The greatest speech 4 women in the heart of United Nations.... reminding the global nations of why United Nations was formed on the ashes of the Jewish Holocaust and the League of Nations.... that women matter... girls matter.... reminding the birthplace of humanity- UNITED NATIONS ITSELF... that women and girls are equal..... the greatest speech.... NEVER SHARED GLOBALLY... EXCEPT 2 ONE BILLION RISING... who cried over each and every word... and old women like us... who wear and bear the scars in the good fight of equality and human dignity and basic rights and freedoms and that education 4 each and all is the greatest tool we can give and inspire our global children...

John Baird’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly

macleans.ca

September 30, 2013

Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird addressed the 68th Session of the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 30, 2013 in New York City. Here is a copy of his speech, for the record:

As we gather near Ground Zero, site of the World Trade Center mass murder, I wish first to honour the victims of terrorism:

I honour all victims, everywhere, including those killed and wounded at the Westgate Shopping Mall in Nairobi.

Tragically, we lost two Canadians, including a Canadian diplomat.

There is no more fitting venue to honour the life of Annemarie Desloges and her service than right here, in front of these United Nations.

The crime of terror is an assault on all people.

And, in its wake, the human family is one.

One in pain. One in mourning. One in our resolve that evil will never triumph.

At this moment of grief, the oneness of humankind is the theme of my remarks today.

Allow me to begin with an observation drawn from the Canadian experience.

The Province of Newfoundland and Labrador was the last province to join Canada, but it is the site of the earliest known European settlement in the New World. L’Anse aux Meadows is more than a thousand years old.

We consider the province’s capital city, St. John’s, to be the oldest English settlement in North America, dating back to 1497.

The early Newfoundland settlements are the subject of significant archeological activity. Among the artifacts commonly found is a three-handled drinking mug, known as a “tyg.”

The three handles are designed for sharing. During the 17th century, it was common to share eating and drinking utensils.

Further research reveals the tyg mug is not unique to Canadian and English history. On the contrary, cups with three or more handles are common to many of the world’s cultures. Indeed, nearly three millennia ago, Homer wrote in the Iliad of a multi-handled mug.

The tyg and its many counterparts around the world are tangible reminders not just that eating and drinking are social activities but that, as long as human beings have inhabited this planet, sustenance and the necessaries of life have been community endeavours.

Human beings share from necessity. We cooperate to survive. We form communities because that is our natural state.

As Cicero observed, “We were born to unite with our fellow men, and to join in community with the human race.”

Animated by the same spirit of community, the Charter of the United Nations declares that our goals include “to live together,” to be “neighbours,” and “to unite.”

The very first words of the UN Charter make clear that this organization is a body of, by and for human beings.

It begins, “We the peoples of the United Nations.”

Not “We the countries.”

Or “We the governments.”

Not “We the political leaders.”

“We the peoples.”

An important reminder of why and on whose behalf we are here.

Here at the UN, Canada targets its efforts on securing tangible results for the human family. It is much more important to consider what the United Nations is achieving than how the UN arranges its affairs.

Canada’s government doesn’t seek to have our values or our principled foreign policy validated by elites who would rather “go along to get along.”

The billions who are hungry, or lack access to clean water, or are displaced or cannot read and write do not care how many members sit on the Security Council. But they do need to know that their brothers and sisters in humankind will walk with them through the darkness.

Peace, prosperity and freedom—these are indeed the conditions that have been sought by human communities from the beginning of recorded time: To live in peace. To live in prosperity. To live in freedom.

Of these priorities, peace is the foremost objective of the United Nations.

It is no surprise that the UN Charter mentions the word “peace” four dozen times.

Sadly, “peace” the word is easier to locate than “peace” the condition.

Since the moment this organization was created, not a day has passed without the human family being pained by war somewhere on this planet.

Almost always, the suffering is felt by the most vulnerable among us.

And, far too often, this involves women and violence.

In the context of war, rape and serious sexual violence are war crimes. I have met girls who were victims of this very war crime, and their stories are horrific. The war criminals involved must be identified, pursued, prosecuted and punished.

Earlier this year, Canada and other G-8 nations agreed to treat sexual violence in conflict as a violation of the Geneva Conventions. I applaud the United Kingdom and U.K. Foreign Secretary William Hague for their work in this area. But he would be the first to acknowledge that the fight to eradicate this crime has been led by women, including Special Representative [of the UN Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict] Zainab Hawa Bangura.

Every year, millions of girls, some as young as age nine, are forced into marriage.

Since I began these remarks, 100 children have been forced into marriage; 1,100 per hour; more than 26,000 per day.

The effects of early forced marriage are documented and beyond dispute. Early forced marriage harms health, halts education, destroys opportunity and enslaves young women in a life of poverty.

A young woman once recounted her wedding date. She remembered, “It was the day I left school.”

No country is immune from this scourge.

This is a global problem. A problem for humanity.

Forced marriage is rape; it is violence against women. Early forced marriage is child rape, violence against young girls. The practice is abhorrent and indefensible.

We condemn it.

Even though some might prefer that we kept quiet.

The discomfort of the audience is of small concern, particularly in the context of a crime that calls to heaven for justice.

If this body does not act to protect young girls, who will?

Another way to protect the vulnerable is to improve the health of mothers, newborns and children so that we can reduce the number of deaths.

I am proud that our Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, has led a global effort—the Muskoka Initiative—to reduce maternal and infant mortality and to improve the health of mothers and children in the world’s poorest countries. It’s about half of the world’s population; all of its potential.

While these efforts—to eradicate sexual violence in conflict, to eliminate early forced marriage and to improve maternal and newborn health—are essential, we must do more than react to crises.

We must invest in opportunities for women and girls.

We must ensure that women participate fully in all parts of our society and in all the countries of these United Nations. This will help us build a stronger, more secure, more prosperous and more peaceful world.

It is in every nation’s self-interest to ensure every young girl realizes her full potential.

And it is from the perspective of the human family, one family, that we must address other threats to peace and security.

Among the most urgent crises remains the violence in Syria.

Canada’s position is clear. We support the Syrian people, the innocent people caught up in this senseless violence, and those who work on their behalf. We will never support a brutal and illegitimate regime that has unleashed weapons of mass destruction on its own people. Nor will we tolerate extremism and terrorism as alternatives to Assad’s tyranny.

The people of Canada have been generous in helping those most in need.

When success is achieved, it is important to recognize it. The near-impossible work of the UN World Food Programme must be applauded, and Canada has responded by being the second-largest single-country donor in the world. Their work in Syria is paramount and has not gone unnoticed. I also commend the work of the UNHCR [United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees] in providing assistance to the refugees fleeing this terrible conflict, and the generosity of Syria’s neighbours in providing safe haven.

Canada joins the entire world in seeking a political resolution to the conflict. Canada supports a peaceful, democratic and pluralistic Syria that protects the rights of all communities.

But let us not confuse a peaceful, negotiated outcome with equivocation or moral uncertainty. There can be no moral ambiguity about the use of chemical weapons on civilians.

Today, September 30, is a dark reminder of the price of accommodation with evil.

It is the 75th anniversary of the Munich Agreement, by which Czechoslovakia’s freedom was sacrificed to appease the Nazi regime. The appeasers claimed they had won “peace for our time.” In fact, their abandoning of principle was a calamity for the world.

Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor who was imprisoned in Auschwitz, has been even more blunt:

“Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented. Sometimes we must interfere. When human lives are endangered, when human dignity is in jeopardy, national borders and sensitivities become irrelevant.”

Just as we are not neutral or silent on the crimes being committed against the Syrian people, neither is Canada neutral on Israel’s right to exist and to defend itself.

There can be no bargaining over Israel’s existence. While dialogue is a virtue, there can be no virtuous discussion with anyone wedded to Israel’s destruction.

Today, the Jewish people are masters of their own fate, like other nations, in their own sovereign Jewish state. Like other nations, Israel has the right to defend itself, by itself.

Canada fundamentally believes peace is achievable. That Palestinians and Israelis and their neighbours can live side by side, in peace and security.

We, like many nations, wish to see a prosperous Palestinian state living in peace with its Jewish neighbour.

That’s why, although we sometimes have fundamental differences on how statehood is achieved, Canada is providing significant assistance to build the institutions that are vital to the establishment of a viable future state. In the West Bank, Canada is contributing greatly to economic, security and justice initiatives.

Recent developments in negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority are encouraging. I salute the leadership and courage of the Israeli Prime Minister [Benjamin Netanyahu] and the Palestinian Authority’s President [Mahmoud Abbas].

I commend U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry for his leadership in this area, and we must all commit ourselves to this cause, united by the prospect of peace.

I look forward to the day when Israeli and Palestinian children can live side by side in peace and security in a Jewish and a Palestinian state.

Ladies and gentlemen, dialogue is important, yes. But our dialogue must be a prelude to action. And action must mean achieving results and making a difference.

Take the recent statements coming from the regime in Iran.

Some observers see encouraging signs, but sound bites do not remove threats to global security. Kind words, a smile and a charm offensive are not a substitute for real action.

We will welcome and acknowledge reform, if and when it comes.

By this we will know when genuine reform has occurred: Has there been real, measurable, material improvement in the lives of the Iranian people and in the security of the world?

Not yet!

We will judge the regime on the basis of its action and results.

The P5+1 [the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany] has had five rounds of formal negotiations with Iran in the past two years. While everyone says the meetings have been “productive,” the fact remains we haven’t seen any change in Iran’s actions.

Next year, nothing would make Canada more pleased than to see a change in Iran’s nuclear ambitions. A change to its terrible human rights record. And an end to Iran’s material support for terrorism.

Now is the time for the global community to maintain tough sanctions against Iran in order that it take a different path on its nuclear program.

The Iranian people want peace. And the Iranian people are suffering great hardship because of their government.

Canada wants the Iranian people to be able to access a life of freedom and prosperity for themselves.

And how do we as a human family achieve and maintain prosperity?

Through free trade among open societies operating under transparent, consistent and fair rules.

Canada continues to diversify its markets because it is a trading nation.

We are aggressively pursuing free trade agreements with other nations.

Bounded by three oceans, with the second-largest land mass in the world, Canada literally is open to the world.

We are both deepening existing economic relationships and building new ones. Whether with China, now Canada’s second-largest trading partner, or the ASEAN [Association of Southeast Asian Nations] countries, where Canadian trade and investment ties are dramatically increasing, or the Pacific Alliance, which provides new and exciting opportunities, or the European Union, where we are negotiating a comprehensive free trade agreement, Canada and Canadians are supporting market liberalization. In the process, ordinary lives are becoming enriched, and entire societies are becoming stronger.

But the quest for prosperity must never come at the expense of our commitment to freedom.

Prosperity is also inextricably linked to peace. After all, those who lack security usually lack the means to provide for themselves and their families.

With economic opportunity, a fruit vendor in Tunisia may not have felt compelled to end his life seeking the dignity to provide for his family.

A young man in Afghanistan may never feel compelled to join terrorist elements simply to raise his children—to ensure their lives are better than the one he lived.

I will always remember the seven-year old girl I met at Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan. Her parents had made the difficult decision to leave their home and to seek refuge in another country—braving hardship because they were motivated, like all parents, by the desire to keep their family safe.

I asked how she was doing. With tears in her eyes, she said, simply, “I don’t like it here. I want to go home.”

Heart-wrenching.

And millions of people are in the same tragic position—millions of members of the human family who cannot even begin to contemplate prosperity until a more basic need, their need for security, is addressed.

The global family will never achieve the prosperity that is our full potential unless we address the peace and security concerns that shackle human opportunity.

Everyone has an interest in contributing to the solution, because peace and security ultimately ensure the freedom of the individual. That’s why we need the people of these United Nations gathered here to promote this freedom.

For the people of these United Nations, no minority is more sacred than the individual, and the freedom of the individual.

Freedom from oppression. Freedom from discrimination. Freedom to worship, to think, to speak, to love, to believe. Freedom to be.

Human freedom can be exercised, and sadly limited, in countless ways.

Religious persecution continues in too many places.

Since we gathered here last year, the world has witnessed:

· bombings of mosques in Iraq and Pakistan and a Catholic church in Tanzania;

· attacks against Hindu, Buddhist and Muslim places of worship in Burma and Bangladesh;

· the bloody persecution of Christians in Syria;

· attacks on Coptic Christian churches in Egypt;

· attacks on a mosque and on a Catholic church in Sri Lanka;

· the detention of Sri Lankan Muslim leader Azad Sally;

· the murders of Catholic worshippers in Nigeria; and

· the Iranian regime’s ongoing persecution of the Bahá’í.

Canada just this year opened an Office of Religious Freedom. Its mandate: to promote freedom of religion and belief as a foreign policy priority. To combat the enslavement into fear, by those who seek to intimidate and undermine the right to worship freely. In peace—and in harmony.

We reject the pernicious notion that human dignity can be sliced up, compartmentalized or compromised.

In a pluralistic society it is impossible to protect some human rights and freedoms while infringing others.

All freedoms are rooted in the inherent dignity of human beings.

Whether the issue is religious freedom, sexual freedom, political freedom or any other freedom, some people ask:

What business is it of ours? What interest do we have in events outside our borders?

Our business is a shared humanity. Our interest is the dignity of humankind.

Many assaults on human dignity have common roots. I refer to neo-fascist ideology, masquerading in different forms, and the threat that it poses to individual freedom.

I spoke earlier of the anniversary of the Munich Agreement.

What the signatories claimed as a triumph of practical politics was in fact a craven capitulation that betrayed human dignity and bankrupted the peace it purported to secure.

It was wrong then to underestimate and to appease fascism, just as it is now to underestimate its modern incarnation.

Extremism that subjugates human dignity and crushes individual freedom beneath rigid ideology must be opposed for what it is.

One year ago today, the world lost the great Somali poet known as Gaarriye. Though his pen has been silenced, the inspiring lyrics remain.

It was Gaarriye who wrote:

“And tell them this: our purpose is peace; our password ‘Freedom’;
Our aim, equality;
Our way the way of light.”

In other words: Peace. Prosperity. Freedom. Three universal human priorities.

Like three handles of a mug from which we all drink. Three values that all humanity shares.

As I close, I cannot help but reflect on three young girls, and my heart breaks for them:

The child bride: “It was the day I left school.”

The girl who was a victim of rape and sexual violence.

The refugee: “I want to go home.”

We are not here to achieve results for governments or political leaders.

We are here to protect and defend these three girls and seven billion other members of the human family. Let us remember this as we embark on discussions to shape a new global agenda, focusing on those most in need.

I am confident that everyone here feels the overwhelming honour and privilege it is to serve our people. It is not without great challenge and responsibility. But we all must stand up and deliver on this unique mandate for the people, for it is the people who expect nothing less.

Thank you.

http://www.macleans.ca/general/john-bairds-speech-to-the-united-nations-general-assembly/

#1BRising

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One Billion Rising Revolution - Canada 2015

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6o7Z4j3ggI4

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CANADA MILITARY NEWS: Nova Scotia Domestic Violence Shelters/BULLYCIDE-BULLY HELP SITES/Homeless Shelters http://nova0000scotia.blogspot.ca/2013/12/canada-military-news-nova-scotia.html

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AND HERE IT IS.... THE BEST WRITTEN ABUSE/MURDER OF WOMEN OF THE STREETS WE WILL EVER HAVE..... ONE BILLION RISING- no more excuses

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How do you stop violence against aboriginal women? Start with the hundred other terrible things that typically happen before the worst begins

Breaking the cycle

By Jonathan Kay

Heather Bottomley grew up in New Westminster, B.C., where she played on a little league baseball team and performed Blues Brothers’ sketches to amuse her friends. After she and a friend dropped out of school in Grade 9, she began dating a boy who introduced her to drugs, sex and motherhood.

Eventually, she moved to the DTES, where she became pregnant with a second child. Her DNA, too, was found on Robert Pickton’s farm.

Georgina Papin was born in Edmonton, the fourth of nine children of seven different fathers. She ended up in foster care, was abused, ran away, and got work as an underage prostitute. She had several children, but lost them to the state after she became addicted to drugs. Eventually, she moved to DTES. Her remains were found on the Pickton farm.

Sereena Abotsway was born in Vancouver, afflicted by both fetal alcohol spectrum disorder from birth and sexual abuse in her home. At the age of four, she and her half-siblings were adopted.

Workers sift through debris during major excavation work at Robert Pickton’s farm in Port Coquitlam, B.C., Oct. 2, 2002. (Ian Lindsay / Postmedia News)

In her teens, she lived in a group home where she started using drugs and experimenting with petty crime. In Vancouver, she attended church and drug-treatment programs. The woman was last seen on Aug. 1, 2001. Her remains were found on the Pickton farm.

The biographical information for these four women is drawn from Wally Oppal’s 2012 report on the police response to the 67 women who went missing from the DTES in 1997-2002.

It’s a catalogue of horrors, but also a valuable document to consider in the context of the current focus on missing and murdered indigenous women. Pickton killed white women and Aboriginal women alike: His evil didn’t discriminate.

Two of the four women described above self-identified as First Nations (Ms. Murdock, a member of the Takla Lake Band, and Ms. Papin, a member of the Enoch Cree Nation). The other two did not.

St. Michael’s Residential School, Alert Bay, B.C., circa 2006. (Hans Tammemagi Photo)

Reading Mr. Oppal’s report, you come to understand, no matter what their race, all the stories shared many of the same heart-wrenching elements: child sex abuse, early drug addiction, untreated mental health problems, violent boyfriends and early pregnancies, followed by teenage flight from a small community to urban predatory landscapes populated by drug dealers and pimps who know how to exploit wounded, vulnerable souls with no local support network.

Before a man strangles, or shoots, or stabs a woman in a cheap hotel room or a dried-up river bed, a hundred other terrible things typically happen to that woman to put her in that vulnerable, isolated position.

Before a man strangles, or shoots, or stabs a woman in a cheap hotel room or a dried-up river bed, a hundred other terrible things typically happen

— Jonathan Kay

For policy-makers, the lesson is clear, no matter whether victims are Aboriginal or not: You can’t just go after the act of murder. You have to go after those hundred other terrible things.

Given the massive over-representation of Aboriginals among the Canadian women (and men) who are murdered every year, it is natural to focus on their race as if that were a causative factor leading to their deaths. But most of these homicides aren’t hate crimes per se: Typically, men such as Pickton are equal-opportunity thugs, looking for the most desperate prey they can catch. The reason they’re killing so many Aboriginals is Aboriginal identity correlates with desperation.

At the root of this is the reserve system, which can trap young Aboriginal girls and women in tiny, impoverished, violent patriarchal communities. When they finally escape, they often end up in large, completely alien urban environments hundreds of kilometres away, with no role models and no family support network. Many of these new arrivals have spent their entire lives in communities composed of just a few dozen families. They come to a city of millions with no job skills, no academic credentials, no money, and no idea how to navigate a place full of unscrupulous strangers.

A second reason — and this one goes to the domestic abuse that drives women out of native communities in the first place — is that the residential school system stripped many native communities of their collective knowledge of parenting and creating healthy families.

The sister of Marlene Abigosis, one of the women memorialized in Mr. Oppal’s report, contributed a poignant passage on this theme:

My father, Marlene’s father, suffered traumatic experiences in the residential school system, then passed on the violence and abuse of every sort to his children

— Marlene Abigosis’s sister

“Half my brothers and sisters have passed away, and all have died from alcohol and/or drug addiction, without ever resolving the pain, anger, hate, shame and loss of a childhood that they were put through while going to school. If it wasn’t the school, it was from parents who were themselves former students of the residential school system.

“My father, Marlene’s father, suffered traumatic experiences in the residential school system, then passed on the violence and abuse of every sort to his children, including to our mother. Therefore the residential school system, the Catholic Church and our father, who was a former student, took something from us children that severely compromised our adulthood, causing the deaths of half my brothers and sisters. And that something was our childhood.”

These are not easy stories to read. But the teenagers Ms. Boesveld has interviewed at Winnipeg’s Maples Collegiate Institute show there is another narrative out there, one that provides more reason for hope.

“At least half know someone in their direct family who has been sexually assaulted,” Ms. Boesveld reports. And just about all of them have day-to-day stories about creepy men following them around town, leering, propositioning, stereotyping them in predatory ways. Yet they also have something their forebears didn’t have: an electronic support network that extends across the country.

Twenty years ago, what happened to women on the DTES largely stayed on the DTES. In the social-media age, that’s changed. As Aboriginal girls, the odds still remain stacked against them. But at least they have a better idea what threats to expect and how to counter them.

Chesney, 17, for instance, tells Ms. Boesveld she wants to teach “newcomers from reserves about when and where it’s okay to walk around.” It’s the sort of information that seems obvious to someone born and raised in a place like Toronto, but isn’t obvious at all to someone coming from a community of 300 people.

As the stories of these girls illustrate, more Aboriginals are creating beachheads of education and middle-class prosperity in Canadian cities. Just a generation ago, it was rare to find Aboriginal university students on campus. Now, they are a common sight. More and more Aboriginal girls in this country are coming to resemble Liberty, 15, whose grandmother is an Aboriginal elder-in-residence for the local school district and whose aunt is Maples Collegiate’s vice-principal.

Girls who experience abuse as children often suffer the same fate as adults. Breaking that cycle will be the life-and-death challenge of Liberty’s generation.

National Post

Jonathan Kay is editor of The Walrus Jonathan.Kay@walrusmagazine.com

http://news.nationalpost.com/silent-no-more/jonathan-kay-breaking-the-cycle/

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CANADA MILITARY NEWS: Help lines/PTSD/SendUPTheCount/Wounded Warrior heroes/loved/missed- honour.

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CANADA MILITARY NEWS: September 2014- not a thing has changed since the 70s…. POVERTY RAGES THE PLANET- USA RUSSIA CHINA PLAY F**KING WAR MONGERING … STILL… and our beloved troops crawl home with their victories sold by politicians 4$$$$- Muslims fix urselves/Stop having 2 many children 4 the planet/Environmentfolks- kids matter more than dogs. God bless our troops – on this day POOR MATTERS MORE THAN DUMB HATE

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CANADA MILITARY NEWS: Gloria Steinem and Marlo Thomas called Canada's Women and girls the bravest in the world back in our days of 60s, 70s and 80s- and we raised our sons 2 treat women and children better- Please don't let us down- March 8- International Women's Day is everyday- no more excuses students- no more excuses- Loretta Saunders 4 u/Rita MacNeil Warrior Woman/BLOGS /DAILY UPDATES /SEP 22, 2014 - JUSTICE 4 REHTAEH PARSONS- one of abusers pleads guilty- One Billion rising

http://nova0000scotia.blogspot.ca/2014/03/canada-military-news-gloria-steinem-and.html

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CANADA MILITARY NEWS: Foodbanks-poverty rampant in industralized developed nations ie Canada,USA,UK,European Union Aussies etc.- check foodbanks and stats- what happens 2 world’s poorest nations?? November 19 2014- stats figures

https://nova0000scotia.wordpress.com/2014/11/19/canada-military-news-foodbanks-poverty-rampant-in-industralized-developed-nations-ie-canadausaukeuropean-union-aussies-etc-check-foodbanks-and-stats-what-happens-2-worlds-poorest-nations-no/

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CANADA MILITARY NEWS: Dec28- Troop news and love/stop abusing children on your reservations…IDLE NO MORE/stop black on black abuse of your children/CANADA IS ONE BILLION RISING- our girls, boys and women f**king matter/ Canada news-updates/ANONYMOUS LOVE- Dalhousie is covered in shame- donations will dry up in all universities unless systemic sexual violence and abuse ends with codes of conduct- ethics in schools starting at primary- enough of this sheeet…. ONE BILLION RISING… Military stepping up also

http://nova0000scotia.blogspot.ca/2014/12/canada-military-news-dec27-troop-news.html

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BLOGSPOT

O CANADA- Child Sexual Abuse – It is your business=HELP LINES 4 KIDS- IDLE NO MORE CANADA

http://nova0000scotia.blogspot.ca/2013/12/one-billion-rising-no-more-excuses-help.html

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CANADA RCMP PARTNER WITH SHANIA- 2 raise awareness about family violence- IDLE NO MORE – One Billion Rising- No more abuses or excuses- Shania lived it and survived 2 talk about it- especially as one of us throwaway kids- u know trashy throwaways of poverty /BLOGSPOT

DECEMBER 13,2014- JUST IN – CANADA RCMP partners with SHANIA – 2 raise awareness about family violence -IDLE NO MORE- ONE BILLION RISING- no more abuses or excuses

https://nova0000scotia.wordpress.com/2014/12/15/canada-rcmp-partner-with-shania-2-raise-awareness-about-family-violence-idle-no-more-one-billion-rising-no-more-abuses-or-excuses-shania-lived-it-and-survived-2-talk-about-it-especially-as-one/

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ANOTHER INVISIBLE WAR- RAPE IN THE MILITARIES OF THE WORLD

i watched with friends and thousands of us chatted, cried and chatted some more- on cbc- THIS IS ALL NATO COUNTRIES- NOT JUST USA- one billion rising- breaking the chains of silence AND abuse…… by God and Countryi

Independent Lens | The Invisible War Nominated for Best Documentary Oscar

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CANADA MILITARY NEWS: Sep 22-Rehtaeh Parsons Justice News- Jun28- hunting and catching PAEDOPHILES NOVA SCOTIA -CANADA/Child Abuse Survivors/Insidious CHILD TRAFFICKING 60 million worldwide/ABUSE OF WOMEN IN THE MILITARY- One Billion Rising- no more excuses/UN paedophiles and sex traffickers???

https://nova0000scotia.wordpress.com/2013/06/27/canada-military-news-jun28-hunting-and-catching-paedophiles-nova-scotia-canadachild-abuse-survivorsinsidious-chils-trafficking-60-million-worldwideunited-nations-protects-paedophiles-and-sex-tra/

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O CANADA- Child Sexual Abuse – It is your business=HELP LINES 4 KIDS- IDLE NO MORE CANADA – We must do better 4 our children -dignity, honour, duty, courage, self-respect/HOW 2 CATCH A PAEDOPHILE- DR. PHIL

https://nova0000scotia.wordpress.com/2014/12/16/o-canada-child-sexual-abuse-it-is-your-businesshelp-lines-4-kids-idle-no-more-canada-we-must-do-better-4-our-children-dignity-honour-duty-courage-self-respecthow-2-catch-a-paedop/

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women voting

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ONE BILLION RISING CANADA- Women and the right 2 vote- country by country- Please honour those women who sacrificed so much 4 ur privilege 2 vote - pls honour us

http://nova0000scotia.blogspot.ca/2013/07/one-billion-rising-canada-women-and.html

AND...

Some facts and dates in Canadian women's history of the 20th century

Sat, 2010-01-16 21:16 — openconcept

This article appeared in the Winter 2000 edition of the CRIAW Newsletter, vol. 20, no. 1

Millennium of Achievements

by Marika Morris, CRIAW Research Coordinator
edited August 2013

A thousand years ago only certain cultures, such as the Mohawk, offered women any kind of equality, such as matrilineal descent and the choosing of chiefs.

Today, just like one thousand years ago, some women around the world are still sold into prostitution, forced to marry against their will, have no right or access to birth control or abortion, have little access to education, and are completely economically dependent on men.

