{"id":664,"date":"2016-02-12T01:05:22","date_gmt":"2016-02-12T06:05:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/opentextbc.ca\/postconfederation2e\/chapter\/11-3-natives-by-the-numbers\/"},"modified":"2020-10-06T15:22:56","modified_gmt":"2020-10-06T19:22:56","slug":"11-3-natives-by-the-numbers","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/opentextbc.ca\/postconfederation2e\/chapter\/11-3-natives-by-the-numbers\/","title":{"raw":"11.3 Natives by the Numbers","rendered":"11.3 Natives by the Numbers"},"content":{"raw":"[caption id=\"attachment_663\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"400\"]\"An<\/a> Figure 11.4 This is a strange pastiche from a pre-Photoshop era. What \"The Evening of his Race\" conveys, however, is the belief of many in settler society\u00a0that First Nations' days were numbered.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nIn the 19th century, Karl Marx predicted the withering away of the state, and John A. Macdonald and his contemporaries predicted the withering away of Indigenous peoples.\r\n\r\nMany non-Indigenous people anticipated that it would be a matter of only a few generations until the First Nations of Canada ceased to be. Some Native people would sacrifice their status and be assimilated into the mainstream of Canadian society, but the bulk would simply perish. Viewed in this light, it is necessary to understand the initiatives like the treaties, reserves, and the industrial schools as temporary measures that would not be needed for long. Why invest heavily in an educational system that won\u2019t be necessary in 20 years?\r\n\r\nFrom where did this expectation of a vanishing population arise? Although the mid-19th century saw an improved understanding of infectious diseases, it didn't do much to stop their spread. Germ theory was just beginning to gain a toehold, and the prevention and cure of some illnesses was coming within reach. The Euro-Canadian population would experience enormous benefits from this revolution in medical science, but Indigenous peoples did not. Indeed, the settlers tasked with the guardianship role envisioned by Ottawa were often misguided in their understanding of how health sciences operated. Missionaries in the mid- and late-19th century debated the health advantages of intermarriage between Indigenous peoples and non-Natives. According to one historian, the Moravian Church in Labrador during the 1860s \u201cbegan to sanction intermarriage on the grounds that European blood, with its resistance to Western diseases, might protect the Inuit from extinction.\u201d[footnote]Lynne D. Fitzhugh, The <\/i>Labradorians<\/i>: Voices from the Land of Cain<\/i> (St. John\u2019s, NF: Breakwater, 1999), 250-251.[\/footnote] It certainly didn\u2019t make much difference elsewhere. Exotic diseases were still having a severe impact on Indigenous populations, even where there had been decades of intermarriage. Smallpox was by no means done at the end of the 19th century; as recently as 1862-1863, the last great smallpox epidemic burned through British Columbian Indigenous populations, claiming upwards of 20,000 lives. The Haida, to take one specific case, numbered in excess of 8,400 in 1840 and barely 1,600 in 1881; the Heiltsuk, to take another, were reckoned to total more than 2,000 in 1835 and only 204 in 1890. The loss of access to resources that occurred around the same time on the West Coast and the plains, in particular as settler societies arrived, reduced Indigenous peoples access to traditional foods, and thus poverty\u2019s grip intensified and Aboriginal people became malnourished. This cycle was repeated for much of the next century: vulnerability led to death; deaths led to dispossession; dispossession created greater vulnerability; and so on.\r\n

An Overview<\/h1>\r\nCanadians\u2019 understanding of Indigenous population numbers is somewhat akin to looking through the wrong end of the telescope. Resettlement of the Prairies and British Columbia occurred when native numbers were already slashed. However, historians disagree over the pre-contact demography of Canada. Only a few years ago, scholars spoke with confidence of a probable 100,000 Indigenous individuals in what became Canada, but now moderate estimates suggests that there were three to five times that number in the Pacific Northwest alone. By 1867, however, the total number of First Nations was about 125,000, including roughly 10,000 M\u00e9tis in the West and 2,000 Inuit in the North.\r\n\r\nThese numbers were not stable. Indigenous demographics worsened up until the 1920s. Population numbers bottomed out \u2014 reached their [pb_glossary id=\"1678\"]nadir[\/pb_glossary]\u2014 in most communities sometime between the 1890s and the interwar era, and then began a slow but steady recovery. From 113,724 in 1921, the total more than doubled by 1951 and surpassed half a million in 1971.[footnote]Statistics Canada, Historical Statistics of Canada<\/i>, 2nd ed., ed. F. H. Leacy (Ottawa, ON: Statistics Canada, 1983), A154-184.[\/footnote] The 1996 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples used a more restrictive definition of Aboriginal<\/em> but, even so, it observed population increases of 42% from 1961 to 1971, 57% from 1971 to 1981, and nearly 47% from 1981 to 1991.