With the transition to a settler colony, the prejudices and actions accompanying the settlers became significantly more overtly racist.
"The proposition that civilization would bring not only degeneration but also annihilation to the Indians was one that was much more frequently expounded by settlers than it had been by fur traders... By disparaging Indian culture Europeans could convince themselves that little worth would be lost if the Indian way of life was brought to an end." [6]
The residential schools introduced above were run by various church denominations, funded by the government of Canada,
...1880s, the federal government had adopted an official policy of funding residential schools across Canada. The explicit intent was to separate these children from their families and cultures. In 1920, the Indian Act made attendance at Indian Residential Schools compulsory for Treaty-status children between the ages of 7 and 15. [7]
The churches played a significant role in the cultural genocide of the native population,
...the missionaries were a part of the settlement frontier and required major social change of the Indians... Their aim was the complete destruction of the traditional integrated Indian way of life. The missionaries demanded even more far-reaching transformation than the settlers, and they pushed it more aggressively than any other group of whites. [8]
The land is the culture
With the advent of white settlers, land settlement for resource exploitation (minerals, forestry, fishing) and agriculture effectively cleansed the indigenous populations of B.C. and the prairie provinces of Canada from their territories.
While rereading Diamond's work, his underlying thesis about the rise of guns, germs, and steel was the establishment of agricultural-based settlements, essentially implying that agriculture started the whole system of violent empires through the course of history. Some modern theorists support the same claim.
The corollary is probably more accurate: that when indigenous agriculture was 'industrialized' - organized to support a more powerful elite - the violence began domestically with internal control and then expanded out seeking new resources and more power. That puts it in basic terms, but indigenous agriculture existed in most regions of the world. It was not organized on a for-profit power and control model, but was - and is - set within the limits of sustainability in the natural environment.
Regardless, the removal of the indigenous populations of B.C. and prairie provinces was accomplished through disease (smallpox, tuberculosis mainly, and other ailments associated with European lifestyles), military and settler violence, and the full range of laws and orders designed to maintain dominance and exclusion over the remaining populations.
British Colonial policy was "dominated by expediency"
"...the underlying intention of almost any Native land policy in a settler colony was the dispossession, with as little expense and trouble as possible, of Native people of most of their lands." [9]
Those lands not dispossessed became the reserves, small plots of land of little importance for any of the resource industries, Canada's modern apartheid system that still exists and continues to subjugate the indigenous populations regardless of the rhetoric of reconciliation. Talk is important, but it is the land that is the culture.
Back to the future
Canada continues with its mostly racist policies towards its indigenous inhabitants. The Indian Act, now incorporated into the Constitution, and limitations put on other laws and the control exerted by the Department of Indian Affairs denies the equality of rights to land and resources for the indigenous people. As above, violence is still used to control indigenous lands for resource extraction by large corporations.
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