“NO INDIANS ALLOWED”: CHALLENGING ABORIGINAL SEGREGATION IN NORTHERN BRITISH COLUMBIA, 1945-1965 by Matthew Barager B.A., University of Northern British Columbia, 2016 THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS IN HISTORY UNIVERSITY OF NORTHERN BRITISH COLUMBIA June 2019 © Matthew Barager, 2019 ABSTRACT This thesis argues that Indians and White people who were sympathetic to Native issues episodically challenged racial discrimination and segregation during the post-war era by asserting Native people’s growing citizenship rights while calling into question the cultural assumptions that underpinned such prejudice. Those participating in this discourse used analogies with global theatres of racial tension, namely the southern United States, to legitimize their protests. Indians articulated their demands for citizenship by leveraging their burgeoning political rights, their wartime contributions to Canada, and their growing economic contribution to post-war northern British Columbia. During this era, Indians, activists, and sympathetic Whites fought for the liberalization of Native drinking laws and the culturally deterministic preconceptions that motivated such legislation. Finally, newspaper reportage and public perceptions influenced, and to some degree shaped, public discourse on issues of racial discrimination as well as on Native political protest and activism. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I owe a debt of gratitude to many people for providing a tremendous deal of help and assistance throughout my writing of this dissertation. First and foremost, I would like to thank my advisor and mentor Dr. Ted Binnema for his knowledge and support. Ted always made himself available to help me through the more trying parts of my thesis and to offer me advice. It was a privilege to work under his guidance as his constant encouragement and enthusiasm in my research challenged me to be the best historian I could be and to write the best thesis I could write. Ted’s passion for history is infectious, and I am grateful for the fact that this enthusiasm rubbed off on me throughout the course of my undergraduate and graduate studies. I can only hope that someday I will, through hard work, reach his level of expertise in the discipline. I would also like to thank the many people who provided financial support which enabled me to conduct my research and complete this thesis. I would like to thank the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and Daphne Baldwin (George W. Baldwin, QC, Graduate Scholarship) for your generosity as, without it, this thesis would not have taken the shape it did – or taken shape at all. I am also grateful to the staff at the libraries, museums, and archives in Prince George, Vanderhoof, Smithers, Terrace, Prince Rupert, and Victoria for the assistance I received when researching. In particular, I would like to thank Jean Eiers-Page at the Prince Rupert City & Regional Archives for her enthusiastic support for my project while I was in the town. Similarly, I am also extremely grateful to Tyler McCreary, Eric Holdijk, and the staff at Smithers’ Bulkley-Valley Museum for helping me in my research and for sharing the evidence collected in the Shared Histories Project with me. I would have never been able to share, or even find, many of the leads and stories discussed within this dissertation’s pages without your support and your interest in my research. I also thank the members of my committee: Dr. Jonathan Swainger, Dr. Agnes Pawloska-Mainville, my external examiner Dr. Michael Murphy, and my defense chair Dr. Kevin Hutchings for providing valuable feedback and insights. Their advice helped me ensure that this thesis was the best possible piece of research and scholarship I could write. Lastly, I would like to thank my family and friends for their unwavering support in my project and for keeping me humble. Although it was hard to hear that this thesis would probably not reach the gold podium of the New York Times’ list of book sales despite my best efforts, I think this rather subtle let down allowed me to more properly anchor my expectations and research to reality. Any faults remaining in this work are entirely my own as well as anyone who had anything to do with my thesis during its inception. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ................................................................................................................................................. ii Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................................. iii Table of Contents ............................................................................................................................... iv Introduction .......................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter 1 – The “Little Rock of the North”: Indian Segregation and the Transnationality of the Civil Rights Movement ................................................................................................. 18 Chapter 2 – “Although I’m an Indian by Birth I’m a Canadian Citizen”: Blurring the Lines Between “Indian” and “Citizen” ........................................................................................ 46 Chapter 3 – “Now We’re as Good as White People!” Fighting for Liquor Equality, 1951 1962 ....................................................................................................................................... 63 Chapter 4 – “Just How Misleading a Straight News Item Can Be”: The Role of Newspapers in Shaping Public Discourse on Anti-Native Prejudice .................................................. 97 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................ 132 Bibliography ...................................................................................................................................... 