Saskatchewan??

[PassionateNortherner]

Originally Posted by Zoisite

That's okay if you can't find the book online. I'm interested to try to track it down and there's other ways to do that besides going online. What university was it, and what is the full name of the book, and the author's name if you can recall that? Do you recall if the book is a Canadian publication? Maybe the university published it? I know a lot of universities publish books for their own course materials.

Is this the course you took in university? Is it one of the books listed under required course materials as shown here? - https://www.athabascau.ca/syllabi/hist/hist338.php That's for AU but I see that UBC also offers the same course.

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I was attending Brandon University and the course when I took it was around 2005. The book could very well have been independently published in Manitoba, likely University of Manitoba where many of the publications on Western history come from. UnfortunatelyI cannot remember the author. Sidenote: I hold a degree in Canadian Studies and took a lot of history, political science, native studies, and sociology courses and I learned at a great deal of books in these subjects about Western Canada specifically were independently published within the Western provinces. Most books published by actual publishing companies talking about Canada in general seem to have left out a lot of Western history or offered a much different version of the histories of the region. Another book you should check out if you want a really good history of what life was like for some First Nations people in Saskatchewan
is Treaty Promises, Indian Reality: Life on a Reserve by Linda Ungar and is the story of a guy named Harold Lerat, someone I actually met several times as he used to look after our horses.

One of my family members wrote a lot of stories down told to her from the older people in my family. That side of my family were German and they settled in Saskatchewan in 1900. They took out homesteads. My great-great-grandmother told a story of how after they built their house, the local native population from a nearby reserve used to come and sit on the floor and beg for food. They were starving and she could see their bones and the desperate look in their eyes. She used to give them bread and they'd leave. They used to hire native people during threshing time. The Indian agent used to come around and offer the native people as labourers. The settlers would pay the agent and as said by many native people later, he used to give them none of the money for working. They used to have to fend for themselves although they were not allowed to leave the reserves without signed permission, they would sneak off to find food. The mortality rate of native children in those years was over half of children who didn't make it to age 10.

Currently there is a lot of animosity between First Nations and Non-First Nations people in the prairie provinces. A lot of people blame racism but its much more complicated than that. The two groups have been living side-by-side for over a hundred years. Many of the settlers came here after First Nations people were put on reserves and after the rebellions. Many of the settlers came from bad conditions in Europe so they came to Canada not really understanding that they were settling on land taken away from others. And so you ended up with a lot of First Nations people resenting the descendants of these settlers and you had the descendants of these settlers defensive and upset because they hadn't had anything to do with what happened before. And years of being kept down, years of residential school and things like the 60s scoop, families were destroyed. As a result, many First Nations people live in poverty and so many have problems with addictions and mental health, many turn to criminal activity and you get a situation where 95% of crimes are committed by First Nations people and 95% of those in jail are First Nations and 95% of children in foster care are First Nations.

I don't know if you heard about the Gerald Stanley case here. It was a very heated case with people on both sides. Eastern news reports tried to label Saskatchewan as full of major racists but the truth as I know it, having lived here in rural Saskatchewan is that many people are extremely frustrated with becoming victims of crimes by First Nations and many people are afraid because police are too far away to help them. The situation which exists needs to be changed but in my opinion The Indian Act needs to be abolished and the federal governments, be they Liberal or Conservative, often just make things worse. We have our own version of Black Lives Matter here, systemic problems which really need to be solved because issues like the Stanley case might just increase.