However, Canadian women have also made significant gains over the last millennium, and particularly over the past 100 years:

· In 1897, after a very long fight, Clara Brett Martin became Canada's first lawyer and the first woman to practice law in the entire British Empire. She overcame editorials opposing women lawyers on the grounds that the physical attraction between them and the judges and juries would be intolerable; She lobbied for a bill in the Ontario legislature that would overturn the Law Society of Upper Canada's regulations barring women because only "persons" could be admitted. She was taunted and ridiculed by classmates, professors, the public and the media simply for enrolling in law school.(1)

· In 1909, the Criminal Code was amended to criminalize the abduction of women. Before this, the abduction of any woman over 16 was legal, except if she was an heiress. The maximum penalty for stealing a cow was much higher than for kidnapping an heiress.(2)

· In 1910 Québec legislation reduced the working hours for women in the textile industry from 60 to 58 hours per week, the first of other legislative amendments to reduce women's work week.(2)

· In 1913 the Home and Domestic Employees Union was formed in Vancouver. In 1915, Helena Gutteridge ensured that equal pay was written into the Vancouver Trades and Labour Council constitution. Her work to bring together women's groups and labour activism resulted in BC's first minimum wage act in 1918. (2)

· Suffrage activist and shit-disturber Emily Murphy became Canada's first woman judge in 1916.

· By 1917, over 35,000 Canadian women worked in munitions factories while Canadian men fought overseas in World War I. (1)

· After a long struggle, Canadian women (except First Nations women) obtained the right to vote in federal elections in 1918, after some limited women's suffrage was granted the year earlier. (3)

· In 1921, Canada's first woman MP Agnes Macphail began several successful campaigns, including prison reform and the establishment of old age pensions. In the same year, BC passed Canada's first maternity leave legislation.

· In 1921, Nellie McClung was elected to the Alberta legislature, where she campaigned for old age pensions, mothers' allowances, legal protection for widows, better factory conditions, minimum wage, birth control, and more. Alberta was the first province to have public health nurses, municipal hospitals and free dental and medical care for kids. (2)

· In 1922, Martha Bowes of Saskatoon's CJWC was the first female Canadian radio broadcaster on the airwaves in between January and February. (4)

· In 1925 the federal divorce law was changed to allow a woman to divorce her husband on the same grounds that a man could divorce his wife - simple adultery. Before this, she had to prove adultery in conjunction with other acts such as "sodomy" or bestiality.(2)

· In 1928, Canada's Olympic Team included women for the first time. (2)

· In 1930, another change to federal divorce laws allowed a woman deserted by her husband to sue for divorce after two years of being abandoned from the town her husband lived in before separation. Before, a woman's legal residence was wherever her husband lived, even if she didn't know where he lived. (2)

· In 1931, Saskatchewan labour activist Annie Buller spent a year in jail for setting up a defense fund for striking workers. She later managed two newspapers and worked for rights for working-class women. (2)

· In 1932, Dr. Elizabeth Bagshaw directs Canada's first family planning clinic, which was illegal at the time. In 1936, Ottawa nurse Dorothea Palmer was arrested for telling women about birth control. (2)

· By 1938 all provinces except Nova Scotia expanded minimum wage laws to apply also to men. What started as activism to protect working-class women also ended up benefitting male workers. (2)

· Québec women obtained the provincial vote in1940.. (3)

· In 1941, Québec allowed women to practice law. In the same year, Eileen Tallman organized the first Canadian bank strike. (2)

· In 1943, there was a massive influx of women into the paid labour force, taking over many traditionally male jobs while men were away at war. In 1945, Saskatchewan CCF MP Gladys Strum announced in Parliament that "No one has ever objected to women working. The only thing they have ever objected to is paying women for working." (2)

· The National Gallery exhibited the work of early Canadian painter Emily Carr in 1945, the same year she died. (2)

· In 1946, restrictions on Chinese women entering Canada were relaxed. Chinese men had died in the building of Canada's railroad since the 1860s, but were not permitted to become Canadian citizens until 1946. (2)

· In 1947, Canadian women no longer lost their citizenship automatically if they married non-Canadians. (2)

· In 1951 Ontario enacted Canada's first equal pay legislation. Other provinces followed suit between 1952 and 1975. (2)

· In 1952, Manitoba women were first permitted to serve on juries. New Brunswick women become jurors in 1954, and PEI women in 1966. (2)

· A federal Women's Bureau was established in 1954. (3)

· In 1955, restrictions on married women in the federal public service were removed. In the past women public service employees were fired upon marriage. (3) This occurred only 45 years after a 1910 report concluded, "Where the mother works, the baby dies." (1)

· In 1955 women from Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, and other Caribbean nations were recruited as domestics and granted landed immigrant status.(2)

· Aboriginal women (and men) obtained the federal vote in 1960. (2)

· In 1965, a woman established a shelter for "prostitutes, lesbians and junkies" (!) in Toronto.(2)

· In 1966, women won a battle against high food prices through massive supermarket boycotts. (2)

· In 1967, women student protesters succeeded at integrating women into the University of Toronto's Hart House, for which women students paid fees but were restricted from entering. (2)

· In 1968, the Presbyterian Church first ordained women. In the same year, inmates of the Kingston Prison for Women began publishing their magazine Tightwire, which provides the perspective of women in conflict with the law in articles, poetry and fiction. It was a banner year for women's self-expression, with books published by Margaret Laurence, Marie-Claire Blais, Claire Martin, and Mary Van Stolk. (2)

· In 1969, the distribution of information about birth control was decriminalized. In the same year, Toronto women picketed a bikini contest held in sub-zero temperatures by carrying mannequins sectioned off like cuts of beef. One contestant opened her coat to show a placard that stated "I have a mind." Other similar protests were to follow. (2)

· In 1969, Women's Liberation Clubs were formed in some high schools, colleges and universities, following the development of informal "consciousness-raising groups" a few years earlier. (2)

· In 1970, Kenojuak's Inuit stone-cut The Enchanted Owl was used on a stamp, and she received the Order of Canada. (2)

· Also in 1970, the same year as the ground-breaking report of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women, women organized a cross-country "Abortion Caravan" to demand access to abortion services without charge. The Commission, by the way, did not even mention violence against women. It was still an unspoken and stigmatized reality. (2)

· By 1971, Canada accepted an equal number of female and male immigrants. In the same year, Dauphin, Manitoba ceased to fire its female civic workers upon marriage. (2)

· In 1971, Québec finally allows women jurors after eight Québec women were jailed earlier in the year for protesting the all-male jury law. The federal government amended the Canada Labour Code to prohibit sex discrimination, reinforce equal pay for equal work, and establish a 17-week maternity leave. A year later, the federal government also abolished sex discrimination against potential jurors in criminal cases. (2)

· In 1972, BC NDP MLA Rosemary Brown became the first Black woman in Canada to be elected to a legislature. The federal government instituted its first child care expense deduction. The same year saw the first issue of The Other Woman, a lesbian feminist newspaper. (2)

· In 1973, Pauline Jewett was the first woman President of a co-educational university - Simon Fraser in Burnaby, BC, (3) a hundred years after women weren't even allowed to enrol or graduate from most universities. Jewett went on to become a Member of Parliament focusing on issues of peace, disarmament and women's equality.

· In 1973, the first rape crisis centres in Canada opened - in Vancouver and Toronto. In the same year, Interval House, one of the first shelters for abused women, also opened in Toronto. By 1975 there were five transition houses in BC. (2) This was 73 years after a woman in an "insane asylum" because she claimed her husband abused her was given a gynecological operation to "cure" her - a common practice around 1898. (1)

· In 1974, the RCMP hired its first woman member, (3) one hundred years after an 1874 magazine stated, "Woman's first and only place is in her home." (1)

· In 1975, the federal government amended 11 laws in keeping with equality for women, including providing equal rights for women and men in public service pensions. (2)

· The remaining overt discrimination against female immigrants was removed from the Citizenship Act in 1976. (2)

· In 1978, the first "Take Back the Night" march was held in Vancouver. Also that year, female flight attendants won the right to continue working after marriage and past the age of 32. (2) In the same year, the law changed so that women could no longer be fired for pregnancy in federally-regulated industries.

· In 1980 in Nova Scotia, the first woman to be elected leader of a provincial political party holding seats in a legislature was Alexa McDonough. In the same year, a 1957 rule disallowing women fishers working with their husbands from receiving UI benefits was overturned. (2)

· In 1981, 1,300 women met concerned about women's rights being excluded from the proposed new Charter of Rights. They lobbied Members of Parliament intensively which resulted in the inclusion of women's rights in Canada's constitution. (2)

· In 1982, NDP MP Margaret Mitchell was laughed at in the House of Commons when she raised the issue of violence against women. The outcry from women brought national attention to the issue.

· In 1983, rape laws were broadened to sexual assault laws and for the first time, made it a criminal offence for a man to rape his wife. In the same year, Ontario police were directed by the Attorney General to lay charges in domestic violence cases. Before this, men usually faced no consequences for beating their female partners. (2)

· In 1983, the Canadian Human Rights Act prohibited sexual harassment in workplaces under federal jurisdiction. (3) Before this , women in these workplaces had no legal recourse if their employers demanded sexual favours.

· In 1985, the law was changed so that Aboriginal women who married non-status men could retain their Indian status, 14 years after Ontario Native Women's Association President Jeanette Corbière-Lavell launched an unsuccessful court challenge to overturn sex discrimination in the Indian Act. (2) This was 99 years after employees of the Indian Affairs Department were charged with trafficking in Aboriginal women. (1)

· Also in 1985, CRIAW Board member Audrey McLaughlin was elected to the House of Commons as MP for the Yukon, and in 1989 became the first female leader of a federal political party with sitting members.

· In 1986, Sharon Wood from Canmore, Alberta was the first Canadian woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest. (2) A century before, women were discouraged from any sport by doctors who claimed sportswomen's uteruses would shrivel and they would become mentally ill. (1)

· In 1988, the first woman Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, Bertha Wilson, wrote one of the majority judgements which struck down Canada's restrictive abortion law. When she had first applied to law school, a professor told her to go home and take up knitting.

· In 1993, Canada's refugee guidelines were changed to include women facing gender-related persecution.

· In 1999, the Supreme Court ruled that job standards and tests cannot be solely based on capabilities that would favour men. The case was brought by BC forest fighter Tawney Meiorin, who had been laid off from her job after a completely satisfactory job performance due to a new physical fitness test based on men's abilities, and having little to do with the ability to actually do the job.

This is only a partial list, leaving out landmarks most people know about like the 1929 Person' Case and various pay equity victories. During the late 1800s and throughout the 1900s, small groups of women fought for rights for all women, and entrenched these new rights into law. With a minuscule amount of political, social and economic power, women have changed the character and priorities of nations.

The continuing challenge is to eliminate poverty and violence, and to ensure that equality rights guaranteed on paper by national laws and international agreements become a reality for every woman of every race, language, ethnicity, economic status, ability, and sexual orientation. Sounds pie in the sky? So did the vote for women. So did the abolition of slavery. So did the decriminalization of homosexuality. So did laws against child labour. So did an 8-hour work day and a 5-day work week. Every good idea started with a handful of committed people who were called crazy, unrealistic, and worse. They were attacked, vilified, spat on, dismissed and ridiculed. Some were murdered. They were accused of shaking the foundations of society and heralding an economic collapse. Instead, economies grew by leaps and bounds with increased rights for citizens, as women piled into the paid workforce, as more people had money in their pockets with which to fuel the market. Fortunately for most of us, that handful of "crazy" people stood firm. Our duty is to continue where they left off, as social justice is still a far-away goal for many women in Canada and around the world. We wish you a happy and productive millennium, in which your goals, and those of the world's women, are finally realized.

(1) Alison Prentice, Paula Bourne, Gail Cuthbert Brandt, Beth Light, Wendy Mitchinson, Naomi Black, Canadian Women: A History (Toronto: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988)
(2) Moira Armour and Pat Stanton, Canadian Women in History: A Chronology (Toronto: Green Dragon Press, 1990)
(3) Status of Women Canada, Canadian Committee on Women's History and Department of the Secretary of State of Canada, "Towards Equality for Women: A Canadian Chronology," Women's History Month, October 1992.
(4) STEWART,Peggy, Radio ladies: Canada's women on the air 1922-1975, British Columbia, Magnetewan Publishing, 2011. p.1

http://criaw-icref.ca/millenium

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ARTICLE- SERIOUSLY???? WOMEN WERE TREATED FAR WORSE.... HOW ABOUT COMPENSATING WOMEN 4 HUNDREDS OF YEARS OF HELL????

Commission may seek repeal of 15th-century Papal Bulls

CHINTA PUXLEY THE CANADIAN PRESS Published February 10, 2015 - 5:19pm

Justice Murray Sinclair says the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is weighing whether to ask the Vatican to repeal some Papal Bulls that allowed explorers the right to conquer the New World and the “heathen” aboriginals. (CP)

Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission is weighing whether to ask the Vatican to repeal the Papal Bulls of Discovery that granted 15th-century explorers the right to conquer the New World and the “heathen” aboriginals that called it home.

Chair Murray Sinclair says the commission examining the impact of Canada’s Indian residential schools is looking carefully at the 1455 and 1493 Catholic edicts as part of its final report.

Many argue the proclamations legitimized the treatment of aboriginal people as “less than human.” Crown sovereignty in Canada can be traced back to those papal bulls and neither Canada nor the United States has repudiated them, Sinclair said.

“The movement to repudiation is very strong,” Sinclair said. “If we as the commission are going to join that movement or endorse

it, … we have to come to a conclusion that it’s necessary for reconciliation, to establish a proper relationship between aboriginal and non-aboriginal people.”

A growing chorus in Canada is calling on the Vatican to help begin a new relationship with aboriginal people on equal footing.

The discovery bulls, and others in the same vein that followed, gave Catholic explorers “full and free power, authority, and jurisdiction of every kind” and outlined their “duty to lead the peoples dwelling in those islands and countries to embrace the Christian religion.”

If aboriginal people refused, the Vatican granted its envoys the authority to enslave and kill.

If the commission recommends the bulls be rescinded, Sinclair said, it has to weigh the legal implications, which could strike at the core of Crown sovereignty over land.

“What would be the basis for rationalizing Crown sovereignty if the Doctrine of Discovery is no longer available?” Sinclair said. “We have to consider that question and perhaps give some direction about how that relationship can be re-established in a proper way … on a nation-to-nation level.”

The United Nations appointed a special rapporteur in 2009 who found the bulls lie “at the root of the violations of indigenous peoples’ human rights.” The edicts have resulted in the “mass appropriation of the lands, territories, and resources of indigenous peoples,” the UN found. They also form the legal basis of many modern-day land claim disputes, it said.

Keith Matthew, former chief of Simpcw First Nation in British Columbia, has been quietly building support in Canada for their repeal. He recently got the support of the Assembly of First Nations, which passed a resolution at its December meeting endorsing the revocation of the bulls.

It’s about hitting the “reset button on our relationship,” Matthew said. “The papal bulls put us in a position no better than animals.

“We know better today. We’re just as civilized and human as anyone else in this world. It’s really about righting a historic wrong.

“I’m no animal. I’m a person, a human being.”

Hayden King, director of the Centre for Indigenous Governance at Ryerson University, said simply repealing the edicts isn’t enough for reconciliation.

He said it would be more significant if the government recognized its sovereignty was based on a “fairy tale” that aboriginal people are not human and further recognized aboriginal title to land.

“Unless there was corresponding action, it would seem kind of hollow.”

http://thechronicleherald.ca/canada/1268373-commission-may-seek-repeal-of-15th-century-papal-bulls

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ONE BILLION RISING- IDLE NO MORE CANADA- we want better 4 our grandchildren…. no more excuses- no more abuses

Frog Lake First Nations grandmothers march against substance abuse

Elders in the community are worried, says a spokesperson for Frog Lake

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/frog-lake-first-nations-grandmothers-march-against-substance-abuse-1.2773004

AND...

Sweet Jesus, Mother Mary and Joseph.....Like Shania Twain says- LOOK AFTER YOUR OWN KIDS- feed them, love them !!!!... seriously????

Government shuffle over who pays hurts native kids’ health, study finds

A study suggests that aboriginal children often get poorer health care than other kids because of disputes between governments about who pays the bill.

Vanda Sinha of McGill University says it’s hard to put numbers on the problem because nobody is tracking it.

But she says a survey of front-line workers turned up plenty of stories about children suffering as their files are shuffled between federal, provincial and First

Nations governments.

Sinha says the federal government has told the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal that such bottlenecks don’t exist — or, if they do, they aren’t Ottawa’s problem. She says Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives are trying to solve the problem by defining it so narrowly it disappears. The study was done by the Assembly of First Nations, the Canadian Paedeatric Society and several universities. (CP

http://thechronicleherald.ca/canada/1268378-government-shuffle-over-who-pays-hurts-native-kids%E2%80%99-health-study-finds

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CANADA MILITARY NEWS: Aug-Sept 2014-Hundreds-thousands missing, abused, women/girls-prostitutes-drugs/sex-trafficking- tortured-murdered-brutally beaten-missing HEY CANADA- WE NEED A REAL INQUIRY IN2 ALL MISSING WOMEN…Don’t Discriminate- it’s not just First Nations- It’s Canada- All Canada Women and girls- especially prostitutes-drug scenes… let’s git it done- all politicians need 2 get on board here…

http://nova0000scotia.blogspot.ca/2014/08/canada-military-news-aug-sept-2014.html

and..

blogged-wordpress

CANADA MILITARY NEWS: Aug-Sept 2014-Hundreds-thousands missing, abused, women/girls-prostitutes-drugs/sex-trafficking- tortured-murdered-brutally beaten-missing HEY CANADA- WE NEED A REAL INQUIRY IN2 ALL MISSING WOMEN…Don’t Discriminate- we have walked this battle since the 60s – political greed and indifference from all Canadian parties 4 years and years and years shames us all

https://nova0000scotia.wordpress.com/2014/08/25/canada-military-news-aug-sept-2014-hundreds-thousands-missing-abused-womengirls-prostitutes-drugssex-trafficking-tortured-murdered-brutally-beaten-missing-hey-canada-we-need-a-real-inquiry-in2/

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O CANADA-PROSTITUTES-SEX TRAFFICKING-Let’s talk about it Canada/ Women Equal Men in our Canada- PROSTITUTION- how can any politician condone the abuse of women…. DID THE HIGHWAY OF TEARS TEACH US NOTHING???-… did little girls and women horrendously abused teach us nothing…. women kneeling b4 men??? Seriously in 2014- and u want 2 make this NewAgeMedia Pretty… oh so Pretty??? in the year 2014??? ONE BILLION RISING- break the chains- no more abuses-no more excuses -RELOCATION REVISITED: SEX TRAFFICKING OF NATIVE WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES- 2 many First Nations children dumped in2 foster care- How many MISSING CANADIAN PROSTITUTES IS THE QUESTION-DON’T DISCRIMINATE- git r done

http://nova0000scotia.blogspot.ca/2014/07/o-canada-women-equal-men-in-our-canada.html

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O CANADA-PROSTITUTES-SEX TRAFFICKING- Women Equal Men in our Canada- PROSTITUTION- how can any politician condone the abuse of women…. DID THE HIGHWAY OF TEARS TEACH US NOTHING???-… did little girls and women horrendously abused teach us nothing…. women kneeling b4 men??? Seriously in 2014- and u want 2 make this NewAgeMedia Pretty… oh so Pretty??? in the year 2014??? ONE BILLION RISING- break the chains- no more abuses-no more excuses -RELOCATION REVISITED: SEX TRAFFICKING OF NATIVE WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES- 2 many First Nations children dumped in2 foster care- How many MISSING CANADIAN PROSTITUTES IS THE QUESTION-DON’T DISCRIMINATE- git r done-

https://nova0000scotia.wordpress.com/2014/08/23/o-canada-prostitutes-sex-trafficking-women-equal-men-in-our-canada-prostitution-how-can-any-politician-condone-the-abuse-of-women-did-the-highway-of-tears-teach-us-nothing-did-little-gir/

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http://nova0000scotia.blogspot.ca/2014/07/o-canada-women-equal-men-in-our-canada.html

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CANADA MILITARY NEWS: ivory and precious elephants and God’s Creatures- China 2nd only 2 The United States of America 4 hunger 4 $$$ endangered species tusks-heads-horns etc. – at any cost!!!! Shame on the lot of ya….AND U ARE WORLD’s worst LEADERS AND ABUSERS OF R CLIMATE… now heroes of climate change??? Ur hypocrisy reeks…. imho

http://nova0000scotia.blogspot.ca/2014/11/canada-military-news-china-2nd-only-2.html

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BEST COMMENT:... as we've been saying...

Or do you think it might be a question of massive (and stupid) overreach?

Russia is the dominant power in Eastern Europe - running NATO right up to its doorstep and then trying to flip the Ukraine to the west by supporting the violent overthrow of a properly elected President were dumb and aggressive moves that provoked a Russian response. Ukraine is an artificial country that contains lots of territory and people that are more properly Russian. This crisis was entirely predictable and easily avoided. The aggressor frankly is the west not the Ruskies.

Kind of the same thing in the Middle East. Iran is the dominant power there. Especially since the really dumb second Iraq war took out the only direct check to Iranian ambitions. US policy has been one blunder after another. And those were piled on top of a ridiculous support Israel no matter what it does principle, and a strong bias for the loathsome Saudis - why on both counts one wonders. Again hardly surprising that Iran has been shoring up its power in the region. The US might have had a bit of support from Turkey if it weren't so p!ssed off by the emergence of the Kurds from the wreck of Iraq.

My advice to the Yanks would be:

1. read some histories

2. study some atlases

3. hesitate to intervene at all

4. only intervene when there is a clear, limited and achievable objective

5. back off the blind support for the Israelis and Saudis

6. respect the Russians and Iranians

7. fix your economy

8. keep an eye on the Chinese and Indians.

J.L. Granatstein: Who is really to blame for this global mess? Everyone and no one

Republish Reprint

J.L. Granatstein, National Post | February 10, 2015 | Last Updated: Feb 10 8:30 AM ET

The

Canadian

Encyclopedia

Women and the Law

Women have looked to the law as a tool to change their circumstances, while at the same time the law is one of the instruments which confirms their dependent status as citizens (seeSTATUS OF WOMEN).

Women and the Law

Women have looked to the law as a tool to change their circumstances, while at the same time the law is one of the instruments which confirms their dependent status as citizens (seeSTATUS OF WOMEN). The first phase of the Women's Movement, in proclaiming that women were capable of reason as well as reproduction and nurturing, claimed a place for women in the public sphere, while also relying upon the concept of "separate spheres" to delineate their areas of strength and competence.

Historical Changes in Women and the Law
Laws 200 years ago excluded women generally from public life. They did not enjoy the right to advanced education, to hold public office, to vote or to sit on a jury, to name but a few. In areas of private law, married women could not own property and mothers could not claim custody of their children, among many things. Major accomplishments of the first phase of the WOMEN'S MOVEMENTwere the entrance of women into higher education, the gaining of the vote for many, the inclusion of women in the definition of persons for the purposes of the Senate Act and abolition. Although the latter proved unpopular and unworkable, during the course of theTEMPERANCE MOVEMENT women identified family violence as directly related to alcohol consumption, bringing the issue of FAMILY VIOLENCE into public awareness.

Women and the Vote

By the end of the 19th century, many women and some men were questioning the severe restrictions of rights for female citizens. A loophole in the law allowing some women, particularly in LOWER CANADA, to exercise the franchise had been specifically removed by the 1850s throughout Canada. Feminists argued for fuller participation of women in public life, on the grounds both of moral justice and because "feminine virtues" might well bring about needed reforms. After a lengthy campaign, women in Manitoba, Alberta and Saskatchewan gained the right to vote in 1916, and in Ontario and BC, the following year. On the federal level, the vote was first given to relatives of enlisted men in 1917 and then broadened to all women in 1918. The other provinces followed suit by 1922, with the exception of Québec, where women were denied the vote until 1940. First Nations women did not earn the right to vote until the 1960s.

Women in the Legal Profession

Under the French regime, important posts in the army and the government were, by custom, granted only to men. Under the British regime, women were usually excluded by law from holding public office until the beginning of the 20th century. After their earlier successes, women began to seek public office, and through the first half of the 20th century, a few women succeeded in being elected to the federal Parliament and the provincial legislatures. They were generally marginalized, even when in positions of power. For instance, Irene PARLBY, the first woman elected to the Alberta legislature, was minister without portfolio, when her qualifications suited her well to other ministries. Although in 1929 women gained recognition as persons for the purposes of appointment to the Senate, in the intervening years relatively few women have been appointed to that body. Through 1995, 342 appointees were men, while 38 were women, or 10% of the total. Twenty-three percent of the 1996 Senate are women (seeWOMEN'S SUFFRAGE).

Clara MARTIN led the way for women of the British Commonwealth to enter the legal profession. In 1897, after a lengthy and difficult struggle, she was admitted to practise law by the Law Society of Upper Canada. As with most female pioneers in the profession, she chose to remain unmarried in order to continue her career. Women have been slow to enter the legal profession. By the 1990s half the graduates from law schools are female, but they comprise only 20% of the practising bar. They are noted for leaving the profession in higher proportion than men and working more for corporations and governments. In large firms they comprise a small proportion of the partners. Women form about 19% of the law teaching faculty in the 19 Canadian law schools.

In 1916 Emily MURPHY was appointed a magistrate by the Alberta government, the first woman to be appointed to the Bench in the British Commonwealth. Since then there have been appointments at all court levels. In 1982 Bertha WILSON was appointed as the first woman to the Supreme Court of Canada, followed by Claire L'Heureux-Dube in 1987. In 1990 Catherine Fraser was appointed chief justice for the Province of Alberta, and now half the Court of Appeal in that province is comprised of women. Women achieving positions of power within policy-making bodies such as the civil service have been less successful.

Equality and the Law

Throughout the brief 200-year history of the Women's Movement, women have sought equality with men. Until relatively recently equality has meant being treated the same as men, being accorded the same rights as men. All the achievements of the first phase of feminism were directed toward this goal. The Report of the Royal Commission on theSTATUS OF WOMEN IN CANADA in 1970 re-affirmed that desire, and changes to the law until the mid-1980s followed this "sameness" philosophy.

Women and Property

Accordingly, the Matrimonial Property Acts passed in most provinces near the end of the 1970s provided for equal division of property on dissolution of marriage. Passage of these acts followed the uproar caused by the MURDOCH CASE, whereby Mrs Murdoch was awarded very little following 25 years of marriage as an Alberta farm wife. This case exemplifies the impression that in the area of family law women have been treated most clearly as dependants.

In New France, where 25 was the legal age of majority, a woman usually passed from the control of her father to that of her husband when she married. A husband's permission was necessary for a wife to engage in business or even to administer or sell property which she had owned before marriage. French law, however, provided that half of the common property belonged to the wife and her heirs on marriage dissolution, whereas British law gave a husband wide authority over his wife's property and made no provision for division of assets. Although Married Women's Property Acts were passed in the late 19th century in most common-law provinces giving women the right to control their own property, the laws made no provision for the equitable division of property held by the spouses in case of marriage breakdown or death. Nor did they improve the economic situation of women and children (seeWOMEN IN THE LABOUR FORCE).

It has taken 15 years for it to become apparent that the impact of these matrimonial property acts has been, in many cases, to deprive women of income and security. Statistics indicate that women do not fare as well economically as men upon dissolution of marriage (seeMARRIAGE AND DIVORCE). There are many and complex reasons for this, but it is now being seen that the uneven economic circumstances of men and women, the undervaluing of housework and child care, the disruption of women's careers for childbirth and child rearing, the fact that women are often the custodial parent and other factors should be considered in the division of property.

Women in the Labour Force

By the 1970s approximately one-half of Canadian women were in the paid labour force, though, overall, women in 1996 earned 66% of what men earned. In a drive for fairer labour legislation, especially legislation recognizing equal pay for work of equal value, women's groups and unions proposed affirmative action programs to counteract employment policies that were intentionally or inadvertently discriminatory to women. Parental and pregnancy benefits became an important issue as, increasingly, women remained in the paid work force during childbearing years.

After 1971 Canada's unemployment insurance scheme provided for limited pregnancy benefits for workers. The Bliss case (1979) showed how problematic are equality claims based on women's sameness to men. In Bliss, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that if a worker, otherwise entitled, were denied benefits because of pregnancy, it was not because she was a woman. In 1983 amendments were made to the Unemployment Insurance Act changing pregnancy to parental benefits in order to eliminate this problem. In the 1990s the Supreme Court of Canada again faced with a claim of a woman while on pregnancy leave found that equality claims did not have to be measured against whether a man could become pregnant or not.

