March 2016 (Issue # 68) Press for Conversion! 15

Genocidal Precedents for Canadian Concentration CampsBy Richard Sanders

WWI was not the first time thatthousands of people had beenforced into captivity for threat-

ening the “peace, order and good govern-ment of Canada.”1 In fact, Conservativeand Liberal governments alike already hada well-established modus operandi thatused mass captivity to subjugate so-called“foreign” enemies on the homefront.

Canada’s 20th-century internmentcamps did not arise in a vacuum. Theycontinued a long-standing tradition of forc-ing targeted populations into isolated ru-ral locations across the country. Canada’ssystem of mass confinement followed theUS model for segregating Aboriginals intoremote ghettos, called reserves. But thiswas only one weapon in a multidimension-al war to destroy First Nations. Besidesrestricting physical movements, elites useda diversity of tactics, including residentialschools, to hold Indigenous people inplace. They were also confined within thebounds of a genocidal legal framework thatrestrained religious, linguistic, social, eco-nomic and political freedoms.

Such multidisciplinary genocidecannot be committed by a few sociopaths.Large scale atrocities can only be achiev-ed by an institutionalised sociopathy.Those with “Antisocial Personality Disor-der” are defined by the US Department ofHealth as individuals with “a long-termpattern of manipulating, exploiting or vio-lating the rights of others. This behavior isoften criminal.”2 When state agencies,NGOs or corporations run programs orbusinesses that inflict these same abuses—albeit on a vastly more devastatingscale—they go undiagnosed, at least bythose rendered prisoner by the reassuringnarratives of captive institutions.

Those who are able to free them-selves from the confining frames of thoughtand language imposed by sociopathic in-stitutions, sometimes dare to speak outagainst the normalisation of antisocial pol-icies. By trying to liberate those who re-main enslaved within the narrative websspun by abusive institutions, activists maybe diagnosed as rebels, radicals, conspira-cy theorists or, ironically, as psychopathswith “Antisocial Personality Disorder.”

A century ago, racist and xenopho-bic views were the norm in Canada. Wide-spread antisocial pathology was pandem-ic throughout the country. The largest andmost highly-respected religious bodies

were captivated by this social illness. Thisis well illustrated by the Churches’ enthu-siastic collaboration with governmentagencies to plan, conduct, justify and cov-er-up the genocidal programs of mass cap-tivity inflicted on Indigenous peoples.

But long before Aboriginals wereforced into the confinement of reserves andresidential schools in the 1880s, Canadi-ans happily profited from the institutionof chattel slavery. For two centuries, Blacksand Indians were subjected to the “legal-ized” captivity and forced labour practisedby British and French colonialists. Whileprominent members of Canada’s Catholicand AngloProtestant churches ownedslaves, these institutions also helped per-petuate slavery with Biblical narratives torationalise their antisocial pathology.

These long-standing patterns of rac-ist, institutionalised abuse and exploitationare the sociopathic precedents for Cana-da’s widely-supported, mass internment offoreigners and political radicals that be-gan with the pretext of WWI.

Perhaps the most alarming aspectin this history of sociopathy is that pro-gressive, reform-minded Christians—bothProtestant and Catholic—were entrappedby Canada’s mass psychosis. Althoughgenuinely sincere in their work, mission-aries were restrained by the straightjacketof a widespread, cultural pathology.

Those captured heart and mind bypredatory institutions, and working withinthe strict confines of their myths and nar-

ratives, felt compelled to “uplift” peopleswho they saw as inferiour, uncivilised, un-Christian and unCanadian. Unable to per-ceive social reality, and blind to the hor-rors that their actions were having on oth-ers, well-meaning Christians were spell-bound by the sociopathy of Canada’s dom-ineering Eurocentric delusions of grandeur.

This social illness went far beyondmere racism and ethnocentrism to becomean enslaving cultural narcissism. Thoseenthralled by the anti-social narratives ofCanada’s dominant religious and politicalinstitutions were confined by arrogant hu-bris, an entitled sense of superiourity, anda fearmongering paranoia that “strangers”are inherently inferior, dangerous and evil.

Hamstrung by myths of nationalexceptionalism, many Canadians took upthe imperialist call of the “white man’sburden...to serve your captives’ need,”those “new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child.”3 Good Christians jus-tified their genocidal efforts to rend othercultures asunder, with such altruistic goalsas civilisation, education and morality.Immured by grand imperial delusions,Canadian nationalists believed that theywere building a model country that wasbound by destiny to lead the world. AsPrime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier pro-claimed in 1904, to cheers from Liberalsand Conservatives alike, “the TwentiethCentury belongs to Canada.”4 This nonpar-tisan fantasy of national superiourity wasingrained, not only in the patrician psyche,

Following the genocidal US model of “aggressive civilisation,” Canadaconcentrated Indians in remote ghettos called reservations, held them

captive in Christian schools, confined them with laws restricting religious,linguistic, economic & political rights, and framed them with racist narratives.

Photos: Two Cree chiefs held captive by Canada during the Northwest Rebellion, 1885

First Nations, First Captives:

O Genocide

Our Home onNative Land...

Big Bear Poundmaker

Press for Conversion! (Issue # 68) March 201616

but in the mindset of main-stream citizens. The countrywas gripped by a widespreadsocial malady that can aptlybe called the Canada Syn-drome. (See pp.2-4.)

The delusion that as asuperior nation we shouldsow our “Canadian values”abroad, grew from an earliernarrative meme of so-called“Christian values.” GeorgeEmery, in his pioneering his-tory of prairie Methodism,described the prevailingAngloProtestant hegemonysaying Canadians believed “Christian val-ues would be menaced throughout the do-minion if the west, with its enormous ma-terial potential, were not won for Christ.”5

(See “Occupation(al) Psychosis...,” p.18.)

