Murray Dobbin
Prairie Colonialism
The CCF in Northern
Saskatchewan, 1944-1964
My experience has convinced me that there will never be any change
unless ... [we] ruthlessly uproot every last vestige of colonialism to
which the native has been subjected. In Northern Saskatchewan we
have a living example of what colonialism does to a people for essentially this is what the entire native question amounts to. 1
- Jim Brady, Metis leader and Marxist activist, 1955
When the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) formed
the government of Saskatchewan in 1944, it found a "north" virtually unchanged from the north of 1885. No roads connected it with
the south, and no roads connected the thirty-odd northern settlements. The settlements themselves could barely lay claim to the
title of "settlement": most were temporary gathering places and, if
not for the Catholic and Anglican missions, would not have existed
at all. There were no schools, no hospitals, and no social services;
there was no modern housing, no sanitary infrastructure, and no communications system. While the CCF entered the north with its own
objectives - essentially to lay claim to the province's natural
resources - it was confronted by a need entirely outside its political
realm: the need for native rehabilitation.> As it turned out, neither
objective would be achieved by the CCF during its ensuing twentyyear reign. For the natural resources that failure simply meant a delay
Studies in Political Economy 16 1985
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Studies in Political Economy 16 1985
in exploitation; for the native people, it meant the entrenchment of
a colonial regime in which the Department of Natural Resources
replaced the Hudson's Bay Company as colonizer.
The terms' 'colonialism," "colonial relations," "neo-colonialism,"
"underdevelopment,"
etc., have been and continue to be used
regularly to describe the situation and conditions facing native people in various parts of Canada. Yet these terms and others related
to them are often used too loosely, without thoughtful consideration of the need to be historically specific and to distinguish between
different periods in the exploitation of native peoples. Questions of
class and class collaboration by an elite of native people often get
left out or confused.
In a sense the degree of connectedness with the world capitalist
economy determines the distinction between colonialism and neocolonialism. Whereas colonialism is generally characterized by formal political dependence, the absence of a local bourgeoisie or petty
bourgeoisie, and limited integration into the capital and commodity
markets of the developed nations, neo-colonialism reflects a more
complex and extensive set of relations with those same nations, or
rather, with the transnational corporations which replace the colonial administration. Where colonialism presents an overall picture
of lack of development - "un-development" - neo-colonialism
presumes a much more intensive penetration by international capital
in a pattern of "underdevelopment,"> the population is more tied
to the commodities of the West, and the class structure of the native
population becomes more complex, with an elite sharing in the
economic spoils. Nominal political independence masks a new relationship between the native elite and those for whom, in effect, they
govern - the transnationals.
This paper contends that notwithstanding the absence of legal inequality at its base (although there was an element of this in that
treaty Indians could not vote until 1960), the relationship between
the CCF government and the natives remained essentially colonial.
After a brief examination of the pre-1944 period, I will look at the
CCF's twenty-year record in the north, dividing it into three periods:
(1) 1944-50, early reforms; (2) 1950-60, policy stagnation and native
impoverishment; and (3) 1960-64, confirmation of a capitalist
strategy. I will then address the political debate that went on in the
CCF government and party with respect to the northern policies, and,
finally, attempt to explain why the CCF chose to follow the policies
that it did.
I will argue that due in part to the CCF's lack of initiative in public
resource development, and to capital's own priorities, significant
8
Dobbin/Colonialism
capital penetration did not occur in the north under the CCF. The
Saskatchewan petty bourgeoisie was the main beneficiary of CCF
policy. As a result, and in spite of the fact that government policies
disrupted the native economy, no significant change in the class structure of the native population took place. Social relations changed
significantly only in the sense that the CCF created an extremely statedependent native population with new and serious social problems
- a population increasingly centralized into settlements. On balance,
this development made any future movement into the working class
more difficult for native people. To obtain an explanation of the
CCF's regressive policies in northern Saskatchewan, I suggest it is
necessary to examine not only the inherent limitations of social
democratic ideology but also the particular features of a party and
government with roots in a settler-colonial society.
Northern
Saskatchewan:
1670-1944
In examining post-World War II northern Saskatchewan, it is first
necessary to look briefly at its colonial history. Ron Bourgeault has
described relations of the Hudson's Bay Company [HBC] with the
Indians of northern North America as "feudalistic," with the Indians having been transformed into a "peasant or serf labour force
... with the commanding officer ... functioning as a feudal lord. "4
Control over access to particular European goods (guns, axes, knives
and steel traps) served as the principal mechanism used to force compliance with the requirements of the fur trade. By establishing a
dependence on such goods, the HBC and earlier traders conquered
the Indians' communal society and forced a change from the production of goods for communal consumption to the production of
goods for commodity exchange. While the social reproduction of
I labour was left in the hands of the Indian population, production
became based increasingly on the individual family unit rather than
the band. Certain dimensions of Indian society were thus deliberately
preserved, and others transformed, on the basis of the needs of the
fur trade."
By the late eighteenth century, the cost of contract European labour
was becoming prohibitively expensive and the HBC took measures
to develop an indigenous labour force. By encouraging marriages
between Scottish or French labourers and Indian women, a workforce (the Metis or Half-breeds) with knowledge of the country and
ties to European culture was assured. The fear that this work-force
would develop nationalist sentiments meant, however, that the HBC
had to prevent its members from rising to the officer class - and
to a shareholders' position within the company. However the class
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Studies in Political Economy 16 1985
and race oppression that these restrictions imposed on the Metis
created precisely the nationalist feelings that the HBC feared. It was
from these colonial relations and a sense of nationhood that the Metis
struggle for free trade and the two national liberation struggles
(1869-70 and 1885) emerged.
Metis nationalism found its strongest expression at Red River in
what became the province of Manitoba. It was here that the Metis
were concentrated most and where their rudimentary class structure
was most visible. The Metis of the northern bush - those living there
permanently as employees of the HBC, trappers, etc. - were scattered in small pockets throughout the vast fur-bearing area. With
the exception of the transient voyageurs, who were among the most
advanced working-class Metis, the political struggles on the plains
had a very limited impact on northern mixed-blood people.
The rebellion of 1885 represented the last coherent expression of
the Metis nation and hastened the disintegration of that national unit,
which had formed after the founding of Manitoba. With the formal
absorption of the North-West by Canada and the end of legal inequality for Metis, the basis for Metis nationalism quickly eroded.
The impact of rapid settlement of the west was felt in the north in
several ways. Most importantly, the native population became more
homogeneous. With the old fur trade infrastructure displaced by more
modern means, the Metis voyageurs and post employees - remnants
of the Metis working class - gradually disappeared. Some migrated
south towards the modern society for which they were more suited;
others retreated to the life of the bush.
During the decades that followed 1885, all the native people who
remained in the north became members of a single class of seminomadic trappers and hunters - indentured labour to the HBC. The
term Metis gradually disappeared in most areas- and, with the exception of the new legal status of treaty Indians, little remained of
the old distinctions created by the HBC. Nominally introduced to
the cash economy, and formally governed by Canada, the native
population remained a captive of the old social relations. And with
the old water-based transportation routes abandoned, their isolation
from the south became complete.
When the HBC was refinanced in the 1860s under the aegis of
finance capital, it was with the owners' knowlege that the NorthWest would soon be developed in the interests of industrial capital.
Nonetheless, they expected and promoted the continued "rule" of
the HBC over the northern fur area." In the absence of any significant state presence in this wilderness area, the "mercantile" operations and the feudalistic political rule of the HBC were, de facto,
10
Dobbin/Colonialism
to be maintained.
While the Hudson's Bay Company gave up formal political control over the North-West in 1870, it retained effective control over
the daily lives of native people in northern Saskatchewan." Assisted
ably by the church misssions, the HBC, through continued utilization of a system of indentured labour, maintained the colonial social
relations that had prevailed throughout the 18oos. State intervention in the region was minimal: "During the whole lengthy period
from 1660 to 1930 administrative goals in northern Saskatchewan
remained simple and uncomplicated, namely, the preservation of
peace and good order as a means of promoting the interest of the
Hudson's Bay Company, the Missions and the private traders.':" For
the most part, this "peace and good order" was administered by the
HBC and the missions themselves - with the state power there when
needed:
After the turn of the century a single ReMP officer and an Indian
agent made once yearly visits to each community. Between the two
great wars a handful of provincial and federal civil servants became
permanent residents in the north.'?
As well, the Liberal party, which enjoyed almost total support among
the personnel of the HBC, private businesses and the Catholic clergy,
added its presence to the old colonial structure at election time.