Women's Legal Rights

In the 1970s women became more conscious of their legal rights, or lack of them, than ever before. As courts and lawyers are prohibitively expensive for most women, the federal and provincial human rights commissions proved to be an alternate and less expensive way of dealing with individual complaints of discrimination. The Bliss case as well as the earlier LAVELL and Bedard cases, dealing with discrimination against female INDIANS on the basis of their sex, pointed out to Canadian women how inadequate were the existing constitutional guarantees against sexual discrimination. Cases such as these, as well as a growing consciousness of the need for stronger legal measures against discrimination, fuelled the successful drive by women for better guarantees in the new Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (1982).

Section 15 of the charter attempted to provide the broadest possible definition of equality rights. The Charter, women hoped, would provide a new standard of equality against which laws in Canada could be measured. In 1983, the Constitution Act guaranteedABORIGINAL RIGHTS to male and female persons. Section 12 of theINDIAN ACT (female loss of status upon marrying a non-Indian) was repealed in 1985 (see alsoABORTION; MEECH LAKE ACCORD;MEECH LAKE ACCORD: DOCUMENT; NATIVE PEOPLE, LAW;PORNOGRAPHY).

LEAF

The Women's Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF) was formed to argue s15 Charter cases and to bring before the courts the concept that equality must be considered within the context of the lived experience of the claimants and not measured against some apparently neutral but usually male standard. LEAF has intervened in many major and controversial cases, and has influenced the way equality is viewed under the law. As intervenors at the Supreme Court of Canada, LEAF has argued that pornographic representations of sex combined with violence are discriminatory to women and that women who murder their husbands who battered them may have a defence of battered women's syndrome.

Women and Violence

Rape and Sexual Assault
In the 1970s and 1980s the issue of violence claimed public attention, particularly among women. The double sexual standard was mirrored dramatically in the Criminal Code laws on RAPE, which permitted questions as to the victim's, but not the accused's, previous sexual history and encouraged defence counsel to argue that women had consented to sexual intercourse. In 1982 major changes to the Criminal Code addressed the situation where the victim of a sexual assault was, in effect, put on trial along with the accused. The legal concept of rape was replaced by one of SEXUAL ASSAULT and violence.

In the 1990s changes to the Criminal Code clarified the consent issues. Domestic violence, which is almost always against women and children (seeCHILD ABUSE), has long been considered a private matter in Canada. Although wife beating is a form of assault and punishable under the Criminal Code, social attitudes and prejudices have meant that police were reluctant to intervene in domestic disputes. The courts hesitated to find a husband guilty of beating his wife without a third-party witness. In the late 1970s Women's Organizations drew public attention to wife and child battering and to the fact that laws on the books were not being applied. Across Canada, law enforcement agencies began to intervene in cases of domestic assault. It soon became evident, however, that simply punishing the offenders was not in itself a long-term solution. In many cases, the woman was dependent on the man and feared for the welfare of the family if he was sent to prison. Women's shelters, therapy and public campaigns against family violence were some of the alternate approaches developed. In the mid-1990s, books have appeared profiling the batterer, shifting the focus from the victim. In 1996, the Alberta Legislature passed an act concerning domestic violence.

Sexual Harassment

Sexual harassment on the job was first considered by federal and provincial human rights commissions in the 1970s and, by the early 1980s, unions began to insist that employers enforce policies against it. In 1984 legislation providing redress for victims of sexual harassment was introduced into Canada's Labour Code.

Conclusion
Many believe that more women in the practice of law, the judiciary and government will alter women's status before the law. Although many changes have been made, there are still areas of law which treat women differentially, to their disadvantage.

· EQUALITY

· LABOUR

· LAW

· VOTE

· SUFFRAGE

· WOMEN

Important Dates in Canadian History



Settlers	Rights	Rule	War	Peace	Military	Borders	Money	Symbols

	DATE	EVENT
	DATE	EVENT
	c. 40 000 - 10 000 B.C.	Early descendants of Canada's aboriginal people cross the Beringia land bridge from east Asia into North America.
	c. 900 - 1 000 A.D.	Early Viking explorers are believed to be the first Europeans to visit North America.
	c. 1400s	Foundation of the Iroquois Confederacy, considered the high point of "pre-contact" aboriginal civilization.
	Jun 24, 1497	Italian explorer John Cabot claims island of Newfoundland for England.
	Jul 24, 1534	French explorer Jacques Cartier sails into the Gulf of St. Lawrence and claims Gaspé Penisula for France. Early attempts to found permanent settlements fail.
	1604	Explorer Samuel de Champlain establishes first French settlement on St. Croix Island. In 1605, the colony is relocated to Port-Royal.
	May 13, 1607	British explorer Christopher Newport establishes Jamestown as first permanent British colony in North America.
	Jul 3, 1608	Founding of Quebec City on the St. Lawrence River heralds first permanent French settlement in North America.
	May 17, 1642	Montreal, then known as Ville-Marie, is founded by Paul de Chomedey Sieur de Maisonneuve.
	Sep 24, 1663	New France becomes a royal colony of the French Empire.
	May 2, 1670	The Hudson's Bay Company is founded by King Charles II. The company is given control of a vast new territory known as Rupert's Land, comprising much of northern North America.
	1702 - 1713	Queen Anne's War / War of the Spanish Succession: French and British forces battle for control of Acadian colonies on the east coast of North America.
	Jul 13, 1713	Treaty of Utrecht ends Queen Anne's War. France cedes Newfoundland, Acadia and its Hudson's Bay settlements to England.
	1750	British Calendar Act forces all British colonies to abandon the Julian calendar and switch to the Gregorian calendar.
	1755	British expel French colonists from Acadia.
	1756 - 1763	Seven Years War / French and Indian War: France and England battle for control of New France.
	Sep 13, 1759	The decisive Battle of the Plains of Abraham results in British victory in the Seven Years War.
	Feb 10, 1763	Treaty of Paris ends the Seven Years War. France surrenders New France, now known as Quebec, to Britain.
	Oct 7, 1763	Royal Proclamation of King George III establishes general procedures for obtaining British control of aboriginal land.
	Jun 22, 1774	The Quebec Act permits the the continuation of the French language, legal system and Catholic religion in the former New France.
	Jul 1, 1776	13 British colonies in New England successfully revolt against Crown rule and form an independent country known as the United States of America. Loyalists flee to Quebec and Britain's Maritime colonies.
	Dec 26, 1791	Constitution Act divides Quebec into two colonies: Upper Canada (English) and Lower Canada (French).
	Jul 22, 1793	British explorer Alexander Mackenzie crosses the Rocky Mountains and claims the Pacific coast of North America for England.
	1805	British explorer Simon Fraser founds Fort McLeod as the region's first permanent white settlement.
	1812 - 1815	War of 1812: Britain and the United States battle for control of eastern North America.
	Dec 24, 1814	The Treaty of Ghent ends the war of 1812. Both Britain and the United States agree to re-establish the "status quo ante bellum" and return to the pre-1812 state of affairs.
	Aug 28, 1833	London passes the Slavery Abolition Act, emancipating all slaves within the British Empire.
	Mar 6, 1834	The City of Toronto is incorporated.
	Feb 4, 1839	In response to growing unrest in the Canadian colonies, Governor General Lord Durham releases the Durham Report, which recommends the merging of Upper and Lower Canada.
	Feb 10, 1841	Act of Union unites Upper and Lower Canada into the United Province of Canada with a single parliamentary-style government.
	Feb 19, 1858	The British Crown Colony of British Columbia is established on the Pacific coast.
	Sep 1, 1864	Charlottetown Conference sees politicians from the United Province of Canada and Britain's Maritime colonies begin talks over a possible political union.
	May 22, 1867	The British North America Act passes the British Parliament, uniting the former United Provinces (Quebec and Ontario) plus Nova Scotia and New Brunswick into a new self-governing colony, the Dominion of Canada.
	Jul 1, 1867	The British North America Act takes effect, and John A. MacDonald is inaugurated as the first prime minister of Canada.
	Jul 31, 1868	The Rupert's Land Act transfers control of the massive Rupert's Territory from the Hudson's Bay Company to the Dominion of Canada.
	Jul 15, 1870	Manitoba is carved from the Rupert's Land territory to become the fifth province of Canada. The remaining land becomes known as the Northwest Territories.
	May 8, 1871	Britain and the United States sign the Treaty of Washington, solidifying peace between their nations and removing all remaining British troops from North America.
	Jul 25, 1871	British Columbia becomes the sixth province of Canada.
	Jul 1, 1873	Prince Edward Island becomes the seventh province of Canada.
	May 23, 1873	The Northwest Mounted Police, precursor to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, are founded.
	Apr 12, 1876	The Indian Act is passed by the Parliament of Canada, founding the modern system of aboriginal reservations.
	Feb 15, 1881	The federal government authorizes the construction of the transcontinental Canadian Pacific Railway.
	Dec 21, 1883	The Royal Canadian Regiment is founded as the first permanent regiment of what will become the Canadian Army.
	Nov 7, 1885	The "last spike" is driven in Craigellachie, British Columbia, completing the Canadian Pacific Railway.
	Apr 6, 1886	The city of Vancouver is incorporated.
	1889 - 1902	Canadian troops are sent to fight for the British in the South African Boer War.
	Jun 13, 1898	The Yukon is separated from the Northwest Territories to become Canada's second territory.
	Sep 1, 1905	Alberta and Saskatchewan are separated from the Northwest Territories to become the eighth and ninth provinces of Canada.
	Apr 27 - Oct 31, 1908	Canada sends a national team to the Olympics for the first time.
	May 4, 1910	The Naval Service Act founds the Royal Canadian Navy.
	1914 - 1918	Canadian troops fight under British command during World War I.
	May 24, 1918	Women are granted the right to vote in Canadian federal elections. Provinces follow suit at different times between 1916 and 1940.
	Nov 11, 1918	World War I ends with the signing of an armistice between the allied powers and Germany.
	Jan 10, 1920	Canada becomes one of the founding members of the League of Nations.
	Apr 1, 1924	The Royal Canadian Air Force is established.
	Oct 29, 1929	A stock market crash in the United States triggers the Great Depression of the 1930s.
	Dec 11, 1931	The Statute of Westminster grants Canada near-complete political independence from Britain, including the right to an independent foreign policy.
	Sep 10, 1939	Canada declares war on Germany and sends troops to fight in World War II.
	Jun 1940 - Dec 1941	Canada declares war on the various other countries allied to Nazi Germany: Italy (Jun 10, 1940), Finland, Romania, Hungary (Dec 7, 1941), and Japan (Dec 8, 1941).
	Jun 6, 1944	Canadian troops participate in the decisive D-Day invasion of Normandy, France.
	May 8, 1945	V-E Day: World War II ends with the surrender of Germany.
	Nov 9, 1945	Canada is one of the founding members of the United Nations.
	1946	The Canadian Army is founded, incorporating previous militias and regiments under a single land force command.
	Apr 1, 1949	Newfoundland becomes the 10th province of Canada.
	1949	Changes to the Supreme Court of Canada Act end the right of Canadians to make legal appeals to the British House of Lords. The Supreme Court of Canada becomes Canada's highest judicial body.
	1950 - 1953	Canadians fight in the Korean War under United Nations command.
	Feb 28, 1952	Vincent Massey is sworn in as the first Canadian-born governor general of Canada.
	Dec 10, 1957	Lester Pearson becomes the first Canadian to win a Nobel Peace Prize for his work mediating the Suez Canal crisis in Egypt.
	May 12, 1958	Canada and the United States co-found the North American Aerospace Defense Command to jointly protect the security of North American airspace.
	Jun 22, 1960	The election of Liberal Jean Lesage as prime minister of Quebec heralds the beginning of Quebec's "quiet revolution" of secularization and modernization.
	1963	American nuclear weapons are stationed in Canada for the first time.
	Feb 15, 1965	The Maple Leaf becomes Canada's official flag.
	Jul 1, 1967	Canada celebrates its centennial.
	Sep 9, 1969	The passage of the Official Languages Act makes Canada an officially bilingual country with French and English as Canada's two official languages.
	Oct 16, 1970	Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau evokes the martial law powers of the War Measures Act to crack down on separatist terrorists in Quebec following the assassination of vice-premier Pierre Laporte.
	1975	Canada begins converting to the Metric System.
	Jul 17, 1976	Montreal becomes the first Canadian city to host the Olympic games.
	Nov 15, 1976	The separatist Parti Quebecois party is elected to power in Quebec for the first time.
	May 20, 1980	Quebec voters reject a referendum on separation from Canada.
	Apr 17, 1982	Queen Elizabeth II signs the Canadian Constitution Act, transferring control of the former British North America Act to Canada. The revised version contains a new Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
	Jun, 1984	The last American nuclear weapons are removed from Canada, ending a denuclearization phase.
	Oct 4, 1984	Marc Garneau becomes the first Canadian in outer space.
	Oct 3, 1987	A free trade agreement between Canada and the United States is approved.
	1991	Canadians participate in the first Persian Gulf War to expel Iraq from Kuwait.
	Mar 29, 1993	Catherine Callbeck of Prince Edward Island becomes the first woman to be elected premier of a Canadian province.
	Oct 30, 1995	Quebec voters narrowly reject a second referendum on separation from Canada.
	Apr 1, 1999	Nunavut is separated from the Northwest Territories to become Canada's third territory.
	Mar, 1999	Canada participates in NATO air strikes against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.
	Feb 3, 2002	Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, Canadian troops are deployed to Afghanistan to fight the Taliban regime and Islamic terrorists.
	Jul 7, 2011	Canada ends its combat mission in Afghanistan.

http://www.thecanadaguide.com/important-dates

ONE BILLION RISING- BREAK THE CHAIN

Culture of Canada

“What does it mean to be Canadian?” It’s a question Canadians ask each other so much, it’s practically a national mantra. The goal of establishing a “Distinct Canadian Identity” is a task that has consumed generations of Canadian writers, artists, politicians and everyone in between — and still shows no signs of being settled any time soon.
Obviously, “culture” is a broad category that can encompass any number of topics depending on who’s setting the terms. For the purposes of this guide, I am focusing on “culture” as Canadians traditionally define it, which is to say, anything that provides a sense of purpose and patriotism to the country, including both cultural products (like art and music) and broader social attitudes.

Social Issues – Laws and attitudes on controversial topics.
Religion in Canada – What Canadians believe.
Canadian Manners and Etiquette - How to behave around Canadians.
Canadian Traditions – Celebrating Canadian-style.
Canadian Foods – Eating Canadian-style.
Canadian News and Media – How Canadians learn about current events.
High Culture - Art, literature and theatre.
Pop Culture – TV, movies, music, celebrities, and more.
Sports – The games Canadians play.
Anti-Americanism – Canada’s most persistent obsession.
Canadian Self-Image – How Canadians see themselves.
Canadian Urban Legends – Weird things Canadians believe that may or may not be true.

http://www.thecanadaguide.com/culture

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Canadian Manners and Etiquette

The stereotype of the fundamentally “polite Canadian” is a bit of a cornball cliche, but it does have some basis in reality. Canada is a nation with fairly strong conventions of social etiquette, and properly obeying and understanding these rules is one of the most crucial ways to “fit in” to broader Canadian society.
In general, Canadians are a mostly friendly, unpretentious people who value honesty, sensitivity, empathy and humility in their relationships with friends and strangers, as well as respect for the privacy and individualism of others. While obviously many Canadians fail at honouring these lofty principles, such values nevertheless provide the basis of what is considered “good manners” in mainstream Canadian society.

Roles and Formalities

Most corporate Canadian workplaces embrace a dress code known as "business casual," with outfits similar to the ones above representing the norm. Ties and jackets have become increasingly uncommon in all but the most formal or high-ranking office settings.

Canada is usually considered a mostly egalitarian country in the tradition of other western democracies, which means that respect for hierarchy is not considered a particularly important value in daily life. Most Canadians are strong individualists of one form or another, and will dislike changing too much of their behaviour or personality just to please others — indeed, such aggressive conformity may actually be scorned by others as phony or weak.
Modern Canadian children are usually permitted to be relatively outspoken and independent from a young age, and may speak to adults, even teachers or parents, in the same casual style they use for friends. The same is mostly true for employer-employee relations, and maintaining a friendly workplace where everyone acts as if they’re on the same level (even if they’re obviously not) is exceedingly common these days. Though the Canadian government, judicial system and military possess a lot of complex protocols dictating things like proper titles of address and appropriate dress, such institutions are considered outliers of unusual formality and strictness within a broader, casual culture of relaxed relationships.

Signs like this, imploring travellers to surrender their seats to the old or disabled, are common in Canadian buses and trains.

The main figures of reverence in Canadian society are people over the age of 70 (so-called “senior citizens“), who are usually given a higher-than-normal degree of politeness and courtesy, and people with obvious handicaps or physical disabilities, who are expected to be treated with compassion and understanding. Authority figures with obviously intimidating powers, such as police officers, will usually be given polite deference as well, though it should be noted that Canadian law and the Canadian Constitution grants individual Canadians significant legal rights to question or disobey authorities whom they have reason to believe are misbehaving.

Time

Canadians use the 12-hour clock and tend to refer to time in fractions, for example "quarter-after three" or "half-past two."

For the most part, Canadians are very literal about time and schedules. If someone says to “come at 3:00″ he usually expects his guest to be there at 3:00. Lateness of more than 15 minutes is considered rude, and an apology or explanation will be expected. Likewise, earliness of more than 15 minutes is usually considered presumptuous and may cause an awkward surprise for a host who is not yet ready.
Most Canadians with full-time careers work from roughly 9 AM to 5 PM Monday through Friday (so-called 9-to-5 jobs). 12 noon is usually considered lunchtime, while 6 PM is approximately when most families eat dinner. With some exceptions, telephoning people in the very early morning or very late night is considered rude and disruptive. Most do not appreciate being disturbed at work, either. Weekends (Saturday and Sunday) tend to be the most busy and active days for socializing — since most people will not be working — though Sunday morning can be a somewhat taboo time to make plans since many religious Canadians will be attending church.

Canadian Social Customs

Greetings

Canadians meeting for the first time usually shake hands to introduce themselves, and may shake hands before departing, as well. Short hugs are becoming more common for closer friends. Kissing remains mostly reserved for family or lovers, though some French-Canadians may partake in the European practice of giving light cheek kisses as part of a friendly greeting.

Gifts

Giving gifts to strangers is generally rare in Canada, unless the person in question has done some favour or is otherwise considered to be “owed” one as thanks.
Even on designated gift-giving holidays, the decision to actually exchange gifts with friends (or even certain family members) is very much dictated by the degree of closeness one feels towards them. Gifts for “no occasion” can be sweet, but also hold a high potential to create lingering feelings of awkwardness for the recipient, especially with expensive gifts.

Tipping in Canada

These days, a lot of restaurants will give you the option to give an automatic 15 per cent tip when you pay using a debit or credit card machine, thus sparing customers the difficulty of after-dinner math.

When dining at any “sit-down” style restaurant, Canadians are expected to tip, or donate, some extra money to their waiter at the end of the meal. The bare minimum expected is 15% of the total price of the bill, but over-tipping in the case of exceptionally good service is common as well. Failing to tip (or under-tipping) is considered extremely rude and will probably generate some sort of immediate reaction, even if only a subtle one.
A variety of other professions in Canadian life expect tips as well, including pizza delivery men, taxi drivers, bellhops and hairdressers, among others. Confusion over exactly who should and should not be tipped (and how much) has led to the creation of a lot of helpful online guides. In general, Canadian tipping etiquette is the same as that of the United States, and American tipping manuals are often used for reference.

Guide to Tipping in Canada, About.com

Gestures

In contrast to some other parts of the world, Canada is not a nation with a lot of obscene or offensive gestures. In general, most rude hand or body gestures are done knowingly, and can be easily avoided as a result.
Some of the most common “bad” gestures include:

Raising only the middle finger — an extremely obscene gesture of anger/frustration towards someone else.
Thumbs down — mild gesture signaling disapproval.
Elbows perched on the table while eating — generally considered rude in formal settings, though common in more casual situations.
Eating with an open mouth or talking with a full mouth; unapologetic public belching, nose-blowing or other releases of bodily functions — all considered extremely disgusting and are usually expected to be followed by an apologetic “Excuse me.”
Sneezing is weirdly ritualized. Sneezers say “excuse me” following a sneeze, while anyone in the immediate vicinity says “bless you,” as a sign of sympathy.
Pointing or staring at strangers — considered rude and a form of leering.
Conversely, not making eye contact with the person one is speaking to is considered a rude form of shyness or bored distraction.
Though attitudes can be more forgiving in hot summer months, most indoor businesses generally hold firm to the “no shirt, no shoes, no service” principle. Public nudity of any sort is illegal, and attempted only by the most avant-garde and attention-seeking.
There is something of an ongoing debate in Canadian society regarding “public displays of affection” or “PDAs,” such as cuddling or passionately kissing in public places. Some may find such displays easy to ignore, while others consider them quite gross and offensive. Unfairly or not, homosexual partners continue to be judged more harshly in this regard.

Conversation Taboos

A common cliche is that the three most common taboos in Canadian life are sex, politics, and religion, as each are considered extremely personal, private matters that many Canadians can find awkward or uncomfortable to discuss in public — especially with strangers.

Politics

Aside from those who make outspoken political opinions a large part of their personality, politics is generally considered a mostly private matter in Canada. Voting is done in secret and Canadians have a legal right to keep their party preferences hidden, even after they leave the voting both. As a result, “who did you vote for?” can be a very presumptuous and uncomfortable question, and even a close friend might react with offense if asked.

Swearing is a strange sort of taboo. Almost everyone swears in private, or when talking to friends, but swearing in front of strangers remains controversial, and Canadian law does not permit uncensored swearing to be broadcast on TV or radio. In both cases, the primary justification is usually protecting children from hearing offensive language that they might imitate.

Politics in Canada is quite polarized between right and left, consisting of parties (and voters) who believe very different things about basic government principles and programs such as raising taxes, spending taxes, foreign policy, criminal justice, gun ownership, poverty, welfare, immigration, drug legalization, homosexuality, prostitution and individual rights. Publicly spouting strong opinions on topics like these is usually seen as an invitation for argument, which many find obnoxious and insensitive.

Sex

Sexually explicit conversation can actually be illegal in Canada in many contexts, making it the most sensitive social taboo of all. The federal government, as well as the governments of all the provinces, have laws on the books banning sexual harassment, which includes workplace conversation about sex that makes others feel uncomfortable or vulnerable. This includes stuff such as excessively sexual compliments or come-ons, as well as discussions of one’s own bedroom appetites and habits.
Most Canadians consider their sex lives a very private matter, and may regard hearing about other people’s as unsettling, if not disgusting. In most cases, even mentioning things such as sex organs or sexual acts is considered highly tasteless in any public setting.

Religion

Canadians have widely different religious beliefs, and like political beliefs, these often reflect vastly different opinions on fundamental questions about life and society. Many of the most common Canadian faiths were actually founded in explicit opposition to one another, and thus promote theories of God and salvation that are mostly incompatible, and may portray non-believers as heretics of some form or another.
People don’t like to be judged, so one’s religious views are rarely discussed openly in public, though Canadians are usually fine with openly self-identifying as a member of a particular faith. Beyond that, attempting to explain or promote one’s religious beliefs (or, for that matter, atheism) in any sort of uninvited setting is almost always regarded as preachy, irritating and cloyingly self-righteous.

Other Canadian taboos

Unlike some parts of the world, Canada has a "waiting in line" culture that encourages customers to be patient and orderly when shops or services are busy. "Budging" in line is an enormous social taboo.

Many Canadians have complicated views about the United States, and mentioning America or Americans can often provoke intense argument or discussion that many might find uncomfortable. Regardless of political context, the issue of abortion is considered almost uniformly taboo to discuss openly, as are any questions or theories about innate differences between the two genders or members of different races. Attitudes considered sexist or racist are generally among the most scorned in modern-day Canada, even if not everyone agrees what “racism” or “sexism” actually entails.
Discussions about French-Canadians and their sense of persecution in Canada, or desires to leave the country, have a strong potential for generating polarized, uncomfortable debate as well — particularly if there are French-Canadians present. The same is true of the status of aboriginal Canadians, whose chronic social problems are one of the most frustrating and embarrassing realities of Canadian society.
Canadians’ sense of what is “private” can vary a lot depending on the person, with some having no embarrassment about openly discussing things such as their relationship with their parents, failed marriages, career woes, income or physical appearance. Others, however, may be more guarded, shy, or sensitive. Being a good conversationalist in Canada is generally a matter of being able to sense a person’s level of comfort on different personal topics, and proceeding accordingly.

Canadian Stereotypes

The common international stereotype that Canadians are excessively, or even absurdly polite is well-known in Canada, and even if not entirely warranted, still affects the way Canadians deal with one another. A sort of positive feedback loop, in other words.

Our friends on the Internet, of course, have a lot of fun with the polite Canadian stereotype.

In practice, a lot of Canadians, particularly those from more upper middle-class backgrounds, take very seriously the idea that they should apologize a lot, or only ask for things in a very roundabout, indirect sort of way. There’s also a fairly common perception that a stereotypically “good” Canadian does not engage in excessive bragging or self-praise, but rather carries herself with a strong sense of humility and even light self-deprecation. At one time, there was also a certain cliche about Canadians being quick to “defer to authority” — or blindly agree with anyone who outranks them — though in recent decades this has become more a theory of understanding Canadian politics and history, and less a practical, day-to-day value of Canadian living (as discussed in the “roles and formalities” section above).
Of course, in the end stereotypes are just that — unfair generalizations. Each Canadian is ultimately an individual, and as such will likely have his own unique perspective on how to be a decent and well-mannered human being. And sadly, there will always be a large amount who can’t be bothered at all.

Links About Canadian Manners:

http://www.thecanadaguide.com/manners

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Aboriginal Canadians and the First Nations

By most standards, Canada is a very young country, and Canadians are a very new people. The vast majority of the country’s population is descended from European immigrants who only arrived in North America in the 18th century or later, and even the most “historic” Canadian cities are rarely more than 200 years old.
But thousands of years before any of this happened, there were still people living in Canada. Aboriginals, also known as natives, First Nations peoples, or North American Indians are the descendants of the original inhabitants of North America, and today survive in the form of a small, but influential and important minority group that help remind Canadians of their country’s ancient past— and their contemporary responsibilities to its first residents.

History of Canada’s First Peoples

Early aboriginal tribes were famous for their unique styles of housing, particularly cone-shaped tepees made of hide and sticks (seen here) as well as ice igloos and "long house" wood cabins.

Everyone has to come from somewhere, and most archaeologists believe the native peoples of Canada migrated from east Asia to western North America sometime between 40 000 and 10 000 B.C., back when the two continents were still connected by a massive land bridge. In the centuries that followed, these peoples spread all across the lands that now comprise the United States and Canada, forming hundreds of distinct tribes, communities and nations scattered across the vast landscape. Though population estimates vary wildly, they undeniably numbered in the millions.
The exact character of aboriginal societies varied a fair bit depending on where exactly they were located, but most shared certain common characteristics, particularly hunter-gatherer sustenance lifestyles, strong respect for nature, egalitarian and communal social values, and deep and detailed spiritual beliefs. Many eventually formed sophisticated communities, complete with permanent housing, farms and stable political structures, as well as rich cultures with distinctive traditions in art, fashion, song and dance. At the same time, however, their societies tended to be lacking in other important fields, and most native communities lacked a written language, used only primitive weapons and had mostly simplistic and superstitious understandings of basic scientific concepts.