[footnote]Lance W. Roberts, Rodney A. Clifton, Barry Ferguson, Karen Kampen, and Simon Langlois, eds.\u00a0Recent Social Trends in Canada, 1960-2000\u00a0<\/i>(Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen\u2019s University Press, 2005),\u00a032.[\/footnote]\r\n\r\nThis 20th century turn-around was fuelled by high fertility rates and came in the face of terrible health conditions. Even at the end of the 20th century, by which time the fertility transition saw overall Canadian fertility drop to below 2.1 births per woman (which is to say, below replacement levels), it was comfortably in the 3.0 range on reserves. In the 1960s, the Indigenous crude birth rate stood at 47 per 1,000 population, falling to 28 per 1,000 by 1980, and rebounding a little to 29.5 in 1991.[footnote]Juhee Suwal and Frank Trovato, \u201cCanadian Aboriginal Fertility,\u201d Canadian Studies in Population <\/i>25, no. 1 (1998): 75.[\/footnote] Indigenous fertility rates have resisted global and Canadian trends toward smaller families in part because of socio-economic factors: educational attainment \u2014 for mothers in particular \u2014 is a strong predictor of life-time fertility and, generally, Indigenous females have had fewer opportunities in this respect than non-Indigenous women. Poverty, artificial and racist barriers to secondary education, and cultural disinclinations to stay in school (partly a product of the dismal record of residential schools) contributed to higher fertility throughout the 20th century and into the new millennium.\r\n\r\nHaving more babies, however, is only part of the equation. While there were additions (few of which, incidentally, came from immigration -- unlike in a newcomer society), there were also significant subtractions. Poverty and malnutrition, along with overcrowding on reserves, poor state-provided housing, and cramped living conditions among children in residential schools were ideal circumstances for the spread of [pb_glossary id=\"1680\"]epidemic tuberculosis (TB)[\/pb_glossary]. Well-established within Indigenous communities in the East by 1800, TB spread to the West Coast in the early 19th century, the Plains during the railway boom, the sub-Arctic in the early 20th century, and the Arctic soon thereafter. Mortality rates were at record levels. Tuberculosis is more conventionally known as a disease associated with rapid urbanization, tenement housing, and slums, but its toll in industrializing Europe was surpassed by rural, isolated Aboriginal communities. Fully 700 per 100,000 population died in First Nations communities in the 1930s and 1940s and, even though this ranks as one of the worst rates recorded, it is utterly eclipsed by the 8,000 per 100,000 mortality recorded in residential schools.[footnote]\"TB and Aboriginal People\"<\/a>, Canadian Public Health Association,\u00a0<\/i>accessed February 11, 2016,\u00a0https:\/\/www.cpha.ca\/tb-and-aboriginal-people<\/a>.[\/footnote] By the 1950s, the TB epidemic among Inuit had affected a third of the population, many of whom were sent south for treatment (that included surgical draining of the lungs and the removal of ribs). It was not until advances in antibiotics and specifically the development of streptomycin in the mid-1950s that mortality rates fell among Indigenous peoples (the rest of Canadian society already had experienced enough socio-economic improvements to reduce its mortality rates).\r\n\r\nRemoval and resettlement confounds any effort at a continuous demography of Indigenous peoples. Although the First Nations that signed (\"took\") treaties had the expectation that the Canadians would provide medicine and would exercise a \"guardian\"-like role, the colonial authorities proved incapable of settling on a consistent definition of aboriginal <\/em>and indigenous<\/em>. Repeated efforts on the part of Canada to reduce its obligations produced fluid categories and a shell-and-pea approach to counting people in Indigenous communities. Doing so left Indigenous peoples exposed to health crises and, from the demographer's perspective, continues to vex any understanding of the population history of Indigenous peoples. Status and non-Status categories make matters slippery enough, but M\u00e9tis self-identification compounds things considerably. From a fraction of the total in the pre-WWII period, M\u00e9tis, as a share of the Indigenous total, have leapt to 32%.[footnote]Statistics Canada, Aboriginal Peoples in Canada: First Nations People, Metis and Inuit, National Household Survey, 2011,<\/i> Catalogue no. 99-011-X2011001 (Ottawa: Minister of Industry, 2013): 6.[\/footnote] Changes to the legal definition of Status<\/em> and the reinstatement of Indigenous women and their children as Status Indians beginning in 1985 gave a major boost to Indigenous numbers and demonstrates: a) the arbitrariness of this census category, b) the way it was used by government to give the false impression of declining numbers, and c) a sense of how badly undercounted Indigenous populations may have been in the 100 years after the Indian Act<\/i>.