What Is the Indian "Problem"?: Tutelage and Resistance in Canadian Indian Administration

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.

Noel Dyck, an anthropologist at Simon Fraser University, has written a
valuable overview of the relations between status Indians and the
successive governments that have administered the territory we call
Canada from the 17th century until the 1990s. His study of those
relations persuades him that “Euro-Canadians’ imposition of coercive
tutelage in their management of Indians affairs represents the most
continuous and central element of the Indian ‘problem.’” In other
words, to understand the so-called Indian problem, one has to comprehend
the misguided fashion in which governments have sought to control
Indians and to compel them to adopt values and a way of life similar to
that of the immigrant society.

Dyck makes his case by means of a rapid review of Native/non-Native
relations, concentrating on both the ministrations of Christian
missionaries and the policies of the state, the latter especially from
the 1830s onward. His greatest concentration is on the
post-Confederation era in western Canada, but his treatment carries the
story right up to the 1990s with a careful examination of the federal
government’s initiatives, from the White Paper of 1969 to the failed
Meech Lake Accord. Dyck concludes that Canadians now have two choices:
we can continue the sorry tale of coercive tutelage, perhaps by
“subcontracting the Indian ‘problem’” to the “brown
bureaucrat”; or we can learn from our mistakes and extend to
registered Indian communities genuine autonomy in the form of unfettered
self-government. He contends that selection of the latter option will
require “intelligent and unflagging leadership from federal and
provincial politicians,” but nothing in his account gives the
slightest cause to hope for such a breakthrough on the political level.

As useful as Dyck’s study is, it is not without its problems.
Because it is focused principally on “registered Indians,” it is of
dubious application to the majority of aboriginal peoples in Canada. The
book deals mainly with “western Canada because this is the region with
which I am most familiar,” but it is driven to comment on Jesuit
missionaries in New France, the eruption in 1990 at Oka/Kanesatake, and
the implementation of the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement of
1975 to make its points. The reader is left wondering which peoples and
what parts of the country are covered by the argument. Finally, in both
its 17th-century and post-Confederation sections, it seriously
misunderstands and misrepresents the views and objectives of the
numerous, heterogeneous missionary groups that both evangelized and
served the Native peoples.

Significantly, Dyck’s notes contain no references to primary
denominational sources and few to the considerable secondary literature
on missions. Nonetheless, if these qualifications are kept in mind, this
book can serve as an enlightening, if depressing, introduction to a
study of the baneful influence of Indian policy in Canada.