Until the 1970s, many young native children were raised in what were known as "residential schools," church-run institutions that taught their students to embrace Christianity and abandon their traditional cultures and languages. Far from solving anything, these schools ended up being terrible places of disease, abuse and neglect, and in 2008 the Canadian government granted massive reparations to anyone unfortunate enough to have attended one.

It was for these reasons and others that when Europeans first came to North America in the mid-1500s, most regarded the aboriginals as a hopelessly backwards people greatly inferior to themselves. Missionaries sought to aggressively convert this supposedly “godless” race to Christianity, while early French and British colonists saw them as a useful and easily-exploited source of cheap labour for the fur trade, or soldiers for the battlefield. As the European powers began to fight more actively amongst themselves for control of North America, aboriginal nations grew in nuisance, and were eventually forced into signing lopsided treaties that surrendered political control of their land in exchange for measly financial compensation or dubious promises of protection or safety.
Awful as all this political displacement and expulsion was, in the end it was disease that effectively weakened the aboriginals beyond recovery. Unexpectedly exposed to dozens of new European illnesses to which they had no immunity or cure, millions of natives would ultimately perish from plagues like smallpox, Typhoid and influenza. By the close of the 19th century, Canada’s aboriginal population had declined by more than 90 per cent, with the traditional native culture of North America having been all but eclipsed by the triumphant Europeans.

Canada’s Aboriginals Today

The creation of aboriginal artwork has proven to be incredibly lucrative for many native Canadians well into the present day, where such works are much-sought by collectors and tourists. Seen here is one of the most famous sculptures by master Haida artist Bill Reid (1920-1998).

Only when Natives were firmly in the minority did Canada’s aboriginal policy begin to become a bit more compassionate. Having displaced the natives from most of the country’s good land, in the mid-1800s the reserve system was introduced, isolating Canada’s surviving aboriginal population into small, protected areas where they would finally be free to govern themselves and protect their traditional way of life in a semi-independent fashion. In 1876, the Government of Canada further clarified the rights and powers of aboriginals through an elaborate piece of legislation known as the Indian Act, which still remains in effect to this day, albeit with many amendments and updates.
Today, Canada is home to about one million citizens of aboriginal descent (or about two per cent of the total population), comprising over 580 distinct tribes or bands, many of which exist within larger aboriginal nations. The majority of these are located in rural areas of Canada’s prairies and west coast, though native communities can be found nearly everywhere across the country, even the most remote regions of the far-north. Most aboriginals speak English as their first language, though efforts to preserve and strengthen traditional aboriginal tongues remain strong, with five native languages (Algonkin, Athapascan, Salishan, Siouan and Inuktitut) being fairly well known and widely spoken.

Statistical profile of Canada’s Aboriginal population, Government of Canada

Native Reserves and Special Rights

Aboriginal Canadians have been dubbed “citizens-plus” in recognition of the fact that they enjoy access to a variety of rights other Canadians do not, as part of the federal government’s efforts to protect their traditional way of life and improve their welfare after years of abuse and neglect. An aboriginal who has confirmed his native identity with the government of Canada is declared to be a “status Indian,” and is entitled to various benefits and privileges stemming either from colonial-era treaties, or other, more modern arrangements negotiated with the state. Many of these unique rights, in turn, flow directly from Canada’s aboriginal reserve system.

The highest representative body for aboriginal interestes in Canada is the Assembly of First Nations, whose chairman is usually treated as a national spokesperson for native rights. Seen here, Assembly chair Shawn Atleo (b. 1967) with Prime Minister Stephen Harper (b. 1959).

A native reserve or reservation is a legally protected area where aboriginal Canadians can live in a state of semi-exemption from a number of federal and provincial laws and participate in a society organized according to native traditions. In practice, most reserves are small, isolated communities, resembling anything from a trailer park to a small village, with populations of no more than a few hundred residents each. Governance of the reserve is legally entrusted to the local band council, which has considerable power to determine how their community will be run, and what sorts of benefits their residents will receive. Most reserves still receive some sort of regular treaty payment from the federal government, and this money is used by the band council to provide residents with basic services such as housing, education, roads, police, and — in many cases — employment.
Living on the reserve also exempts natives from having to pay federal or provincial taxes, and, in most cases, entitles them to special grants to help pay for health care, post-secondary education, public transportation and other social services. Aboriginal hunters and fishermen are likewise usually exempt from size and quantity restrictions, and if a reserve’s territory is lucky enough to contain natural resources such as oil or minerals, then the residents may be eligible to earn a cut of the royalties, too. These days, some of Canada’s savvier native bands have taken to exploiting the legal exemptions of their reserves to operate tax-exempt malls or casinos that make a lot of money for the tribe, as well as selling untaxed cigarettes or legally dubious products like fireworks, which may be banned by the surrounding city or province.

Troubles

One of the great tragedies of modern Canada is how poor the quality of life remains for Canadian aboriginals, even after several decades of aggressive government efforts to redress the sins of the past. Despite a multitude of social programs and special privileges, the life of a typical aboriginal in 21st century Canada remains significantly worse than that of any other demographic group, with rates of poverty, addiction and mental illness grossly disproportionate to their percentage of the population. Statistics show that an aboriginal Canadian is almost 10 times more likely than a non-aboriginal to wind up in prison, and aboriginal youths are five to six times more likely to kill themselves than their non-native peers.

In 1990, the city of Oka, Quebec approved a plan to build a golf course on a traditional burial ground of the Mohawk tribe, and in doing so helped trigger one of the most infamous episodes of native conflict in modern times. The tense 78-day standoff between aboriginal protesters and government forces ultimately only ended once the army was called in.

The root causes of all these social ills are obviously quite complicated and hard to define, but there are a number of popular targets. Many blame the reserve system itself. In most cases, any native who chooses to live on a reserve is willingly opting into a much lower standard of living than he would enjoy elsewhere, as many reserves simply lack the quality of housing, education, medical care and even basic amenities like clean water and electricity that other Canadians take for granted.
Increasingly, it has become popular for critics to characterize many reserves as having “third world” living conditions, with blame pointed at either the federal government (which neglects to provide adequate funding to bands), corrupt band councils (which embezzle funds and misspend), or both. Others have gone further and argued that Canada’s entire system of dealing with aboriginals is hopelessly backwards and anachronistic. By continuing to place so much responsibility on the Canadian government and treaties to fund, regulate and supervise aboriginal affairs, they say, Canada’s natives remain in a perpetuate state of infantile dependence, unable to do much of anything without government support and consent.
Many aboriginal leaders would doubtlessly like to see their nations assert greater independence from Canada, but without an alternative source of funding to make this vision a reality, the dependence on government sponsorship must continue. This is part of the reason why many Canadian native bands are now trying to place a greater emphasis on securing royalties from natural resources harvested from their traditional lands, or gain a cut of corporate profits from things like oil pipelines, mines, dams or fisheries from companies operating within their tribal borders.

Links About Aboriginals:

http://www.thecanadaguide.com/first-nations

-----------------

Marginalization of Aboriginal women

A Brief History of the Marginalization of Aboriginal Women in Canada

Aboriginal women in Canada frequently experience challenges and discrimination that are not necessarily shared by non-Aboriginal women, nor are by Aboriginal men. Aboriginal women have been described as facing a “double-burden” – that for being discriminated against as a woman, and further for being Aboriginal. To begin to understand this situation, and why the circumstances of Aboriginal women deserves their own careful consideration, we must examine how both Native/non-Native relations and gender relations were developed throughout Canada’s colonial history, where these two types of relations intersect, and where they diverge.

As non-Aboriginal settlers first arrived in what is now Canada, they brought with them their patriarchal social codes and beliefs, and tried to make sense of Aboriginal society through a patriarchal lens. As the colonies consolidated to form the Dominion of Canada, Crown policies were created throughout the country with the goal of assimilating and “civilizing” First Nations peoples based on a European model. These policies had profound effects on Aboriginal women across the country.

By outlining these early histories of gender relations we aim to give the reader a sense of how initial colonial assumptions resulted in the drastic alteration of women’s influence and social systems in a relatively short time. These impacts continue to be felt by Aboriginal women across Canada today.

Aboriginal Women’s Traditional Roles & Power

Women were respected for their spiritual and mental strength and men were respected for their spiritual and physical strength. Women were given the responsibility in bearing children and were given the strength and power to carry that responsibility through. Men had always respected that spiritual and mental strength and women respected the men's physical strength. There was always a balance between men and women as each had their own responsibilities as a man and as a woman.

Beverley Jacobs,
Former NWAC president and Mohawk activist,
“International Law/The Great Law of Peace,” 35.

Despite the vast socio-cultural diversity amongst Canada’s hundreds of First Nations, historians and experts largely agree that a balance between women and men’s roles typically existed in pre-contact Aboriginal societies, where women and men had different, but complementary roles. Many First Nations were matrilineal, meaning that descent – wealth, power, and inheritance -- were passed down through the mother.

Historians and scholars have emphasized the various capacities in which women were able to hold positions of power and leadership in their community. Lisa J. Udel, for example, explains that motherhood was honoured and revered as key to the thriving of the culture, and was not always strictly defined by its biological role, but was understood as a position of leadership and responsibility for caring for and nurturing others.¹ The role of the Clan Mother is frequently cited as an example of a powerful political role, central to the Haudenosaunee Six Nations confederacy. While many Nations had male chiefs, in some societies such as the Haudeonsaunee, women selected the Chief and were also able to take his power away.² Historians and other experts also emphasize that women across many First Nations were responsible for land holdings and allocation of resources—they controlled access to certain areas as well as distribution of its products.

Ultimately, however, as women’s roles varied greatly between First Nations, they shared similar characteristics. Scholar Rebecca Tsosie identifies three common characteristics: gender roles were not ranked hierarchically but rather considered to be complementary, in many cases women were able to transcend gender roles, and “the central role of Native women within their societies is often reflected in the religious or spiritual content of their cultures.”³

And, as scholars Shari M. Huhndorf and Cheryl Suzack point out, “although Indigenous women do not share a single culture, they do have a common colonial history. The imposition of patriarchy has transformed Indigenous societies by diminishing Indigenous women’s power, status and material circumstances.”⁴

For further readings on Aboriginal women’s traditional roles, see Paula Ann Gunn, The Sacred Hoop (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), and Laura E. Donaldson, “’But we are your mothers, you are our sons’: Gender, Sovereignty, and the Nation in Early Cherokee Women’s Writing.” In Indigenous Women and Feminism: Politics, Activism, Culture. (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010), 43-55.

Settler mischaracterization of Aboriginal women’s roles

As settlers arrived in what is now North America, they brought with them a foreign patriarchal European value system. European settlers imposed their own frameworks of understanding onto Aboriginal social systems, which had particular ramifications for Aboriginal women. As schoalr Julia V. Emberley describes, settlers made sense of Aboriginal societies by viewing them through a European, patriarchal lens, assuming that Victorian principles represented the natural order of things. For instance, many settlers held onto Victorian beliefs that women were delicate and ill-equipped for hard labour, and thus viewed Aboriginal women who worked the land as proof that Aboriginal men treated women as inferior, for they were doing the men’s work. The power and agency of Aboriginal women were invisible to them.

Scholar Laura E. Donaldson provides another telling example of Eurocentric mischaracterization. She describes the Cherokee role of Ghigau, or “war woman,” a figure who becomes known as “the most beloved woman” after she reaches menopause:

The Ghigau sat in council meetings with both the peace and war chiefs, decided the fate of war captives, prepared the purgative Black Drink at the centre of many Cherokee ceremonies, and led the women’s council. In his Diary of the American Indians, which was published originally in 1755, James Adair derided this unique political institution as a petticoat government—a direct jab, according to Paula Gunn Allen (Laguna Pueblo) at the power of the Ghigau. Indeed, Allen argues that the honour accorded her by the Cherokee people offended the Euro-American belief in universal male dominance.⁵

Sexual Policing of Aboriginal Women & Constructing Deviance

European men further believed that a woman should remain chaste and “virtuous,” according to their cultural and religious beliefs. Settlers developed and held onto the mythical archetype of the virtuous Indian Princess willing to reject her own people for Christian civilization.⁶ Thus developed the Indian Princess/Squaw dichotomy, or, what Rayna Green terms “the Pocahontas perplex,” placing Aboriginal women into a restrictive binary based on European patriarchal values. If a woman could not be virtuous by strict Victorian standards, which, as Green points out was nearly impossible, she was deemed unworthy of respect. These concepts were written right into the Indian Act, with certain rights afforded to men and women of “good moral character,” as determined by the Indian agent. The Indian agent became, therefore, a sort of sexual policing agent. Indian agents had the power to act as justices of the peace or magistrates, giving them legal authority to monitor and control their Indian charges. Any sexual relations that did not conform to monogamy in marriage were seen as un-civilized and counter to the government’s civilizing mission.⁷

Scholar Joan Sangster points out that female sexuality was regulated in numerous ways, with colonial law as “one crucial site of sexual regulation.”⁸ The Indian Act gave the agent power to jail people, and the agent’s responsibility for registering births, marriages, and those eligible for Indian status gave agents power to punish those who did not conform. While many First Nations customary laws allowed for divorces, Indian Agents forbade them. A woman cohabitating with a new partner could be charged with bigamy and sent off to a reformatory, far from her family and homeland.⁹ As Sangster points out,

The fact that the Indian Affairs filing system designated a whole category for ‘Immorality on the Reserves,’ with almost all the complaints centering on sexual misbehavior, indicates the importance of the agent’s role as custodian of sexual morality.¹⁰

The Juvenile Delinquents Act and Training School Act of the 1950s, for example, were established to train young women away from perceived “promiscuity” and into domesticity, forcing European patriarchal roles onto Native women.¹¹ If Native women did not recognize or obey European patriarchal roles, they could be severely punished.

While written legislation provided standards for behaviour, day-to-day experiences did not always reflect these laws. Although there are consistent threads of resistance, some aspects of colonial laws and ideals filtered into First Nations communities and individual mentalities, including gender roles and sexual relations. Sangster draws upon sociologist Karen Anderson to explain that the internalization of these sexual double-standards, “reorder[ed] the domestic sphere on reserves ‘involved both direct coercion and the indirect ‘colonization of the soul,’ with the colonized literally coming to discipline themselves.”¹² As such, legal ramifications occasionally became weapons used by community members who wrote to the Indian Agent, or directly to Ottawa, to complain about “sexual deviancy.”¹³This history has led to contemporary ideas of Aboriginal women’s sexuality. As Lubicon Cree scholar Robyn Bourgeois described in an interview, the myth of the Aboriginal woman as a sexual deviant persists in contemporary Canadian society with some very real ramifications:

No, this view hasn’t changed, and yes it is something I have encountered. The myth of the deviant Aboriginal woman continues to plague us, reinforced by dominant cases that coalesce prostitution and Aboriginal women into a single entity. Contemporary Canadian society dismisses violence against Aboriginal women and girls today on the basis of these perceived deviances (addicted, sexually available). We are not even treated as human beings. Human beings have the right to a life free from violence, yet we have to convince the Canadian state to step up and protect us. And these stereotypes provide the justification for why the State doesn’t step up.¹⁴

Indian Act Gendered Discrimination

Now that we’ve explored the ways in which colonial ideas perpetuated discrimination against Aboriginal women, it is important to understand the ways in which these ideas have been retained to the present day. This discrimination continues to be reinforced through various means, perhaps most notably the Indian Act. As such, we will explore three areas of gender discrimination which the Indian Act continues to perpetuate and normalize: regulation of the family, the reserve system and geographic exclusion, and political exclusion.

Government policy and legislation impacted the expected roles and rights of Aboriginal women in various and far-reaching ways. The Indian Act is only one of such policies, yet is the most common critique raised by scholars who point out how women were excluded from positions of power. The Indian Act remains a central feature in the lives of Aboriginal women, and is essential to understanding the current and historical socio-political situation in Canada.

The Indian Act, created by the federal government in 1876, was evidently designed with the colonial ideal of men as leaders and heads of households, and women as dependents of their husbands. The Indian Act denied women the right to possess land and marital property—only widows could possess land under the reserve system. However, a widow could not inherit her husband’s personal property upon his death—everything, including the family house, legally went to his children. Government agents modified the Act slightly in 1884, with an amendment that allowed men to will their estate to their wives, but a wife could only receive it if the Indian agent determined she was of “good moral character.” This particular amendment remained in the Indian Act until 1951, although to this day men still hold exclusive rights to property, even if a relationship ends. This has far-reaching implications in the lives and safety of the affected women:

Over the years more and more women were being thrown out of their homes by husbands. While the men then moved their girlfriends—often [non-status]—into the family home, the Indian women and children had to move into condemned houses or in with relatives who already were overcrowded. Since the Indian Act gave men sole ownership of property through certificates of possession, women had no housing rights or recourse to help through the law.

Janet Silman
Enough is Enough: Aboriginal Women Speak Out, 11

Targeting kinship & family systems under the Indian Act

The European belief that the patriarchal, nuclear family was a natural means of organization influenced settler-Aboriginal relationships. Many First Nations historically have operated on a matrilineal system where descent is traced through the mother, meaning that a child would become a member of his or her mother’s clan. Many societies were also matrilocal, in which a man married into a woman’s family and would live with her community, resulting in settlement patterns based on the female line. In contrast, European settlers had taken for granted that a family was structured with men as the head of the family and the women as subservient, and tried to understand Aboriginal families by imposing a patriarchal European family model onto matriarchal Aboriginal kinship systems. This belief was perpetuated throughout government policies that attempted to restructure the Aboriginal family to fit this mould. Aboriginal kinship systems were forcibly restructured over time through a number of policies, including the Indian Act, Indian status, and the residential school system. Scholars, community members and other experts point out that even after the closure of residential schools, foster parenting, adoptions [link to 60s scoop], and other child welfare policies continue to separate Aboriginal families and place them in non-Aboriginal homes and kinship systems.¹⁵

Aboriginal families initially continued to recognize their own matriarchal descent patterns and matrilocal systems despite encroaching non-Aboriginal settlement. In 1851, however, this would be forcibly disrupted when the government created legislation to determine who qualified as Indian. The government decided that to be an Indian, one had to be an Indian male, be the child of an Indian male, or be married to an Indian male. Under this system, a woman depended on her relationship with a man to determine whether or not she was an Indian. This completely contradicted the matrilineal system of many First Nations and disrupted a hereditary system that had been in place for hundreds of generations.

Those who qualified as Indian under this legislated criteria would gain Indian “status,” hence the term Status or Non-Status Indian. For women, status was not guaranteed. Legislation stated that a status Indian woman who married a non-Indian man would cease to be an Indian. She would lose her status, and with it, she would lose treaty benefits, health benefits, the right to live on her reserve, the right to inherit her family property, and even the right to be buried on the reserve with her ancestors. However, if an Indian man married a non-native woman, he would keep all his rights. His wife would in fact gain Indian status. Even if an Indian woman married another Indian man, she would cease to be a member of her own band, and would become a member of his. If a woman was widowed, or abandoned by her husband, she would become enfranchised and lose status and her rights altogether.

Alternatively, if a non-native woman married an Indian man, she would gain status. In all these situations, a woman’s status was entirely dependent on her husband. As is explicitly stated in Section 12 (1)(b) of the Indian Act, “a woman who married a person who is not an Indian… [is] not entitled to be registered.”

As Emberley explains, the exclusion of women and devaluing of their status established “fraternal links between aboriginal and colonial men, created fissures within aboriginal families along gender lines, and eventually led to patriarchal relations and the regulating of ‘the aboriginal family’ on a European bourgeois model.” ¹⁶

Once the Indian Act was passed, the responsibilities of our men and women changed drastically. As a result of being confined to a reserve, our traditional men and women lost their responsibilities in using their strengths, either physically or mentally. Women were thought of as property by our O :gwe ho:we men who became acculturated into believing that they had to think like white men . The entitlement to status under the Indian Act itself enabled that to happen, wherein the male would gain status and his wife and his children would gain his status.

Beverley Jacobs

“International Law/The Great Law of Peace,” 108

Geographical impacts of the Indian Act for women

The colonial governments creation of the reserve system, and the Indian Act’s further legislation of reserve lands and who could reside on them, impacted women (as well as men) drastically. The Indian Act’s provisions regarding rights to land and status disrupted the ancient matrilineal kinship system as well as matrilocal post-marital residency patterns that had been in place for generations.¹⁷ The impacts of colonial policies have long had strong geographical dimensions along gender lines, including the restructuring of power and forced displacement of individuals, families, and communities. Julie V. Emberley points that non-Aboriginal control over lands, through environmental conservation efforts or through expropriating traditional lands, has resulted in the loss of women’s traditional power.¹⁸ Further, the right to live on one’s own reserve was suddenly denied many women who had strong ties and Aboriginal rights to their territory.

Historically, through the Indian Act a woman has had to leave the reserve community she married into if her husband abandons her or passes away. Aboriginal women on reserves face additional challenges with property. In these cases, lack of regulation regarding on-reserve matrimonial property has forced many women to leave their homes and belongings behind as they leave the reserve. (See, for example, the Native Women’s Association of Canada’s page and resources on matrimonial real property, available at http://www.nwac-hq.org/research/matrimonial-real-property). This, coupled with the larger history of colonialism, has put many women in incredibly vulnerable positions, having to leave their homes for unfamiliar spaces where they are unsupported and with minimal assets. This marginalization of Aboriginal women has put many women in desperate situations.

Scholar Sherene H. Razack has examined how space can be highly gendered and racialized, and has studied how gendered and racialized urban spaces have encouraged and condoned violent behaviour against Aboriginal women. (See “Gendered Racial Violence and Spatialized Justice: The Murder of Pamela George,” Canadian Journal of Law and Society, 2000, 15:2, pp. 91-30.) Razack argues that in contemporary Canadian society, violence against Aboriginal women has become normalized, and that the circumstances of Aboriginal women tend to be presented outside of any historical context, absolving any responsibility or accountability to the people who perpetrate the violence and marginalization. In her study on the murder of Pamela George and the subsequent trial, Razack illustrates how the judge and defendants perceived the social problems and violence experienced by the victim as “natural” for an Aboriginal woman and thus sentenced the two men responsible to only six and a half years, with one man able to leave on parole after two-thirds of his sentence.¹⁹

This situation continues to play out in Canadian society, where to date over 3000 women have been murdered or are still missing in Canada since the 1970s, many of them Aboriginal. This epidemic is perhaps most well-known in areas such as Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, or Highway 16, now commonly known as “the Highway of Tears.” In the overwhelming majority of these cases no suspects have been listed, nor have murderers been found. The government and police have been criticized for their lack of action, even as local residents were informing them of the suspicious pattern. The Vancouver Police Department explained their lack of response to the systemic murders by claiming that, “many street involved women do not have close family ties and many deliberately go 'missing' for any number of reasons, including their desire to evade the police."²⁰ However, as scholar John Lowman points out, many "did have close family ties and well-established social networks and had suddenly disappeared nonetheless."²¹ This exchange illustrates the invisibility of Aboriginal women as persons, particularly those affiliated with prostitution, and the normalization and general acceptance of violence against these women.

In 2010, the Canadian government pledged $10 million in support of campaigns for missing and murdered Aboriginal women; however, this funding has since been cut back, and the means of distribution has been criticized by Aboriginal women’s groups.

Exclusion of Women in Politics

The colonial patriarchal system also operated on the European assumption that women inherently had no capacity for political involvement. The federal government imposed the band structure as a new form of Aboriginal government to eradicate traditional hereditary leadership and facilitate federal influence and control. Band governments were created as strictly male domain, with women unable to become chiefs or band councillors. Women, who previously were key decision-makers and advisors, were now completely excluded from decision-making in their own communities:

At the election of a chief or chiefs, or the granting of any ordinary consent required of a band of Indians under the Act, those entitled to vote at the council or meeting thereof shall be the male members of the band of the full age of twenty-one years.

Indian Act, 1876 Section 61²²

Many First Nations resisted the imposition of band council governance systems, but were ultimately unsuccessful in stopping them. The most notable example of this would be the Haudenosaunee Six Nations, who continued to recognize hereditary chiefs and Clan Mothers as leaders until 1924 when the federal government forcibly and violently imposed it upon them by “beating up our Clan Mothers and supporters and chiefs” and sending dissenters to jail.

Until 1951, Indian women were excluded from political activity by law. They were not allowed to vote or to hold office. In 1951, the Indian Act was amended so that an Indian did not necessarily have to have status to be band member. With this amendment, the wording was changed so that the Indian Act no longer specified the sex of the voter. Because of this—essentially by default-- women were finally allowed to vote in band elections. In 1960, the government of Canada finally gave all Aboriginal peoples, male or female, the right to vote federally.

Conclusion

Now that we’ve looked at how racial and gendered discrimination against Aboriginal women has been created and perpetuated, we will now examine the ways in which women have resisted and reclaimed their traditional power and influence. Please see our section on Aboriginal women & contemporary activism to continue reading.

By Erin Hanson

Endnotes

**1 Udel, Lisa J. “Revision & Resistance: The Politics of Native Women’s Motherwork.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 22:2, 2001. 43-62.**

2 McGrath, Ann & Winona Stevenson, “Gender, Race & Policy: Aboriginal Women and the State in Canada and Australia,” and Williams, Robert. “Gendered Checks and Balances: Understanding the Legacy of White Patriarchy in an American Indian Cultural Context.” Georgia Law Review 24: 1990. 1034

For a more in-depth examination of women’s roles in appointing leadership, see “The Changing Status of Seneca Women” by Joy Bilharz, in Women and Power in Native North America edited by Laura F. Klein and Lillian A. Ackerman

3 Tsosie, Rebecca. “Native Women and Leadership: An Ethics of Culture and Relationship.” In Indigenous Women and Feminism: Politics, Activism, Culture. Ed. Cheryl Suzack et al. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010, 32.

4 Huhndorf, Shari M. and Cheryl Suzack, “Indigenous Feminism: Theorizing the Issues,” In ed. Cheryl Suzack et al.

5 Donaldson, Laura E. “’But we are your mothers; you are our sons:” Gender, Sovereignty, and the Nation in Early Cherokee Women’s Writing.” In Indigenous Women and Feminism: : Politics, Activism, Culture. (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010), 43-44.

6 Green, 701.

7 Sangster, 308.

8 303.

9 Sangster, 311-2.

10 313.