The lack of state intervention or presence in the north paralleled
the lack of capital penetration. Until the late 1930s, the remnants
of the fur trade constituted virtually the only economic activity. Immediately before the war, some commercial fishing, some hard-rock
mining, and small-scale forestry entered the picture. But none of these
new ventures had a significant impact on more than a handful of
native people. There was virtually no infrasructure beyond charter
air service. No roads connected the north with the south, nor any
of the northern communities with each other. There were two residential schools run by the Indian affairs department and a couple of
nursing stations. No system of communications existed.
While social relations had been modified slightly, there was little
visible difference from the 1800s.The cash economy was there in name
only, as cash played almost no role in the trapper's economy. Formal relations indicated a feudal mode of production. With respect
to class structure in the native population, all but an insignificant
minority (which had neither the numbers nor the social status to act
as a neo-colonial elite) were semi-nomadic trappers and domestic
hunters. They subsisted on the trade and the land essentially in singlefamily units loosely tied to bands or extended families. Treaty In11
Studies in Political Economy 16 1985
dians and non-status Indians were virtually indistinguishable
socially and economically. While the distinction between treaty and nonstatus Indians was recognized within the native population,
its
political and economic significance was minimal. Towards the end
of this period, treaty Indians received marginally better services. The
fact that they could not vote had no impact on their daily lives that
distinguished them from their non-status, voting counterparts. Again,
with few exceptions, the native people enjoyed no effective, informed participation in electoral politics. With respect to native organizations, none of those existing in the 1930s (Indian or Metis) ever
penetrated into the north. Collective action, if it took place at all,
was rare and spontaneous.
The CCF's
Early Initiatives: 1944·1950
In examining the CCF's twenty-year administration
of northern
Saskatchewan,
it is useful not only to divide those two decades into
periods, but also to take note of the fact that policy in the north
was plagued throughout with a contradiction that the CCF was unable
to come to terms with. Essentially there were two areas of northern
"development"
that vied for policy initiatives: resource development
and native rehabilitation.
As we will see later, there were those who
saw these two areas as one; that is, they held the view that native
rehabilitation
depended on the integration of native people into
modern economic development. That there were contradictions
between the two was never seriously addressed. There was no native
policy as such, and no cabinet minister was responsible for native
people in general or native rehabilitation
in the north in particular.
It was thus left up to individual departments
with responsibilities
in the north to take whatever initiatives they felt to be appropriate.
No agency or cabinet committee was ever established to co-ordinate
such initiatives.
In practice it was the Department
of Natural
Resources and Industrial Development (generally referred to as the
DNR in the north) that had the greatest impact on native people,
since it faced, on a daily basis, the conditions of native people.
The fact that the first years of the CCF's administration
were
characterized
by reforms was due, to an extraordinary
degree, to
DNR's first minister, Joe Phelps. Phelps was a radical populist from
southern Saskatchewan - one whose agressive pursuit of public control of natural resources became a thorn in the side of a CCF cabinet
that became increasingly cautious as the forties wore on.!' A tireless
political activist, Phelps ignored the general rule adopted by the CCF
Cabinet whereby the civil service was to remain "neutral."
Phelps
immediately politicized it and quickly replaced many in the DNR12
12
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Dobbin/Colonialism
with committed socialists - among them two Marxist Metis leaders
from Alberta, Jim Brady and Malcolm Norris. Phelps also put
socialist Allan Quandt in charge of the DNR's Northern Administrative District (NAD).
The CCF led an impoverished government and to its credit spent
a considerable amount of money for the benefit of people who
politically were nearly invisible. It began a vigorous program of
building schools and hospitals. It established, with the federal government, a fur conservation and orderly marketing system aimed at
stabilizing and increasing the income of native trappers. It expanded the commercial fishing industry (by buying out some of the private
operators, by building freezer and filletting plants, and by establishing
a fish-marketing service), and it encouraged the involvement of native
people in that industry. Even the- initial efforts aimed at naturalresource development brought benefits to the native people: a Crownowned northern air service, the beginning of a road-building program, and the establishment of a radio-telephone communications
system!". Most of these reforms were accomplished under the aegis
of the DNR, the principal exceptions being the building of day
schools, hospitals and nursing stations. In conjunction with these
reforms the CCF undertook measures to centralize the non-status
portion of the population for which they had formal responsiblity.
Family allowance cheques (which were, by agreement with the federal
government, distributed by the DNR) were withheld from mothers
whose children were not in school.>
This conscious policy of centralization, which the CCF saw as
critical for delivery of services, was enhanced, somewhat unintentionally, by the economic reforms implemented by the DNR. The
principal reform was the implementation of a compulsory orderly
marketing system for the two staple furs, beaver and muskrat. This
program, a co-operative effort with Ottawa, and one undertaken in
conjunction with a major conservation program, was aimed at increasing and stabilizing trappers' incomes. The unforeseen result was
a strike of capital by the Hudson's Bay Company. The historic practice of providing credit to trappers was thrown into disarray by the
forced withdrawal from the market of the two main furs. The DNR
attempted to counter the HBC's action by first offering to buy them
out in the north. When this offer was turned down, the government
established "trading posts" in those settlements where there was no
competing trader.
The hiring of Metis activists Norris and Brady was an explicitly
political act recognizing the objective, if not the actual slogan, of
self-determination. Brady was hired as a conservation officer but was
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Studies in Political Economy 16 1985
given authority to establish, in the village of Cumberland House,
the producer co-operatives he had initiated among the Metis of Alberta. Brady viewed the co-ops not only as a source of collective
economic security, but also as a political reform aimed at breaking
down the extreme individualism of the semi-nomad and providing
lessons on the value of collective decision-making on both economic
and political matters.u Brady established a fishermen's co-op and
the first wood producers' co-op in the north. In conjunction with
these economic efforts, he also held regular adult education classes,
initiated an informal village council, published a community newsletter, and set up a local credit union.v
While Brady was conducting his co-operative experiment in
Cumberland House, the DNR was attempting other political reforms.
Numerous mass meetings with native people were called in settlements
throughout the north to discuss the government's programs. A trappers' association was established and Malcolm Norris conducted
social and economic surveys of all northern settlements - at the same
time identifying local individuals who would be able to give help to
local government in the future. As well, the DNR took the hiring
of staff out of the hands of the public service in Regina and implemented a policy of hiring people sympathetic to its reforms and
with some understanding of the crisis faced by native people.!?
The reform initiatives were slow and tentative, but given that this
was the first major contact of any government with the native people, and that it was the quintessential farmers' party designing the
reforms, this was a reasonable beginning. And the slow pace of
reform was more than matched by Cabinet's cautious approach to
public resource development. The DNR's industrial development
branch had embarked on several ill-fated, publicly funded projects
in the south which had brought the CCF much embarrassment and
bad publicity. 18 Having been burned in the south, the prospects for
the government undertaking major projects in the north were very
dim. Public intervention in northern resources was thus restricted
to minor operations: the fur conservation program; the Games
Branch, which controlled the harvesting of animal resources; the fishand fur-marketing services; and the Saskatchewan Timber Board,
which acted as the purchasing agent for the small, private timber
and saw-mill operators.
There was already a mining sector in the north, under the jurisdiction of the Department of Mineral Resources (DMR), when the CCF
took office. Large mining operations existed at Uranium City on the
shore of Lake Athabasca in the far north-west corner of the province, and at Creighton in the south-east area of the NAD. Both opera-
14
Dobbin/Colonialism
tions employed large numbers of workers, but these workers were
virtually all non-native. Furthermore, these mines were tied into the
transportation infrastructures of Alberta and Manitoba respectively. The disruption of native life normally associated with mining and
its attendant infrastructure was restricted to the small native population in the immediate vicinity of the mines. The CCF developed no
clear policy on mineral development in this period. In particular,
no provision was made for publicly funded and controlled exploitation - something that would have been a natural step in any plan
for public mineral exploitation. Little promotion of private exploration was undertaken by the DMR. Two programs of significance did
emerge from the DMR - a prospectors' training program and a prospectors' assistance program. Both were introduced at the initiative
of Malcolm Norris. Morris, who also pushed hard for the establishment of a Saskatchewan Mining Development Corporation, saw these
programs as a first step in drawing native people away from the poverty of semi-nomadism and into the modern wage economy. Yet even
in these programs, which involved both native and white trainees,
the aim of drawing native people into the working class was merely
implied, and pursued by Norris more as his own political objective. 19
Perhaps the single strongest piece of evidence indicating the CCF's
ambivalent attitude towards resource development - and social
reform as well - was the continuing backward state of the economic
infrastructure. A single road, not much more than a dirt trail, was
constructed to LaRonge, barely one hundred miles from the southern
boundary of the NAD. The two main elements of infrastructure
established by the CCF were its air service and radio-telephone communications system. The lack of new economic activity and the lack
of modern infrastructure both contributed to the continuing
backwardness of the native population. While the air service and the
communications system had some impact (in medical emergencies
and the transportation of fish at fair prices), in general native people remained isolated from the south of the province and from each
other. With no clear commitment to major economic development
of any kind, native people were left no choice but to eke out an existence on the old and dwindling economic base of the past.
