The 150th anniversary of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) came and went on May 23rd. Although Niagara Falls was lit up by night in spectacular crimson, celebrations were generally subdued and the official statement of Marco Mendicino, federal Minister of Public Safety, said Canada’s national police force was “reflecting on its past with humility” and “acknowledging that the RCMP has played a role in some of Canada’s most difficult and dark moments.” Not your average gusher of praise, to be sure. In a country whose government, academia, news media, social activists and Indigenous organizations are pushing a narrative that their nation’s treatment of Indigenous people has amounted to “genocide,” it seems the top law enforcement organization is being forced to share the blame.
In fact, the historical record is clear that for much of Canada’s history, the RCMP was among the best friend Canada’s Indigenous people had. In at least one instance, its predecessor organization saved one of Canada’s largest groups of Indigenous tribes from extinction: the Blackfoot.
Before Canada even became a country, and before the future Prairie provinces were settled by whites, the unquenchable thirst for alcohol that had grown among the Blackfoot of southern Alberta had become so strong that some were found frozen to death in the snow following a binge of heavy drinking. The problem worsened after an outbreak of smallpox in 1870, with some selling all that they had to obtain alcohol, and outbreaks of violence and murder becoming more common. It became so bad that the proud warrior nation began to separate into small groups, afraid to cross paths.
That’s the way Irish-born Father Constantine Scollen described the Blackfoot in a letter to Alexander Morris, Lieutenant-Governor of the recently created North-West Territories, in September 1876. “It was painful to me to see the state of poverty to which they had been reduced,” Father Scollen wrote. “Now they were clothed in rags, without horses and without guns.”
This was in stark contrast to the state of the Blackfoot when Scollen first started living among them in 1861. “Formerly they had been the most opulent Indians in the country,” he wrote. “They were then a proud, haughty, numerous people (perhaps 10,000 on the British side of the line) having a regular politico-religious organization.” In the blunt language of the day, Scollen also noted the Blackfoot people’s “thirst for blood” and other “passions.”
Modern-day confirmation of how well off some of the Blackfoot had been comes in a booklet published in 2008 by the Blood Tribe (one of the three main members of the Blackfoot Confederacy) describing Chief Peeniquim (Seen From Afar) as being rich enough to have 10 wives, 100 horses and a huge lodge made with 30 buffalo skins. Two horses were needed to move his lodge from place to place.
In his letter to Morris – who negotiated four of the seven treaties the new Dominion of Canada entered into between 1871 and 1877 with the Ojibway, Cree, Blackfoot and other tribes living between Thunder Bay and the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains – Scollen attributed the Blackfoot’s fallen state to the devastating impact of smallpox and to alcohol. “The fiery water flowed more freely, if I may use the metaphor, as the streams running from the Rocky Mountains, and hundreds of the poor Indians fell victim to the white man’s craving for money, some poisoned, some frozen to death whilst in a state of intoxication, and many shot down by American bullets,” he wrote.
The “fiery water” was not part of a diabolical plot by the fledgling Canadian government to commit genocide upon the Indigenous peoples of the Prairies. It came from the American side of the 49th parallel, specifically from the rapidly developing chain of towns along the Missouri River running through northern Montana and North Dakota – places like Fort Benton and Great Falls.
Read the full op-ed at C2CJournal.ca.