Social Gospeland Social Progress

Some of the loudest voices of Canadiannativism were leaders of the Social Gos-pel, a progressive strain of Christianity thatprospered from the 1880s until the early1920s. Historian Richard Allen definedthis reform movement, by saying the

“social gospel rested on the premise thatChristianity was a social religion, con-cerned ...with the quality of human re-lations on this earth.... [I]t was a callfor men to find the meaning of theirlives in seeking...the Kingdom of Godin the very fabric of society.”6

The Social Gospel included “advo-cates of direct social assistance; social pur-ists; those who advocated a change of atti-tude as the means to social change; stateinterventionists; and socialists.”7

Leaders of the Social Gospel wereusually white, middle-class, AngloProtes-tant missionaries or clergymen. Driven to“uplift” the less fortunate, these reformerswanted to help inferiour classes and racesto deal with growing social, moral and eco-nomic problems of industrialisation.

The Social Gospel, said MarianaValverde, was an effort to “humanize and/or Christianize the political economy ofurban-industrial capitalism.” Valverde isa University of Toronto criminology pro-fessor who authored a classic text on Cana-da’s social purity movement. “Prophets”of the Social Gospel, she has said

“were generally moderately left of cen-tre, but included such mainstream fig-ures as W.L.Mackenzie King, who ...was influenced by social gospel ideasin his popular 1919 book, Industry andHumanity.”8

Before becoming Canada’s longest-serv-ing Prime Minister, King was “an ardentsocial gospeller,” said historians DouglasFrancis and Chris Kitzan. King believedthat his political mission on earth was di-vinely inspired. Calling himself “a trueservant of God helping to make the King-dom of Heaven prevail on Earth,” King ex-plained: “This is what I love politics for.”9

Methodism Led the WayMost Social Gospel leaders belonged tothe Methodist Church, which adopted its“Social Creed” in 1908. Capturing the re-formist spirit of the Social Gospel, it wasa rallying cry for the whole progressivemovement. The Creed declared it “the dutyof all Christian people to concern them-selves directly with certain practical indus-trial problems.” Among these were achiev-ing “the right of workers to some protec-tion against the hardships often resultingfrom the swift crises of industrial change,”“the abolition of child labor,” and “theabatement of poverty.” Methodists also of-fered a “pledge of sympathy and of help”to those “seeking to lift the crushing bur-dens of the poor, and to reduce the hard-ships and uphold the dignity of labor.”10

Canada’s Methodist Church was apowerful force in Anglocentric settler cul-ture. Like an invasive non-native species,it spread quickly across western Canada,and had a devastating impact on Indig-enous peoples. Between 1891 and 1911,Canada’s prairie population rose almostfivefold, from 220,000 to 1.32 million.11

Between 1896 and 1914, during the So-cial-Gospel heyday, there was a tripling inthe prairie Methodist fold, and its churchesgrew in number from 180 to 562.12

Emery described prairie Method-ists as “part of the predatory white settlerpopulation”13 that did not lament the dev-astation of the Aboriginal population. In

fact, he points out that: “During the 1870s and

1880s Methodist mis-sionaries acted as ad-vance agents for thewhite settler society.They favoured theslaughter of the buffaloherds, the government’snative treaties and...thereserve system.”14

To aid in this geno-cide, the church was hap-py to cozy up to Canada’seconomic elites. As po-litical scientist Kenneth

McNaught said, “the Methodist church inthe 1880’s and 1890’s was consolidatingitself as a church of the well-to-do.”15

Methodists were later central in formingthe United Church of Canada (UCC). In1925, when Methodist, Presbyterian andCongregational churches merged, the UCCtook over the fifteen Methodist and ninePresbyterian residential schools.16

Teaching “The Three Cs”As Methodists and other Christians spreadacross the Canadian prairies in the 1880s,they brought a growth in residentialschools. Rather than imparting the tradi-tional “Three Rs,” church schools targetedAboriginal children with “The Three Cs,”Civilise, Christianise and Canadianise.

Of the sixteen Methodist residen-tial schools built between 1838 and 1975,all but two were in the West. Their earliestefforts to “uplift” Indian children beganwith two Ontario schools in 1838 and1848. Its first three residential schools inwestern Canada began in the late 1870s.Six more were founded there in the 1880s,two in the 1890s, another two in 1900, andtheir last one opened in 1919.17 Usingopening and closing dates of these well-meaning, but genocidal, Methodistschools, we can calculate that each schooloperated for an average of 66 years. Cu-mulatively then, the 14 Methodist residen-tial schools in western Canada inflicted the“Three Cs” for a total of 925 years. Thetoll on Indian lives is still being felt.

Among the Methodists who lav-ished praise upon missionaries for theirfine efforts to Canadianise, civilise andChristianise the Indians under their con-trol, was Rev.J.S.Woodsworth. In his So-cial-Gospel classic Strangers Within OurGates (1908), Woodsworth noted that:

“Much missionary work, evangelistic,educational, industrial and medical, hasbeen done among the Indians. Many are

Anglican residential school, Moose Factory, James Bay, 1950.