11 Sangster, 302-3.

12 Sangster, 307.

13 Sangster, 314.

14 “Breaking the silence about Canada’s 800+ missing and murdered Aboriginal women: Interview with Cree academic and activist Robyn Bourgeois.” Black Coffee Poet website, Feb 16, 2011. Accessed February 17, 2011. Available online at http://blackcoffeepoet.com/2011/02/16/breaking-the-silence-about-canadas-800-missing-and-murdered-aboriginal-women-interview-with-cree-academic-and-activist-robyn-bourgeois-a-photo-essay-of-the-no-more-silence-rally-feb-14th-201/

15 Emberley, 61.

16 Emberley, 62.

17 McGrath & Stevenson, 41.

18 Emberley, 61.

19 Razack, 92.

**20 Lowman, John. “Violence against Women: Violence and the (outlaw) status of Street Prostitution in Canada. Violence Against Women 2000 6(9): 996.**

21 Ibid.

22 Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, Chapter 18: An Act to amend and consolidate the laws respecting Indians. April 12, 1876, Available online: http://www.ainc-inac.gc.ca/ai/arp/ls/pubs/1876c18/1876c18-eng.asp

23 Beverley Jacobs, presentation to University of British Columbia, March 19, 2008.

http://indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/home/community-politics/marginalization-of-aboriginal-women.html

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Aboriginal Society and Culture
Canada's native peoples may have begun as immigrants from Asia in the far-distant past. But their presence in North America over thousands of years certainly justifies considering their society and culture to be native or aboriginal. Ancient artifacts recovered by archaeology, tradition, legends and customs as traced by anthropology, can reveal a good deal about the evolution of these peoples throughout eons of prehistory. Still, our own concern is history. And so, while by no means disregarding the findings of archaeology and anthropology for either the prehistoric or historic periods, we will look at the first Canadians at about the time they were to enter into written historical record, with the arrival of newcomers from Europe. We will observe them on the eve, so to speak, in a broad survey of the main native cultural groupings across the territories of a Canada-to-be; once again taking our course from east to west and north.
In Newfoundland then there were the Beothuks, a small group of coastal dwellers who largely lived by fishing and seal-hunting. Yet all too little is known about them; driven inland or brutally slaughtered by invading European fishermen from about 1500 on, and brought to extinction before the 1830s. It is said that the Beothuks' liberal use of red ochre, a pigment made from hematite (iron ore) with which they stained their bodies, led to the name "Red" Indian that would be applied across North America: a sad sort of bequest from a vanished native people. On the Atlantic mainland, however, the more numerous Micmacs endured. Behind the Micmacs were the Malecites in what is now New Brunswick; both tribes being Algonquians in language.
In fact, Algonquian-speakers formed one of the largest linguistic families or groupings throughout aboriginal Canada, reaching from the eastern woodlands north to the Subarctic and west into the Great Plains. In this truly extended family, the Blackfoot of the Alberta prairies might have nothing much in common with the Micmac in Nova Scotia other than language forms. Still, the Algonquian peoples in general were migratory hunters, fishers and gatherers, though some of them might practice a little corn-growing and garden-tending in more southern areas. Outside the Atlantic region, the main Algonquian-speaking tribes included the Montanguais-Naskopi, north of the St. Lawrence in the Shield country of eastern Quebec; the Algonquins (the tribe name lacks the "a") located around the Ottawa, the Nipissings beyond them; the Odawas (Ottawas) of Lake Huron, and the Ojibwas (Chippewas) above Lake Superior. Still further, there were the Algonquian-speaking Cree, a farspread tribal family in itself, comprising the Swampy Cree along the shores of James and Hudson Bay, the Woods Cree northwest through Manitoba and Saskatchewan, and the Plains Cree from Saskatchewan across Alberta territory.
Algonquian tribes, however, were largely just units of common ancestry, beliefs and practices without commanding authority. The real working unit within them was the band: a much smaller community of families which ranged over its own recognized territory throughout the year, guided by shamans, its spiritual leaders, as well as by its chief, frequently a noted hunter at its head. During the winter, the band broke up into member-families, to carry on the hunt for very survival in the snowy wilds, tracking deer, elk, moose and other game. In warmer seasons the band came back together; to fish at well-established river or lake locations, to gather berries, wild rice and other plants, and to continue hunting, whether for birds or beaver, rabbits or bear. The canoe -- especially the elegant, efficient birch-bark canoe made where the white-skinned paper birch grew -- the snare, the bow-and-arrow, and the flint knife, woven, portable basketry or light, bark-covered wigwams; all were prime and necessary features of Algonquian migratory culture, in which free movement across rock and forest was an inherent part of life itself.
Much more limited in range of territory, yet far more concentrated and strongly organized, was the next linguistic family, the Iroquoians. They mainly occupied the St. Lawrence Lowlands-Lower Great Lakes region in Canada, a narrow southern confine compared to the vast areas beyond it known to Algonquians and other language groups; but a moderate and considerably favoured region, as we have seen, which could support a sizeable native population in itself. The Iroquoians, moreover, had basically taken to corn-culture, growing beans and squash as well; so that before the historic period began, hunting and fishing had become only supplementary for this largely-settled people, dwelling in substantial villages that might hold well over a thousand inhabitants each. Surrounding garden lands cleared from the forests provided a food supply that could be stored each year; so that, barring natural calamities, the Iroquoian gardeners were released from the winter shortages that continually threatened the roaming Algonquian hunters. This greater security and stability thus enabled the village-dwellers to develop far more effective tribal authority. Furthermore, organization and authority promoted power -- which might lead on to war. In any event, the Iroquoians could and did conduct purposeful inter-tribal warfare, in wars largely beyond any clashes of small Algonquian bands.
With the rise of power and fighting prowess among Iroquoian tribes, their villages came to be defended by encircling log palisades, sometimes in three rings, surmounted by platforms for bowmen and stone hurlers. Inside the palisades, the inhabitants lived in large bark-covered longhouses, each holding ten to thirty related families, while apartment quarters and fireplaces were allotted to every family. Relationships came through the female line; a married man moved into his wife's longhouse; and senior family-matrons elected the tribal chiefs, who were men, but who could be removed if these elder headwomen so required. Women, furthermore, planted the crops and tended the gardens, which freed the men for war as well as for hunting or trading, yet also gave the women a central economic role to add to their social and political importance. In a real sense, Iroquoian society and culture showed aspects of both democracy and feminism. How "primitive" was the heritage of people such as these in Canada?
The Iroquoians dwelt on both sides of the Lower Great Lakes, however; particularly in what would become the American state of New York, as well as north above those lakes in "Canadian" territory of the future. There was thus much interflow between tribes across a non-existent border, and many contacts, including hostile ones, between the Iroquoians north or south of Lake Ontario. The most powerfully organized tribes indeed were centred to the south in the area of modern up-state New York. These were the Five Nations of the Iroquois (as Europeans would come to know them), who stretched west from the Hudson River through the Finger Lake country to the Niagara Peninsula: from east to west consisting of the Mohawks on the upper Hudson, the Oneidas, the Onondagas, the Cayugas, and the Senecas toward Niagara -- who at times located villages on the "Canadian" side of Lake Ontario as well. The Five Nations Iroquois formed a league or confederacy by the 1500s, which kept them at peace with one another under a grand council of fifty chosen federal chiefs, and united them against their outside enemies. The Iroquois League thus emerged as a military force to be reckoned with; not only by neighbouring Indian tribes, but by Europeans, too, when they arrived. In fact, this Iroquois Confederacy became the one native power to be feared (and rightly so) by incoming Europeans for a century and more after 1600. Still, Iroquois strength did not just stem from skill in the swift raids of forest warfare. It also came from skill in diplomacy and debate, and from the high, determined morale of a well-knit people who decided their own affairs.
North of the Five Nations, the main Iroquoian peoples dwelling in Canada were the St. Lawrence Iroquois, whose villages were there at the sites of Quebec and Montreal when the first French ship came up the river in 1535; the numerous Attiwandirons, who spread westward from the head of Lake Ontario towards the Detroit River; and the Hurons, centred on the fertile Georgian Bay shores south of Lake Huron but extending their sway down to the harbour of Toronto on Lake Ontario. The Hurons in many respects were the strongest rivals to the Five Nations Iroquois. They were flourishing and populous in their large villages set in parklike cornfields. They traded actively with Algonquian tribes east, west and north, exchanging garden products for skins, furs, fish and game. They also had their own Huron Confederacy of five tribes, formed in part as a defensive alliance against the weight of the Iroquois. But the Hurons' Confederacy would prove less well co-ordinated -- and perhaps the Europeans' early presence in their midst lessened their own resolve, as well as bringing white men's diseases that gravely weakened them. At any rate, the Hurons were to fail and disappear. But that is a story for the telling later.
Moving further west in Canada beyond the Iroquoians, we have already noted the Algonquian tribes that lived along the Upper Great Lakes or through the Precambrian Shield country on into Manitoba. But the Great Plains region which here opened out contained another distinct type of aboriginal society, even though there was a good deal of linguistic variety within it. It included Algonquian-speakers, of course, like the afore-mentioned Plains Cree or Blackfoot; but it also held the Assiniboine and the Sioux (or Dakota) of southern prairie areas, or the Stoneys of the foothills, all of whom belonged in language to a wider Siouan family that reached well down into the American Plains West. And there were the Sarcee in country around a future Calgary. They spoke the Athapascan tongue generally associated with vast areas northward into the Subarctic; but they evidently had moved south in prehistoric time and adopted Plains culture.
That culture was essentially dependent on the buffalo: the North American bison, whose great herds had roamed mid-continental grasslands since time immemorial. The buffalo amply fed the Plains Indians; provided them with warm clothing, and thick robes against sub-zero winters; furnished skins to cover their tepees, bones for their tools and sinews for their bowstrings and snares. In brief the buffalo supplied a whole vigorous Indian economy of the Plains. Yet the tribes who lived by it had had to hunt the buffalo on foot; since the horse, once native to America, had died out there thousands of years before; not to be re-introduced until the Spaniards brought it with them from Europe in the 1500s. Only the dog carried some share of family baggage, as the Plains tribes roamed across the prairies following the buffalo herds. Mass kills were made effectively at "buffalo jumps". Here a herd was stampeded over a steep prairie decline, funnelled to it by pre-placed stones and brushwood, and by Indians shouting from either flank, until the broken animals left lying at the bottom could readily be slain. But hunting down single beasts by foot, crawling in to kill with bow and spear, was a process of endless craft and patience -- until the horse arrived, to revolutionize Plains Indian life.
Horses that strayed from Spanish-held lands in Mexico in time led to wild herds that flourished freely on the grassy prairies of mid-America; and the native peoples of that world increasingly learned to catch, tame and ride them. Hence by 1730 or so, tribes in the Canadian Plains West were tending and riding their own stock of horses. The results appeared in vastly increased mobility and warlike power for Plains Indian society. Its members still lived by the buffalo; but they had far more ability to get it, far more security of food supply. Consequently, the native tribes of the region built up a distinctive horse-based culture and society, confident in peace or war, with their own strong sense of freedom on the open land, and led by chiefs approved by councils of their elders.
In the high Cordilleran ranges that climbed west of the plains, native life was understandably focused within mountain valleys, or on the upland Central plateau of British Columbia. Here in areas between the Rockies and the Pacific slopes, the Plateau language family contained the Kootenay Indians to the east, and the Interior Salish peoples to the west, while Athapascan-speaking tribes ranged on northward. Yet these were fairly small groupings in an often difficult terrain: non-agricultural and semi-nomadic hunters who also depended considerably on salmon taken from the mountain rivers, especially on towards the coast. Emphatically more numerous, organized and influential, however, were the aboriginal peoples further west, on Canada's Pacific Coast.
Given its mild climate and plentiful resources in both land and sea, it is none too surprising that the Pacific shore would produce the most thickly populated and complexly developed societies to emerge in native Canada. Their richness even appeared in language diversity, for here there was no one (or even a dominant) linguistic family. In the north, edging Yukon and Alaska, were Linglit speakers; the Haida tongue was found in the Queen Charlottes, the little-related Tsimshian language group on the adjacent mainland. Further south, there were the Nooka and Nitinat on Vancouver Island, along with other mainland elements of their own linguistic Wakeshan group. Below these again, on island and main, were Coast Salishan speakers. Altogether it added up to nineteen mutually unintelligible native languages spoken on the British Columbian coasts alone.
These early linguistic differences might scarcely seem to matter in the history of Canada -- yet for a country later to be split by language, they might suggest some enduring problems of heritage. More significant for us now, however, are the major tribes within this West Coast language diversity: since they lived much the same kind of lives in their Far West setting, although with some specialties of their own. The Haida of the Charlottes, the Tsimshians on the Skeena, the Bella Coola below them, or the Kwakiut, Comax, and other peoples down to the lower shores of Vancouver Island, all present a similar story of living in great wooden village-houses set beside a generous sea. Salmon, fresh or dried, taken in the annual salmon runs, formed a staple of diet; but shell fish and other fish were available in plenty. Seals, porpoises -- and whales harpooned by Haida or Nootka -- added to that plenty, as did berries and edible plants on land, or land animals from deer and elk to bear and mountain goat: all to provide for a securely stable and well-developed West Coast native society. The great trees of the rain forest, moreover, furnished them with excellent timber, which they split into long planks (using just stone tools with remarkable skill) to erect their big communal dwellings. The massive tree trunks that made the supporting house-posts were carved with the same skill to display clan crests or totems, from which developed the lofty totem pole, still more elaborately carved and painted with the symbols of the whole genealogical past of tribal clans.
The wood-working abilities of West Coast craftsmen were no less displayed in bowls, dishes or painted chests; but especially in their dugout canoes. These long, sea-going craft (from which whales were taken in open waters) were shaped from thick cedar trunks, yet were so carefully hewed and chiselled out that the heavy mass of wood was pared down to sturdy yet slim and graceful vessels that often carried sail. But if wood-working, or sand stone carving, was man's work, so weaving was the woman's: producing cloaks and blankets finely crafted from cedar bark and mountain-goat wool, large rush mats to line the houses for warmth, broad-trimmed bark hats closely woven to keep out the frequent rains, baskets of spruce-root, fish nets of spun twine, and still more. In view of this richly-productive society, it is not too surprising that it came to show class differentiation. While clan and kinfolk bonds joined the dwellers within each village house, the ownership of real property -- of house sites, berry patches, fishing and sealing places -- led to some elements amassing wealth. There hence were upper and lower levels within this tribal society, though each village itself stayed relatively independent. And at the very bottom level were slaves, captured in war or purchased, who did the most menial tasks. Furthermore, in a social confirmation of rank and power, wealthy, honoured persons held potlachs, great ceremonial feasts at which they liberally distributed gifts in testimony to their standing. Solid, self-assured and prosperous, the peoples of the Pacific Coast lived with potlaches and high ceremonies that did indeed display how well endowed they were.
Turning north and inland, we enter the harder, far less endowed native worlds of the Subarctic and Arctic. While Algonquians occupied the eastern Subarctic areas across the Shield, chiefly Montagnais and Cree, the western Subarctic was the province of another major language family, the Athapascan, whose members widely called themselves the Dene (de-nay), in that tongue meaning "the people". These western Athapascans covered an immense territory; but lived in small, scattered bands of hunters ranging through the northern forests. Like the Algonquians, whose life was not dissimilar, the band was much more the daily reality than the tribe. Yet there still were tribal differences and diversity, because the Subarctic expanses varied widely in themselves, from the mountain uplands in the Yukon to valley plains along the Mackenzie river system, or to the tundra country eastward on to Hudson Bay. Thus the Tutchone people in the Yukon, inhabiting the northern extension of British Columbia's Central Plateau, often depended on salmon fishing as well as on seeking moose or caribou. The Sekani hunted moose and mountain sheep on the Rockies' slopes, but were excluded by their enemies from the buffalo on the plains below. The Slaveys lived by lakes and streams from the Hay River and Slave River north to Great Bear Lake, taking fish, berries, small game and moose, in a culture of little winter groups and bigger summer bands, again considerably like the Algonquians. And the Chipewayans, most numerous of the northern Athapascan peoples, held the Subarctic forest fringe east to the Coppermine River and the tundra Barren Lands beyond, which they ranged in pursuit of caribou. For these Chipewayans, life was regularly built about following the annual migration of great caribou herds, from their winter shelter in the forest to summer pastures on the open barrens.
The final aboriginal Canadians to be surveyed are the Inuit, the people of the Arctic. Never large in numbers -- not surprising, considering the nature of their territory -- their very survival expresses their own high resourcefulness and adaptability. They formed but a single language group, one related to Siberian peoples but not to any Amerindian ones; which suggests that the Inuit migrated from Asia later than the Indians (who moved on southward) and instead adjusted to the Arctic as their own permanent home. There the earlier Dorset Inuit culture emerged around 500 B.C., and it produced the soapstone lamp, the igloo and the dog sled. Yet the later Thule culture, that came eastward from Alaska around 1000 A.D., brought more advanced sea-hunting techniques, including whale-catching. By about 1400, accordingly a Thule Inuit population had spread -- if thinly -- all around Arctic Canada north of the treeline, and from Alaska to the shores of Greenland.
These, then, were the Inuit by the opening of the historic age in Canada. They existed in tribal groups: the Ungava, Baffin Island, Netsilik (Seal), Caribou and the Mackenzie Inuit among them. For such nomadic hunter-gatherers, however, the band once more was the operative unit, consisting of a few interrelated families, though coming together in larger regional bands in winter, as at sealing camps. The leader of a family band was usually its oldest active huntsman; but despite the seeming looseness of authority, the family ties were strongly binding, while close co-operation and sharing among band households were hallmarks of the Inuits' society. In summer they lived in sealskin tents, as they hunted caribou, fished or gathered berries. In winter they built their igloos -- a brilliant instance of dome-construction with materials readily at hand -- and they used another first-rate technological invention, the skin kayak, to take seals and other sea-mammals amid the icefields themselves.
The keen ingenuity of the Inuit appeared in the use of their few (if ample) resources. Bones substituted for wood in construction, though driftwood might sometimes be employed. Tools and weapons were edged with native copper: the Inuit found metal, where any was available, far better than stone. Seal oil fed their lamps. Sealskin, left haired, made winter boots; hairless, waterproof summer ones; while caribou fur supplied warm winter parkas. Insulated also against cold by energy-rich animal foods -- particularly seal meat or whale blubber -- the Inuit in a wide variety of ways successfully responded to the fiercest challenges of the Canadian land. Yet they still had time for creative art, for delicately rendered carvings in whalebone or walrus ivory, or else for story-telling, singing, drumming, or string games of dexterity and memory. This tough, cheerful people of the Arctic really built up the most distinctive native heritage in Canada.
The Native Canadian Heritage
The legacies from all the original Canadian peoples certainly did not end when Europeans arrived. For one thing, it was the skills and lore of native inhabitants which virtually enabled the new arrivals to survive a daunting wild environment. The first Canadian provided them with knowledge of the canoe, that invaluable means of forest travel, the toboggan and the snowshoe for winter, the dog team for the Subarctic and Arctic. They also instructed early European venturers inland (the clumsiest, most ignorant of idiots in native eyes) how to live off the country and follow its paths -- through what was anything but a trackless wilderness to Indians. In fact, they taught the newcomers basic geography. The old Euro-centric idea of "discovery", of white explorers from Europe finding an unknown America, ignores the essential truth that the native peoples already knew where things were, and thus led their wide-eyed visitors (perhaps with either tolerance or some disdain) into expanses which the transatlantic tourists would later blatantly claim for themselves. But there were a host of further native bequests: from the Iroquoians' "Indian" corn and tobacco to the pemmican of Plains tribes: a nutritious mixture of dried buffalo meat pounded with berries and fat which became a basic staple for the western fur traders. Or there was Far West smoked salmon, eastern Algonquian maple syrup and wild rice. Furthermore, the wearing of moccasins or parkas on to today, the playing of lacrosse derived from St. Lawrence Valley tribes, or running kayaks down turbulent streams, demonstrate just a few other varied inheritances from the native past. But more noteworthy still, are the artistic endowments that have stemmed from the first Canadians.
Those that came from the Inuit have already been touched on; although not enough to express the continued widening and deepening of their arts right to the present; wherein carving in soapstone and other materials, work in printmaking and other graphic forms, have now brought them world regard. Similarly, the artistry of the West Coast tribes has been mentioned; yet not enough to indicate that it, too, would win world recognition -- in wood-carving from totem poles and masks to mythic statues; in works of argillite, a soft black slate, or bold, bright symbolic paintings done on wood. Moreover, Plains art set out its own symbolic paintings on the hides of prairie tepees, while the Iroquoians bequeathed a long tradition of handsomely decorated pottery and superbly carved tobacco pipes: as tobacco held a ritual significance when being smoked at native ceremonial or sacred occasions. And the Algonquians not only produced intricate embroidered designs in porcupine quills (or later, beads) to adorn their basket work or deerskin garments; but in modern years have also created outstanding paintings, by artists who combine contemporary techniques with images of their age-old legends and spiritual beliefs.
In truth, we must not omit the spiritual reach of native heritage in general. Christianity would enter and spread with the Europeans, but it never eliminated the aboriginal patterns of religious belief, some of which would revive and renew their inheritance among native Canadians within more recent time. It is difficult to generalize fairly. Still, it may broadly be said that aboriginal faiths held powerful creation myths, believed in supernatural beings to be honoured and supplicated with rituals and ceremonies, and had a sense of afterlife in a realm of the dead, which human agents might contact to re-unite with loved ones. Moreover spirits or souls resided in all living things, notably animals; and there was a senior great spirit-force of power and mystery, whether Orenda to Iroquoians, Kitchi Manitou to Algonquians, or Waken Tanka to Plains tribes. To reach and deal with spiritual forces, shamans (however named) were crucially present throughout native society from Algonquian to Inuit, West Coast to Iroquoian. They were medical healers as well as omen-diviners, teachers as well as masters of ritual. But such necessary oversimplifications as these can by no means cover the many manifestations of native spirituality: from the Shaking Tent prophecies among Algonquians, the Huron Feast of the Dead, the Iroquois False Face Society that effected healing, wearing masks, to the Guardian-Spirit Quests of West Coast tribes, great Sun Dance ceremonies on the Plains, or rituals for the sea-goddess Sedna among the Inuit. Religious culture was an integral part of native identity. Both thrived or weakened together.
Still, identity also needs numbers to keep it thriving. It is estimated that there were probably over one million native inhabitants across Canada when Europeans first arrived. And just some thousands of the latter entered, for long years thereafter. Yet by 1867, when a Canadian federal nation-state came into being, there were around three and a half million people in Canada -- of whom merely some 125,000 were of native blood. The aboriginal groups had not only failed to keep pace relative to total growth, but had most absolutely declined. What had happened? There were many reasons: repeated losses due to war, pillage and famine; the dispersal of whole tribes by victors, the European occupation of vital lands or resources, and a grim failure of confidence within native cultures that could not easily adjust to the strangeness -- and power -- of European ways. Moreover, there was alcohol, unknown to Indian or Inuit, yet peddled to them by the newcomers; a seeming escape from pain and loss which proved numbing, degrading and terribly destructive in its long-term results. Far more disastrous in their effects, however, were the great sicknesses that also came with the intruders from overseas.
In days before all knowledge of germs or viruses, the entering Europeans were unaware that they might be carrying diseases with which they had lived for centuries to native Americans who lacked any immunity to them. Thus in North America, smallpox, dysentery, diphtheria, influenza, could destroy in many thousands, and even measles became a wholesale killer. The fact is, that while the Old World of Europe, Asia and Africa had continually experienced but survived the recurrent epidemics that had moved across it along with people and trade, the New World of the Americas had been insulated by the surrounding oceans ever since the ancient land-bridge to Asia had sunk beneath the waves. That is, until venturers from Europe learned to cross the Atlantic -- and over time spread infections that could reduce populous aboriginal societies to near-demoralized remnants. It was not at all foreseen or understood. Yet in Canada the sweep of deaths due to disease, whether among seventeenth-century Hurons or nineteenth-century Inuit, added a terrible postscript to native heritage: one that appeared in the drastic decline of aboriginal populations down to 1867; and even till the 1920s, when at last it stopped, thanks largely to the growing effects of both natural and medical immunization.
Accordingly, disease amounts to a major factor in the obvious failure of the original Canadians to hold their territories across the continent against the transatlantic newcomers. But it is no less true that they faced great forces ranged against them in a Europe already closely populated and complexly developed, even when Christopher Columbus sailing from Spain made his first landings in America's West Indies during the 1490s. It neither demeans the native cultures as "savagery", nor overpraises "civilization" in western European countries of that day, to note that the latter proved unquestionably stronger (not better) in the long run: through being far more widely organized in powerful political states, through having achieved much fuller economic development, and through having built a cultural body of written knowledge, science and technical abilities quite unknown to native Canadians by the time of European entry. More specifically, too, the Europeans had produced a potent metal technology, whether for utensils, tools and implements, guns and cannon, or even iron nails; while native Americans had not discovered how to smelt metals from ores, though they might use natural outcrops of copper or gold. Hence they had remained essentially in the stone age.
Emphatically, however, "stone age" again does not imply merely primitive existence in pre-Columbian America. Not when Inca civilization in Peru could engineer huge works in stone composed of perfectly fitted giant blocks, or craft delicate designs in gold jewellery; not when the Mayas of Central America erected splendidly carved and painted temple-pyramids, and excelled in astronomy and mathematics. And not when the Aztecs of Mexico constructed a rich, urban-centred empire, until it was overthrown by Spanish conquerors. Moreover, the evidence is there that native societies in Canada were still growing along their own cultural paths -- certainly including the rising Iroquois and Huron confederacies -- until the intervention of European power changed those paths forever. But that in no way meant that the legacies of the first Canadians would lose their significance, down to the present or into the future. For there was a final, fundamental bequest they made: a keen awareness of environmental heritage, a ruling concern for the land and its offerings, which all later Canadians should take earnestly to heart.
The first Canadian peoples lived in keeping with nature and its balances, respecting the life-giving plants and animals it supplied; not treating it as something alien to be mastered and exploited as incoming Europeans would all too often do. The original inhabitants were not nobly super-human. It is little value to move from old stereotypes of heroic settlers and vicious redmen to new ones of vicious pioneers and heroic natives. Plainly the facts, like human beings, are mixed. Besides, the aboriginal tribes did alter pristine nature, whether by clearing cornfields or burning off prairies to run buffalo. They might well have wrought more changes, if they had had the technological capacities. Nonetheless, it remains true that through religious beliefs as well as cultural patterns, the original Canadians deeply revered the natural world and its creatures, and sought by deed and faith to sustain them. Their reasons of course were practical as well as spiritual. But all the same, their heritage first taught the conserving of Canada's environment -- a teaching far more urgent today, and one which we have only started to take into due account. So much, then, has stemmed from the country's native peoples. But now it is time to look at those who came after, bringing vast new consequences to the whole environment: the Europeans who crossed the Atlantic in the wake of the first voyage of Christopher Columbus to America in 1492.
Atlantic Adventurers -- and Fish and Fur