The impact of the CCF's policies in the first six years of its administration varied. Capital penetration, even by small capital, was
very limited as neither tourism nor mining exploration had yet taken
off. What forestry operations there were tended to be very small and
on the southern fringes of the NAD. The centralization of native
people was beginning to have an impact on their social and economic
life as well as on the stability of the family (aspects of which will
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Studies in Political Economy 16 1985
be examined in detail later). No changes took place in the class structure of the native population. There simply was no significant increase in wage employment. The most important changes in this
period were just becoming visible and were significant more for their
potential than for their realization. The development of the fishery,
Brady's successful experimentation with the native producer co-ops
in Cumberland House (the only settlement which did not have a single
citizen on welfare in 1950), and Norris's training and assistance programs for prospectors all suggested a commitment by the DNR to
challenge the impoverished and backward social and economic base
of the native people. Brady's efforts at establishing a village council, Norris's gradual encouragement of local leadership figures, the
frequent mass meetings to explain government programs, and the
DNR's growing understanding of the need for political education
all pointed in the direction of social progress - even if progress had
occurred in fits and starts. The political power of the HBC and the
clergy had been challenged explicitly and the government's filling
of that colonial power vacuum seemed to be a necessary expedient
which would change as political reforms took effect.
The lack of any explicit reform program or any agency to carry
one out left native rehabilitation to the vagaries of political chance.
In this sense the election of 1948 was a watershed for the north. The
CCF lost both northern seats and Joe Phelps was defeated in his
southern constituency. The losses in the north shocked even the
radicals in the party. Though opposition from the HBC, the clergy
and private business had been virulent, the CCF had been confident
that native people would recognize the genuine progress that had been
made. Discussions by progressives in the party and within the DNR
after the election focussed on the lesson of the election: native people would have to be brought decisively into the political process.>'
Yet this new political determination came just as the only cabinet
minister who had supported such initiatives lost his seat.
Stagnation
and Retreat: 1950-1960
Phelps's defeat and the loss of the two northern seats to the Liberals
quickly translated into a full retreat in the area of native rehabilitation. There were three elements to this retreat: a series of DNR
ministers whose interests were almost exclusively in the south and
who were prepared to leave northern affairs in the hands of the oldguard bureaucrats; the CCF government's new enthusiam for a
"neutral" civil service; and the government's and party's newly
cautious approach in the north as a result of the loss of the region
in the election. It should be mentioned as well that throughout this
16
Dobbin/Colonialism
period, despite increased opportunities for collective action, there
was no coherent, organized resistance on the part of native people
to government inaction;"
The reform efforts lasted some two years past the election due to
the persistence of the group of radicals and native sympathizers who
had been placed in positions of authority by Phelps. But in 1950-51
a systematic purge of this element left the north in the hands of those
who had fought the reforms from the beginning.P Brady was forced to resign and his experiments in producer co-ops were allowed
to falter and were never repeated. During this period the early efforts at preparing the ground for village councils were abandoned,
hiring was put back in the hands of the Public Service Commission
in Regina, and compromise replaced confrontation with respect to
the main power-brokers in the north - the HBC and the Catholic
church. The government now co-operated with the clergy on matters of education, with the result that in many communities the church
retained its reactionary domination over education for twenty-five
more years. The genuine competition that the government "trading
posts" had presented to the HBC was moderated and efforts to break
a large fur lease held by the company ceased;"
For the rest of the CCF term, that is, to their defeat in 1964, there
was a virtual policy vacuum with respect to the native population
in the north. Though ninety-five per cent of native people lived in
sub-standard housing (many in shacks with dirt floors or in tents)
there was no housing program during this period. Not a single native
settlement received sewer and water services. There were no vocational training programs, adult education programs, or literacy
classes. Standards in health care and education remained far below
those being met in the south, and public health education was nonexistent. No effort was made to establish local governments, nor was
there any further effort made to promote the collective expression
of native opinion. The only reform implemented during this long
period was the transformation of the government trading posts into
consumer co-ops; even here the initiative was' 'top-down," with little or no effort made to educate the affected population in the principles of co-operation.> The most active members were non-natives,
and in many communities the native people continued to patronize
the most exploitive retailers, who often spoke Cree and had lived
in the area for years.
The policy vacuum in the area of social reform was almost matched by the lack of initiative in resource development. Within Cabinet
the topic of development in the north (and whether or not it would
be private, public or a combination of bot?) was never seriously
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Studies in Political Economy 16 1985
discussed." John Richards suggests that public resource development
was simply seen as too risky for a capital-poor social democratic
government operating, for much of the fifties, in a hostile, Cold War
atmosphere.w There is little evidence to suggest that if capital had
identified the region as an area desirable for investment the CCF
government would have resisted. In the area of mineral development
there was substantial exploration work done in the early and midfifties - all of it by private companies. Such exploration was not
capital intensive and could conceivably have been undertaken by the
government with a view to future development. The small-scale mining that did take place under the CCF was also private.
What economic development did take place did so more in spite
of the government than because of it. Until the early sixties (which
we will examine later), there was no additional expenditure on infrastructure. Forest operations remained strictly on the small-operator
scale and commercial fishing continued more or less at its former
level. The sector that experienced the most growth was the tourism
sector - one which could expand with a minimum of government
intervention, since most of it involved "fly-in" camps, with the
operators based in LaRonge (the one community with road connections to the south). This sector was strictly occupied by the Saskatchewan petty bourgeoisie.
While there was no coherent economic development policy with
respect to the north, there gradually developed a de facto situation
in which two economies - native and white - existed side by side.
The principal industry of the native people was still trapping even
as late as the early sixties. In 1959-60, a total of 1,600 men out of
a workforce of about 2,200 were engaged in trapping. Six hundred
of these trappers, plus another two hundred men, engaged in commercial fishing. Only a handful of these men earned more than a
few hundred dollars from each source. The average income from
trapping was about $300; over 500 fishermen had net returns below
$500, and many did not even cover their expenses. Fewer than 200
men had full-time wage jobs, and these were concentrated at Sandy
Bay (the site of a power station) and three villages in the west where
mink ranches provided employment. There were, over the course of
1959-60, part-time jobs as well: a total of 530 jobs were provided
in forestry, guiding, fish plants, mink ranches, power, and the DNR
(mostly fighting forest fires). These ranged from two weeks to six
months in duration, with most of the jobs being at the lower end
of the scale. The mining industry - at its peak in 1958 - provided
2,000 jobs in the north; about one per cent of these went to Metis
and Indians." (It is interesting to note that the number of mining
18
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Dobbin/Colonialism
jobs was about the same as the number of natives trying to survive
on trapping and fishing.) There were some women trappers and
perhaps as many as twenty women who worked as fish-filletters and
cleaning staff at tourist camps. Virtually all the full-time jobs in the
mining, forest and tourist industries, as well as the civil service, went
to whites, and all the private businesses were operated by non-natives.
In the typical native community, average earned income per capita
was well below $200 annually, making most of the north one of the
world's poorest areas - and well within the income criterion used
to designate poor countries as "underdeveloped." The addition of
transfer payments raised the per capita income figure to $300.28
In describing the two periods of CCF administration, I have indicated a number of economic reforms and social programs affecting native people and the general structure of the' 'native" economy.
But I have not described the actual conditions of native people
resulting from these interventions in native society. It is, of course,
important to understand these conditions in and of themselves. But
part of the purpose of this paper is to examine the extent to which
the CCF perpetuated a colonial system and the extent to which it
promoted capitalist development in the north. Until the early 196Os,
the north Temained more un-developed than under-developed; that
is, the degree of capital penetration was so minimal that it would
be difficult to talk of a structural imbalance in the economy. It is
generally through such an imbalance and the massive disruption of
native life (through extensive infrastructure formation, the influx of
non-natives, the destruction of the environment, etc.) that native
resistance movements, or movements aimed at independence, selfdetermination, etc., arise. This in turn generally prompts attempts
by the state to implement a neo-colonial solution utilizing a small
(educated) native elite. During the period 1950-60, no such development took place in northern Saskatchewan. There was no organized
resistance, no educated elite to utilize, no political need to utilize such
an elite, and indeed, as investment was so minimal, no capitalist
"spoils" to share with a native petty bourgeoisie.