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devout Christians living exemplarylives, but there are still 10,202 Indiansin our Dominion, as grossly pagan aswere their ancestors, or...half civilized,only to be debauched.”18

Strangely enough, Woodsworth’sbook on “strangers” and “newcomers” toCanada included a section on Indians. Itrelies heavily on two tracts from the Meth-odist Department of Missionary Literature:Indian Education in the North West, byRev.Thompson Ferrier, and The BritishColumbia Indian and his Future, by Rev.R.Whittington. Ferrier’s work concluded:

“The Indian problem is not solved, butit must not be given up, and it need notbe deserted in despair until there is aproper and final solution. I believe itpossible to civilize, educate and Chris-tianize the Indian.”19 (Emphasis added.)

Rev. Whittington, who led theMethodist Indian Missions in BC, alsopraised his Church’s residential schools byspeaking of “the noble band of teachers,who daily and quietly are really laying thefoundations of the future in the souls aswell as the minds of our Indian children.”20

The rapid population growth ofprairie settlers and the boom in churchesand residential schools, benefitted the im-perial project known as Canada. Westwardexpansion of Canadian “civilisation” wasa national crusade of Biblical proportions.Methodists, like Woodsworth, with theirblessed rage for Social Gospel progress,took themselves and their godly missionfar too seriously. “[I]n concert with otherProtestants, Methodists were the self-ap-pointed guardians of Protestant Christianvalues in society,” said Emery. “[T]hey as-sumed that the perpetuation of Protestant-ism was vital to the nation-building proc-ess.”21 As prominent Presbyterian SocialGospeller Rev.Charles Gordon proclaimedin 1909, “it is the Christian Church ...morethan all other forces put together, that hasto do with the making of a nation.”22

The Methodist Church, Emerywrote, also exhibited “an aggressive na-tionalism” that “opposed the penetrationof the west by rival cultures from FrenchCanada and Europe.” The church foughthard for English-language public schoolsbecause it was preoccupied with assimi-lating Francophones and other nonAngloaliens. Methodists also created missions to“Protestantize the Europeans.”23 Thesewere tasked with assimilating east Euro-peans, mostly Ukrainians, in the so-called“Austrian Missions” of northern Alberta,and Winnipeg’s All People’s Mission24

where Woodsworth worked (1908-1913).

Nation-Building MythsThe role of religious narratives in Cana-da’s nation-building experiment is ex-plored by Douglas Francis and Chris Kit-zan. In The Prairie West as Promised Land,they show how Biblical illusions were usedto express and structure the narrative mythsof Anglo settlers. The “Promised-Land”image that they fabricated “became thedominant perception of the region duringthe formative years,” from 1850 to WWI.25

Francis and Kitzen see three mainversions of the Christian mythology thatcaptured Canadian settlers’ imagination:

(1) The “myth pictured the Prairie Westas an Edenic paradise” that was “flowingwith milk and honey,”

(2) “Social gospellers believed that thePrairie West was destined to be a New Je-rusalem,” where “virtuous and morallyupright” settlers could establish their“Kingdom of God on Earth,” and

(3) The prairies were a “land of oppor-tunity” “free of the limitations of privilegeand traditions that hampered advance-ment.” They saw it “as a tabula rasa—ablank sheet—upon which each individualcould write his or her own destiny of suc-cess, wealth and happiness.”26

Trapping Natives & NativistsBut all was not perfect in the Social Gos-pel paradise, especially for Aboriginals.While building a “New Jerusalem” pavedthe way for Christianity to be writ largeacross the “empty” prairies, it was a deathknell for First Nations. Long before Anglo-Protestants turned their bigotry against eastEuropeans in WWI, they had pegged In-dians as the needy targets of uplift. Pennedas a primitive savages and heathens, Abo-riginals were the first nations to be forcedinto mass captivity by Canadian settlers.

From the first visits of Europeansto what they came to call Canada, Indig-enous people had been kidnapped, en-slaved and converted. European monarchsand their churches authorised imperialagents to conquer and control the humanand natural resources of the new-foundlands. Forced to relocate their communi-ties, confined to reservations, coerced intoresidential schools and bound by the In-dian Act, Aboriginal people have been heldphysically, socially and legally captivethroughout Canadian history.

But members of Canada’s captorsociety were also held hostage. Trappedwithin the narrow-minded confines of aracist worldview, many settlers were boundby the nativism that riddled Canada’s larg-

est religious, economic and political bod-ies. Among the leading advocates of thisxenophobia were the Social Gospel’s top,influence pedlars. Their bigotry against In-dians was as boundless as the prairie sky.Thus shackled, Social Gospellers mount-ed no resistance to Canada’s genocide ofAboriginals. They saw no need.

In fact, these progressives werebound and determined to administer thevery injustices that they should have beenprotesting. Brimming with good inten-tions, many well-meaning souls steppedforward to clear the path toward what theysaw as heaven on earth. But instead, theyforged a genocidal road to hell for all In-digenous peoples standing in their way.

By the late 1800s, Canada’s crusadeto expand Britain’s imperial vision acrossthe prairies, was in full swing. To imple-ment this plunderous policy, which dispos-sessed Indians of their land, Canadian au-thorities imposed severe restrictions on Ab-original mobility and culture. Churches andstate institutions united to impose geno-cidal programs of physical captivity andcultural assimilation that could only suc-ceed with the willing participation of many,well-intentioned Canadians.

Bound by Legal FictionsThe ludicrous idea that western Canadawas an empty slate, devoid of humanity,was a restatement of the ancient “Discov-ery Doctrine.” For 400 years, this legal fic-tion justified the genocidal conquest of theAmericas for the profit of European mon-archs and Church authorities.