And yet, several centuries before Columbus first came upon America, the Norsemen had already reached Labrador and Newfoundland. Norsemen, viking sea-rovers and traders from Scandinavia, had been the leading mariners of early medieval Europe. Navigating without a compass, they sailed and rowed their open longships to Ireland and Normandy, or down into the Mediterranean. In northern waters, they voyaged west to colonize Iceland. From there in 985-6 A.D., Eric the Red pushed on further to plant settlements in Greenland. Leif Ericsson (i.e. Eric's son) then acted on a report of lands seen southward by a viking trader blown off course. In 1001 Leif sailed from Greenland past Baffin Island and down the Labrador coast to land at wooded "Vinland", an uncertain place, but probably in Newfoundland. At any rate, he wintered here, gathering grapes (berries?), vines used as fasteners in ship-building, and collecting timber needed in a treeless Greenland. Later Norse expeditions then tried to colonize Vinland; but armed clashes with native "skraelings" ("barbarians", probably Inuit, since they used skin boats) discouraged these attempts. While Norsemen still returned to trade for wood with the skraelings, they no longer tried to settle -- although their trading contacts with natives would evidently spread from Greenland west to Ellesmere and Baffin Islands, perhaps into Hudson Bay, as well.
Vinland itself disappeared into the mists of time, whether it lay in Newfoundland or around Cape Cod, or even further south, as some have held. What we do know of it comes from the great Norse sagas, poetic tales recited (and freely ornamented) for folk-audiences long before being written down. But that the Norsemen did enter the New World, and specifically came to Newfoundland, has been strikingly confirmed by archaeology: through the discovery in the 1960s of an actual Norse base of the mid-eleventh century at L'Anse aux Meadows on the northern tip of the island. This one generally-accepted Norse site in America -- now declared a United Nations world historic site -- has been carefully excavated to reveal eight sod-walled buildings and workshops. These in turn have disclosed traces of iron-working and carpentry along with a man's bronze cloak pin and a woman's spindle for making yarn. It all suggests that this oldest known European settlement in North America was an actual colonial community, although it was evidently not occupied for long.
But the Norse presence in America did not lead to lasting European penetration. It was too soon. Medieval Europe did not yet have the concern or capacity for transatlantic expansion. Moreover, Norse settlements in Greenland withered in the later Middle Ages, as a colder cycle of climate (sometimes termed the Little Ice Age) began to fill northern seaways with dangerous ice floes, and to chill the Greenland pastures themselves. Although the folk memory of lands across the ocean remained in Norse heritage, the mass of Europe paid no heed. It took other times, people and interests, to turn attention westward centuries later, when Christopher Columbus set sail.
By then, by the 1490s, the peoples of Western Europe had entered the vigorous new era of the Renaissance: an era of emerging nation-states and their powerful rulers, of burgeoning cities and commercial enterprise; of bold advances in learning, and eager, assertive desires to reach out and to know. Furthermore, there had been major improvements in ship design and navigation which brought sturdier, sea-keeping ships able to make some headway against a wind, the compass and other instruments, and ever improving charts. Then the development of gunpowder led both to shipboard cannon and individual fire-arms. Finally, there was the search for new trade routes by sea to India and China, since Turkish military power had been thrown across the old land routes from Asia into Europe. The interests and capacities, the times and the people, had all appeared -- to open Europe's Age of Discovery.
The Portuguese, sailing down past Africa, had rounded the Cape of Good Hope by 1488, as they sought a southeast passage to India. In 1492, Columbus in the royal service of Spain instead sailed westward into the Atlantic to reach the Orient. No one of any learning then doubted that the world was round. The real issue was, how large was it; and the critics of Christopher Columbus were not so wrong in holding that it was far bigger than he thought, making such a voyage impracticable. But through one of history's grandest human errors, Columbus ran into the unknown Americas halfway around -- although till his death he went on believing that he had reached Asia. In any event, this new and unexpected American land-mass, which would bring Spain a great overseas empire, inspired further attempts to get beyond it, and find a northwest passage onward to the spices, silks and riches of the East. Thus came the voyage of John Cabot in 1497, commanding an English ship from Bristol, authorized, if not financed, by King Henry VII of England.
Cabot, or Giovanni Caboto, was of Italian birth as was that other master navigator, Cristofero Colombo. But he sought to discover a shorter northern route to Asia by direct voyage west from England, not by Columbus's long swing south through warmer waters. Cabot, too, did not get to Asia. Instead he made the first recorded landfall on the northeastern coasts of North America since the days of the Norsemen. His actual landing-point remains debatable, whether on Newfoundland, Cape Breton Island or Labrador. Yet there is no question that he sailed along the shorelines, and on his return was awarded 10£ by a lavish King Henry for finding "the new Isle". Indeed, he gave England claim to this New Found Land. No less significant, in his voyaging Cabot also came upon the Grand Banks off Newfoundland, to carry back word that the sea here was so thick with fish they could even be taken up in baskets. And thus, he proclaimed to Europe the enormous fishing wealth available across the North Atlantic.
Nevertheless, it well may be that Cabot's ship was not the first European craft to discover the Newfoundland fisheries. Fish, mainly salted for keeping, had long been a basic foodstuff in western Europe, notably the big, fleshy cod. With mounting European population, especially in fast-growing towns, the demand for cod had steadily risen; so that vessels from Atlantic ports not only sailed north to fishing grounds off Iceland, but probed west as well in search of new grounds to harvest. And thanks to better ships and seamanship, they now might venture right to the Newfoundland banks. At any rate, it appears that seamen from Bristol, a leading West of England port, were already in those waters during the 1480s, while the Portuguese were also thrusting expeditions westward. Moreover, Cabot's own voyage was funded by Bristol merchants looking to Atlantic trade. But through his journey, what had been but a rumoured fishing area (why tell competitors?) now was officially reported across Europe as being so full of cod "they sumtymes stayed our shippes". And so, from about 1500, fishermen began crossing the open ocean to Newfoundland in ever-growing numbers; not just from England or Portugal, but from the Atlantic ports of France and Spain as well.
Over the next half century and more, visiting fishing ships came increasingly to know harbours on Newfoundland coasts, as they sought shelter for repairs, fresh water, or deer and other game to vary scant shipboard diet. Moreover, English ships in particular set up regular fishing stations on shore, because they practiced the "dry" fishery. The "green" fishery took back quickly gutted, heavily salted cod to Europe; and salt was readily available in warm southern European countries, where it was made by evaporating large pools of seawater on sunny beaches. But in cooler, damper lands like England, salt had to be imported and was expensive. Dry fishing, however -- in which split cod, only lightly salted, was dried on wooden racks or "flakes" on shore -- was not only salt-saving, but produced a good and lasting product, even for tropical markets, and was far more economical to transport, lacking any bulky water content. In fact, dry cod was one of the first, efficient, dehydrated mass-foods. Hence permanent English fishing stations came to flourish, concentrating strongly in the eastern Avalon Peninsula of Newfoundland -- to be called the English Shore -- while French stations scattered more thinly westward along the coasts, and Portuguese or Spanish, summer visitors in the green fishery, scarcely established themselves on land.
The results grew plain well before the sixteenth century had ended. In 1583, Sir Humphrey Gilbert came to the roomy, deeply sheltered harbour of St. Johns -- the chief Avalon place of arrival and departure for fishing ships from Europe -- and there with full ceremony proclaimed England's title in Newfoundland, before some thirty-six vessels in port, French, Spanish and Portuguese as well as English. Five years later, England's defeat of the mighty Spanish Armada heralded a long decline in the sea power of Spain, which by then had taken over Portugal. By then, too, the French who had become increasingly active in both the dry and green fisheries had got to mainland shores beyond Newfoundland -- to shape a whole new age in Canada's history. But that really went back to the 1530s, and the voyages of Jacques Cartier, sea-captain from Saint-Malo on the Atlantic coast of France, who had been commissioned by King Francis I to seek riches of gold and silver such as Spain had found in America, and to unlock the long hoped-for Northwest Passage to Asia.
In 1534, Cartier had reached the Labrador approaches to the Strait of Belle Isle, an area already known to French fishermen. He sailed on through the Strait into the Gulf of St. Lawrence, coursing around its shorelines. And in the Gulf, at the Bay of Chaleur, something highly significant took place. Micmac Indians arrived on shore from a fleet of canoes, and with much shouting, held up furs on sticks, beckoning to Cartier's ship. He sent two men ashore, who in return for furs, offered knives, ironware and a "red cap" for the chief. This certainly was not the first fur-trading encounter. No doubt, the Indians had previously bartered with visiting fishermen, bringing them not just deer and game in exchange for white men's hatchets, kettles and trinkets, but glossy furs and beaver robes, which could be sold in Europe more profitably than fish. Nevertheless, this exchange recorded here by Cartier did mark a developing fur trade between Indians and Europeans. It was to mould Canadian history and heritage through ages yet to come. For beyond fish, which had brought the European newcomers across to Canada's coasts, fur would lead them right on into the continent.
On the Gaspé Peninsula, Cartier erected a tall, wooden cross, claiming the lands for France; but he did not enter the St. Lawrence River, that broad waterway thrusting into North America. He returned in 1535, however, with three ships, and sailed up the great river to the Iroquoian village of Stadacona, where the city of Quebec now stands. The Indians who welcomed him there referred to their village as "Kanata", an Iroquoian word meaning village or settlement. But Cartier took the term to apply to the surrounding country as well, calling that "Canada", and the St. Lawrence that flowed through it the "River of Canada". From Stadacona, the French then sailed on up-river to Hochelaga at the site of present Montreal, another large St. Lawrence Iroquoian village set in cornfields. But here tumbling rapids barred their ships from going further; and Cartier climbed Mont Royal, to see the river stretching on westward into distant forests.
After a harsh winter back at Stadacona -- terrible to the unprepared French -- Jacques Cartier returned to Saint-Malo in mid-1536: without real gold or silver, yet with knowledge of a mighty waterway that could be the key to French empire in America. Accordingly, it was decided to plant a colony in this new land of Canada, from which explorations to find gold and a Northwest Passage could continue. Various delays still held the project back till 1541, when 150 colonists came out with Cartier, to settle at Cape Rouge near Stadacona. Another killing winter followed. Cartier left with the survivors before the Sieur de Roberval, the official leader of the colony, finally arrived with still more settlers -- many of whom would also die at Cape Rouge, in disastrous French ignorance of the North American land environment. Consequently, Roberval and the remaining colonists would go back to France. There were no gold mines to support a colony, no passage to the Orient. And the rise of Catholic-Protestant civil warfare within France itself soon left little margin for more colonial adventures from the 1640s.
All the same, fishing and fur-trading persisted. By mid-century, the Basques, both Spanish and French, had built up whaling at points along the Labrador coasts. Whalers, fishermen, and increasingly venturers who came to trade, spread into the Lower St. Lawrence, where Tadoussac at the mouth of the Saguenay particularly became a place of summer meetings between the trading ships and the Indians who gathered there with furs. The latter were mainly Montagnais, Algonquians from the St. Lawrence north shore; though in time other tribes up-river also sent pelts down to Tadoussac. Moreover, since beaver fur made excellent rain-resistant felt hats, and hats such as these grew widely fashionable in Europe during the later sixteenth century, the demand for plentiful Canadian beaver rose in consequence -- while the beaver hat, broad-brimmed or narrow, three-cornered hat or top hat, would reign through varying European styles for centuries ahead in female as well as male versions.
At the other end, the Indian demands for European goods were no less widening: for iron axes and edge-tools much better than stone, or iron traps to replace root-and-sinew snares; for fireproof metal kettles instead of woven baskets or breakable pottery; for cloth and blankets instead of animal skins, or glass beads instead of shell or quill-work. Furthermore, the Indians in direct contact with Europeans might pass some trade goods on to tribes behind them, for more furs to barter with the white man. These "middlemen" native groups could thus become important agents in the fur commerce, spreading awareness and desires for trade to inland peoples, even before they had actually seen a European. And so the fur trade developed as a crucial, mutual link between native societies and the newcomers. But in the process it would disrupt the former and emplace the latter firmly in Canadian lands.
Colonization, Cultural Change and Indian Conflict
As yet, however, in the years before 1600, no permanent European settlements had been made within the future bounds of Canada. True, in Newfoundland, especially along the English Avalon shore, there were fixed dry-fishing stations on land. But these were occupied by visiting transatlantic fishermen only over the summer months; although, in time, some "winterers" did stay on, to look after the docks, sheds and drying racks, and ready them for another season. Still, this was hardly effective colonization. Then around 1600, things rapidly began to change.
France recovered from its destructive period of religious wars under a strong, uniting monarch, Henry IV. Expansive business interests in the vigorous French nation-state now sought anew to build colonial holdings in America: through gaining royal charters that granted monopoly rights to trade, lands and government in French claims overseas. In the prosperous, sea-minded England of Queen Elizabeth, and then of James I, enterprising merchant-capitalists took up similar designs. The upshot was a mounting series of new colonial ventures; for example, the chartered colony of some forty English settlers established in 1610 by John Guy, Bristol merchant, on Conception Bay in Newfoundland, or the successful founding of English Virginia by the well-heeled London Company at Jamestown in 1607. And as well, there was the very substantial group formed by the Sieur de Monts in France in 1604, which held a chartered monopoly of trade and settlement for "Acadia, Canada and other places in New France" -- Acadia being the name which the French by now had given to the Atlantic mainland region beyond Newfoundland. DeMonts set out to plant a colonial base within this broad monopoly grant. With him went Samuel de Champlain, royal geographer to Henry IV, an experienced soldier and seaman who had already visited the St. Lawrence in 1603. New France was about to grow.
The first efforts came in Acadia, where in 1605 De Monts established the little settlement of Port Royal on the Nova Scotian shores of the Bay of Fundy. Wooden houses that held forty people were built, enclosing a small courtyard. Fields and gardens were cleared; Indians came to trade furs. Yet Port Royal's success was definitely qualified, for its returns did not meet the costs: above all, of unlawful trading by monopoly-breakers ("interlopers"), who drained off furs along an open seacoast impossible to control. Thus de Monts, advised by Champlain, resolved to move his enterprise to the St. Lawrence; a region much further from the ocean, but where the flow of furs down one great continental river would be both larger and easier to tend. Port Royal was abandoned, though later re-occupied and recurrently fought over. But the main thrust of French colonial ventures henceforth lay with the St. Lawrence -- and with Champlain, who went there in 1608, as the company's "lieutenant in the country of New France".
He moved well above Tadoussac to establish a new trading base at Quebec, where the Iroquoian village of Stadacona had stood. Here furs could be intercepted before they got down to Tadoussac; narrows in the river would make checking interlopers more feasible; and the rugged heights of Cape Diamond above the stream could back and secure a post set by the water's edge. And so Champlain built a habitation at Quebec in 1608 for himself and twenty-seven companions, again composed of wooden houses linked in a courtyard, but with a surrounding palisade, a moat, drawbridge and small cannon: a little fortress for any troubles ahead.
Stadacona and the other St. Lawrence Iroquoian villages once known to Cartier had gone. Why had they vanished? In part, it seems because of the disrupting changes brought to native cultures by the fur trade. The French had been trading with Micmacs, Montagnais and other Algonquian hunting peoples long before they got up to the St. Lawrence villages of Iroquoian corn-growers, who were not major fur-hunters in themselves. Consequently, the Montagnais and their neighbours had built up a telling superiority in white men's goods, in iron weapons and tools, enabling them to displace the Iroquoians from the vital St. Lawrence Valley trade route, and to make their deserted lands a hunting domain. No one can precisely give the details, but the spreading swirl of change would also affect the Five Nations Iroquois south and west of the St. Lawrence area, leading them to shape their own defensive League or Confederacy. In any case, the French became centrally tied in with tribal alliances, native raids and war, as they sought to advance their own fur-trade interests from a permanent base at Quebec. In 1609 Champlain and two other Frenchmen thus went with some sixty Indian allies, mainly Montagnais, south into the Iroquois country of the Mohawks, following the Richelieu River from the St. Lawrence to what would be named Lake Champlain. There they met and fought with a band of the formidable Mohawks; but shots from French guns killed three and scattered the rest of their opponents. It was a brief, unintended start to bloody cycles of French-Iroquois warfare -- arising primarily out of the fur trade.
In repeated efforts to enlarge that trade, Champlain also made other expeditions inland, to develop relations with still more distant tribes who could send furs to Quebec. In 1613 he travelled up the Ottawa River from the St. Lawrence through the country of his trading allies, the Algonquin tribe, thereby opening a great Ottawa highway westward to French use. Two years later, Champlain undertook a still longer journey to the Huron country, paddling up the Ottawa again, and continuing via Lake Nipissing and the French River to Georgian Bay on Lake Huron. The "freshwater sea", he called it, as in July, 1615, the French first looked upon the Great Lakes. From here Champlain's party canoed to the foot of Georgian Bay, to the fertile, well-cultivated and populous lands of the Hurons: village-dwelling agriculturalists like their Iroquoian relatives -- but long-term rivals -- the Five Nations Iroquois south across Lake Ontario. The Huron Confederacy of four tribes was already sending furs down to Quebec, via the Ottawa and Algonquin allies along the way. And thanks to the Hurons' settled position at the heart of the Great Lakes Basin, their well-established trading ties with hunting peoples to north and west, plus their own considerable strength, they were eminently fitted to become the key middlemen in the French fur trade -- collecting furs from Great Lakes tribes to forward to Quebec.
Still, the Hurons wanted not only trade goods from a French alliance, but armed support against their Five Nations enemies. Hence Champlain was soon committed to lead them in an attack on the Iroquois below Lake Ontario. In October, 1615, his army of Hurons, and some Algonquins, came upon a strongly fortified Iroquois village at the eastern end of that lake. A hasty, premature Indian attack failed, and deliberate, European-style seige warfare did not suit impatient Hurons. They retreated carrying Champlain in a basket, since he had been wounded by an arrow in the knee. Back in Huronia, he recovered over the winter, and visited the Petuns and Ottawas in the western, inter-lake peninsula of future Southern Ontario before returning to Quebec in 1616. The flow of fur from Hurons to French successfully went forward. But the former had lost some of their trust in all-conquering Europeans, while the Five Nations Iroquois felt new confidence. Accordingly, to strengthen French political and cultural influences, Christian missionaries were sent into the Huron country.
It must be stressed that this did not mean some darkly cynical design behind the attempt to Christianize -- and "civilize" -- the Huron tribes. In the aftermath of great religious changes in Europe, where the Protestant Reformation had been followed by the Catholic Counter Reformation, a Catholic France (or a Protestant England) was full of zealous convictions which often identified the aims of the true faith with that nation's political and economic purposes. (What else is new?) Champlain, himself an ardent Catholic, wanted to send missionaries to the Hurons not just to Frenchify them or make them safe allies in the fur trade, but to lead them to Christian knowledge and salvation. He had already brought four Récollet friars out from France in 1615, one of whom, Father Le Caron, was in Huronia during Champlain's stay there. But the task was too great for the relatively small and weak Récollet community. They themselves proposed calling on the powerful Jesuit Order, highly trained and disciplined, and already serving the cause of Roman Catholicism in missions around the world. In 1625, three Jesuits arrived at Quebec, to begin a long Canadian heritage for their order -- of courage, suffering, faith and devoted service. Among them was the outstanding Father Jean de Brébeuf, who began his work in Huronia the next year.
Meanwhile, the French settlement at Quebec had grown slowly, but significantly. By 1628, twenty years after its founding, the original fur-trade post of twenty-eight men was a village and the capital of New France with around seventy inhabitants, including women and children; for some families now were settled there. Still, the bulk of Quebec's small French population were traders and storekeepers, workmen and dockhands, with soldiers, seamen and some clerics added. The first farmer, Louis Hébert (also an apothecary or pharmacist), had only arrived in 1617, to raise crops on the heights of Cape Diamond above Quebec. The settled colony could scarcely yet feed itself, being still dependent on the supply ships from France that took furs back overseas with them. As a result, when a minor war between England and France briefly erupted in Europe, an English fleet entered the St. Lawrence, captured a heavy-laden French convoy in 1628, and so compelled a starving Quebec to surrender by the next summer.
Champlain, its governor, was sent to England as a prisoner. But the fact that hostilities had already officially ended in Europe when Quebec was taken, led to its return to France in 1632. Thus its former governor resumed his post, under the Company of The Hundred Associates, now the holders of the Canadian fur-trade monopoly. Actually, there had been several changes in the monopoly holders since Sieur de Monts' initial grant. Indeed, the creation in 1627 of a much more powerful chartered body, the Hundred Associates, had promised well; until the English war and the seizure of the Associates' first major convoy. Though restored in control, once New France was handed back, the Company never fully recovered from this sizeable loss. Its later efforts to build the French colony were only limited. Nevertheless, more colonists, including farmers, did arrive. Trois Rivières was established as a settlement up-river; and by Champlain's death in 1635, there were about two hundred French in the vastness of the St. Lawrence holdings: remarkably few, yet an enduring base for a monumental French-Canadian heritage.
But new problems were looming far in the wilderness interior. Here, Jesuit missions spread in Huronia over the 1630s. By 1639, in fact, Father Jerome Lalement was erecting a self-sufficient mission headquarters at Ste. Marie on the Georgian Bay shore near present-day Midland, the first European-built community in inland North America: with farm fields, stone bastions for defending soldiers, a canal system of drainage, log chapel, hospital and workshop, together with a palisaded Indian village to house converts. Nevertheless the Hurons, like other native peoples, seemed to be more interested in immediate material benefits from trade goods than in future Christian salvation; while their own spiritual leaders, the shamans, were implacably hostile to the black-robed Jesuit "sorcerers". And so the efforts of the missionaries were not just discouraging, but hazardous. Then came the mounting impacts of European diseases in crowded Huron longhouses. The death rate was appalling: a Huron population of around 25 000 was nearly cut in half. The French, unknowing carriers, were hotly accused of evil magic. But the natives also came to feel that their own ancestral culture had failed them. Conversions mounted, as a sorely weakened, demoralized Huron people sought both help and hope: even as their Five Nations enemies moved to a decisive phase of conflict.
The Iroquois had faced cultural change themselves, again associated with the fur trade, that crucial yet destabilizing bond between native and newcomer. They equally desired trade goods; but the French at Quebec were distant and allied with foes of the Iroquois Five Nations -- as the fight of 1609 on Lake Champlain had made sharply clear. Still, in the same year the Dutch arrived on the Hudson, and by 1624 had established New Amsterdam (later New York) at that river's mouth. The Iroquois hence gained access to Dutch trade supplies, including muskets. In time, moreover, the rise of New England, where the strong English Puritan colony of Massachusetts Bay was founded in 1629, could offer another, if farther, source of valuable goods. In time, as well, the Five Nations grew thoroughly dependent on the traps, hatchets and guns of the European. But like the Hurons, not being primarily hunters themselves, the Iroquois also became middlemen, trading furs from other tribes. They sought to block the flow of pelts to the St. Lawrence, to swing it down to their own villages and the Dutch on the Hudson. The Huron-Algonquin-French trade system proved too firmly entrenched, however. Consequently, traditional native rivalries of Huron and Iroquois swelled to a far more deadly struggle between committed fur-trade middlemen -- in which, for very economic survival, one side had to demolish the other. And the Iroquois had escaped the terrible Huron losses from disease; most likely because they did not have white men regularly living in their midst. They were politically well organized; their own morale was high; while by the later 1640s they held a massive lead in guns. All this spelled ruin for the Hurons, whom they sweepingly attacked; while the few and far-off French could do little.
In 1648 Iroquois raiders fell on the mission village of St. Joseph in Huronia, slaying the Jesuit Father Daniel and bearing away hundreds of prisoners. In 1648 St. Ignace and St. Louis were destroyed by an Iroquois army of 1,200, and Fathers Brébeuf and Lalement taken off to slow deaths by torture. The broken Hurons could make no effective stand. To prevent more bloodshed, the Jesuits themselves abandoned and burned their prized showpiece, the big central mission of Ste. Marie. The next year saw the survivors of the grand Jesuit cultural experiment reach Quebec: only some sixty French, including soldiers who had come too late, and around 300 Christian Hurons, whose descendants would live on in settlements outside Quebec. The Hurons as a people had disappeared; though they had not actually been wiped out. Native warfare was seldom as ruthless as European conflicts could be. The defeated elements had been shattered and dispersed, some to flee east to shelter with the French, others west across the Great Lakes to tribes there, while still others would be incorporated in the Iroquois nations, as was the custom among the native peoples, especially in regard to women and children.
Nonetheless, Huronia was extinct. Then the victorious Iroquois drove on to clear the land of any other rivals. The Petuns, Attiwandirons and Nipissings were scattered, leaving Southern Ontario virtually an empty hunting ground. Meanwhile, the Five Nations had blocked the routes to the French, then directly struck at them. In 1650 Iroquois war parties came within a few miles of Quebec. And Montreal, the advanced post first set up in 1642 as a French mission and hospital base for Indians, was particularly embattled on the front line. But by 1653 the Five Nations were ready to cease fighting. In part, they had achieved their purpose of removing fur competitors; in part, they were worn down themselves, yet had not really cracked New France; and in part, they were under heavy attack from the Eries on their west. Accordingly, a breathing-space rather than a peace ensued. But during it, the fur trade -- that be-all of New France -- was able to revive after famine years of blockade. Moreover, since the former native trading system had been virtually erased, the French themselves had to travel inland to the western tribes for furs. And so the coureurs-de-bois took over.
These roamers of the woods had had their beginnings in Champlain's "young men" sent out to live with native peoples and learn their languages and customs -- taking cultural change the other way. Among them was Etienne Brulé, who in 1615 had gone with Hurons south from Georgian Bay to Toronto harbour on Lake Ontario, thus evidently becoming the first European to travel the Toronto Passage between the Upper and Lower Great Lakes, as well as, later, the first to enter Lake Superior. And by the 1650s, Brulé and others like him had found their heirs in French traders and trappers who knew the wilds about as well as the Indians: daring individualists, often self-seeking and fiercely unrestrained, who gloried in freedom and adventure. This new breed of wilderness French included men like Pierre Radisson and Médard Chouart des Grossielliers, who traced northern routes above areas of Iroquois domination to reach new fur sources along the Upper Great Lakes. Radisson and Grosseilliers visited the country around Lake Superior in 1659; and the next year returned to Quebec with a large fur cargo. Still, such temporary successes could not basically alter the problems of a weak, beleaguered French colony facing real prospects of economic collapse. In fact, the Iroquois had returned to war again in 1658, cutting off trade and harrying French settlements afresh.
In these circumstances, the failing French monopoly company, The Hundred Associates, could do little; even though its trading operations had now been transferred to a select business group within Canada itself. But amid conflict and sharp doubt, the Jesuits stood out as vital patrons and supporters of the colony: wealthy and powerful in Europe and especially influential in New France, where the Jesuit Superior now stood second only to the governor in authority at Quebec. The staunch Jesuit presence there, through these hard-pressed times, would leave lasting heritage impressions on French Canada.
But by 1661 things were changing dramatically once more. The young monarch, Louis XIV, had taken full control of a rich and formidable French state, free now from wars at home, and able to pursue grand designs abroad, under its ambitious and absolute new ruler, Louis, to be called the "Sun King". Through the invaluable services of his colonial minister, Jean Colbert, the king worked diligently to remake and extend the French empire. Thus in 1663, an impotent company rule in New France was replaced by strong royal government, operating directly under the crown and its officials, while effective military action against the Iroquois was soon to follow. A new era for the French in Canada was under way, to last for virtually a century ahead. And as for the native Canadians themselves, they now faced not just passing Norse contacts or uncertain English and French venturings from overseas, but large, steadily-growing European communities on Canadian soil -- as the newcomers increasingly became settled, rooted colonists.