There was, however, a significant disruption of native society, not
by resource development, but (largely unintentionally) by the original
reform policies implemented during the 1944-50 period. Besides the
day-to-day misery that this disruption caused for native people, these
policies had two broader effects: (1) they shifted the centre of colonial power from the HBC to the CCF administration, that is, the
Department of Natural Resources and Industrial Development; and
(2) they effectively began the process of clearing the native people
from the land - a process that historically, in Canada and elsewhere,
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Studies in Political Economy 16 1985
always precedes or parallels capitalist resource development.
The clearing of native people from the land was not done consciously in the service of transnational capital, nor was it the explicit
intention of the CCF. The CCF did, however, deliberately centralize
the native population in its early efforts to provide health care and
education. The government had, apparently, neither the imagination nor the inclination (nor the resources) to adapt health care and
education to the semi-nomadic way of life of native people. Had it
intended to replace the meagre economic base with something more
viable and contemporary, this centralization would have been rational
enough (if carried out over time and with native support). But the
net effect of this centralization was the undermining of the old
economy and its replacement by government transfer payments a process which created an extreme form of dependency. In the colonial context, as we will see below, this dependency on the state,
in the absence of any other changes in social relations, displaced the
old dependency the native people had experienced as indentured
labour for the HBC. In effect, the CCF, through its DNR, replaced
the HBC as the colonial agent in the north, demanding a new kind
of social behaviour in exchange for services and transfer payments.
The development of native dependency on the state came as an
indirect result of two unrelated government actions. The first was
an explicit policy of centralization based upon withholding family
allowance cheques from those families which did not have their
children in school. In conjunction with the construction of day
schools in the north (in contrast to residential schools, which
separated families for months at a time) this effectively meant
withholding payment from those families which did not establish
some form of residence in settlements with schools. While this action clearly helped to break the semi-nomadic pattern of native people, another program - the orderly marketing of fur - had a greater
impact in undermining the native people's "occupation" of the land
(something that would become more critical in later decadesj.e As
mentioned earlier, the orderly marketing system implemented by the
two senior levels of government was a cash-based system involving
(as it did with grain in the south) an initial and final payment. Its
compulsory aspect regarding the two staple furs prompted a strike
of capital by the HBC, which resulted in a drastic decrease in credit
available to the trappers. With $50 credit instead of $300, the trapper was obliged to make many trips back and forth from his/her
trapline, meaning more time spent in settlements and, significantly,
a reduction in the proportion of a given trapline area actually
harvested for fur. When the season was over, the trapper was obliged
20
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Dobbin/Colonialism
to wait for the final payment. Often this meant pitching a tent beside
the nearest post office and waiting for as long as two months. In
the meantime, any accumulated cash was spent on essentials (which
would normally have been supplied from the land), and often the
final payment cheque was signed over to a private trader or to the
HBC to secure the credit needed to survive the wait. When the cheque did arrive, the trapper would "very often find himself, after his
long wait, broke, without credit, without a food supply and in
debt. "30
The overall impact of this involuntary centralization was
devastating for native social and economic life. While the orderly
marketing of fur did have some limited impact on stabilizing income,
it raised income only marginally. In contrast, the centralization that
resulted meant that native families had to maintain two households
- one on the trapline and one in the settlement. This fact, coupled
with the reduced "income" from domestic hunting and fishing (due
to time spent away from the bush), resulted in the near doubling of
the need for cash and in a greater dependence on expensive southern
goods. As a result, relief payments to Metis doubled between 1948
and 1951. By the mid-1950s, relief payments (which were set arbitrarily at half what they were in the south), family allowance, and
old age pensions accounted for half the total cash income of the
average native family."
Aggravating the economic state that native people faced was the
new determination by the government to enforce the political obligations of northern citizens. Income tax, license fees, royalty fees, food
tax, special charges to help pay for conservation measures, etc., were
collected by the DNR. While the dollar amount of these state levies
was small, the real economic impact, given the average income, was
not insignificant. Equally important, these citizen obligations, enforced in the context of a colonial political relationship in which native
people were effectively powerless, served to increase the alienation
from government that the people already experienced.
Ironically, one of the government's main successes put increasing
pressure on native families. The provision of health services resulted
in a dramatic lowering of the death rates among Indians and Metis.
In the ten years ending in 1960, infant mortality was cut in half
(though it remained at 60 per 1,000 live births - twice the provincial average). At the same time the birth rate in northern Saskatchewan remained one of the highest in the world at over 40 per 1,000
in population. The crude rate of natural increase was surpassed by
only seven countries in the world.v The resulting rapid population
increase put a tremendous strain on already inadequate resources -
21
Studies in Political Economy 16 1985
resources that now had to be shared increasingly with tourists, local
whites and white commercial fishermen.
Social and family life also faced severe and long-term disruption
as a result of the CCF's centralizing policy. Where settlements had
been little more than the local mission and HBC trading post, they
were now becoming "a hodge-podge of overcrowded homesteads
[where] there [were] no public services. "33 The family roles of men
and women changed dramatically. Prior to the orderly marketing
system, the subsistence self-sufficiency of the family allowed relative
equality in the economic roles of men and women: while men generally (though not exclusively) did the trapping and hunting, women
prepared the hides for sale, made clothing and also engaged in food
gathering. The stability of the patriarchal family unit rested, in part,
on the man's ability to secure credit: the better trapper received more
credit, his family was better off, and he gained prestige in the process. With the introduction of orderly marketing, the case system,
and the capital strike by the HBC, the individual trapper's capacity
to care for his family decreased dramatically. Even if he could maintain the same level of income in the chaos of the new system, his
income needs had doubled. Men were often forced to leave their
families to find work in Alberta or the Northwest Territories, staying away for months and even years. 34
The impact of these changes and the growing dependence on
transfer payments was felt at least as strongly by women as by men.
Women whose husbands left to find work were frequently forced
by circumstances to move in with another man - often white in order to guarantee their childrens' well-being. In general women
found themselves displacing their husbands in terms of economic and
political authority. Generally better educated than their husbands,
it was most often the women who dealt with the new government
agencies and programs: they were the spokespersons for the family
in dealing with the state. Family allowance became the single largest
cash contributor to a family's income and the cheque was made out
in the woman's name. The same was true of social welfare. Family
allowance became so important that large families became desirable,
and with better health care and lower infant mortality, they also
became more possible. It was common in the 1950s for one brother
to give up a child for legal adoption to another brother whose wife
was unable to have any, or many, children." With the economic and
political status of women increasing as the men's steadily declined,
tension within families increased dramatically. Domestic violence,
never a major feature of native life before, increased.
Injected into this already tragic equation was another new element:
22
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Dobbin/Colonialism
alcohol. In LaRonge, in 1952, against the vigorous protest of the
local CCF radicals, the government licensed a local hotel bar. As
the tourist industry developed apace, more liquor outlets were opened.
Three elements - cash from government transfer payments, easily
obtained alcohol, and a concentration of unemployed native people
- combined with the previously described social disruption to produce the basis for alcohol abuse and its attendant tragedies, which
still plague the north today.
In examining the policies of the CCF as they affected the daily
lives of northern native people, there is no question that, overall,
life became more difficult. While health care and education improved,
living standards did not, and massive social disruption, dependence
on government, and alcohol abuse accompanied CCF government
intervention. This in no way suggests that the social conditions that
preceded CCF intervention (often referred to incorrectly by romantics in and out of academia as a "traditional life style") were
desirable, characterized as they were by poverty, ignorance, low life
expectancy, etc. Nonetheless, the social stability and subsistence selfsufficiency of the past were positive features when contrasted with
the social chaos of the 1950s.36 Leaving aside the question of assessing the quality of daily life, it is the purpose of this paper to place
these new conditions in a broader context. Did the CCF simply
modify and maintain a colonial administration over native people,
or did it promote fundamental changes in social relations on behalf
of imperialism and monopoly capital?