The Discovery Doctrine wasgrounded in a much older legal fiction,called terra nullius. Originally used bylawyers in ancient Rome, this Latin le-galese refers to empty, barren or vacant ter-ritory belonging to no one. During the“Age of Discovery,” the Catholic Churchredefined terra nullius to encompass newlands coveted by European monarchs. Asthe Manitoba Justice Inquiry, noted:

“terra nullius was expanded…to in-clude any area devoid of ‘civilized’ so-ciety. In order to reflect colonial de-sires, the New World was said by somecourts to fall within this expanded defi-nition.”27

Stretching this term’s boundariesbegan a litany of new crimes to encloseand capture Aboriginals. This framing ofIndigenous peoples was aptly described byCanada’s Royal Commission on Aborigi-nal Peoples, as a “restrictive constitution-al circle drawn around First Nations by thegovernance sections of the Indian Act.”28

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The Occupation(al) Psychosis of Empire-Building MissionariesBy Richard Sanders

The Canadian mission to expandthe British empire was a spring-board for spreading “Christian val-

ues” around the world. Capturing the Ca-nadian west was seen as a moral exerciseto build the religious muscles of civilisa-tion. Fixated on their Social-Gospel mis-sion, progressives took up the “white man’sburden” to uplift heathens and inferior rac-es wherever they could be found.

“[I]f Prairie society were givenChristian foundations, Canada could be-come a mighty base for exporting theChristian evangel on a global scale,” saidhistorian George Emery, so that “Canadacould participate fully in the Anglo-Saxonmission to bring about the Kingdom of Godon earth.”1 As its “Board of Missions” re-ported in 1908, “the mission of the Meth-odist Church is to save Canada, thatthrough Canada we may do our part to-ward saving the world.”2

By 1919, Canada’s Protestantchurches supported 768 overseas mission-aries in ten countries, at a cost of about $2million ($25.5 million in 2015). This, saidhistorian Robert Wright, “rendered Cana-da the greatest missionary nation in Prot-estant Christendom on a per-capita basis.”3

This global “missionary enterprise,” hecontinued, “owed much ...to the generosi-ty of wealthy Canadian businessmen in theLayman’s Missionary Movement.” Muchof this largesse came from the pockets of“executives, brokers and lawyers” in To-ronto’s three richest churches.4 Besidestheir devotion to spreading “The Word,”these businessmen were avid promoters

(and beneficiaries) of empire. Being en-slaved by their blind faith in both religionand capitalism, Canadian businessmen andmissionaries shared an inability to see be-yond the shackles of their cultural pro-grams.

In 1918, when economist/sociolo-gist Thorstein Veblen5 coined the phrase“trained incapacity,” he applied the termto capitalists, critiquing their “habitual ad-diction to pecuniary... considerations.”Arguing that businessmen have a “trainedinability to apprehend any other than theimmediate pecuniary bearing of their ma-noeuvres,” he said their “habitual employ-ment... holds them more rigorously andconsistently to...pecuniary valuation.”6

Veblen’s book also described howreligion provides “national strength” to“predatory cultures,” which were “essen-tially... parasitic..., despotic, and, with duetraining, highly superstitious....” Religion,Veblen maintained, “fosters the nationalpride of a people chosen by the MostHigh,” and “trains the population in habitsof subordination and loyalty.”7

Veblen’s idea of “trained incapaci-ty” has been widely adapted. In 1931, phi-losopher/psychologist John Dewey appliedit to ethnology and created the phrase “oc-cupational psychosis.” In 1935, literarytheorist Kenneth Burke used Veblen andDewey’s work to explain many maladap-tive beliefs and behaviours. In 1937, Bel-gian sociologist Daniel Warnotte appliedit to his study of “professional deforma-tion” in bureaucracies. US sociologistRobert Merton added to the idea in 1949when studying dysfunctional “overcon-formity” and inflexibility in large institu-

tions. Recently, theology professor BirgitHerppich has tried to use the idea of “oc-cupational psychosis” to reduce “culturalbias in missionary education.”8 Using the“trained incapacity” theory to improve mis-sionary success rates reveals a learned in-ability to see that “missionary education”is, in itself, a clear form of “cultural bias.”

Missionaries are preoccupied withthe task of educating nonbelievers. This isnot a mere job, career or occupation. It isa self-righteous calling or mission that canseize, capture, take over or possess thosewho occupy this field of work. Trained inthe business of conversion, missionariesmay become so engrossed, fixated or oc-cupied by their task that they are blindedto its harmful effects. For example, beingincapable (or unwilling) to see that resi-dential schools were the tools of culturalgenocide, missionaries gave glowing talesto bless their efforts to educate heathens.

Such narratives were blindly takenas gospel by many who, though outside themissionary field, professed Christianity.Because political and economic elites, oc-cupying many professions, adopted mis-sionary beliefs, the vocation’s trained in-capacities spread widely and infected manyhuge institutions. The missionary mindset,having escaped its professional confines,was able to seize settler culture as a whole.

On a social level, missionary atti-tudes were central to Canada’s colonial oc-cupation, that political habit of seizing,occupying, controlling and profiting fromlands already settled by others. Mission-aries rendered progressive-sounding nar-ratives to justify the containment of Indi-ans, atheist socialists and other threats to

Imprisoned on ReservesErased from the metaphoric map, likechalk dust from the supposed tabula rasaof the prairies, Aboriginals were swept offthe land in an ethnic-cleansing campaignthat confined them to reserves. These wereCanada’s first POW concentration camps.Corralling Indians into captivity kept themout of the way of European settlers whowere then being poured into the prairies.

