Back in July, the governing Liberals decided to quietly announce they were cutting funding to Indigenous searches for unmarked children’s graves around residential schools.
Indigenous communities were initially offered up to $3 million per year to help defray the costs of identification.
However, the federal government chose to cap those funds — in the absence of any consultations with Indigenous leaders — at $500,000. Thankfully, the Trudeau government reversed course in August and restored the original funding allotment of $3 million.
It is instructive to note that Ottawa has constitutional competence for — and thus a fiduciary responsibility to — Indigenous Peoples in Canada.
All of this got me thinking about one of the most enduring features of Indigenous/non-Indigenous relations in Canada — namely, the federal government’s obsession with pinching pennies when it comes to our Indigenous communities.
DELIBERATE FRAMEWORK
One of the critical areas of investigation around this topic is fully understanding its key drivers.
Why would monetary considerations be top of mind for colonial and Canadian governments for hundreds of years? What should we infer from that fixation with dollars and cents?
Significantly, I’m not talking about budget constraints, lower reserve costs, special circumstances or an increase in wealthier Indigenous communities.
I’m suggesting there has been a deliberate and ongoing mindset in Ottawa that starts with this premise: How do we find ways to cut funding for Indigenous Peoples?
The whole point of
colonial and Canadian government policies toward Indigenous Peoples was
to assimilate them and, if that didn’t work, to eradicate them outright. (kill off)
That way, the federal government’s “honour of the Crown” and its fiduciary commitment would come to a screeching halt. Crudely put, the costs associated with “Indian status” would no longer be necessary.
SEVERING BONDS
Residential schools in Canada were intended, among other things, to sever the bond between Indigenous children and their parents and reserve community. As they assimilated into white society, this would eventually lead to fewer First Nations people on the government’s payrolls.
The schools (many were of poor construction and deadly firetraps) were a case study in cost-cutting: Indigenous children constantly complained of being hungry and cold and often went without medications. Even when children died at these schools, the government refused to pay the costs of returning them to their Indigenous families.
Similarly, the horrible “Sixties Scoop” was a continuation of this same line of thinking: force Indigenous kids into foster care and foreign adoption to reduce costs over time.
The federal government moved in the late 1950s with the express intention of saving money by turning the care and welfare of Indigenous children over to provincial child protection services.
With respect to the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, the Trudeau Liberals have been excruciatingly slow in implementing many of the final report’s 231 “calls for justice.”
Only five per cent or so of the government’s promise to spend $724 million on supporting Indigenous women and girls with new shelters and transitional housing has been spent.
From the advent of colonial governments in Canada in the mid-1700s, each one has sought to reduce expenditures for Indigenous Peoples. Officials in the old Department of Indian Affairs — long before its current iteration as the Department of Crown Indigenous Relations — were always crunching the actuarial numbers to identify when payments to Indigenous communities would finally end.
Don’t forget the cost-savings sought through violating solemn treaties, withholding annuity and land dispossession payments, building low-budget “Indian hospitals” and even denying benefits for returning Indigenous soldiers from the world wars.
Much of the cutting of Indigenous monies is consistent with a colonial mindset or project that has devalued, dehumanized and degraded Indigenous Peoples from the very beginning.
The racist rationale was simple: they were only going to die off anyway, they would forever be ””uncivilized,” pagan “savages,” they would never be smart enough to know what to do with the land and financial resources, and they would always be expendable, largely invisible and, most assuredly worthless.
I’m sure that I’ve missed many other examples of damaging government cost-cutting. But one common theme that is painfully obvious is that Canadian governments have historically sought to short-change Indigenous Peoples.
In the end, the First Peoples just weren’t worth spending government money on. You have to conclude that the real power brokers of this country never really accorded them much value from the outset.
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