Bourgeault has identified northern social relations under British
colonialism as feudal and Wallerstein has described those relations
as entailing a "reciprocal nexus ... the exchange of protection for
labor services .... "37 Adapting Wallerstein's criteria, colonialism
can only be said to have existed under the CCF if all social relations
were determined by this relationship between native people and the
CCF government. Perhaps the single most important factor to discuss
is that of class. As mentioned earlier, no more than 350 native men
and women were involved at anyone time in wage labour throughout
the CCF period. This represented ten per cent of the total workingage population (male and female) and was therefore an insignificant
development in terms of numbers. But equally important, the
socialization that is normally associated with membership in the industrial working class was weak at best. The vast majority of wage
jobs were part-time and/or seasonal and represented only one factor in the individual's total "income." Trapping, commercial fishing,
domestic hunting and fishing, and transfer payments made up the
rest. The "working class" experience of most native people was
23
Studies in Political Economy 16 1985
limited in depth and took place in a milieu still dominated by a strong
attachment to the land, a powerful individualism, and a cultural bias
that did not separate "making a living" from other dimensions of
life. In short, while some native people did work at wage jobs on
a full-time basis and were drawn away from their previous seminomadism, and while others were introduced to wage-labour relations, there was no development of a working class in the north. The
semi-feudal relationship involving the harvesting of fur, plus the
domestic hunting which supplemented it, still dominated the social
relations of the population. With the development of the tourist industry and mining exploration, and the gradual expansion of government, there did develop, among the white population, a class structure reflecting this development (i.e., a small working class and a
petty bourgeoisie). Yet because the jobs in these sectors were almost
exclusively held by whites from the south, this class structure was
largely separated from the native population. Just as there were two
nearly exclusive economies, there were two corresponding social
structures.
In examining the question of colonialism during this period it is
instructive to examine the relationship between these two nominally
separate realities. At one level the relationship was explicitly colonial
- for example, with government employees (who I will examine in
more detail below), agents of the HBC, private traders, the clergy,
and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). But even at a
purely social/cultural level, whites were viewed by native people as
all-powerful; in essence, for impoverished native people, whites were
a homogeneous group, their economic and political status in relationship to the natives outweighing any objective internal class differences. There was no such thing as an unemployed white in the
north - whites were only in the north because of gainful economic
activity.
The rapid growth of the white population after 1950 introduced
a new element in to the north. Where the previous white population
had become part of the community,
many of the newcomers were of lower-middle class origins. The
puritanical morality associated with their background led them to define
Metis behaviour as "depraved," "immoral," and "irresponsible."
Thus a degree of social isolation hitherto not present contributed
markedly to crystallization of the settlement along ethnic lines. As a
result two clearly defined ethnic communities have emerged .... "38
Those separate communities were marked, materially, by the new
possessions, homes and modern services of the whites. And the
24
Dobbin/Colonialism
separateness was reinforced to the point of mutual exclusivity by
"whites [allocating] to themselves a higher social value, which is not
based upon any implicit theories of race ... but essentially upon
the conviction that the Metis are incapable of managing their own
affairs in virtue of ignorance, weakness of character, and a propensity to involve themselves in activities inimical to a well ordered social
existence. "39 In many instances whites behaved much like the contracted labour of the 1800s:they viewed their time there as temporary;
their cultural focus was to the south; and their conversations were
about the next trip south or what they would do when they went
back home. In the two mining communities, where almost eighty
per cent of the white population lived, the contrasts were so dramatic
as to give the appearance of an apartheid system. At Uranium City,
a city that gradually acquired all the amenities of southern towns,
a one-mile exclusion zone was established within which natives could
not build homes or pitch tents.
In short, the failure to follow up the reforms initiated during
1944-50 placed the native people in social and economic limbo, with
their old subsistence economy undermined yet with the social relations, attitudes and crippling individualism of the old system still
in place. No modern economic activity was available to them and
no effort was made to moderate the old cultural bias that dimmed
prospects of their integration into a modern and dynamic society.
These were indirect results of the CCF's policies - the results of
omissions as much as commissions. But in terms of colonialism, it
was the CCF's most direct relationship with the native people on a
daily basis that was the determining factor. The old colonial relationship was relatively simple: the HBC provided credit to the trapper in return for his/her labour. The CCF replaced that relationship
with one that was much more complex. In part it was economic:
through legal means, the new relationship required the native to sell
certain furs to the government's Fur Marketing Service in return for
cash. But equally important, it demanded certain social behaviour
(centralization, taxes, royalties, compliance with conservation laws,
acceptance of resource allocations, attendance of children in school,
etc.) in return for payment of a different kind: transfer payments.
The old feudal element of "protection" was there as well, not only
in concrete terms (health, education, welfare, competition with exploitive private interests), but also in the paternalism with which all
these services and policies were delivered to the people.
For the native people it was as much the form of government intervention as the content that characterized the relationship. First,
there was no effort to educate people in the rudiments of democratic
25
Studies in Political Economy 16 1985
decision-making. No local governments or even advisory bodies were
ever established. At the level of partisan provincial politics the attitude of the two main parties was at best paternalistic and at worst
cynical and exploitive. The Liberal party continued to get votes by
the use of $5 bills, booze and threats, while the CCF, with the exception of the northern radicals, failed to make any effort to involve
native people in the political process in a genuine way. It was into
this political vacuum that the DNR field workers were thrown.
Because no government agency or department was ever given a mandate to formulate and implement a native policy, that job fell to those
who were in closest contact with the native population: the conservation officers (COs). These individuals, who had little in the way
of training or policy statements to guide them, had immense influence
over the lives of native people. They were in charge not only of conservation, but also of "community administration, tax collection,
local government projects, the Saskatchewan Hospital Services Plan,
social welfare, and community development."4O A report by the Centre for Community Studies (which conducted socio-economic studies
for the DNR) described the COs as
comparable to the District Officer or District Commissioner of the
British Colonial Service. In most communities ... they are, in fact,
the government. 41
While many of these individuals were sympathetic to native people
and in fact bent the rules that they were supposed to enforce, they
nonetheless had great arbitrary power and were not answerable to
those over whom they exercised it. Coincidentally, they even looked
the part of colonial officers: they dressed in uniform, wore RCMPstyle hats and drove distinctive, high-powered cars - all of which
tended to separate and alienate them from the people with whom
they dealt.
In summary, it seems clear that the CCF government, primarily
through the Department of Natural Resources, basically maintained
a system of colonialism over the native population with itself replacing
the HBC as the principal agent. There was no appreciable change
in the class structure of the native population; the population was
still largely trapped in the archaic subsistence economy of the past
and denied (through the lack of any active policy of the CCF) access
to the modern economy; culturally, the population retained the individualism of the semi-nomad and the colonial mentality of the indentured labourer; to the extent that changes did occur in social and
economic patterns, native people were faced with an increasing and
debilitating dependency on government transfer payments; socially,
26
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Dobbin/Colonialism
they faced a paternalistic and racist white population whose quasiapartheid behaviour and living standards and styles established
another dimension in native powerlessness; politicaly, the native
population remained virtually excluded from the democratic process,
dealt with the state almost exclusively through the medium of the
conservation officers, and was unable to form its own organizations
to speak with an independent voice. As well, they found themselves
impoverished while tax money, royalties and profits from mining,
forestry and tourism flowed south.
Confirming a Capitalist Strategy: 1960-1964
While the CCF, in its overall impact on the north, maintained colonial social relations with the native population and did not facilitate
the penetration of large capital into the north, there were indications
of the direction it would probably have taken in the future. First
of all, the refusal of the government to develop a comprehensive
native rehabilitation program (which would necessarily have involved
the allocation of resources and resource revenue to the native people) implied the standard, capital-intensive approach to resource
development. Secondly, while centralization was initially a policy
designed to facilitate the delivery of services, the negative impact of
this policy on native exploitation of fur and game resources had
become increasingly obvious. Clearing the land of native people was
compatible with large capital development. Thirdly, such development as did take place in the main sectors - mining, forestry and
tourism - was private. All mining exploration was private and no
measures were taken to allow future public investment in mineral
development.
This implied development strategy was given fresh and strong
impetus in the final years of the CCF administration. While other
aspects of the northern reality remained as they were in the 1950-62
period, the government began to move towards the promotion of
large capital investment in the resource sector. Major efforts were
undertaken in the construction of an infrastructure for such ventures
(new roads were built up the western and eastern sides of the Northern Administration District). Most importantly, the government
laid the groundwork for the signing of long-term leases with large
forest companies for huge tracts of the northern commercial forest
belt.
The period from 1960-64 saw some new developments in both
resource development and social policy. In both, the patterns of the
previous decade were confirmed. In the area of resource development, the government undertook its first major effort at establishing
27
Studies in Political Economy 16 1985
the infrastructure necessary for resource extraction by constructing
roads up the west and east sides of the Northern Administrative
District. As well, according to A.H. MacDonald, then northern administrator, the government was "doing everything possible to promote development."42 While it seems that leases with large forest
companies were not actually signed until after the CCF/NDP's defeat
in 1964, the groundwork for those long-term agreements was prepared
by the CCF. In the area of social and economic reform for native
people, this period witnessed increased political pressure for change.