As James Daschuk said in Clearingthe Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation,and the Loss of Aboriginal Life: “Reservesbecame centres of incarceration as the in-famous ‘pass system’ was imposed to con-trol movements of the treaty population.”And, as Sir John A.MacDonald told Par-liament, we “are doing all that we can byrefusing food until the Indians are on the

verge of starvation, to reduce the expense.”29

More than a century later, the Ca-nadian government finally admitted:

“The notorious pass system was neverpart of the formal Indian Act regime. Itbegan as a result of informal discussionsamong government officials in the early1880s in response to the threat that prai-rie Indians might forge a pan-Indian al-liance against Canadian authorities. De-signed to prevent Indians on the prai-ries from leaving their reserves, its im-mediate goal was to inhibit their mo-bility. Under the system, Indians werepermitted to leave their reserves only ifthey had a written pass from the localIndian agent.”30

To the Mounties, the blatant illegality ofenforcing mass internment was irrelevant.Under the Indian Act, Indians were noteven allowed to hire lawyers to challenge

the Canadian government’s crimes.Besides using the “Pass System” to

arrest Indians caught “off the reservation,”Mounties also jailed them for trespassingand for vagrancy. This was appreciated byleading Methodist Social Gospellers likeJ.S.Woodsworth. In Strangers Within OurGates (1909), he used a five-page quota-tion from L.M.Fortier, Chief Clerk of Can-ada’s Immigration Department. Speakingof the Mounties, he said: “Colonizing theNorth-West would be a very different mat-ter without the aid of this splendid organi-zation.” Using his racist wit to lump to-gether crooks with all Indians found guiltyof being “off reserve,” Fortier said Cana-da’s Mounties kept a “sharp lookout” for“smugglers, horse thieves, criminals,wandering Indians, and such like gentry.”31

March 2016 (Issue # 68) Press for Conversion! 19

the status quo. This Christian evangel hasnow been replaced with the Good Newsthat global salvation can be found byspreading “Canadian values.”

References/Notes1. George Emery, Methodism on the Cana-

dian Prairies, 1896-1914, 1970, pp.11-12.(PhD thesis, History, UBC.)circle.ubc.ca/bitstream/id/123796/UBC_1970_A1%20E44_4.pdf

2. Annual Report, Missionary Society, 1907-08, pp.55-56. Cited in Ibid., p.12

3. Robert Wright, A World Mission: CanadianProtestantism and the Quest for a New In-ternational Order, 1918-1939, 1991, p.53.

4. Phyllis Airhart, Serving the Present Age:Revivalism, Progressivism, and the Meth-odist Tradition in Canada, 1992, p.188.

5. In 1899, Veblen wrote The Theory of theLeisure Class, coined the term “conspicu-ous consumption” and took on StephenLeacock as a PhD student in the PoliticalEconomy at the University of Chicago.

6. Thorstein Veblen, The Instinct of Workman-ship, 1918, pp.347-348.

7. Ibid., pp.166-169.8. Birgit Herppich, “Cultural Bias in Mission-

ary Education: The Unintentional Dynamicof Trained Incapacity,” Papers, Bk 32, 2014.place.asburyseminary.edu/firstfruitspapers/32/

J.W.Bengough,Grip, April 1888.

“Christian Statesmanship”Sir John: Indians starving? Oh, well.... I’ll seeyou don’t come to want...Mr. Contractor.”[Note: Sign reads “Starved by a Christian Gov’t”]

Although racism was the norm inWoodsworth’s circles, it was opposed byradicals, not just with words but with ac-tions. In 1906, when local 526 of the anar-chosocialist Industrial Workers of theWorld (IWW) was formed in Vancouver,it was led by Squamish First Nation activ-ists. Though mostly Indigenous, this Lum-ber Handlers’ union also had Chinese, Ha-

waiian, Anglo and Chilean members.32

Capitalism and religion were underattack by atheist radicals like Jack Lon-don. In The Iron Heel, published one yearbefore Woodsworth’s xenophobic tract,London’s hero was Ernest Everhard. In ar-guing with a well-meaning but naive Bish-op, he said the “Indian is not so brutal andsavage as the capitalist class” and noted“The Church condones the frightful bru-tality and savagery with which the capital-ist class treats the working class.” Londonalso quoted Presbyterian, Baptist andMethodist leaders to prove the “Church’soutspoken defense of chattel slavery.”33

London was influenced by US So-cialist Party leader Eugene Debs,34 anatheist cofounder of the IWW. He com-pared the state’s control of unions withtheir control of Indians. Capitalists, he

said in 1906, tolerated organised labour“so long, only, as it keeps within‘proper bounds,’ but ... put [it] downsummarily the moment its members,like the remnants of Indian tribes onthe western plains, venture beyond thelimits of their reservations.”35

By keeping Indians within their“proper bounds,” Canada’s pass systemcontributed to genocide on every level:physical, economic, religious, social, psy-chological and political. Confinement toreserves cut off access to food and otherresources, blocked trade and commerce,stopped travel to religious and socialevents, prevented the building of allianc-es, and stopped parents from visiting chil-dren kidnapped and held in government-financed, church-run residential schools.

Penned in by EducationResidential schools were seen as essentialto progress. To Social-Gospel reformerson the cutting edge of Canada’s westernfrontier, the “Three Cs” were the key toteaching Indians about the culture of theirsuperiours. As UBC Political Science pro-fessor Barbara Arneil has said, the “driv-ing force” behind this education was “tofoster ‘civic virtue,’ to ‘morally uplift,’ andto build ‘civilization’ through the progres-sive vehicle of education and the socialgospel.”36 (Emphasis added.)

