Four Horses

Charlie Angus recording Four Horses in the Qu'Appelle Valley

Charlie Angus

MP, Timmins-James Bay

I thought I knew Canadian history.

The stories of the National Dream
and the Medicine Line may have been dull compared to the myths of the
American "wild" west but they spoke of a nation founded on compromise
and good governance.

However, as I stood with guitar in hand on the
grasslands of the Qu'Appelle Valley I saw my country in a way I had
never imagined. Not so long ago on these picturesque fields, Aboriginal
children were suffering death rates that were higher than in any western
nation until the dark days of the Warsaw Ghetto. And the response from
the government of the day to this tragedy was anything but fair.



I came to the Qu'Appelle Valley for the filming of the video "Four
Horses." It is a musical video project intended to shed light on this
dark history. The project was inspired by James Daschuk's harrowing new
book Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation and the Loss of Aboriginal Life. 
Daschuk's work is grounded in years of academic research but his
analysis of how John A. MacDonald used starvation as a deliberate policy
to break the Tribes of the west is stirring discussion across the
country.







Writing the song "Four Horses" was my way of being part of the
discussion. The metaphoric horses of the Apocalypse -- disease, war,
famine and death -- touched a chord with Daschuk and publisher
University of Regina Press. We began collaborating on the video to
reintroduce this history to a new generation.





This is the story of those four horses.



The First Horse

To Fort Qu'Appelle came a Dapple Grey

As the children coughed blood in the autumn rain.

They broke the treaty when the buffalo failed

And fenced the land for the CP rail.





Daschuk takes us back to the brutal winter of 1878 when Ottawa began
receiving reports of the starving Cree, Assiniboine, Okanese and
Blackfoot begging for food and dying in front of government forts. The
collapse of the buffalo economy was a catastrophe that had been expected
for some time. In fact, when Treaty 6 was signed two years earlier, the
government made guarantees of food and medicine to help transition the
people if hunger hit the plains. But as the winter wore on, MacDonald
reneged on the Treaty commitments.











In a notorious House of Commons debate, he bragged that the government
would withhold food "until the Indians were on the verge of starvation,
to reduce the expense." Hunger became a convenient tool for forcing the
First Nation people onto marginal reserve lands to secure the
development of both the CPR and immigrant farm settlement.





The Second Horse

I saw a black horse at Cut Knife Creek

But the Great Poundmaker was a man of peace

He spared the soldiers true to his word

So they hung the braves at Fort Battleford.





The loss of the buffalo reduced the Plains tribes to destitution.
When the starving Cree and Blackfoot went to Fort Battleford to seek
food from the Indian Agent the government responded with soldiers,
cannons and gatling guns.



The Cree had not come to fight. They wanted food for their families.
However, when the troopers attempted to move against the hungry people
they found themselves overexposed and facing a defeat that would have
been larger than the Little Big Horn. Any American can tell you the
story of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull but how many Canadians know the
story of the great leader Poundmaker? He ordered the Braves to allow the
soldiers to go leave unharmed in order to prevent bloodshed.



In response, the federal government "hunted to death" the Cree and
Assiniboine braves. A number were publicly executed at Fort Battleford
in the largest mass hanging in Canadian history. MacDonald forced the
famine-struck families to witness the hanging in order to "convince the
Red Man that the White Man rules."





The Third Horse

The third horse danced for the Great White Chief.

Hunger's a lesson that's so easy to teach.

To kill a warrior you need a gun in hand

But to kill a people you need a bureaucrat man.





One of the most disturbing aspects of Clearing the Plains is how the
famine became an institutionalized tool used by Indian Affairs used to
further degrade the people forced onto reserves. Officials who tried to
improve conditions were often fired or overlooked for advancement. For
example, the government removed Dr. John Haggerty who is credited with
stopping a smallpox epidemic. The government saw his efforts as a waste
of money. Instead, the government promoted venal Indian Agents who used
the withholding of food and forced sexual favours to lord over destitute
communities. Thus was born the bureaucratization of misery that became
the hallmark of Indian Affairs throughout much of the 20th century.





The Fourth Horse

The pale horse waits at the mission school.

Progress they say can be so cruel.

But the spirit lives on across the Great North Plains

As the people find their voice again.





The Pale horse is the symbol of death. And nowhere did death take a
bigger toll than among the children forced into mission schools where
the tuberculosis rates were appalling.



But the Four Horses also teaches us something else -- the
extraordinary resilience and determination of First Nation people.
Despite a century of substandard education, health care and housing,
they have not been eradicated or assimilated. In fact, they are now
reclaiming their rightful place in Canada. 



SOURCE:  Huffington Post, Dec. 9