134 iv Introduction Bridget A. Moran, a prominent social worker and activist in northern British Columbia, criticized the editors of the Prince George Citizen on November 8, 1956, for claiming that the region’s Indians lived as equals to their White neighbours.1 In her letter to the editor Moran wrote: You state that Indians mingle freely with Whites on our buses and trains, and in stores, theatres and restaurants. Might I suggest that you conduct a discreet survey of the hotels and restaurants in this northern area, particularly in some of the towns west of here, and study their policies in respect to service of Natives. I believe that some of the facts you might glean from such a survey would be both startling and disturbing.2 One year earlier, Moran had personally encountered the negative effects of racial segregation when visiting Vanderhoof with Indian clients from the neighbouring Stoney Creek reserve. When Moran asked her Native colleagues to join her at a local café, they told her that the establishment refused to serve Indians like so many other facilities in the village. Moran recounted her unsuccessful attempt to rally her comrades into action: “I started to suggest that we go in, Irish and Indian together, and make a kind of Custer’s Last Stand against this racism. Midway through my pleas, I stopped; the looks of horror on their faces told me a million stories of discrimination, humiliation, fear.”3 1 In a historical study of racial discrimination such as the present one, the terms “Indian” and “Native” must be used rather than more contemporary terms. Commentators and activists during this period of study, whether Aboriginal or not, used the terms “Indian” or “Native” to refer to people who were thought of as such. Similarly, due to the episodic nature of these protests, this project had the difficult task of differentiating, and thus labelling, who was an “activist” – and who was not. Although numerous people engaged with this discourse during studied era, many limited their protests to an occasional letter to a local newspaper. Consequently, then, for the purposes of this historical study, an “activist” is defined as a person who had a sustained engagement with Indian issues throughout the era – whether their efforts were limited to the arena of racial discrimination. 2 Bridget A. Moran, Letter to the Editor, “Status of the Indian” Prince George Citizen, November 8, 1956, 2. 3 Bridget Moran, Stoney Creek Woman: The Story of Mary John (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2007), 15-16. 1 Moran’s encounters with racial segregation and discrimination reflected rampant anti-Native prejudice in northern British Columbia after the Second World War. In 1949, Maisie Hurley of the Native Brotherhood condemned businesses in Vanderhoof for refusing to serve Native customers. In 1952, Chief Harold Sinclair of the Kitwanga reserve protested the decision of Smithers’ hotels to refuse Native business by going “to the local jail to find a cell in which to sleep.”4 Indians in Smithers were also forced to use separate entrances at a local hotel.5 In 1954, Andrew Paull, a Native activist, testified that Indians in Burns Lake could not sit at the tables in local restaurants and were only served at the counter. Furthermore, he noted that Indians were “herded into a corner like a bunch of dogs” when going to the local theatre.6 Native people in Prince Rupert were also segregated in the town’s theatre.7 H.B. Hawthorn, in his 1955 report on the living conditions of the province’s Indians, observed that non-Native communities made the legal differences between them and Indians “acute.”8 And in 1958, more than one thousand rioters besieged Prince Rupert’s police barracks and city hall in what would later be considered a protest against discriminatory liquor legislation. These examples illustrate the struggle of Native people to overcome racial prejudice and find a new place for themselves in Canada’s rapidly changing post-war landscape. In this pursuit, Native people employed several tools to bolster their demands and to challenge the culturally entrenched stereotypes held by mainstream society that underpinned Indians’ social ostracization. Indians and commentators connected local incidents of racial 4 “Discrimination Decried by Indian Chief,” Native Voice, June 1952, 11. 5 Tyler McCreary, Shared Histories: Witsuwit’en-Settler Relations in Smithers, British Columbia, 1913-1973 (Smithers, BC: Creekstone Press Ltd, 2018), 114. 6 “Magistrate Roasted for Backward Policy toward B.C. Interior Natives,” Native Voice, May 1954, 3. 7 John Sutton Lutz, Makuk: A New History of Aboriginal-White Relations (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008), 254. 8 H.B. Hawthorn, C.S. Belshaw, and S.M. Jamieson, The Indians of British Columbia: A Survey of Social and Economic Conditions (Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 1955), 856. 