While the government and its reli-gious agents sometimes differed on howto impose the “Three Cs,” they collabo-rated well. John MacLean, a Methodistmissionary in Alberta, who became a pub-lic school inspector,37 wrote in 1899 thatthe government wanted residential schoolsto “teach the Indians first to work and thento pray.” MacLean however said mission-

aries wanted to “christianize first and thencivilize.”38 Either way, the Three-C proc-ess was genocide. While First Nations weredispossessed of land and culture, Canadasucceeded in expanding the boundaries ofthe British empire. To political, economicand religious elites, it was a win-win-winsolution to the “Indian problem” that theysaw as a major obstacle to “progress.”

Whatever their differences, churchand state agreed on the value of residen-tial schools in destroying the symbolic coreof Aboriginal cultures, their languages.MacLean became the Methodist Church’schief archivist and chief librarian at theSocial Gospel’s Wesley College in Winni-peg (1922-1928). (See p.26.) He said that:“It is the desire of the Government and themissionaries that the English languageshould become the only medium of com-munication.”39 In Canadian Savage Folk(1896), MacLean further remarked that:

“There can be no legitimate method ofstamping out the native language exceptby a wise policy of teaching English inthe schools, and allowing the Indiantongue to die out.”40

Canada’s religious schools for In-dians were a major weapon in the all-outwar to exterminate Aboriginal cultures.During the 1880s, Canada engineered a“Perfect Storm” to wash the prairies cleanof First Nations and to usher in a goldenage for European settlers. As the govern-ment’s Truth and Reconciliation Commis-sion noted in 2012:

“From 1883 onward, the federal gov-ernment began funding a growingnumber of industrial schools in the Ca-nadian West. It also continued to pro-vide regular funding to the church-runboarding schools. The residential sys-tem grew with the country. As Euro-Canadians settled the prairies, BC, andthe North, increasing numbers of Abo-riginal children were placed in residen-tial schools.”41

In 1884, after a report contractedby Sir John A.MacDonald, Canada beganpouring money into the Churches’ exist-ing program of residential schools. The re-port, written by Nicholas F.Davin, a poet/playwright/lawyer and newspaperman-cum-Tory MP, urged the Canadian govern-ment to copy the assimilation plan of theUS government’s euphemistically-named“Peace Commission.” He said this US pro-gram, “known as...‘Aggressive Civiliza-tion,” had been “amply tested” since 1869.Its “principal feature,” he said, was the “in-dustrial school.” The “chief thing to attendto in dealing with the less civilized or whol-ly barbarous tribes,” Davin said, “was to

Press for Conversion! (Issue # 68) March 201620

separate the children from the parents.”42

Another feature of “AggressiveCivilization” was the concentration andconfinement of Indians. As Davin said,“the Indians should, as far as practicable,be consolidated on few reservations.” Can-ada’s Aboriginal policies were soon dom-inated by mass captivity, both physicallyon reserves, and culturally by churchschools. Christianity was absolutely cen-tral to the genocidal plan. Europeans, saidDavin, were “civilized races whose wholecivilization…is based on religion.” Prais-ing their “patient heroism,” he said the“first and greatest stone in the foundationof the quasi-civilization of the Indians...was laid by missionaries.” Davin extolledtheir schools as “monuments of religiouszeal and heroic self-sacrifice.”43

After Davin’s report on “Aggres-sive Civilization,” the state boosted fund-ing to church-run Indian schools in thewestern Canada from $962 in 1877, to$53,000 in 1886, and $226,000 in 1906.44

(In 2015 figures, this was $39,000, $2 mil-lion and $5.4 million, respectively.) Thesechurch schools were cheap yet effectivebricks in the apartheid wall that kept Abo-riginals out of the “Peaceable Kingdom.”

Davin may not have identified him-self a Social Gospeller, but he did have a“progressive” side. In 1895, he introduc-ing a bill to allow women (white ones, atleast) to vote. Although unsuccessful, Dav-in’s bill sparked the only full-fledged Com-mons’ debate on (white) women’s suffragebetween the 1880s and WWI.45

Davin was influenced by his loverKate Hayes, with whom he had a long af-fair and two children. Like other Social Go-spellers in the “social purity” movement,Hayes used religion, class and ethnicity tobelittle others. She believed, said York pro-fessor Kym Bird, that “non-Anglo-Cana-dians were a godless impure breed that re-quired assimilation and civilization intomiddle-class Anglo-Canadian values.”46

These “Canadian values” taught cit-izens not only to ignore the genocide ofresidential schools, but to see them as proofof the Church’s benevolence towards god-less savages. But, as David Langtry, theActing Chief Commissioner of the Cana-dian Human Rights Commission stated:

“Wilful blindness to the horrors of theschools was government policy. Dr.Peter Bryce, hired by the...governmentin 1907 to report on health conditionsat residential schools in westernCanada, found that in Alberta the mor-tality rate was a staggering 50%.

“Ottawa’s response was to fire

Bryce, abolish the position, stop report-ing and repress the facts. Shortly after-wards, it became mandatory for all Abo-riginal children to attend residentialschools.”47

Bryce is now being celebrated byprogressive Canadians for exposing thenegligent, if not deliberate, spread of TBthrough the schools. However, this narra-tive turns a blind eye to Bryce’s overt sup-port for cultural genocide. The “wander-ing bands of Indians would still have beensavages,” said Bryce in 1907, “had it notbeen for the heroic devotion of those mis-sionaries.” His report also stated that the“story” of Canada did not sufficiently cred-it Europeans for “transforming the Indianaborigines into members of a civilized so-ciety and loyal subjects of the King.”48

Occupied and PreoccupiedFirst Nations were defrauded in one of thelargest land grabs in the history of imperi-al civilisation. Central to this Canadiansuccess story was a social-engineeringscheme that imposed severe limits on Ab-original mobility, while promoting a mas-sive influx of European immigrants.

