks a lot of power.
00:32:14
Speaker
And I just want to close out with this kind of, essentially the final paragraph from Ron Lalibert's piece, which we will be putting in the show notes. While Hoeing Sugarbeats was backbreaking stoop work performed under long, hot summer days, low paying, and the working conditions were extremely poor, Aboriginal people endured in the industry for over 50 years. Under such working conditions, it seems likely that one of the ways they coped was through their sense of humor, as some jokingly refer to themselves as the Gravaho Indians.
00:32:40
Speaker
And that's, again, in the title of the thing, and even in the title of the CBC. Yeah. Was it the title of the article? Yeah. Yeah, that's in the title of the academic article, too. And you'll link it in the... And in the CBC story,
Historical Injustices' Modern Impact
00:32:51
Speaker
too. Yeah. And so, I mean, what would you call this, right? Like, it's not traditional human chattel slavery, but it is... It's slavery.
00:33:01
Speaker
You know, it's like you know in prisons like when When prison workers do work, it's not like they don't really have much of a choice like they're kind of pressured into it Yes, they are forced. It's forced labor. I mean, what's the difference between forced labor and slavery, right? Like a lot of the articles a lot of the like media coverage that you do see of this Yeah sees it or tries to frame it as forced labor. Yeah, but again, what is forced labor? How is forced labor different from slavery?
00:33:26
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. In a lot of ways, it's continuing the legacy of the makeup of whoever was slaves back in that time, like black people, Aboriginal people, they make up a huge amount of our prison population. The black incarceration rate has gone up a ridiculous amount in the last 10 years, for example. What I'm curious about is who are the people and who are the families and businesses who benefited from this?
00:33:52
Speaker
Are they still around? Probably. They probably still have a lot of their wealth. We should take it. This is where you come in. I would pay you a little bit of money to go out and write this story, but what is CBC doing on this? What is the wider world?
00:34:07
Speaker
And who are the bureaucrats who put this into motion, right? I also want to hear the stories of the indigenous folks who are still alive. Like this is living memory. This is the 70s, 80s. You know, like we talk about the 60s scoop for residential schools as if it's this long ago history. The last residential school, I think, closed in 1996. This forced labor program, I think, was running until the 80s until they eventually transitioned to, I think, bringing in workers from like Central America or Mexico. Yeah, child apprehensions are still happening.
00:34:34
Speaker
Like the youth incarceration rate rate for like that community in Saskatchewan, I think is over 90%. It's still going on.
00:34:42
Speaker
So like that's the thing that I've dug into. I mean, it's not that it's not, people don't know about it, but it is the like, it's the discourse, right? It's not what we're talking about. And you have a remarkable ability to kind of drag these, to drag these, you're trying to downplay it, but you do, to drag these kind of historical facts into the daylight of modern times and to actually talk about them and reckon with them, right? And Ellie, how do we reckon,
00:35:09
Speaker
with this. Yeah, I think the main thing is like putting value into this research. Like I'm sure there's like, you know, descendants of people who worked on those farms, who would probably love to do this type of work. But I think it's not seen as like, viable, or like relevant history to Canada. So I think investing in that is huge. It's like paying researchers to do
Need for Historical Research on Racial Injustices
00:35:29
Speaker
that type of work.
00:35:29
Speaker
but also sharing it in a way that makes it real for people too. Like I'm just a random guy with a Twitter account, so when it comes to like some of the Black History stuff I come across, all I really do is just like post it online and it gets traction. So it shows that people are interested in this. So in terms of what we can do, I think it's just understanding that, you know, I think a common theme in this episode is that this is Canada.
00:35:53
Speaker
I mean, if you want to do work on the story, if someone out there wants to do work on the story, like Progress Alberta does want to transition into a media platform. And this is the type of work that we would like to do and we would like to fund and we would like to have people go out and again, talk to those indigenous people who were forced to go through this. Talk to the sugar beet farmers who did profit from this essential slave labor.
00:36:13
Speaker
Yeah, and like we just don't even have the frame of sugar beet as the like slave crop of the prairies Right. Like that's just we just that's not in our vocabulary. It's not in our brain. It's not in our discourse Yeah, but I don't think you can frame sugar beets as like anything but right. Yeah, you know as cotton was to the United States South yeah, like like you're relatively like innocent thing on first glance, but Yeah, a long terrible history
00:36:40
Speaker
Well, that's it for, I think, this cheery episode of Canada's Secret Races Past. Yeah. Smash that like button. Yeah, smash that like button. Hit subscribe. Bashir, how can people find you online? Just Twitter, at Bashir Muhammad. Yeah. And if people want to get a hold of you, you have a website or something, too. Yeah. I also have a blog, BashirMuhammad.com, where I write about stuff like the race riot.
00:37:05
Speaker
Again, yes, smash that like button. If you did like this podcast, if you do want more of this type of content, please share it. I mean, we post our stories to theprogressreport.ca after every episode. Share that page with your friends, your family, people who you think need to know about it. Leaving a review is actually really helpful when it comes to just the algorithms and what have you.
00:37:28
Speaker
And even just like commenting on the way when it's posted on social like any type of interaction is actually good. If you like this podcast and you want to support what we do, thank you. You can go to theprogressreport.ca slash patrons, put in your credit card and contribute. We would really appreciate it. Also, if you have any notes, thoughts, comments, things you think I need to hear about,
00:37:53
Speaker
I'm on Twitter at Duncan Kinney, and you can reach me by email at DuncanK at ProgressAlberta.ca. Thanks so much to Cosmic Family Communist for the amazing theme, thanks for listening, and goodbye.