2 discrimination to the broader trend of global civil rights movements and decolonization which swept across the post-war world. At the same time, Indians buttressed their protests around the newly articulated rhetoric of human rights to better position themselves to demand equal citizenship rights. This interplay between racial oppression and liberation is relevant and significant to the historical scholarship for several reasons. First, there has been no attempt in the scholarship or the non-academic literature to provide a comprehensive analysis of this history. While Coates and Morrison observed in 2005 that “official policies of segregation kept communities apart across much of the North; unofficial racism drove severe wedges between the ethnic groups,” the scholars did not specify where, how, or why these practices were enacted.9 Similarly, John Sutton Lutz argued in his study of Native-White relations in British Columbia that “racism was so intense in parts of BC that there was a virtual apartheid.”10 Although Lutz addressed numerous examples throughout the region, he neglected the history of the Native political protest which challenged racial discrimination in northern British Columbia. Likewise, Robert A. Campbell’s investigation into the catalytic effects of the 1958 Prince Rupert riot on the eventual granting of liquor privileges to the province’s Indians in 1962 does not connect the event to the broader context or framework which shaped Native political protest during this period.11 This limited scope is also prevalent in non-academic histories. Although celebrity journalist Craig Oliver lamented that “Natives occupied the lowest ranks in Prince Rupert’s caste system … [and] at the Capital Theatre movie house and at most churches, Natives 9 K.S. Coates and W.R. Morrison, “Reconciliation in Northern British Columbia?: Future Prospects for Aboriginal-Newcomer Relations,” Northern Review no.25-26 (Summer 2005): 27. 10 Lutz, Makuk, 254. 11 Robert A. Campbell, “A ‘Fantastic Rigmarole’: Deregulating Aboriginal Drinking in British Columbia, 194562,” BC Studies 141 (Spring 2004): 81-104. 3 were permitted to sit only in specially designed seats, the worst in the house at the Capital,” his recollections lack a larger perspective that comes with directed research.12 Similarly, the story of veteran Dick Patrick of the Stoney Creek reserve and his struggles, as well as triumphs, against the racist practices of Vanderhoof restaurants has been documented by journalists.13 However, this treatment of Patrick’s protests does not address the lesser known accounts of racial exclusion that his Native neighbours encountered. Even Moran’s in-depth recollections of racial discrimination in Vanderhoof did not acknowledge the systematic and pervasive nature of anti-Native prejudice in the region and how that prejudice influenced how the people of Vanderhoof discussed racial discrimination. American historians have recently investigated the history of anti-Native prejudice and Indian political protest in the western United States. Gregory Nickerson explored the impact that mass communication and news media made in challenging anti-Native prejudice in Sheridan, Wyoming, through a study of the town’s All-American Indian Days and its call to strengthen relations between White and Native people.14 Similarly, historians such as Jessica Leslie Arnett, Terrence M. Cole, and Peter Metcalfe have explored the campaign that the Alaskan Native Brotherhood and Alaskan territorial authorities launched to combat informal policies of Jim Crow-style segregation which culminated in the passing of the state’s Anti-Discrimination Act in February of 1945 which criminalized racial discrimination.15 12 Craig Oliver, Oliver Twist: The Life and Times of an Unapologetic Newshound (Toronto: Penguin Group, 2011), 3. 13 Samantha Wright Allen, “First Nations Soldiers an ‘Untold Story,’” Prince George Citizen, November 9, 2015, https://www.princegeorgecitizen.com/news/local-news/first-nations-soldiers-an-untold-story-1.2107252; Sam Redding, “Remembrance Day Ceremonies at School,” Vanderhoof Omineca Express, November 13, 2013, 16. 14 Gregory Nickerson, “All-American Indian Days and the Miss America Pageant,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 67, no.2 (Summer 2017): 3-26. 15 Peter Metcalfe, A Dangerous Idea: The Alaska Native Brotherhood and the Struggle for Indigenous Rights (Fairbanks, AK: University of Alaska, 2014), 58–59; Terrence M. Cole, “Jim Crow in Alaska: The Passage of the Alaska Equal Rights Act of 1945,” Western Historical Quarterly 23 (November 1992): 429–49; Jessica Leslie Arnett, “Unsettled Rights in Territorial Alaska: Native Land, Sovereignty, and Citizenship From the Indian Reorganization Act to Termination,” The Western Historical Quarterly 48 (Autumn 2017): 233-254. 4 These historians also investigated the multi-faceted approach that Native protestors took when challenging race-based policies of exclusion. For example, Arnett argued that Native activists advanced a model of United States citizenship which argued that “sovereignty, selfgovernment, collective land ownership, and economic self-determination” were necessary for citizenship.16 Second, although intended to fill this gap in the scholarly literature, this thesis also intersects with the limits of the existing scholarship as a critique on some of the assumptions that underpin this existing analysis. While it may not have been her intention to do so, Moran’s metaphorical envisioning of Vanderhoof and the neighbouring Stoney Creek Reserve as existing in “two solitudes” establishes a misleading framework for scholarly research and an incomplete historical narrative.17 Although some living in Vanderhoof, and other communities in northern British Columbia may have wished – and actively endeavoured to ensure – that the reserve and Indians existed in isolation from their village, the evidence suggests the opposite: Native people were active patrons of business, community leaders, and engaged citizens throughout this era. Perhaps this dynamic is what Elizabeth Furniss was alluding to when she argued that that the flaw behind this segregationist approach is that it portrays an inaccurate reality where homogenous ethnic groups existed along parallel, yet never interconnecting, lines of historical development.18 Envisioning White/Indian relations within the framework of a single, yet dynamic, cultural system allows us to appreciate the formation, articulation, and adaptation of racial ideologies in the region that motivated acts of anti-Native discrimination. Racism, as Audrey 16 Arnett, “Unsettled Rights in Territorial Alaska,” 234. 