Newcomers, including many eastEuropeans, were shifted onto the prairieplaying field like so many little pawns inthe “Great Game” of empire. This achiev-ed Canada’s nation-building goals by:(1) Removing First Nations’ peoples from

their traditional territories,(2) Displacing them with new Canadian

settlers whose presence imposed a falsesovereignty over the stolen land, and

(3) Using other newcomers as a menial la-bour class to be exploited on farms, andin mines, lumber operations and hugeinfrastructure projects like railways.

Members of Canada’s mainstreamsociety aided and abetted not only the gen-ocide of Indigenous peoples but the rapidassimilation of nonAngloSaxons. But be-

cause good, decent, ordinary people do notgenerally want to collaborate in callousanti-social enterprises, the nefarious natureof Canada’s imperial project had to be kepthidden. Canadians had to be convinced thattheir grand national project was not onlymorally justified, but essential to humanprogress. The narratives that evolved to ra-tionalise and cover up Canadian crimes,relied on the entitled sense of superioritythat preoccupied AngloProtestant thinking.

Canada’s nation-building mythswere built on the firm bedrock of religiousand political delusions. The self-image thatpossessed the prevailing public mindsetwas of a new nation, rich not only in“Christian values” but in Britain’s hal-lowed, constitutional monarchy. Acceptingthis mirage required a studied ignoranceof imperialism. Besides turning a blind eyeto the empire’s many wars, believing in thefictive Peaceable Kingdom meant blissful-ly ignoring the savage treatment of Indi-ans and Canada’s slave-like exploitationof aliens, especially nonAngloSaxons.

Out of Sight,Out of [One’s] Mind

Behind the rich, dream-like mirage of aHeaven-on-Earth paradise that the Anglo-Protestant mainstream believed they werecreating in Canada, there lurked the reali-ty of a living hell for First Nations. Al-though reserves were places of captivity,torment, deprivation and starvation, thistruth was largely hidden from mainstreamCanadian consciousness. Being geograph-ically removed from the dominant settlersociety, reserves—and those trapped onthem—were easy to ignore. Other thanMounties, missionaries, and other agentsof government, few from the AngloProt-estant community ever visited reservations.

So, keeping Aboriginals confinedto reserves not only facilitated Europeanoccupation, it also swept natives under a

J.S.Woodsworth’s Social Gospel classic,Strangers Within Our Gates (1908) dealtwith Canada’s “motley crowd of immi-grants.” In his section on Indians, whomhe called “savages,” he praised theChurches’ “missionary work, evangelis-tic, educational, industrial and medical,”and reported that although many Indians

“are devout Christians living exem-plary lives,...there are still 10,202 In-dians in our Dominion, as grossly pa-gan as were their ancestors, or...halfcivilized, only to be debauched.”

March 2016 (Issue # 68) Press for Conversion! 21

mental rug. Keeping Indians hidden—outof both sight and mind—helped settlers toavoid unsettling qualms of conscience. Justseeing the living conditions of those forcedonto reserves, let alone hearing their dis-turbing narratives of genocide, might haveupset some settler’s blind faith in the pow-erful national mythology that building Ca-nada was a God-inspired enterprise.

Hiding Indians on reserves shield-ed European settlers from the mental dis-ease that might arise if they realised theircomplicity, witting or not, in Canadiancrimes against humanity. Cognitive disso-nance was also avoided by non-physicalmeans. The physical boundary lines drawnaround reserves were not as effective insegregating Aboriginals from Europeansettlers’ as the storylines of superiority thatseparated Indians from mainstream Cana-da. The official narratives of church andstate created virtually insurmountable wallsof apartheid between the cultural worldsinhabited by Canada’s two main solitudes.

First Nations have also been heldin place with linguistic weapons. Canada’sreligious and political institutions not onlypenned Aboriginals in place with such slursas “primitives,” “heathens” and “savages,”they also framed them as “strangers” withinthe “Peaceable Kingdom.”

Old Narratives, New EnemiesCanada’s largest political and religious in-stitutions developed effective myths andnarratives to rationalise their use of struc-tural violence against Indigenous peoples.During the 20th century, lessons learnedfrom the physical, social and legal segre-gation of Aboriginals—and the old narra-tives that had evolved to justify these di-verse forms of mass captivity—were putto use against a whole new set of enemies.With WWI and the Russian Revolution,east Europeans and particularly “Reds”soon replaced the “Red Man” as the cho-sen enemy of both church and state. Newwine was placed in old bottles.

Although the “foreign” enemy hadchanged, symptoms of Canada’s SettlerSyndrome—that mass hysteria which pos-sessed mainstream AngloProtestant culture—remained intact. The racist and xenopho-bic belief systems that permeated the coun-try’s leading institutions continued un-scathed, as did the popular narratives andmyths of Canadian exceptionalism.

While the vivid, social pathologyof Canadian narcissism continued to cap-ture the imagination of Conservative- andLiberal-Party elites, it was also the norm

within Social Gospel circles. Even thoseheroic trendsetters on the vanguard of thisreformist Christian movement, like Rev.J.S.Woodsworth, were shackled and en-slaved by Canada’s national delusion.

Canada’s dominant culture be-lieved it was their noble mission to civi-lise and Christianise those seen as theirinferiors. Citizens on the right, left andcentre all believed that they could not standidly by while Canada was besieged by In-dians, east Europeans, “Reds” or other“foreign” threats to the national good. En-slaved by narratives of “Christian values”and west European superiority, captives ofthe so-called “Peaceable Kingdom” sus-pended their disbelief in Canada’s fictivemyths. In doing so they were able to keepcalm and carry on imposing the audaciousfelonies of their self-righteous imperium.