The struggle for a single agency to develop and implement northern
policy met repeated rebuffs from the Cabinet. The position of northern administrator within the DNR continued to be a position with
no budget and little power. In the words of the main report by the
Centre for Community Studies: "The Province has shown few signs
of willingness to undertake anything so bold as the fishery development of the late forties. "43
A brief examination of costs involved in programs aimed strictly
at northern "development" reveals just how Iowa priority social
and economic reforms were in the CCF's programs. The largest expenditure by far was for roads whose benefits went predominantly
to private entrepreneurs and, eventually, transnationals. Over a period
of ten years the outpost hospital program cost $75,000, and the fur
program $100,000. The development of the fishery was the most expensive project: $400,000 for construction of the fish plants, and
$265,000 for price supports. Yet even here the native people paid
many of the costs: royalties collected on fish alone (between 1949
and 1959) were over $200,000. In the early sixties the government,
prompted by programs in Manitoba, implemented a "community
development" program. Over a four-year period (1959-63), it averaged $44,000 - including village streets, portable saw mills, community
halls, assistance to agriculture, vocational training and leadership
training. While the CCF gave lip-service to the need for community
development, it broke that concept's first principle: that the community development workers should not be part of any regular
government department. Instead, the CCF simply provided a few
weeks of training to the feared and all-powerful conservation officers.
In contrast to the miniscule budget for community development, the
government during this same period spent an average of $300,000
annually on social welfare. In 1961, a bad year for forest fires, the
government spent $500,000 on forest protection. 44
I suggested earlier that the CCF could not be described as having
engaged in the "underdevelopment" of the north - the degree of
capital penetration was simply too slight for such a description, and
28
Dobbin/ Colonialism
what it implies, to hold. Rather, as a result of policy inaction, it administered a period of "undevelopment" which, though it did introduce some economic activity, left the significant resource sectors
almost untouched. However, given the policy thrust of the last four
years of its mandate, the private capital bias revealed during the
1950s, and the forced centralization of native people (whatever its
motivation), it can be argued that the CCF prepared the ground for
major capital penetration. Its repeated refusal to undertake a policy
of promoting native self-determination further suggests that the CCF
consistently pursued policies that did nothing to prevent, and indeed
implicitly facilitated, imperialist domination of the north and its
underdevelopment.
The Political Struggle for Northern Reforms
The results of twenty years of CCF government intervention in northern Saskatchewan are clear enough. The political process that led
to these results, and an explanation of why the CCF party failed so
completely to come to grips with the native question, are equally important questions.
The election defeat of Joe Phelps in 1948 and the subsequent
deterioration of the reform process did not go unchallenged. In the
party, within the DNR, among CCFers in the north, and in the upper echelons of the civil service, the debate about northern policy
continued. The debate was vigorous and the leadership of the CCF,
including Premier T.C. Douglas, was kept clearly informed of the
alternatives to its northern policy. It cannot be argued, therefore,
that the continued impoverishment of native people was a matter
of ignorance or lack of opportunity to change. Within the party
throughout the 1950s, at conventions, and in regular correspondence
and communication with the party officials, northern reformers
pressed their case for a policy of de-colonization and selfdetermination. While many of these resolutions (prompted by Jim
Brady, Malcolm Norris and a small number of white socialist colleagues, and supported by radical CCFers in Prince Albert) were
received sympathetically by many in the party, they often failed to
pass, and those that did were regularly ignored.:"
In the north the radicals who had been purged from the DNR continued to promote their reforms among native people, attempted to
bring native people into the political process where this was possible, and put up candidates for each provincial election. For their efforts the northern socialists were systematically isolated.jheir presentations to Cabinet and party were rejected, and their candidates for
election rejected by the party executive in Regina. Because the party
29
Studies in Political Economy 16 1985
had so few members in the north and the executive had the constitutional authority to choose candidates in such situations, in two out
of three elections held under these circumstances the choice of the
northerners was overruled and a candidate supportive of the statusquo was appointed.w By 1960, when party membership was large
enough to elect a candidate and have it stick, the CCF was so
discredited among the native population that the personal integrity
of the candidate and his campaigners were no longer deciding factors. The election promises made by CCF candidates Allan Quandt,
Jim Brady and others were, the native people reasoned, simply
beyond anything the CCF itself would ever deliver. The defeat in
1960 led Brady to conclude: "After twenty years of monumental
blundering the CCF in the north [is]no longer a political force. The
Indians and Metis detest them. "47
The rejection of radical solutions put forward by Marxists was
hardly a rare occasion within the CCF party and government. Yet
pressure for reform came from other quarters as well. Within the
government there were studies done which pointed to the need for
such reform and identified the repeated election defeats with the lack
of such policy changes. In the early fifties DNR hired an anthropologist, Vic Valentine, to do studies on the impact of its policies
on the Metis. His conclusions, while somewhat muted, were clear
enough and were supported by the evidence: the CCF had severely
undermined the old way of life and replaced it with nothing except
welfare." In 1952, DNR's planning officer explicitly rejected any
native rehabilitation initiatives on the grounds that they would not
receive political support in the south.t?
The most comprehensive studies of northern Saskatchewan were
undertaken by the Centre for Community Studies (CCS) in 1958.s0
The CCS was established by the CCF government, in conjunction
with the University of Saskatchewan, to do social and economic
studies of the rapidly changing southern farm communities. The
academics involved in the centre were of various political persuasions, but many were socialists and examined the north from this
perspective. They did detailed studies of every aspect of government
policy in the north and sought out the co-operation of people like
Brady and Norris. Their conclusions were extremely critical of past
and present policy and concluded that the CCF had created a colonial administration in the north. Its conclusions and its long list
of proposals for reform were not acted upon.
The focus of much of the debate over the direction of CCF policy
was the concept of a single agency for the north - some authoritative
agency that could co-ordinate all government policy in the north with
30
Dobbin/Colonialism
respect to native people and resource development. Pressure for this
reform came from several sources (in the government and the party)
across the political spectrum. By the early fifties it was clear that
some agency was needed to co-ordinate the activities of the various
departments with mandates in the north. It was recognized by senior
bureaucrats and their ministers that interdepartmental rivalry and
overlapping of jurisdictions was a barrier to rational programming.
At this level the reform was sought primarily because of a perceived
need for administrative efficiency. Within the party the northern
socialists were arguing for a single agency because only through such
an authority could a policy promoting native self-determination be
effective. In 1968 the LaRonge CCF Club, of which Brady, Norris,
Quandt and others were members, submitted to Cabinet a comprehensive policy document entitled, "A Single Agency for the
North. "51 It detailed twenty-two proposals for social, economic,
research and educational projects and policies aimed at developing
resources in the context of native rehabilitation.
It was not simply internal studies, commissioned surveys and activists within the party that pressured the Cabinet to make the move
to a single agency. In 1961 the Budget Bureau, a powerful financial
agency with great influence in the government, recommended a single
agency. In 1963the Treasury Board, similarly influential and generally conservative, advised the Cabinet that if it wanted to implement
any real change in the north - even if it simply wanted to make
present programs more effective - a single agency was crucial. None
of these suggestions, proposals and pressures for change were successful. All were discussed by Cabinet and all were voted down. 52
the CCF's Northern Policies
I have tried to establish the thesis that the CCF government, in its
administration of the north, basically played the role of colonial
overseer within a context of very limited economic development. The
social and economic devastation that the native people experienced
is undeniable. Further, it is clear that the government was made
aware, from various sources, of the crisis native people were facing
and the measures that were needed to halt and reverse the process,
and that it consciously chose to reject such measures. It remains only
to seek an explanation of why such a choice was made. It is especially
important for socialists to understand why a social democratic party could fail so completely to deal with obvious human misery. It
is even more important when we recognize that the two governments
on either side of Saskatchewan - Social Credit in Alberta and Conservative in Manitoba - had significantly better records in many
Understanding
31
Studies in Political Economy 16 1985
respects than did the CCF.
Some of the explanation for the CCF's sorry record in the north
is straightforward and could apply in a general way to all Canadian
governments (i.e., they were adminstering a capitalist economy, not
a socialist one, and for the CCF, one set in the context of a society
just emerging from a state of settler colonialism). Other reasons and these help to explain why the CCF was in some ways more
backward than the Tories and the Social Crediters - reflect the particular characteristics of agrarian social democracy: its Fabian roots,
it populist character, its social gospel dimension, its particular
egalitarian focus. Each of these traits played a role in the CCF's inability to meet the needs of native people in northern Saskatchewan.