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CANADA: A Celebration of Our Heritage
Chapter 3: A Century of New France: 1663-1763

Colonial Growth, Imperial Expansion
By the early 1660s, the colonists of New France numbered less than 3,000 after half a century of occupation; though already over half of them were Canadian-born. Near-empty Acadia was not even in French possession at that time. Claimed as well by England, this Atlantic coastal area had repeatedly changed hands. The French had been driven out of a revived Port Royal in 1613. Instead, Scottish settlers had begun their own colony of Nova Scotia there in 1628, only to see the whole territory restored to France in 1632. Then, after short years of renewed French colonization, Acadia-Nova Scotia had again been taken over by English power in 1654; to be held until France came back once more in 1670 -- which by no means put an end to Acadia's shifts. Meanwhile, in English Newfoundland, "planters" (colonists) largely brought out in the 1630s and 40s had in the main become permanent resident fishermen; though probably were still under a thousand by the 1660s. Of course, by then there were many more thousands of English colonists on the North American seaboard, from New England to Virginia. Yet in all the Canadian territories of the future there were only the mentioned few handfuls of European settlers. Within New France, however, this was about to change.
The new royal government established for that French colony in 1663 sought vigorously to promote settlement, economic development and military security, closely guided and supported by the weighty central bureaucracy of Louis XIV's absolute state. This new governing system, which would last to the end of French rule in Canada, had at its core a Sovereign or Superior Council, directly appointed by the crown and headed by three top officials, the governor, intendant and bishop. The governor, particularly concerned with military and external affairs, was nominally foremost; and in wartime, or in Indian diplomacy and in the fur trade, he well would be. Yet the intendant, dealing broadly with internal administration, especially in regard to settlement, land, law, and economic policies, could loom large indeed. And the bishop did not just lead the influential and established Catholic Church within the colony, but, as a high officer of the ruling Council, could be powerful in social, judicial and other matters brought before it.
Personal factors also had their effects, as witnessed by the career of François de Laval, first bishop of Quebec. The Jesuits' own candidate for that post, and appointed to it by both Pope and King, the forceful Laval not only complemented the Jesuit's own strivings by shaping an active, resident clergy for the people of New France, but also by maintaining a strong religious presence within the colony's ruling Council. In that Council's early years, Laval clashed with Quebec's first governor, the Chevalier de Mésy, whose personal piety still did not make him subservient enough to an authoritative bishop; though Mésy did do some useful work in getting the new government system into operation. More significant, however, was Jean-Baptiste Talon, intendant in New France between 1665 and 1672. A first-rate servant of an outstanding master, the minister Jean Colbert in Paris, Talon was critically important in the first decade of New France under royal government -- which put that colony decisively on a path to lasting growth.
Yet essential to that growth was the ending of the Iroquois fur blockade, and their raiding onslaughts on the colony. In 1665, more than a thousand of the king's regular troops arrived from France to carry the war home to the enemy's lands. The next year, the seasoned Carignan-Salières regiment and a sizeable force of colonial militia marched into Mohawk country with drums beating, banners waving, guns massed, in a grand display of European armed strength. What proved more effective, the French army razed Mohawk villages, burning cornfields and food stores, a heavy blow to settled Iroquois peoples. In 1667 the Five Nations sued for peace. Their power had been blunted, though not broken. But now developments already in hand within the French colony now could readily go forward.
Basic here was settlement. A new stream of immigrants arrived from France, state-assisted even to the provision of farm animals, seeds and implements. Intendant Talon also led the home authorities to agree to Carignan-Salières' officers and soldiers remaining as colonists. Those who chose to do so were granted lands along the Richelieu, thus forming a bulwark against future Iroquois attacks from the south. Furthermore, Colbert, with Talon's backing, sent 1,200 marriageable young women (the filles du roi, wards of the Crown) to this frontier colony, where in 1663 males had outnumbered females nearly two to one. Further still, Talon withdrew hunting or fur-trading privileges from bachelors, and provided money grants to young married men and fathers of large families. This indeed was supporting family values. By 1671, the intendant could happily report about 700 births to Colbert. During the first decade of royal government, in fact, population climbed to over 9,000. From then on, immigration fell away, largely due to declining government aid, as France became caught up in costly new wars in Europe. Nevertheless, the tradition of large French-Canadian families was now well set; and thereafter, a still growing colony went on replacing over ninety percent of its people through natural birth, not immigration.
Settlement also meant land grants, to build a wider base for farming in New France. In this respect, the French seigneurial system of land-holding, already brought to the colony in its days of company rule, continued to set patterns for a rising countryside. Under this traditional system, the crown granted large estates to chosen seigneurs, overlords, in return for obligations of settlement and service. They in turn allotted individual farms to tenants -- "habitants" in New France -- who for their part owed rents and services to their own seigneur. Seigneurialism could be oppressive in a densely occupied Old France; but in New France where land was widely available, it was far less so, and was the means of getting people on to farms. The seigneur or his agent dealt with arriving immigrants to entice them to splendid new land-holdings. (Developers have a long heritage of their own in Canada.) And so cleared farms spread out along the St. Lawrence shore, both eastward of Quebec and west towards Trois-Rivières. A rural, seigneurial French-Canadian society was taking shape apart from the fur-trade world.
Talon had much to do with supervising the whole process. Yet to carry out Colbert's instructions, he also fostered economic developments in far more than farming settlement. The great minister wanted particularly to broaden New France from its narrow reliance on furs; not only to make it much more self-supporting and less dependent on supplies from home, but even to enable it to provide supplies of its own -- say, in grain or lumber -- to France's plantation colonies down in the West Indies. Talon responded diligently. He strove to encourage lumbering, mining and shipbuilding, stressed domestic crafts, and founded a Quebec brewery. His efforts were still hampered by the colony's relative lack of money, labour and internal demand. And Colbert's visions of an industrious, compactly integrated France overseas would effectively be denied by North American distances -- and by the lure of the fur trade in itself. But while the colony was not to become solidly self-supporting, Talon's efforts and the growth of both agriculture and craftsmanship undoubtedly strengthened it: to make it a more substantial base for the great new expansion of French fur trade, which now was increasingly under way.
By the 1670s, the lifting of the hostile Iroquois barrier meant that the French could freely travel the Ottawa or Upper St. Lawrence rivers into the Great Lakes region, and to western furs beyond. Gone were the Huron middlemen, though the Ottawa in some degree took on that role. But generally, the French themselves, coureurs-de-bois and fur entrepreneurs, thrust their canoe routes northwest and southwest into the heart of the continent. They were enthusiastically backed by the Comte de Frontenac as Governor of New France from 1672 to 1682 -- not just in order to expand French-Indian trade, but also to restore that governor's own debt-laden fortunes through fur profits. In 1673, the aggressive Frontenac established an advanced post where the Upper St. Lawrence met Lake Ontario at the future site of Kingston, and granted this Fort Frontenac to one of his ablest fur-trade protegés, the Sieur de La Salle. From here, the ever-audacious La Salle went on to build a further post at Niagara in 1678; launched the first ship on the Upper Lakes, explored the Illinois country; and finally made his epic journey down the Mississippi, which took him southward to its mouth on the Gulf of Mexico in 1682. Consequently, La Salle enormously extended the French wilderness empire. Meanwhile, Daniel Greysolon du Lhut, coureur-de-bois, had reached Dakota (Sioux) territory beyond Lake Superior by 1679, and then established a fur post for the northwest at Kaministiquia on the head of Lake Superior. Plainly, by the 1680s the French had spread their loosely-held fur domain over almost half a continent -- to the considerable benefit of Montreal, now chief fur-trade headquarters, and Quebec, the key seaport and governing centre of New France.
Yet a rival English fur trade was advancing at the same time. It had long been growing along the inland margins of the English seaboard colonies in America; but particularly along the Hudson River, where in 1664 England had seized the Dutch colony which hence became the Province of New York. From the Hudson, English fur traders took up dealings with the Iroquois, and ventured further inward along the forest frontiers of other English-American colonies. But much broader in long-range impact was a wholly new English fur trade that began about 1670 well to the north of New France, on the inland coasts of Hudson Bay and James Bay. It all stemmed back to earlier English searches for the Northwest Passage; right back to Martin Frobisher, who had voyaged north from the Atlantic and reached Baffin Island in 1576; but above all, to Henry Hudson, who in 1610 went on past Baffin to sail through the strait and into the giant Bay which now carry his name. Although he died there in 1611, after wintering on the shores of James Bay, Hudson had unlocked a navigable northern seaway from the Atlantic into the very core of Canada.
Years later, in 1659, the French coureurs-de-bois from the St. Lawrence, Radisson and Groseilliers, had found abundant high-quality beaver pelts in lands south of the great Bay. But angered by the official seizure of these unlicensed furs on their return to Quebec in 1660, and then frustrated by failure to win their case in France, they instead took a bold proposal over to London in 1665: to use Henry Hudson's route into the great Bay claimed by England, and tap by sea the wealth of fur within its surrounding territories. A trial voyage in 1668 from England to the Bay proved so successful that in 1670, the "Company of Gentlemen Adventurers trading into Hudson's Bay" was set up in London. Its charter from King Charles II gave it monopoly rights over fur trade, lands and government in all the territory that drained into Hudson Bay: a huge area whose extent was then unknown in Europe of the day, but one which actually reached from northern Quebec and Ontario-to-be west over the prairies to the Rockies, and north far into the Arctic. This enormous segment of Canada would form the basis of an English trading empire that spread across the north and west; and existed, besides, long before the final disappearance of New France in 1763. In short, any assumption that there was only French Canada before that date is not true in northern heritage -- from Labrador to Manitoba at least.
Centrally active in forming the English Hudson's Bay Company of 1670 was the soldier, Prince Rupert of Bavaria, Charles II's cousin. In recognition, the Company's chartered territory would be known as Ruperts Land; and its first post, set on the eastern (Quebec) coast of James Bay, was named Ruperts House in 1670. Moose Factory appeared by 1673 on the Ontario shore, Forts Albany and Severn in 1684 and 1685 farther along the Ontario coastline. By this time, however, the growth of Bay Company competition had come to worry the French, spreading as it did in territories which they considered to belong to New France. And so in 1682 a French Hudson Bay Company took shape in response -- which soon would turn to force, in order to drive the English from their posts around the Bay. Furthermore, far to the south, the Iroquois Confederacy was stirring again, increasingly alarmed by the fur trade flowing out of Great Lakes lands to the French on the St. Lawrence, not to themselves and their major English allies in New York Province along the Hudson. The French had never really been able to conciliate the powerful Five Nations, but rather had tried to soothe and overawe them at the same time. Now, rival inland interests were approaching open war.
On the Bay in 1686, a French expedition sent north overland seized Ruperts House, Moose Factory and other posts, along with fifty thousand prime beaver pelts. In the Great Lakes interior, the Iroquois erupted into Illinois country, an area once held by them but which was now tied into the French fur trade. French counter-blows proved ineffective, including a massive attack on the Senecas and Cayugas in 1687. In their turn, the Iroquois descended on Lachine outside Montreal in 1689, and killed many of that village's inhabitants. But French-Indian war and fur-traders' combat on Hudson Bay soon merged into a far wider struggle between France and England, in both Europe and America. In America, it would be fought in Acadia and Newfoundland as well on the St. Lawrence, the Bay, and in the borderlands between New France and the colonies of New York and New England. Imperial expansion, both French and English, had brought the two colonial powers into major conflict within North America. It was really the opening round in a mighty contest for the continent.
Contending Empires in War and Peace
The War of the League of Augsburg was declared in Europe in 1688; but neither its "official" name nor its European background need concern us here, when there are so many Canadian aspects to consider. In Newfoundland, for example, ships from the main French fishing and naval base at the island, Placentia, on its southern coast, ravaged the English outport fishing settlements that had spread along the eastern Avalon shore; in 1696 briefly taking St. Johns itself, the leading English harbour. In Acadia, the French capital, Port Royal, was again seized in 1690 by a fleet up from New England -- another shift in the control of the Acadian colony. French efforts here since the 1670s had to some degree achieved what direct royal government had more fully accomplished on the St. Lawrence. Thus by the 1690s, there were around 1,000 French settlers in Acadia, living chiefly near Port Royal along the Bay of Fundy: farmers on lush tidal marshes, which they diked and drained, plus fishermen, seamen and certainly still some fur traders to the Micmacs. But this small coastal community had once more been neglected by a France caught up with inland expansion; while New Englanders from down the coast had fished in its waters, supplied its settlers by shipboard trade, and shared the view that Acadia should really be theirs. It is also true, that Acadian Indians and French privateers (effectively, licenced pirates) would harass New England ships and outlying settlements from time to time. At any rate, when open war began, Port Royal itself fell easily in 1690 to powerful New England invaders. But the Acadian story was by no means over yet.
Meanwhile at Quebec, Frontenac, the pugnacious former Governor of New France, was back in command. Domineering, scheming and constantly quarrelling, he had been recalled to France in 1682, particularly because of an angry feud with Bishop Laval over trading brandy to the Indians. Laval and the Church had utterly condemned this ruinous trade. The Governor and his fur-trade allies had held that it was essential -- better to have French brandy than English rum. But after his recall, Frontenac's successors had not coped successfully with the Iroquois. Hence the old warrior was sent out again to New France in 1689, an evident symbol of aggressive confidence. He needed all that confidence in 1690, when the fleet under Sir William Phips which had already taken Port Royal sailed up the St. Lawrence to a much bigger target, Quebec itself. Secure in fortifications high on Cape Diamond, Frontenac grandly told the English he would answer them from his cannons' mouths. And he did, while the ill-prepared, poorly-directed attackers battered uselessly away at the shores until they withdrew in failure. Thereafter, the governor was busy with sending forces to raid Iroquois lands or frontier hamlets in New York and New England, in campaigns that, though fiercely destructive, proved largely indecisive.
Far to the north there was another story. On Hudson Bay, the Montreal-born Sieur d'Iberville shaped a distinguished naval career: taking Fort Severn in 1690, capturing York Factory in 1694, the new English headquarters near the mouth of the Nelson River, and defeating a superior English fleet in the chill waters of the Bay. Iberville also sailed to Acadia in 1694, and took Pemaquid, the chief English fort near the entry to the Bay of Fundy, which thus offset the French loss of Port Royal. To cap it all, there was his sweep along the Avalon Peninsula in Newfoundland and the capture of St. Johns in 1696. And so the French had come out well by the war's end in 1697 -- thanks notably to Iberville and other stalwarts like him.
In any event, heavy battling in Europe had settled little, so that the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697 proved largely just a truce. Acadia was returned to France. York Factory was similarly to be restored to England -- though in fact it was not; leaving the English only with Fort Albany on James Bay. The French-Iroquois war still continued. Old Frontenac himself grimly pursued it, carried in an armchair during a shattering attack on the Onondagas, until he died, worn out, in 1698. By then the Iroquois, abandoned by their English allies now at peace with France, and devastated by both war and disease, were growing ready to stop fighting. Their own warrior force had been more than cut in half, to some 1,300 men, while French Canada's white population had climbed to around 13,000. The hard facts of numbers, if nothing else, directed the Five Nations to make peace in 1701. This leading native power could no longer hope in itself to overcome the ever-swelling French strength in Canada. Nevertheless, the Iroquois, still well organized and resolute, could undoubtedly yet play a critical role in power balances between the French and English empires, each now contending for its own supremacy in North America.
In Europe, the interim truce only lasted to 1701. Then a new war, the War of Spanish Succession began -- for reasons outside Canada -- and went on till 1713. Within Canada, this second round actually saw less widespread fighting, and the Iroquois largely stayed out. Newfoundland settlements again were swept by French attacks in 1705, while St. Johns fell once more in 1708. In Acadia the English retook Port Royal in 1710: although their seaborne offensive on Quebec in 1711 failed disastrously without even getting near, after their laden transports foundered on reefs in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. The final outcome, however, was really settled by the decisive victories of England and her allies in Europe. There a battered and depleted France, far overstretched by Louis XIV's visions of continental mastery, had to accept hard peace terms. Accordingly, the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713 brought major gains in Britain's holdings in America.
Yet that word "Britain" first needs explaining. In 1707 England and Scotland had joined in the United Kingdom of Great Britain, so that henceforth there was a British empire under one British crown and parliament. And as for the gains that empire made in the Treaty of 1713, the Hudson Bay Territory -- Ruperts Land -- was now acknowledged by France to belong to Britain. So was all of Newfoundland, except for certain fishing and landing rights that France was granted on its western coasts; while Acadia was now definitely transferred to British hands as the Province of Nova Scotia. Plainly, the French American empire had had to yield large and valuable possessions. All the same, it still was vast. New France yet spread out along the St. Lawrence to the Great Lakes and the northwest beyond; and was linked as well with the new wilderness French realm to be known as Louisiana, that fronted south on the Gulf of Mexico but reached up the Mississippi and Ohio to the Great Lakes country. Here, then, was an enormous inland French domain behind the relatively narrow strip of British colonies along the Atlantic seaboard -- and that interior domain would soon be pushing farther west again.
The official years of peace which followed the Treaty of 1713 were certainly not free from all armed violence; such as the two French wars with the Fox Indians in the Wisconsin country beyond Lake Michigan in 1714-16 and 1728-33. But these conflicts stayed fairly localized, as did other raids or skirmishes, since both France and Britain really sought to maintain the general accord that had been achieved between them in Europe. Nevertheless, the two empires in America kept up their own competition, rivalry and defensive preparations. One good illustration lies in Nova Scotia-Acadia. Having had to abandon Placentia to a British Newfoundland, France began planning a new main fishing and naval base on Ile Royale, or Cape Breton; for that island and the neighbouring Ile Saint-Jean (later, Prince Edward Island) had not been ceded to Britain only mainland Nova Scotia. And the French still had a valuable North Atlantic fishing fleet to harbour and protect, along with the need to defend the sea approaches to New France, now that Newfoundland no longer held French bases.
Hence the French imperial town of Louisbourg went up in the 1720s on a Cape Breton inlet facing the open Atlantic; not just as a fishing base and naval port (which it would be), but also as a massive stone fortress, the strongest citadel in North America. Lavish amounts were spent on its walls and defences, so that an exasperated King Louis XV asked if the streets were also being paved with gold. At any rate, by the 1740s, Louisbourg was both a powerful stronghold and a bustling French city in America, with some 2,000 citizens (doubling over the next decade), a fishing capital, and a key trading market for ships up from the West Indies and New England, as well as from France or Quebec. But the British authorities in the neighbouring mainland province of Nova Scotia, still mostly peopled with French Acadians, worried increasingly about a hostile fortress so near; while New Englanders grew equally concerned over its constant threat to their own rich Atlantic and West Indies commerce.
This seaboard question rose to crisis in the mid-1740s. But in the meantime, other strains between the empires had developed deep in the western interior, no less important in the long run. Here the French fur trade had had to face the fact that British competition had not merely been confirmed by France's reluctant Treaty recognition of Ruperts Land, but was highly effective, too. British goods laid down in quantity by sea at posts on Hudson Bay were then ready for trade, while French goods shipped out to the St. Lawrence still faced a long, expensive canoe haul westward to the trading areas. Furthermore, inland tribes would willingly travel north to the Bay Company posts for the prices, range and quality of items offered there. Thus, it was virtually essential for the French to reach the natives first, to use their own knowledge of the wilderness and its peoples to bring the Indians into French trading patterns and forestall English contacts. From that need came a sweeping competitive advance of French fur enterprise into the lands of a future Canadian West.
Prominent in leading this advance were the Sieur de La Vérendrye and his four sons. The father, born in Trois-Rivières, but a veteran soldier seriously wounded in 1709 during the war in Europe, had entered the fur trade after his return. In 1728 he was stationed on Lake Nipigon, at one of the French "Postes du Nord" beyond Kaministiquia purposely set across Indian canoe routes up to Hudson Bay. Here La Veréndrye took up the idea of thrusting right on to the Western Sea to by-pass the English -- to the Pacific Ocean itself. He never got there; but from 1731 he and his sons did set up a chain of new posts westward that outflanked the Hudson Bay trade: from Rainy Lake to the Lake of the Woods, then to Lake Winnipeg and the Red River by 1734, out on open western prairie. In 1738 La Vérendrye further built a fort at the site of Portage La Prairie which could intercept parties of Assiniboines heading north for the Bay. His sons went on to the Saskatchewan River, that traverses the Great Plains from the Rockies, and erected a post by its entry in 1743 where Plains Cree might be deflected from going on to British York Factory. Though the Western Sea still lay much further, the work of the La Vérendryes and their comrades had carried the French fur trade deep into Plains Canada.
Meanwhile, the British Hudson's Bay Company had done almost nothing to move into the western interior. True, in 1691 young Henry Kelsey had travelled inland to the Saskatchewan plains from York Factory, and is often portrayed as the first white man to see a western buffalo. The first buffalo to see a white man has never been portrayed. But Kelsey's trip led to very little. The fact was, that the Bay Company did well enough sitting on the shore. Bulk transport by sea, in wind-driven ships, was more efficient and economical than any number of brigades of the biggest French canoes, that had to be paddled or portaged overland by sheer human effort. So why leave the coasts when the Indians would travel there themselves -- and incidentally, bear the costs of bringing furs down to the shore posts? By and large, the apparent lethargy of the Bay Company was good business -- at least for the time being. Consequently, even later, when in 1754-55, Anthony Henday made a striking journey from York Factory up the Saskatchewan with a party of Cree, to winter with the Blackfoot in the Alberta foothills, his effort still did not really alter established Hudson's Bay policy. Indeed, the Company's motto might almost have been, "Have furs, need not travel". Things in the West would change; but not greatly during the remaining days of New France and its own farspread fur enterprise.
Yet those days were running towards a close, even by the mid-1740s. In 1744, Britain and France again met as foes in the War of Austrian Succession in Europe, and from 1745 to 1748 this struggle was also waged in North America. Its results still were inconclusive; yet it foreshadowed the downfall of New France. That would not actually take place until the last round in the long imperial contest, the Seven Years War of 1756 to 1763; although the relative positions of both empires -- and the useful advantages of historic hindsight -- enable us to forecast the decisive outcome well before. We will turn from this theme of ultimate French defeat, however, to examine first something far more positive: the vibrant life and society already created in New France, and the enduring, distinctive heritage it left to Canada thereafter, for centuries to come.
The Life and Heritage of New France
By 1745, the settled population of New France along the St. Lawrence had risen to about 45,000, of whom 4,600 living in the capital and port town of Quebec, and 3 500 in Montreal, the fur-trade headquarters and gateway to the interior. There were several settled Indian groups also present: descendants of the Christian Hurons at Lorette outside Quebec, Mohawks who had turned to the French side, dwelling at Kahnawake and elsewhere near Montreal, and some others drawn from Algonquin tribes, located on a few scattered reserves. Yet the overwhelming majority of the inhabitants were of French stock. This, again, was not really the result of a continuing trickle of immigrants from France. It stemmed mainly from natural increase within the colony itself, where the birth rate was definitely higher than in the old land, and probably the survival rate as well, thanks to more and better food, and healthier living conditions in a wide new country.
Certainly, the rural residents, the largest element in the French-Canadian population dwelt fairly comfortably in their square-hewed log farmhouses (though seigneurs and more affluent habitants were now building in stone); and their homes were well heated by large fireplaces supplied with plentiful wood, feeding into massive central chimneys. The farm-dwellers had the room they needed, with a loft above, and cellars below to keep meat frozen through the winter. They had ample fur and deerskin for warm clothing -- not to mention homespun from the wool of their own sheep. And they had ready access to fish and game in the open countryside. Consequently, the habitants faced winter shortages less, and generally lived better than did their counterparts in northwestern France (from where they had largely come); in particular, having more protein in their diet, and wheaten bread, not coarser rye. None of this, of course, should suggest some kind of frontier rural paradise. Wilderness dangers, want and cold, were still never too far away. Work was unending; and women not only tended home and family, but toiled in the fields beside the men. Nevertheless, the rewards were evident, as were the space and opportunities for new farming families. Together, they shaped a robust, self-reliant agrarian society in colonial New France.
This rural community was built and based along the central reaches of the broad St. Lawrence River, that provided it with vital transportation and valuable fishing at the same time. Hence river-frontage was all-important; and farm-lots extended back in long narrow strips from the great waterway. Dotted along the river-front as they were, the sturdy farmhouses thus gave the impression of "one continued village" from below Quebec to Montreal -- so described by the visiting Swedish botanist, Peter Kalm, in 1749. In time, another range (and more) of farm allotments rose behind the original waterfront properties. But the pattern of ribbon-farms, within long, narrow seigneuries oriented to the St. Lawrence, would last long after New France: as maps or an air flight above the region can still reveal today.
In the 1730s, the chemin du roi, the king's road, was run along the north shore of the St. Lawrence from Quebec to Montreal, up to seven metres wide in ploughed dirt, with small wooden bridges over streams, or else fords and ferries. This route, however, was more important at certain periods of the year. In open summer, the river carried far more traffic; in mid-winter the road was good for sleighs, but the river ice could also be. Nevertheless, the importance of the horse for rural land transport as well as ploughing steadily mounted; so that this imported animal, first called "the French moose" by Indians, became indispensable to the habitant farms. It was besides, a favourite source of countryside interest and some expense, not least because of popular winter horse-racing on frozen waterways.
All in all, it followed that the tenant-farmers of New France were far from a downtrodden, exploited European peasantry, but formed a self-respecting and substantial New-World group. They held hereditary possession of their own farms, as long as the set seigneurial dues were paid; and these traditional dues were not that burdensome. They freely engaged in litigation before the courts, enjoying a good land dispute. They were also well aware of their own experienced role in the militia, on slashing raids deep into Indian country. And their life-style was not greatly different from that of most of their seigneurs, themselves busy working their home-farm domaines: in fact, marriages between sons of the seigneurial order and the daughters of well-to-do habitants were assuredly not barred. Hence this was not a closed or oppressive feudal system, whatever its origins in France -- any more than it was a merely economic relationship of landlord and tenant, wherein the former could evict the latter from his land for a whole variety of reasons.
Here was, instead, a system of mutual obligations bound up with land-holding, not land-owning. The seigneur himself did not "own" his land, but held it from the crown; and if he failed in his own obligations of service and settlement, might find his land grant revoked. In general, too, the solid habitant could not be rashly pushed around by some would-be lordly aristocrat. Yet agrarian New France was still far from a social democracy. There was an engrained sense of deference, as well as of mutual obligation. Habitants accepted the seigneur's social leadership, his recognized privileges, although these were largely ceremonial. In short, this was a distinct collective community in at least two ways: distinct from the harsher seigneurialism of Old France; but distinct as well from the individualist farm-ownership of English America.
New France also had an active, influential urban life. Around one-fifth of its population now resided in towns, the centres of commerce and crafts, and of political, religious or military life. Quebec, Montreal and Trois-Rivières also headed local governmental districts; though Quebec, of course, was the seat of government for the whole colony, as well as its prime fortress. In the capital, the structure of royal government continued under its three top figures, governor general, intendant and bishop. Bishops now played a less forceful political part than in the days of Laval; but the power of the Catholic Church was still widespread within a tightly orthodox society, where Roman Catholicism was well maintained by law and supported by tithes -- state-enforced church taxes. The governors of the period, Philippe de Vaudreuil (1703-25) and Charles de Beauharnois (1726-47), made authoritative leaders throughout, while diligent intendants such as Gilles Hocquart (1729-48), a trained civil servant since boyhood, left their own strong on colonial development. Meanwhile, the law courts, the lesser bureaucracy and the officers' class all expanded in a broader but hierarchical society; and all were regularly reflected in the ruling official and garrison world of Quebec.
The economic life of the towns was expressed in both their major wholesale merchants and minor shopkeepers; in artisans from carpenters, masons and blacksmiths to shoemakers and bakers; or in seamen, river boatmen and day-labourers. Quebec, as main port, had its considerable export businesses sending wheat and lumber to Louisbourg and the French West Indies, its importers bringing in French goods, and its shipyard and shipwrights building increasing numbers of river and seagoing vessels. Outside Trois-Rivières, iron-workers at the St. Maurice forges, opened in 1737, were successfully producing stoves together with other ironware for the colony. At Montreal, there were the warehouses, offices and personnel of the far-extended fur trade: but especially the voyageurs, those hard-driving canoemen who left or returned with the seasons, as trade goods and supplies went upriver or western pelts came down to the landing-grounds at Lachine just above the city. The chief merchants of Montreal, moreover, held a special eminence, since the life of the colony still heavily depended on the fur trade; and it was the Montreal fur merchant, the bourgeois, along with his inland agents or partners engaged in dealing with the Indians, who really kept the whole fur empire operating -- and therefore, the vast French claims to dominance across the wilderness interior.
In forest sweeps wholly removed from the busy streets of stone-built towns or the tilled fields of a farming countryside, there lay a very different aspect of New France, the life of the fur trade. By the mid-1740s this largely focused at the farspread inland posts which the French had built; partly for trade with the Indians of a particular area, but partly also to maintain their political and diplomatic presence, and so confirm alliances with native tribes. These post-bases now ranged far beyond Niagara: from Detroit (established 1701) to Fort Miami (1715) in what now is Indiana, then to Fort Chartres (1717) on the Mississippi in Illinois country, and down the Mississippi to New Orleans (founded 1718). Such places as there were not the same as the northwestern line of trading posts intended to draw off furs from the British Hudson's Bay Company; for the southerly forts, lying inward of Britain's Atlantic seaboard colonies, were manned by small but significant French military garrisons, aimed at ensuring Indian loyalties against the wiles of English-American traders invading from the Thirteen Colonies along the coast. In other words, they were meant to keep the Indians tied to French interests in a defensive bulwark against British thrusts westward. And so a "military frontier" under professional officer command would join the older French frontier world of free-ranging coureurs-de-bois; or now their successors, the hired voyageurs and the fur bourgeois out of Montreal. It was no less true, however, that this thinly-held inland New France of soldier, trader and voyageur continued to shape the very destiny of the town-dwellers and seigneurial farmers along the St. Lawrence.
There is one more element still to be added to the total community of New France; limited in number but large in consequence, the Roman Catholic clergy. Most of the clergy were town residents, whether in religious orders or serving in parishes; yet their calling not only extended to the farming countryside, but far into the fur-trade world. To take the last first, Catholic priests and friars had repeatedly proved devoted and daring venturers in the wilderness, from the beginnings of Acadia or the initial French travels to Huronia. They had widely founded Indian missions, in which endeavour the Jesuit efforts among the Hurons had been just one prominent example. They had also accompanied fur trade-explorers on many a classic journey of discovery; such as that of Father Joseph Marquette and the trader Louis Jolliet, the first Frenchmen to trace the Mississippi southward in 1673, though they did not reach its mouth. And Catholic priests were present as well on journeys into the northwest beyond the Great Lakes. As for the agrarian world of New France, from Bishop Laval's day, a local parish clergy had been sent to growing seigneuries: where, indeed, the parishes within a seigneury would become rural social units in themselves, each under its own priest or curé and a vestry of leading parishioners. Yet still, the main core of the Church lay in urban society.
Thus at Quebec, there was the ruling Bishop, the Cathedral, the Seminary founded by Laval to train priests for town or country; and the headquarters of the still-weighty Jesuits. In Montreal, which had once begun (in 1642) as Ville-Marie, a religious mission on a dangerously exposed Indian frontier, its affluent merchant community also supported a rising urban church life; but in particular, the Sulpician Order, which had been granted the highly valuable Island of Montreal as a seigneury, was central in wealth and influence within the swelling eighteenth-century town. There were other male orders of importance in French Canada's Catholic Church, then and in later days; but the female religious orders which crucially served education, hospitals and welfare work demand special attention.
At Quebec in 1639, Mother Marie de l'Incarnation had founded the Ursuline Convent, one of the earliest teaching institutions in North America. Its first pupils were Indians, taught by nuns who had learned both Iroquoian and Algonquian tongues; but the children of well-to-do French colonists also came increasingly to study both arts and science. The Ursuline nuns were mainly drawn from the colonial bourgeoisie, the commercial middle class. On the other hand, the nursing sisters of Canada's first hospital, the Hôtel-Dieu of Quebec, also begun in 1639, were often the daughters of artisan families; while those of Quebec's Hôpital-Générale, opened in 1693, would largely come from more aristocratic circles. And in Montreal, the Grey Nuns established by Madame d'Youville in 1737 cared for the poor, disabled and infirm, the orphans and the elderly. Here in New France lay the beginnings of modern Canadian social and educational services -- and essentially through women's undertakings.
This is heritage, flowing from French Canada well before the British Conquest, but by no means to be forgotten today. Moreover, French colonial women not only worked vigorously in these basic social concerns, but no less showed their own capacity to manage them. And outside the religious frame (which no doubt did give women a scope for their abilities that they would otherwise have lacked), the female residents of New France were not at all the clinging vines of male chauvinist myth. Aside from hard work on the land, country wives might also run their farms while husbands were absent on militia service or engaged in the fur trade. In towns, too, women often had charge of local stores, while the widows of merchants carried on their husbands' businesses -- or, like Marie-Anne Barbel, developed as well a thriving pottery works at Quebec from 1745. French law, based on Roman law, gave women more property rights than did English common law then. And Louise de Ramezay, daughter of a governor of Montreal who died in 1724, joined her mother in profitably managing a sawmill and brick-and-tile factory; then herself went on to build a flour mill and a school, and to deal sizeably in lumber up to her own death in 1776. No one could suggest from such particular examples that this unquestionably patriarchal society was somehow gender-equal. Yet it is true that women had wider freedom of life and action in New France than in Old: a state at times deplored by old-country visitors, or even condemned by church authorities: while Peter Kalm himself found it worth commenting that in Canadian society men did not undertake "matters of importance without their women's advice and approval".
In any case, though the heritage that sprang from this life of New France was not just that of Old France, and had been much modified by North American experience, it still certainly did not express modern North American notions of a free society; or even the degrees of liberty already known in the English-speaking colonies of America. In those provinces there were rich and powerful merchants in New England, New York or Pennsylvania, or great estate-owners in southern plantation colonies. Yet there was no seigneurial order of nobility (although modest) set in a legally superior position on the land. And the average Anglo-American farmer was not by law a tenant but the full proprietor of his own fields and home.
Similarly, in political terms: however well-intentioned was the government of New France, however far from meek and docile were its subjects, the mass of the people still had very little say in their own public affairs. Power came down from above: the King was the ultimate master of this hierarchical society. True, assemblies of inhabitants might occasionally be summoned to present opinions on special issues; while the captains of militia, named to command their local militia units, held a good deal of community respect and some authority as effective rural agents of the intendant. Yet any such expressions of the people of New France were very far from the regularly elected provincial assemblies that were a fundamental part of political life in the English colonies, marking the transfer of the British parliamentary system to those new societies overseas. In sum, whatever the merits (and they were real) of a largely competent, fair and conscientious French system of government, it still had small place for the ordinary citizen and his views on taxes, policies or individual rights -- as would certainly be put forward in words both loud and clear by the elected representative Houses in Britain's Thirteen Colonies in America.
Accordingly, the life of New France was still one where social status, elite privilege and paternal authority in church or state were continually evident. Yet always one must qualify -- regarding this unquestionably "new" France in America. There was always open space and opportunity around it, the wilds beyond it, to make this something other than a closely layered, top-run society. There was, besides, the inherent vigour and self-confidence of the French Canadian people (who were no blind followers); and there was, above all, the enterprise and individualism of the fur trade, the sturdy will to survival against all hardships, Indian wars or increasing weight of the English. These things were rooted in the heritage of New France. They might become somewhat altered over time, or have other aspects added. But French Canada, and all Canada, still owe greatly to the tough inheritance derived from the world of New France -- from the eighteenth century right down to the present day.
The British Conquest of French Canada
In 1745, mounting strains between the British and French in America burst into open conflict, as the War of Austrian Succession spread overseas from Europe. On the Atlantic coast, the long-felt menace of the great French base at Louisbourg -- felt both in British-ruled Nova Scotia and in the New England colonies -- led to a joint assault by New England troops and the British Navy on that fortress-town. It fell late in June, 1745, after a forty-seven-day seige, heavily battered by cannon fire from ship and shore, and after naval reinforcements sent by France had failed to break past the British fleet.
Meanwhile, the continental inland country at first stayed fairly quiet; helped by the fact that the Six-Nations Iroquois Confederacy (the Tuscaroras having joined in the 1720s to make it Six) remained neutral and aloof from either the British or French sides. By 1747, however, the dwindling flow of trade goods from France, due largely to British strength on the distant Atlantic, spurred on an Indian conspiracy against the French in the Detroit-Lake Erie region. Yet once peace was signed in Europe at Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, a new flood of French goods soon drowned this Indian hostility. It did indicate how vulnerable the French empire really was, even deep in the interior, to superior British naval power on the high seas. But, aside from some devastating French raids on the New York and Massachusetts frontiers, the war passed off in inland North American without major events. Then Louisbourg itself was handed back to France in the stalemate peace of 1748. New Englanders were outraged; and not at all impressed by the return of Madras to Britain in exchange, a key fortified base in southern India. In truth, the contest of worldwide empires simply continued, and the peace was no more than a breathing-space between rounds of combat.
That was clearly perceived by the Comte de La Galissionière, who had replaced an aging Beauharnois as Governor-General in 1747. After the war had ended, the new governor reported to his masters in Paris that, while peace had "lulled the jealousy of the English in Europe, this bursts forth in all its violence in America, and if barriers ... are not opposed at this very moment, that nation will place itself in a condition to invade the French Colonies". Hence La Galissionière particularly sought to secure the link of empire between New France and the French colony of Louisiana down the Mississippi. To this end, he worked to hold the Ohio country that lay south of Lake Erie and spread west along the Ohio River to its junction with the Mississippi -- an effort which also was taken up by his successors. For the Ohio Valley indeed represented an outlying buffer zone between the British seaboard colonies and the French in the interior. If Anglo-American advances westward could be halted here, the French empire might still hope to dominate and develop in the enormous mid-continental heartland. But if the much more populous and economically developed Thirteen Colonies should break through into France's open inland territories, then the future would almost surely belong to an English America. A great deal hinged on the Ohio Valley, where in the opening 1750s the French began to build a new chain of forts.
At the same time, the British colonies assuredly were looking westward. Most of them had long claimed the lands behind them. In Virginia, which claimed right out to the Western Sea, the Ohio Company had been formed by 1749 to plant settlers in the Ohio Valley. And in 1753 Virginia's governor sent a mission overland to the French forces in the Valley, protesting their military occupation of British territory. The French rejected the protest, inevitably. The next step would be open conflict. It came the following year at the strategic forks of the Ohio where Pittsburgh now stands. Here a small Virginian working party, attempting to build a fort, were driven off by a French detachment who erected a larger structure of their own, Fort Duquesne. In reply, Virginia sent troops and Indian allies under a young major of militia, George Washington. Late in May, 1754, at Great Meadows near For Duquesne, the conclusive war for America really began: when Washington suddenly attacked and overran an armed French force, but afterwards was himself attacked and defeated by a greater French concentration. He and his men were allowed to retreat to Virginia, while the inland tribes, impressed by this telling victory of the French, now swung strongly to their side. In any event, although outright war would not officially begin in Europe until two years later, it soon spread widely within North America.
Both France and Britain, moreover, took this undeclared American conflict very seriously, strengthening fortified places, sending out regular troops and naval units, and preparing campaigns; although a supposed peace still lingered on in Europe. Consequently, sizeable British reinforcements were dispatched to take Fort Duquesne and win the Ohio country. Major General Edward Braddock marched a regular army inland from Virginia in the summer of 1755. But as it neared the fort, floundering along a crude frontier road little better than a trail, the British column encumbered with seige-cannon and supply wagons was struck from surrounding woods by a withering fire from hidden French and Indians. The column broke; its retreat became a flight, with heavy losses, including that of Braddock himself. New France had gained a major success. Still, the war was only starting.
And elsewhere, the British did somewhat better during 1755. Colonel William Johnson, British agent to the Six Nations, led New York-New England militia, along with some Mohawk Iroquois, to a limited victory near Lake George on the classic Hudson-Lake Champlain invasion route into Canada. More significantly, in the Atlantic region combined British and New England forces captured crucial Fort Beauséjour after two weeks of crashing bombardment. With the fall of this main French strongpoint on the Isthmus of Chignecto (where present-day New Brunswick and Nova Scotia meet), France largely lost hold of what had remained to it of former mainland Acadia. But to explain what this implied, and the tragedy that followed for the French-speaking Acadian people, it is necessary to go back in time to pick up the outstanding story of Acadians and their heritage. In fact, we must go back at least to the Treaty of 1713, when Britain received its lasting title to Acadia, henceforth the province of Nova Scotia.
In 1713 there had been some 2,000 Acadians -- who had strikingly increased by the mid-1750s to over 13,000, thanks mostly to their own high birth rate. Few immigrants had been sent out to join them. Even in the seventeenth century, except for brief phases, Acadia had stayed a neglected colony in French hands; or when periodically in English hands as well. Yet at the same time, in very neglect, the original scant French settlers had quietly grown into a distinct society of their own, raising large, healthy families on fertile tidal flats not occupied by native Micmacs, who maintained friendly relations as a result. Acadian village-settlements spread on the low shores of both sides of the Bay of Fundy, and along open reaches like the Annapolis Valley; but not into the Indian-held forest interior. These villages fished profitably, traded grain crops down to New England for West Indies sugar and rum or European goods, and thrived in a simple rural society where the Catholic church and the family unit stood out, but seigneurialism mattered far less: a quiet, withdrawn people wanting just to be left peacefully to themselves. Yet they would not be: since living where they did, on the margins between two great hostile empires, meant that the Acadians dwelt, in effect, on an earthquake shockline.
As for the British element who ruled in mainland Nova Scotia from 1713, they consisted of little more than a small garrison centred at the old French capital of Port Royal -- renamed Annapolis Royal -- and of course of the visiting New England traders and fishermen around the shores. Attempts to draw farm settlers from Britain or New England to this French-peopled territory largely failed. Hence the government of Nova Scotia sought instead to extract oaths of allegiance from the Acadian inhabitants, to make them into safe British subjects. But the mass of Acadians wanted chiefly just to remain neutral between contending empires, although French emissaries also sought to tie them to the cause of France. To some extent, the British of necessity accepted Acadian neutrality, while the French spent efforts, on holding the Micmacs with more success. As the mid-century approached, however, the imperial contest became far more dangerous and critical, even though the wishfully-withdrawn Acadians failed to appreciate that fact, until too late.
The return of Louisbourg to French control by the peace of 1748 had restored the naval and military power of France in the Atlantic region. And this renewed threat led Britain to reply by founding Halifax in 1749, on the central-Atlantic coast of Nova Scotia. Under Governor Edward Cornwallis 2,000 English settlers were brought from London to establish this new stronghold. Some others of the King's subjects also came from the Crown's holdings of that age in Germany; but most of these German-speaking Protestants were placed at Lunenburg, a little further down the coast. In any case, Halifax took shape as a garrisoned port-town, palisaded against Micmac raids, but in time strengthened by a hill-top citadel and batteries to defend the entry to its superb harbour, which could contain whole war fleets. The town was made Nova Scotia's capital as well; and it would build a proud inheritance as a major British and later Canadian base through great wars yet to come.
The French were active also. They strove to keep a grip on inland Acadia beyond the Nova Scotian peninsula, claiming that only the peninsula itself had really been yielded by the Treaty of 1713; so that the areas past the Isthmus of Chignecto still belonged to New France. The Treaty had indeed but vaguely ceded "all Nova Scotia or Acadia with its ancient boundaries" -- whatever that meant. Britain, backed by some weight of history, argued that Nova Scotia-Acadia had always extended clear up to the Appalachians. France, which wanted particularly to have ice-free access overland from Canada down to Louisbourg, contended otherwise. In any case, the French now proceeded to confirm their view that the border should run at Chignecto by exacting their own oaths of French allegiance from Acadians of that area in 1749, and by planting forts upon the isthmus, the chief one being For Beauséjour, built in 1751. The British in reply erected For Lawrence on their side of the alleged boundary. Skirmishes and raids went on across the line, but all-out war did not come till 1755, when a sizeable British and New England expedition arrived to beseige and capture Beauséjour -- as has already been described. But further, Acadians were found in its garrison, even though most had been forced by the French to serve "on pain of death".
The British authorities in Nova Scotia now came to a grim resolve. Faced in 1755 with the armed might of Louisbourg, French agents working among the Acadians or inciting Micmac raids, surrounded and vastly outweighed by an unsecured, potentially dangerous French-speaking population, the rulers of the Nova Scotian province decided that Acadians must take a full, unqualified oath of allegiance to Great Britain -- or be deported. The new governor of Nova Scotia, Colonel Charles Lawrence, was central to this drastic decision. He himself had built For Lawrence and met French attacks there. He saw the move proposed as urgent military necessity. And at that moment when English America was reeling from the shock of Braddock's major defeat and French triumph in the Ohio, those in authority would very much agree with him, right back to the imperial government in London.
But the Acadians did not recognize the demand for an unqualified oath as what it was -- a downright ultimatum. From years of previous British failure to enforce such an oath, they had come to believe (wishfully) that it still could be refused. Theirs was the understandable but tragic stand of a small people caught between great forces they did not and would not comprehend. That still is no excuse for what happened to them.
British troops -- or rather keenly Protestant New Englanders quite ready to drive Catholic Frenchmen off their valuable lands -- were sent to herd the Acadians from their homes and into waiting ships that would carry them to exile in British colonies down the Atlantic coast. From Beaubassin and Grand Pré around the head of the Bay of Fundy, from the Annapolis Valley and little Atlantic shore villages, bewildered, unprepared Acadians were driven by Yankee bluecoat troops from farms and burning crops into a confusion of ships where families were broken and split up. This, after all, was a major transport movement of over 6,000 people, often well beyond the hurried plans and facilities of those who had supposedly arranged it. Numbers of Acadians never survived their pent-up passage to ports down the seaboard. The wonder is, that so many did, and then managed to eke out a life in the American colonies. Some would go on to France -- though they seldom fitted in there successfully -- while many others escaped transportation altogether, hiding in the woods, crossing into the forestlands beyond Chignecto, or finding their way to French-held Cape Breton Island or the Island of Saint John. Nevertheless, a society of some 13,000 Acadians was effectively broken up and removed, reduced to only shattered remnants. Or was it left shattered? Here his lies the "miracle" of Acadian survival: the achievement, above all, of a profoundly enduring heritage.
Acadians might journey on to France or to French Louisiana, where they later became the "Cajuns" of American history. But remarkably, many in time came back to their ancestral Acadia, when the Franco-British imperial struggle was over. And in Nova Scotia or Prince Edward Island -- yet particularly in New Brunswick-to-be -- they would renew their own society, language and culture, still in largely rural settings. Their will and courage to make such a return, the devotion of a humble, exiled people to their home territory, not only forms an impressive historic testament in itself, but no less provides a strengthening message to all Canada. Today, Acadian communities are vigorously evident in the three Maritime provinces; and in bilingual New Brunswick, they comprise close to half the population. Here is a resolute people's living answer to their terrible time of expulsion, during a deadly contest of empires. But to that contest we ourselves must now return.
In 1756 the Seven Years War began in Europe; but in America the conflict simply continued -- witnessing another French success that year, the capture of British Oswego, which was set on Lake Ontario opposite Fort Frontenac, and thus had threatened New France's main water highway on to Niagara and the Ohio. The French victory at Oswego was won by a new commanding general, the Marquis de Montcalm, a professional soldier of highly deserved renown; but who had shortcomings of his own. He scarcely seemed aware that he, a trained regular, might make military misjudgments. He was all too disdainful of the colonial authorities in New France, and the whole Canadien skill in guerilla warfare developed over a century of swift assaults on Indian villages or English frontiers. Montcalm would gain more successes in 1757-8. Yet he disparaged and resisted the strategies of his supposed superior, the Governor-General Pierre de Vaudreuil (Quebec-born son of a notable earlier governor, Philippe de Vaudreuil), who had taken office in 1755 and had pursued a largely successful hold-off policy of French-Indian attacks amid the forests. Montcalm instead believed that the enemy had to be met and decisively defeated European-style, in pitched battles at strongpoints of defence. Each could be partly right: but their command dissensions scarcely helped to defend New France.
The fact remains that, for all the value of guerilla thrusts in keeping the enemy off balance or disrupting his communications, the crucial battles for America would ultimately be won by regular forces and their well-drilled heavy fire; on open battlefields or in the sieges of key fortresses, not by scattered musket shots from behind trees in the wilds. The French at the start held some advantage in their wilderness knowledge and their ties with the western Indians, not to mention that they were not thirteen unconcerted colonies, moving in varied directions or not moving at all. Yet over time New France's much smaller population and resources were bound to become apparent, as the British colonies began to apply their own real strengths. Furthermore, there was the growing stranglehold of British sea-power on the Atlantic, which in due course let only trickles of French reinforcements and munitions get through, while British regular forces and armaments swelled freely overseas. Finally, there was the guiding genius of William Pitt in the British government from 1757. He shaped a co-ordinated war effort in Britain and America, and chose generals and admirals who could carry it out. Accordingly, though the patterns were not fully apparent till 1758, the greater available weight of British power, once effectively used, spelled doom for France's empire in America. All French aptitudes in forest warfare could do little more than delay the final outcome.
The British surge forward showed dramatically in the taking of Louisbourg in July, 1758, after a seven-week seige. That fortress had been much strengthened and better manned since its return to French control. But a powerful British fleet and army that was assembled at Halifax swept up to the great French base; and there successful landings under General James Wolfe led on to massive cannonades that finally forced the shattered town to surrender. This time the British blew up Louisbourg's fortifications. They also occupied Cape Breton Island and the Island of Saint John, while Wolfe went to seize the fishing coasts of Gaspé. Most important, the way by sea to the St. Lawrence and Quebec now lay open: though it was too late in the season to mount an attack before another year. Meanwhile, there were decisive British successes in the interior, as well. A force under Colonel John Bradstreet repaid the loss of Oswego by capturing Fort Frontenac, which now was weakly held and in poor condition -- a strange weakness considering the critical value of this historic post where Lake Ontario met the St.Lawrence. For with its fall, the French chain of forts to westward was broken. The results appeared that November, when For Duquesne in the Ohio, itself under British attack and now cut off from supplies, was abandoned and blown up by its own defenders. Fort Pitt appeared in its place: later to become Pittsburgh in the spread of American settlement into the Ohio country.
The war moved toward a climax in 1759. That July, stout, stone-built Fort Niagara fell to the assaults of British troops, New York militia and Mohawk Indians, all under Sir William Johnson (as he now was). With the loss of this major stronghold, the little French fort at Toronto harbour was burned by its own garrison. British forces were now converging on the St. Lawrence core of Canada: eastward from Lake Ontario, north from the Lake Champlain region, and up the main St. Lawrence river from the sea, where in June a fleet and army under James Wolfe had arrived at Quebec, the capital and very heart of New France.
For several months Wolfe battered ineffectually at Montcalm's strong French defences along the Beauport shore, on the downstream side of Quebec. But in September he finally struck above the city, his men climbing the steep banks by night; so that the morning of September 13 found a British army some 5,000 drawn up on the Plains of Abraham outside the city walls. With Wolfe on this less protected flank of Quebec, and across the remaining French supply line to Montreal, Montcalm reacted all too hastily. He hurried the bulk of his forces out of their Beauport lines in a long march around the city, and sent them right into battle. In numbers, they nearly equalled the British, but they were tired, disarrayed, and in their confusion not equal to the ordered discipline of their waiting enemies. Massed British volleys rang out in sequence, blasting down the hastily advancing French, who swayed, then broke and ran. It was all over in half an hour. Montcalm was mortally wounded trying to rally his men. Wolfe died on the battlefield, likely shot by a Canadian or Indian sniper. Yet Quebec was surrendered on September 18, and British forces moved into possession of this main bastion of New France -- as it indeed had been, ever since Champlain's founding time.
The war went on, for there were still many French-held posts, Indian allies, and the French army now centred on Montreal. Moreover, after the Royal Navy had to leave Quebec to avoid being frozen in over the winter, the British forces holed up in a badly battered city themselves went through attack. In April of 1760, the French army led by the Duc de Lévis came down from Montreal. At Ste. Foy, a village just west of Quebec, Lévis fought a battle harder than that waged on the Plains the autumn before, and the British under General James Murray, Wolfe's successor, were lucky to get back within Quebec's defences. But then British warships came up the river when the ice went out. Lévis had to give up his seige, and the very thin hope of a French war fleet arriving instead. The French retired bitterly to Montreal once more. There the British soon closed in from all sides, on a town far less defensible than Quebec had been. And at Montreal on September 8, 1760, Governor Vaudreuil signed the Articles of Capitulation with General Jeffrey Amherst. French authority had ceased in Canada. New France had fallen.
Still, the Seven Years War had not ended in Europe as yet, and so Canada remained under an interim British military rule. Besides, there was always the chance that a peace treaty might again restore some American holdings to France, especially if French fortunes of war happened to improve elsewhere. With such a possibility in mind, France in 1762 indeed contrived to send a naval expedition to seize St. John's, chief centre in British Newfoundland, largely as a counter to use in bargaining back French North Atlantic fishing rights. A surprised St. John's fell easily to this bold attack -- but a bigger British expedition sent from New York quickly regained it. In the meantime, peace negotiations were already under way between the principal, mutually exhausted European combatants. They resulted in the Peace of Paris, ratified for Britain by its parliament in February, 1763.
The costliest fighting had gone on in Europe -- where actually not over one blood-soaked acre of ground changed hands in the treaty between the main antagonists, France, Spain, Austria, Russia, Prussia, and Britain. But in North America, a defeated France gave up her huge empire. She kept only St. Pierre and Miquelon as bases for her Atlantic fishery, two little islands off the southern coast of Newfoundland, and some fishing rights, still, on that big island's empty western shores. Her other domains -- Acadia to the Appalachians, all French Canada west beyond that, plus the Ohio and Illinois country and all the lands east of the Mississippi -- passed into British possession; while Spain was given France's Louisiana territories west of the Mississippi. Now, definitely, New France had disappeared. A century and more of growth and expansion, suffering, conflict and courage, had ended in conquest and cession.
But it was not all over -- not in pride, not in achievement, nor in heritage. The French who had shaped Quebec and many a lasting settlement, who had carried Canada to the Great Lakes and the Great Plains, or ranged from Labrador to the Gulf of Mexico, were by no means going to disappear as a strong and vital factor in Canadian history. New France might have departed. French Canada and its resolute descendants would not.