References/Notes1. The Constitution Act, 1867.2. Antisocial Personality Disorder

www.mentalhealth.gov3. Rudyard Kipling, “The White Man’s Bur-

den,” 1899.4. Wilfrid Laurier, January 18, 1904. Cited in

Gerald Brown (ed.), The Canada Club ofOttawa, 1903-1909, 1910.archive.org/stream/1903yearbook00canauoft

5. George Emery, Methodist Church on thePrairies, 1896-1914, 2001. p.11.books.google.ca/books?id=9hylwcw0i5cC

6. Richard Allen, The Social Passion: Reli-gion and Social Reform in Canada 1914-28, 1973, p.5.books.google.ca

7. Douglas Francis and Donald Smith, Jour-neys: A History of Canada, 2010. p.348.books.google.ca/books?id=GbbZRIOKclsC

8. Mariana Valverde, The Age of Light, Soap,and Water: Moral Reform in EnglishCanada, 1885-1925, 2008, p.3.books.google.ca/books?id=ghqEyXf5950C

9. MacKenzie King. Cited by Douglas Fran-cis and Chris Kitzan (eds.), Prairie West asPromised Land, 2007, p.xi.books.google.ca/books?id=IHZhBKRH080C

10. George D.McClain, “The History of ‘TheSocial Creed,’” 1988.LiberalsLikeChrist.Org/socialcreed.html

11. Emery 2001, Op. cit., p.6.12. George Emery, Methodism on the Cana-

dian Prairies, 1896-1914, 1970, p.165.(PhD thesis, History, UBC.)circle.ubc.ca/bitstream/id/123796

13. Emery 2001, Op. cit., p.3.14. Ibid., p.4.15. Kenneth McNaught, A Prophet in Politics:

A Biography of J.S.Woodsworth, 1959, p.6.books.google.ca/books?id=-p67TZY-e6IC

16. Directory of Residential Schools inCanada, 2007, passim.www.ahf.ca

17.Ibid.18.J.S.Woodsworth, Strangers Within Our

Gates, 1909, p.194.archive.org/details/strangerswithino00wooduoft

19.Rev.Thompson Ferrier, “Indian Education

in the North West,” 1906, p.40.archive.org/details/indianeducationi00ferruoft

20.R.Whittington, “The British Columbia In-dian and his Future,” 1906, p.7.archive.org/stream/britishcolumbiin00whitrich

21.Emery 1970, Op. cit., p.11.22. Canada’s Missionary Congress, March 31-

April 1, 1909, p.107.archive.org/stream/canadasmission00unknuoft

23.Emery 1970, Op. cit., p.iii.24. Ibid., pp.227-291.25. Francis and Kitzan, Op. cit., p.ix.26. Ibid., pp.x-xi27. Report of the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry of

Manitoba, November 1999.www.ajic.mb.ca/volumel/chapter5.html

28. Looking Forward, Looking Back, RoyalCommission on Aboriginal Peoples, 1991.qspace.library.queensu.ca/bitstream/1974/6874/5/RRCAP1_combined.pdf

29. James Daschuk, Clearing the Plains: Dis-ease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss ofAboriginal Life, 2013, pp.xxii, 123.books.google.ca/books?id=mxwwZmSSOssC

30. Looking Forward..., Op. cit., pp.272-273.31. L.M.Fortier, in Woodsworth, p.39.32. Sean Carleton, “Bows and Arrows: William

Nahanee & Local 526 of the IWW”teachbcdb.bctf.ca

33. Jack London, The Iron Heel, 1908, pp.18-21.34. Debs was the Socialist Party candidate for

US president five times and won 6% of thepopular vote in 1912. In 1920, he got abouta million votes while serving a ten-year jailsentence for denouncing WWI.

35. Eugene Debs, “The Growth of Socialism,”Appeal to Reason, March 17, 1906, in Debs:His Life, Writings and Speeches, 1908,p.227. (See also, pp.382 and 421)archive.org/details/debshislifewriti00debsuoft

36. Barbara Arneil, “Just Communities SocialCapital, Gender and Culture,” in BrendaO’Neill and E.Gidengil (eds.), Gender andSocial Capital, 2006, p.23.books.google.ca/books?id=tUG0AAAAQBAJ

37. Susan Gray, “John MacLean,” Dictionaryof Canadian Biography, 2003.www.biographi.ca

38. John MacLean, The Indians, their Mannersand Customs, 1899, p.264.books.google.ca/books?id=bggPAAAAQAAJ

39. John MacLean, Canadian Savage Folk:Native Tribes of Canada, 1896, p.547.books.google.ca/books?id=uL0RAAAAYAAJ

40. Ibid.41. They Came for the Children, 2012.

www.trc.ca42. Nicholas Flood Davin, Report on industrial

schools for Indians and half-breeds, March14, 1879, pp.1, 7.archive.org/details/cihm_03651

43. Ibid., pp.1, 14, 12.44. Dr. Peter Bryce, “Report on the Indian

Schools of Manitoba and the North WestTerritories,” 1907, pp.8-9.peel.library.ualberta.ca/bibliography/3024.html

45. Kym Bird, Redressing the Past: Politics ofEarly English-Canadian Women’s Drama,1880-1920, 2004, p.95.books.google.ca/books?id=v8HNwGJTtA8C

46. Ibid., p.92.47. David Langtry, “Residential schools,” Ot-

tawa Citizen, April 8, 2014.48. Bryce, Op. cit., p.7.