Occupied Canada: A Young White Man Discovers His Unsuspected Past

J.R. Miller is a history professor at the University of Saskatchewan and
author of Skyscrapers Hide in the Heavens: A History of Indian-White
Relations in Canada.

For Canadians who still are uncomfortable when they think about Oka or
Elijah Harper’s stand against the Meech Lake Accord, this is not a
book to make them feel good. It is an angry blast that is half personal
memoir, half historical revision. Co-written by Calihoo (born Royer) and
journalist Hunter, it is too hard-hitting to be a pleasant read.

Calihoo was 10 when the death of the grandmother with whom he lived set
him on the path that led to his natural father and his ethnic roots: the
Indian Calihoo family that lived on the Michel reserve near Edmonton.
Young Calihoo learned to love the poverty-stricken reserve and acquired
a sense of belonging he had never known elsewhere. Unfortunately, this
personal discovery occurred just as the band and its reserve disappeared
in a process of group enfranchisement, or voluntary surrender of Indian
status and reserve land. For Calihoo and the band the effects were
traumatic. He fell into a downward spiral of urban despair that ended in
a lengthy prison term. In penitentiary Calihoo found a sense of pride in
his racial past and devoted considerable time to relearning Canadian
history from the Native point of view. That historical view—recited in
considerable detail in the book—may make some non-Natives as
uncomfortable as it made the young inmate angry and determined.

Since his release from prison at age 25, Calihoo has followed several
careers and accomplished a number of feats: a university degree,
political activism, an influential position in the Department of Indian
Affairs, and a variety of important jobs with Native groups. In the
spring of 1990 he gave up waged employment to work on forcing the
federal government to restore the reserve that his band had surrendered.
The events of the summer of 1990 merely confirmed what he had
experienced on an individual level: the First Nations were oppressed by
the non-Natives who “occupied Canada.”

Half autobiography, half history from the victim’s point of view,
this book is a thought-provoking and disturbing work. Some of its
history is one-sided and extreme, some of its claims simply inaccurate.
But there can be no mistaking the honest anger that infuses both the
memoir and history portions of the book. Occupied Canada will not leave
readers feeling good about their country and its history. Nor should it.