Gruending On John A. & Clearing The Plains

Since James Daschuk's Clearing The Plains came out last year Canadian's have been forced to reassess  John A. MacDonald's place in the pantheon of Canadian heros.  Among a fair bit of back-and-forth on the subject, Dennis Gruending's short piece stands out.  My favorite bit from it:

In Macdonald’s case, his attitude about the inferiority of indigenous people was commonplace at the time, but the scope of his actions presents a problem for his defenders. Did he use starvation and near starvation as a weapon against indigenous people in Western Canada whose communities had been decimated by loss of the bison? Daschuk says he did and that the deliberate withholding of food to hungry people led to hundreds of deaths by starvation, and also created the conditions for a tuberculosis epidemic in indigenous communities.

I have heard no worthy refutation of Daschuk’s claim.  In fact, he has been awarded the Sir John A. Macdonald Prize for a Canadian book of history judged to have made the most significant contribution to an understanding of our past.  This is highly ironic but it also means that Daschuk has written a good book.

Incidentally, on the whole notion of  presentism; all we have to do to refute that charge in this case is to find a few folk back in John A.'s day who might have voiced moral objections to his policy.  And indeed we do find them, among the Canadian People themselves.  Apparently, MacDonald stopped just short of starving the native population to death due to worries this might cause a scandal in Eastern Canada.  From this we can conclude that at least some people back in the 1880s had qualms about refusing to provide readily available food to whole populations.  If they were allowed their doubts about John A.'s policy, so too can we be.

Farber Vs. Gwyn On John A.

From Bernie's piece in The Star:

The latest hullaballoo around renaming Toronto’s Union Station after Sir John A. Macdonald should have and could have been avoided from the start. It simply boggles the mind that Toronto Councillor Denzil Minnan-Wong, a savvy municipal politician, would have suggested such a change without engaging in at least some research.

From Richard Gwyn's defense in the same paper:

About John A. Macdonald two comments can be made with near certainty.

The first is that but for him no Canadians would be reading this article because no Canadians would exist to read it other than Americans who happened to live in the new state of that name.

Apparently, attacks on John A. are "shabby" and "opportunistic", but Mr. Gwyn declines to explain why.  I think the most important bit in either column is Bernie's reference to the newly published Clearing The Plains, by James Daschuk of the University of Regina:

In arresting, but harrowing, prose, James Daschuk examines the roles that Old World diseases, climate, and, most disturbingly, Canadian politics—the politics of ethnocide—played in the deaths and subjugation of thousands of aboriginal people in the realization of Sir John A. Macdonald’s “National Dream.”

Mr. Gwyn's piece would have benefited by directly engaging the claims in this book. I admit I have not read it (yet), but the fact that this kind of thing went on into the 1950s makes its claims plausible at least.

All of which is not particularly relevant to the renaming of Union Station.  That's just a dumb idea whatever the truth about John A.  It's just  Denzil  floating a few  balloons to get his name out front before he announces he's running for mayor.

What To Do About John, Eh?

Bernie Farber had a piece in the Ottawa Citizen yesterday re our nation's first Prime Minister:

...Sir John A. Macdonald was also a racist who disdained Chinese rail workers, the very same men who helped build his national dream, by imposing a discriminatory head tax on each of them. And it was Macdonald whose policies of forced starvation helped clear First Nations from the prairies in order to build that railway. Indeed, James Daschuk from the University of Regina argues quite cogently in his book, “Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation and the Loss of Aboriginal Life,” that Macdonald’s starvation policies led to the deaths of thousands. As Daschuk explains: “For years, government officials withheld food from aboriginal people until they moved to their appointed reserves, forcing them to trade freedom for rations. Once on reserves, food placed in ration houses was withheld for so long that much of it rotted while the people it was intended to feed fell into a decades-long cycle of malnutrition, suppressed immunity and sickness from tuberculosis and other diseases. Thousands died.”

What are we to do once we know this?  Make sure its taught in our history classes is one thing, I suppose.  When I was in high-school it certainly was not.  Sir John A. was simply known as a charming drunk who launched the nation from the bottom of an alcoholic stupor.  Class conversations would have been much more useful  if this stuff had been part of the  lesson.