It is perhaps a moot point to suggest that the CCF "failed" to
de-colonize the north, for this implies that social democracy was
capable oftaking the measures necessary for such a task. To replace
the archaic economic base of the native people, to modernize them
with their culture intact, to establish services on a par with those in
the south - to integrate the native people into a modern industrial
society - would have required a degree of central planning, social
engineering and intervention in the economy that was quite simply
outside the parameters of prairie (or any other) social democracy.
In other words, it would have been quite unrealistic for anyone to
expect that the CCF would embark on full-scale de-colonization utilizing the totality of resources in the north to do so.
Brady and Norris attributed the CCF's failure to a "class-induced
fear of the native," and when one examines the class base of the
CCF it seems clear that this was a major underlying reason. For the
CCF the native people were just another element of the poor and
marginal section of the province. And this sector was simply not part
of the political base of the CCF: poor farmers, marginal urban
workers and non-status native people generally voted Liberal, and
had little or no representation in the CCF. The CCF was a party
that grew out of the settler colonial project, and its leadership
reflected the attitudes of the petty bourgeoisie. It did not embrace
a class analysis of society, and even if it had, the party would have
had difficulty applying that analysis to semi-nomadic trappers and
hunters.>' Essentially, the native population took on the appearance
of a "lumpen" element - an unproductive group in a society preoccupied with production.
Yet there was still a very large spectrum of reforms, beneficial to
native people, which were well within the ambit of CCF ideology.
The promotion of producer co-ops, preventive health measures, the
control of alcohol in the north, the promotion of local government,
32
Dobbin/ Colonialism
a housing program, electrification, sewer and water systems, training programs, adult education, etc., all fell within the CCF's range
of action (indeed, most were not even reformist in the wider context) and would have benefited native people enormously. It is the
CCF's failure to provide even these minimal responses to the needs
of native people that requires further explanation.
The CCF's particular brand of social democracy began as an
amalgam of ideologies and settler sentiment that reflected the social
conditions of the region and the ethnic dominance of the British in
Saskatchewan society. Thus while populism and the social gospel were
strong elements in the party, one of its strongest ideological sources
was British Fabianism. This influence was most strongly felt when
the party actually gained power. According to Richards, "the Fabian faith in the philosopher-bureaucrat who designs and implements
change from the centre" dominated CCF thinking on how to run
a government. ss Whatever the wisdom of this approach in general,
it was of little benefit to northern native people. With policy "design
and implementation" left in the hands of men far removed from the
reality of a people trapped in an archaic economy, little in the way
of comprehensive plans or political initiative could be expected.
Though it must be acknowledged that it was these senior bureaucrats,
and not CCF politicans, who called for a single agency for the north,
their principal motivation for doing so was rationalization of departmental responsibilities. While the CCF relied on philosopherbureaucrats at the senior level of the civil service, they opted for the
concept of a "neutral" civil service at the level of middle management. In the north and elsewhere, this often proved disastrous. To
quote Brady: "The CCF continually harboured the worst oppositionists in vital and sensitive administrational posts and they consistently sabotaged every progressive program." S6 While the north
certainly had no monopoly on reactionary civil servants, there was
little to moderate their actions: they were sustained in their attitudes
by their closest associates - Liberal party supporters in the clergy,
private business and the RCMP.
Clearly the CCF government was not exclusively in the hands of
professional bureaucrats. To a limited extent, it still responded to
the pressures and demands of popular organizations. It was, after
all, a populist party that grew out of dynamic political movements,
out of protest and lobbying and the creation of indigenous democratic
institutions. As such, the CCF found it difficult to deal with a group
in society that had no collective voice. For the CCF it was virtually
the case that if a group in society was not organized - if it could
not speak with a collective voice - then it did not exist as an iden-
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Studies in Political Economy 16 1985
tifiable group. Indeed the CCF, or more accurately, T.C. Douglas,
did attempt in 1946 to assist the southern-based Saskatchewan Metis
Society (1937-43)in its efforts to rejuvenate its defunct organization."
In spite of this encouragement, the Metis leaders, plagued with internal differences, failed to breathe new life into their organization.
From that point on the CCF government made virtually no attempt
to develop policy specifically for the Metis.
Part of T.C. Douglas's speech at the 1946 meeting of Metis leaders
revealed another aspect of CCF philosophy which, indirectly, contributed to its failure in policy initiatives with respect to native people. Douglas told the Metis: "The fact remains that we cannot divide
people up .,.
what affects one affects all. "'8 The CCF's
egalitarianism - an admirable trait when applied to a society universally engaged in a single enterprise (and plagued by ethno-centrism)
- became a barrier to progress in dealing with a people who were
not part of that enterprise. For it was an overwhelming reality for
northern (and other) native people that they were divided from the
dominant society: they had special status whether they wanted it or
not. Further evidence of the effect of this egalitarian objective is
found in the one area that the CCF could be said to have had a
"native policy." That area concerned the CCF's initiatives with treaty
Indians - the only people in the province over whom the CCF
government had no jurisdiction. Throughout the second half of the
1950s and into the sixties, the provincial government made various
efforts to have jurisdiction over Indians gradually transferred to the
provinces.w The special, inferior status of the treaty Indians went
against the CCF's egalitarianism. Yet ironically, if its attempts to
have this special legal status had succeeded, it would have been faced with responsibility for thousands more people with a special
historical and socio-economic status - a status that the CCF seemed unable to grasp.
Superimposed on all of the political and ideological explanations
is one that is both political and cultural and that can be described
as the CCF's "settler colonial perspective." No political unit in the
developed world depended so completely on one product - grain
- for its survival as did the provincial state in Saskatchewan.w During the first half of the century, the governments that administered
the province were engaged in the settler colonial project: coming to
terms with the physical, economic and political elements that faced
petty bourgeois farmers in their efforts to get a fair return on their
capital. All the important movements and organizations on the
political scene - the Saskatchewan Grain Growers Association, the
farmers' unions, the Wheat Pool, the co-ops, the credit unions, the
34
Dobbin/Colonialism
political pressure for a Wheat Board, etc. - were designed with the
farmers in mind. The Saskatchewan government, certainly up to
World War II, was a settler-colonial state, and if it failed to carry
out that project, it was doomed to defeat. It was for precisely this
reason that the Liberals (who recognized this fact provincially, but
were saddled with a monopoly-capitalist counterpart in Ottawa) lost
the election to the CCF in 1944.
While it can be argued that Saskatchewan's economy and social
structure were more complex in the 1950s, and that the settler colonial project was complete by the end of that decade, I would argue
that the CCF party and its leaders retained that settler colonial mentality beyond the point where the social reality had shifted. In general
this perspective had little noticeable or significant impact on the
political scene. But for native people it was of critical and long-lasting
importance. The political culture of Saskatchewan rested on a foundation of taming the cruel physical elements through ingenuity and
co-operation and confronting the "monied interests" of the east.
In this culture there was virtually no place for native people. Their
long history, their role in the fur trade, and their national liberation
struggles were either unknown to those who arrived after 1895 or
were seen as simply quaint or irrelevant. It would have been difficult
indeed to persuade prairie farmers that they were "colonizers" of
the native people when they viewed themselves as being colonized
by the banks, the grain companies, the railways and their political
representatives in Ottawa. They had the self-image of a "marginal
frontier group in relation to the whole society and developed attitudes
characteristic of outcast groups, believing that they did not receive
their just or 'parity' share of the national wealth or culture. "61
The British historian, E.H. Carr, touched on this barrier to
understanding when he referred to the inability of western historians
to grapple successfully with Russia, and vice versa, that is, to their
"inability to achieve even the most elementary understanding of what
goes on in the mind of the other party. "62 To be sure, the fact that
the CCF was a party of the petty bourgeoisie - first rural and then
increasingly urban - meant that class was the principal barrier to
progressive policy for native people. But the fact that native people
existed in some sense outside industrial society meant that they were
also outside - invisible to - the imagination of agrarian society.
Indeed, for the most part, they were invisible - isolated on reserves,
on the margins of towns, or in the northern bush.
The misunderstandings between natives and whites, the propaganda
that settlers had absorbed before arriving in the west,
and
the
dark
skins of the native people all contributed to a pervasive racism among
35
Studies in Political Economy 16 1985
virtually all non-natives. While the CCF can be credited with being
less prone to racist ideology than other parties, its members and supporters were susceptible and received little in the way of political
education to the contrary. That ideology often expressed itself in the
notion that native people were "incapable of progress" and that the
best that could be hoped for was a paternalistic administration of
their needs. Exacerbating this attitude within the CCF was another
element in its ideological make-up: its social-gospel dimension. The
crusade against social injustice, led typically by Baptist minister T.C.
