Marx, Keynes and Ancestors

[Ed Weick]

In response to my posting about cultural loss, Keith Hudson said: > >I'm not so sure about all this.  I used to think the same as Ed.  I think, >now, that this point of view romanticises our ancestors. I rather think >that if their society had been as natural/stable/satisfying as is often >implied then it would have been a great deal more robust when faced with >modern society. True, in many places, indigenous society and modern >settlers both needed the same land and couldn't possibly co-exist, but in >many other places the original culture could have survived more or less >intact if they'd wanted it to.  Instead, when faced with all the gewgaws >and temptations (including strong liquor) that modern man had to offer, >then most indigenous societies folded up quite quickly -- voluntarily, as >it were.   What Keith does not appear to have taken into account is the impact of "virgin soil" diseases on indigenous peoples.  Massimo Livi-Bacci, in his Concise History of World Population (Blackwell, 1989), states that "estimates put the indigenous population of North and South America as high as 112 million at the end of the fifteenth century. Within a few decades of contact, this immense community had already begun to shrink dramatically and within a century this most deadly of all historical encounters claimed tens of millions of lives. On some respected scholarly reconstructions, the population declined by over 96 percent, from approximately 112 million to between 4 and 5 million, within one century as a consequence of this colonial enterprise."  With a loss of population this large, or even half this large, very little robustness in dealing with advancing European society would have been possible.   Many indigenous groups had no alternative but to accept the whiteman's dole.  A few years ago I did a study of the aboriginal people of northern Saskatchewan.  The following is a quotation from that study: In the case of the Cree of northern Saskatchewan, Elias cites material in the Hudson Bay Company archives which refers to several instances of starvation among people living near Rapid River, now Stanley Mission, a trading post on the Churchill River.  That starvation was associated with illness and at times with epidemics is probable:   "The winter of 1870-71 was not a good year for hunting and fishing.  On January 3 and February 1, 1871 ... there are notes in the journal that the Indians around the post were starving.  The post personnel did not escape a little hunger themselves.  On March 28, a note states that "Alexis, Patrick McKenzie and William Bear came in with poor hunts starving.  I have told them they can't depend upon us for food of any shape - that we may yet be hard up too.""   "The winter of 1879-1880 was a hard one ... "Andrew McKenzie and party are all starving"; ... "Wm. Ratt arrived.  Reports as starving since he went to the lake (Lac la Ronge lake).  All the lake fellows are starving as well." ... Hard times may have marked the entire decade of the 1880's and beyond that." A number of families were also near starvation in the winter of 1988-89.  Hudson Bay records from Rapid River report that hardly any furs were taken that winter.  Elias cites a reference in the Rapid River post journal to Indians who had come in from beyond Burntwood Lake "sick and starving and unable to procure fish or game" and to "Starving Indians sick and one woman dying".  Several references to 1888 - 1890 period indicate a scarcity of fish and game, with people sick and starving in the vicinity of both Rapid River and at Pelican Narrows. There is no way of knowing what the respective roles of disease and famine were in the situations described. We cannot know, for example, whether game resources periodically failed because of natural cycles or the pressures of the fur trade, or whether the hunters were simply too sick to hunt because of diseases introduced through contacts with non-aboriginals. That significant numbers of people died every few years is likely, however. Given such circumstances, it is not surprising that aboriginal people signed treaties. From the perspective of white society, the treaties represented an important step in bringing a backward region and its peoples into the growing nation state. The fur trade was becoming anachronistic, and aboriginal people who had provided the muscle and backbone of the trade were rapidly becoming irrelevant to the new economic staples, large-scale agriculture and major resource development. The aboriginal people were in a state of desperation, and those who were not yet under treaty were anxious to sign in the hope of obtaining badly needed relief. The story is similar for other aboriginal groups in northern Canada.  Originally, they had to be a robust people to survive, but by the latter part of the Nineteenth Century many, disease ridden and starving, they could no longer look after themselves.  Populations continued to decline until about 1920.  They have rebounded since, and currently about a million Canadians identify themselves as aboriginal.   Ed Weick