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#1BRising ONE BILLION RISING- no more excuses or abuses... finally the world's leaders are stepping up.... it's time... in the year 2015 ... thank u.- God bless our troops our peacemakers who NEVER die in vain or wounded and way 2 often come home with broken souls over the horror at what is done 2 innocent women and children still... thank u Pope Francis ...thank u. Oh and by the by... this old Canadian is both Catholic and adores our Commonwealth of 2.2 billion and our Queen Elizabeth II our Head of State... Peace of Christ cause that's how I roll ... and always... God bless our troops and our vets... 2da as well.

"Although it is a symbol of life, the female body is unfortunately not rarely attacked and disfigured, even by those who should be its protector and life companion."

Pope Condemns Female Genital Mutilation, Domestic Violence Against Women

Reuters | By Philip Pullella

Posted: 02/07/2015 9:39 am EST Updated: 02/09/2015 10:59 am EST

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/09/pope-female-genital-mutilation_n_6635886.html?ir=Politics&ncid=fcbklnkushpmg00000013

Thursday, February 12, 2015

John Baird’s speech to the United Nations General Assembly

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At the election of a chief or chiefs, or the granting of any ordinary consent required of a band of Indians under the Act, those entitled to vote at the council or meeting thereof shall be the male members of the band of the full age of twenty-one years.

Conclusion

By Erin Hanson

Recommended Resources for further reading:

Endnotes

1 Udel, Lisa J. “Revision & Resistance: The Politics of Native Women’s Motherwork.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 22:2, 2001. 43-62.

2 McGrath, Ann & Winona Stevenson, “Gender, Race & Policy: Aboriginal Women and the State in Canada and Australia,” and Williams, Robert. “Gendered Checks and Balances: Understanding the Legacy of White Patriarchy in an American Indian Cultural Context.” Georgia Law Review 24: 1990. 1034

For a more in-depth examination of women’s roles in appointing leadership, see “The Changing Status of Seneca Women” by Joy Bilharz, in Women and Power in Native North America edited by Laura F. Klein and Lillian A. Ackerman

3 Tsosie, Rebecca. “Native Women and Leadership: An Ethics of Culture and Relationship.” In Indigenous Women and Feminism: Politics, Activism, Culture. Ed. Cheryl Suzack et al. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010, 32.

4 Huhndorf, Shari M. and Cheryl Suzack, “Indigenous Feminism: Theorizing the Issues,” In ed. Cheryl Suzack et al.

5 Donaldson, Laura E. “’But we are your mothers; you are our sons:” Gender, Sovereignty, and the Nation in Early Cherokee Women’s Writing.” In Indigenous Women and Feminism: : Politics, Activism, Culture. (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010), 43-44.

6 Green, 701.

7 Sangster, 308.

8 303.

9 Sangster, 311-2.

10 313.

11 Sangster, 302-3.

12 Sangster, 307.

13 Sangster, 314.

15 Emberley, 61.

16 Emberley, 62.

17 McGrath & Stevenson, 41.

18 Emberley, 61.

19 Razack, 92.

20 Lowman, John. “Violence against Women: Violence and the (outlaw) status of Street Prostitution in Canada. Violence Against Women 2000 6(9): 996.

21 Ibid.

**1 Udel, Lisa J. “Revision & Resistance: The Politics of Native Women’s Motherwork.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 22:2, 2001. 43-62.**

**20 Lowman, John. “Violence against Women: Violence and the (outlaw) status of Street Prostitution in Canada. Violence Against Women 2000 6(9): 996.**