Douglas, tended towards "noblesse oblige" when it confronted the
dilemma facing Indian Metis people. This attitude, in turn, was reinforced by a passive acquiesence to racial discrimination on the part
of many native people.
Concluding
Remarks
In its twenty-year administration of northern Saskatchewan, the CCF
government modified but maintained a colonial set of social relations with respect to the native population. This does not mean, of
course, that the north was in some way separate from the world
capitalist system. Its primary significance lies in the fact that despite
its major intervention in the north, the CCF did not act as an active
agent of imperialism or monopoly capital. A pattern of neocolonialism did not develop. As the native people were drawn off
the land and as their old set of social and economic relations was
drastically altered, they were not proletarianized - they did not play
the role of a reserve army of labour. Instead they were allowed, by
government indifference, to languish in an ever-worsening situation
of state-dependency, social breakdown and alcohol abuse which
rendered their integration into the modern economy that much more
difficult. At the same time, the CCF made it clear by its lack of public
resource development initiatives and its acquiesence towards private
capital that it would not oppose monopoly-capital penetration of the
north. This combination of ambivalence in the area of resources,
and practiced indifference with respect to social reform for native
people, left both the people and the resources extremely vulnerable
to the power and priorities of international capital. In effect, international capital was allowed to implement its own priorities on the
basis of its own timetable, with few barriers in its way, and with complete freedom to ignore the presence and the rights of native people.
36
Dobbin/Colonialism
Notes
1. Murray Dobbin, The One-and-a-Half Men (Vancouver 1981), 198
2. T.C. Douglas and Joe Phelps, interviews with the author, 1976, Saskatchewan Archives.
3. Andre Gunder Frank argues in Capitalism and Underdevelopment in
Latin America (Harmondsworth
1971) and other works that
"underdevelopment" is a direct consequence of the capitalist development of the metropole.
4. Ron Bourgeault, "The Indian, the Metis and the Fur Trade: Class, Sexism and Racism in the Transition from 'Communism' to Capitalism,"
Studies in Political Economy 12 (Fall 1983), 48
5. Ibid., 46-56
6. Murray Dobbin, taped interviews with native northerners and early
CCFers.
7. Bourgeault, "The Indian, the Metis and the Fur Trade." (See n. 4 above.)
8. By northern Saskatchewan, I refer to the forested area north of the grainfarming boundary. In the late forties-early fifties, the population there
was something under 10,000 - more or less equally divided between
treaty Indians, mixed-bloods and whites. Of the less than 3,000 whites,
some 2,500 were concentrated in three "white" communities: the mining towns of Uranium City and Creighton, and Island Falls, the site
of a hydro-electric plant. The other thirty settlements were overwhelmingly native. During the administration of the CCF this area was referred to as the Northern Administrative District (NAD).
9. Vernon C. Serl, "Action and Reaction: An Overview of Provincial
Policies and Programs in Northern Saskatchewan," as cited in Dobbin,
One-and-a-Half Men, 167. (See n. I above.)
10. Ibid., 166
II. John Richards and Larry Pratt, Prairie Capitalism (Toronto 1979),93
12. Ibid., 110. Phelps fired four of his six department heads and took on
the position of deputy minister himself.
13. Dobbin, One-and-a-Half Men, 167-8
14. A.H. MacDonald, Director of Northern Affairs for the Department of
National Resources and Industrial Development (DNR), taped interview
with the. author, 1976, Saskatchewan Archives.
15. Dobbin, One-and-a-Half
Men, 123-4
37
Studies in Political Economy 16 1985
16. Ibid., 177-81
17. Allan Quandt, former northern administrator for the DNR, taped interview with the author, 1976, Saskatchewan Archives.
18. Richards and Pratt, Prairie Capitalism, 143. (See n. 11 above.)
19. Quandt, interview. (See n. 17 above.)
20. Ibid.; and Joe Phelps, taped interview with the author, 1976, Saskatchewan Archives.
21. The late forties and the fifties were a period of inactivity in the native
movements of the prairies. The Saskatchewan and Alberta Metis
movements were virtually dead, and the new Union of Saskatchewan
Indians, formed in the south at the initiation of CCP Premier T.C.
Douglas, was ineffective in general and in any case had little representation in the north.
22. Quandt, the man in charge of the NAD for the DNR, was forced to
resign in 1949; Brady was forced out in 1951; and Malcolm Norris was
transferred to the Department of Mineral Resources in 1949. Others
resigned as well and some stayed on and compromised.
23. Quandt and Phelps, interviews (see nn. 19, 20 above); Richards and Pratt,
Prairie Capitalism.
24. The creation of the co-ops, especially when seen in the light of the government's sabotage of Brady's producer co-op initiatives, reflected the
CCP's bias in its view of the role of co-ops; in the south they were designed strictly to reduce costs to petty bourgeois farmers and were never
seen as an alternative form in production relations.
25. Richards and Pratt, Prairie Capitalism, 143
26. Ibid.
27. Helen Buckley, et al., "The Indians and Metis of Northern Saskatchewan, A Report on Economic and Social Development" (Saskatoon:
Centre for Community Studies, 1963), 18-21
28. Ibid.
29. The process of clearing people from the land has continued since the
1950s. Today the Tory government in Saskatchewan has taken the final
steps by establishing municipal governments whose jurisdictions cover
only those areas covered by the surveyed lots in a given village. Village
councils are fighting for "resource control zones" of at least twenty
miles around the townsites.
30. Vic Valentine, "Some Problems of the Metis in Northern Saskatchewan"
(Paper delivered to the Canadian Political Science Association in London, Ontario, June 1953), 3-8
38
Dobbin/Colonialism
31. Ibid., 7
32. Buckley, et ai., "The Indians and Metis of Northern Saskatchewan."
(See n. 27 above.)
33. Valentine, "Some Problems of the Metis." (See n. 30 above.)
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.
36. Interviews with native elders almost invariably reveal a feeling that life
before government intervention was "better" than life after.
37. Immanuel Wallerstein, as cited in Albert Syzmanski, The Logic of Imperialism (New York 1981), 88
38. Philip Spaulding, "The Social Integration of a Northern Community:
White Mythology and Metis Reality" (Saskatoon: Centre for Community
Studies, 1963), 93
39. Ibid., 93-4
40. As cited in Dobbin, One-and-a-Half Men, 213
41. Ibid.
42. A.H. MacDonald, interview with the author,
Archives.
1976, Saskatchewan
43. Buckley, et al., "The Indians and Metis of Northern Saskatchewan," 41
44. Ibid., 41. All figures in this paragraph come from this source.
45. T.e. Douglas, taped interview with the author, 1977, Saskatchewan Archives; Quandt, interview; Richards and Pratt, Prairie Capitalism; see
also references in the Brady Papers, Glenbow-Alberta Institute, Calgary,
Alberta; see resolutions on the north in the T.e. Douglas Papers, Saskatchewan Archives.
46. Quandt, interview.
47. As cited in Dobbin, One-and-a-Half Men, 233
48. Valentine, "Same Problems of the Metis" (see n. 33 above); internal
DNR reports, DNR Papers, Saskatchewan Archives.
49. Report cited in Dobbin, One-and-a-Half Men, 266
50. Ibid., 212. The official report excluded the most critical studies in
deference to the CCF backers of the centre. These studies were later
published by the research director of the centre, Arthur Davis, in A Nor-
39
Studies in Political Economy 16 1985
them Dilemma: Reference Papers, 2 vols. (Western Washington State
University 1967.)
51. Brady Papers, Glenbow-Alberta Institute, Calgary, Alberta.
52. See Dobbin, One-and-a-Half Men, 267
53. The Alberta government actively encouraged Brady to develop producer
co-operatives and hired him to administer one of the Metis settlement
areas it established in 1938. In Manitoba, the Tory government had community development programs in the north in the mid-1950s before the
CCF had even heard of the concept.
54. The Communist party faced similar difficulties for decades - viewing
the native people as simply part of Canada's poor. It was not until the
1950s that it adopted (in part due to Brady's influence with prairie
members) a position identifying their situation as quasi-colonial.
55. Richards and Pratt, Prairie Capitalism, 139
56. Dobbin, One-and-a-Half Men, 232
57. Murray Dobbin, "Metis Struggles of the Twentieth Century," New Breed
Magazine, part four of a series (August-December 1978).
58. Ibid.
59. Dobbin, One-and-a-Half Men, 201
60. S.M. Upset, Agrarian Socialism (New York 1968),44
61. Ibid., 47
62. E.H. Carr, What is History? (London 1964), 24
40