\r\n\r\nOther significant changes include growth in urban Indigenous numbers. Winnipeg\u2019s Indigenous population, to take one example, quadrupled from 1985 to 2010, rising to 10% of the city\u2019s total population.[footnote]Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada, \u201cFact Sheet - Urban Aboriginal Population in Canada,\u201d accessed February 11, 2016, https:\/\/www.aadnc-aandc.gc.ca\/eng\/1100100014298\/1100100014302<\/a>.[\/footnote] In the cities as well as in rural areas, this population continues to be young: roughly one-quarter of the Indigenous population is under 15 years of age, which reflects the high fertility rates that have pulled Indigenous numbers up from the 1920s nadir levels. It also reflects the high rates of morbidity and lower life expectancies of Indigenous people. In 1975 Indigenous males had a projected life expectancy of 59.2 years, whereas Canadian males generally were at 70.3 years. The gap closed significantly by 2000 to 69.5 and 76.0 years respectively, but the distribution of elders is still starkly different: in the non-Indigenous population, individuals over 75 years of age constitute close to 6%, whereas Indigenous elders constitute less than 1% of their population.\r\n

M\u00e9tis Populations<\/h1>\r\nThe significant M\u00e9tis presence in the West was almost overwhelmed after the defeat of the Northwest Rebellion in 1885. Just as the Canadianization of Red River squeezed the M\u00e9tis out of southern Manitoba and into the Saskatchewan River Valleys, the hanging of Riel was followed with further movement to the north and west. The M\u00e9tis diaspora retained roots in what would become the province of Saskatchewan, although greater and greater numbers moved into Alberta. In 1900 Treaty 8 provided land grants to M\u00e9tis in the north, but poverty obliged many to sacrifice those gains to make some ready cash.\r\n\r\nAt this time, the M\u00e9tis occupied an administrative and legal space that was neither as good nor as bad as that of First Nations. They had little in the way of Treaty rights, but they were not as heavily administered as Reserve bands. Racial discrimination was an increasing concern as the category of \"half-breed\" --\u00a0once almost a neutral descriptor --\u00a0became a term of contempt. The ongoing M\u00e9tis relationship with the Catholic Church and allies in Quebec, however, was both fortuitous and a strategy for survival in the emergent Canadian nation. Openness to supporters and reinforcements in fact brought changes to the M\u00e9tis in the 20th century. In prairie communities where the presence of M\u00e9tis francophones and the clergy attracted Qu\u00e9becois settlers, the M\u00e9tis\u2019 Canadien<\/i> <\/i>traditions and French identity became of greater importance; however, in those areas where connections with the Cree were stronger, an Indigenous identity became more apparent. These were only two of several emergent divisions across M\u00e9tis communities in the West. The \"New Nation\" struggled with definitions that made it simultaneously more and less inclusive. Was being \u201cM\u00e9tis\u201d a category into which anyone of mixed ancestry might fit or was it a hybridized culture that was more than the sum of its Plains Native and Franco-Canadien parts?\r\n\r\nBeginning in the 1930s, M\u00e9tis organizations emerged\u00a0and gained traction politically. Although membership inevitably included individuals who had Indian Status, most M\u00e9tis do not. For this reason, many M\u00e9tis have not viewed organizations like the Native Indian Brotherhood bodies as sufficiently representative of M\u00e9tis interests. Nevertheless, inclusion in Section 35 of the Constitution Act<\/i> of 1982 as \u201cAboriginal\u201d peoples with legally entrenched rights has presented an opportunity. There are now more than 400,000 Canadians who identify as M\u00e9tis.\r\n

The Return of the Native<\/h1>\r\nBulked up M\u00e9tis numbers are only part of the current picture. In the 10 years after\u00a01996, the number of Canadians who identify themselves as Aboriginal<\/em> in the census expanded\u00a0from slightly under 800,000 to 1,172,790. What happened after 1996? The changes that Bill C-31 (1985) introduced with respect to Status<\/em> took a while to process, but led inexorably to \"identity mobility.\"[footnote]Lisa Monchalin, The Colonial Problem: An Indigenous Perspective on Crime and Punishment in Canada <\/em>(Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 2016), 8-9.[\/footnote] This was coupled with a growing emphasis on Indigenous community recovery, enthusiasm for reviving languages, and greater public awareness of First Nations issues. Although the law and colonialism had dissuaded Indigenous from claiming this identity in the past, the circumstances had changed. The resumption of the mandatory long-form census in 2016 will likely reveal a continuing growth curve, although possibly less dramatic. The reappearance of Indigenous numbers at the millennium may well have been a one-shot increase, although fertility rates remain outstanding.\r\n
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Key Points<\/h2>\r\n