17 Bridget Moran, Judgement at Stoney Creek (Vancouver: Tillacum Library, 1990), 29. 18 Elizabeth Furniss, The Burden of History: Colonialism and the Frontier Myth in a Rural Canadian Community (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1999), ix.; See also Karla Greer, “Race, Riot, and Rail: The Process of Racialisation in Prince Rupert, B.C., 1906-1919” (M.A. diss., Queen’s University, 1994), 6. 5 Smedley contends, “does not require the presence of empirically determinable cultural differences,” as it readily employs narrative and mythos to describe human behaviour and cultural peculiarities.19 Furthermore, a key component of racial ideologies is the ethnocentric belief within White society that cultural determinants stymied the assimilation of their Native neighbours into mainstream Canadian public life – a conviction which moulded the public’s view on Indian drinking for example.20 In turn, these racialized constructions of Indians influenced the manner in which non-Native business owners, as well as the public, interacted with their Native neighbours. As Niels Winther Braroe observes, “esteem must come both from oneself and from others, since these two sources are not independent of one another.”21 While Native people could find social respect amongst their peers, negotiating their identity with the non-Native portion of the public was exactly that: a negotiation. In addition, this thesis addresses the neglect that northern British Columbia has experienced in historical scholarship.22 This thesis challenges the tendency to treat the province’s northern “hinterlands” as isolated, static, and detached from the currents of global history. To use Moran’s phraseology, this thesis asserts that “rural” northern British Columbia and the province’s “urban” south, or more significantly, northern British Columbia and the global stage, did not exist in “two solitudes.” Rather, this thesis supports Scott Rutherford’s contention that local acts of Native political protest in Canada throughout the post-war period constituted a “global history written through the windows of 19 Audrey Smedley, Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview (Boulder: Worldview Press, 1993), 31. 20 This thesis refers to Native and non-Native peoples as “racial” groups rather than the more accepted term “ethnic groups” – which Smedley defines as a distinct group of people who possess and see themselves as possessing a unique “cultural features, a separate history, and a specific socio-cultural identity – to reflect the language employed by those in the post-war era. Smedley, Race in North America, 30. 21 Niels Winther Braroe, Indian & White: Self-Image and Interaction in a Canadian Plains Community (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975), 3. 22 R.W. Sandwell, “Introduction: Finding Rural British Columbia,” in Beyond City Limits: Rural History in British Columbia, ed. R.W. Sandwell (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1999), 3-17. 6 local experiences.”23 Commentators drew inspiration by, and drew analogies with, contemporary civil rights movements to bolster their demands and legitimize their grievances. However, as Rutherford observed in his study of Native protest against racial discrimination in 1960s-1970s Kenora, Ontario, the history of protest inherently contains local peculiarities specific to that time and era. Although Indians in both northern British Columbia and Kenora drew parallels between their experiences with discrimination and the plight of Blacks in the southern United States, the two Native communities employed different tactics to fight segregation and were socially excluded for different reasons. While Indians in Kenora used public marches and other acts of organized protest, their compatriots in northern British Columbia did not. To elaborate on this example further, Indians in northern British Columbia encountered racial discrimination in part owing to the provincial government’s reluctance to pursue Ottawa’s 1951 liberalization of liquor laws: a problem that protestors in Ontario during the late 1960s and early 1970s did not encounter. So, although the history of Native segregation in northern British Columbia is a global history written through windows of local experiences, it is also a local history written through the windows of global experiences. Third, this thesis critically explores the very medium in which this public debate was held. Historians such as Holly Nathan and Scott Sheffield identified the active role that newspapers and the press media played in shaping public discourse about Native people after the Second World War.24 This point is especially relevant to this thesis as newspapers are a major source of the primary evidence presented here. Although newspaper editors 23 Scott Rutherford, “Canada’s Other Red Scare: Rights, Decolonization, and Indigenous Political Protest in the Global Sixties” (PhD diss., Queen’s University, 2011), 2. 24 Holly Nathan, “Building Dams, Constructing Stories: The Press, the Sekani, and the Peace River Dam, 19571969” (M.A. diss., University of Northern British Columbia, 2009); Scott R. Sheffield, The Red Man’s on the Warpath: The Image of the “Indian” and the Second World War (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2004). 7 proudly boasted of objective reporting, deciphering the reality of Indians’ experiences from editors’ claims can be problematic. As Lorna Roth observed in her study of Native-run radio broadcasting in Canada, “if challenging the obvious distortions in media representations is one thing, the task of identifying and documenting those far more subtle absences is quite another.”25 Consequently, this thesis has the difficult task of oftentimes looking at the plethora of experiences endured by Native people through the lens of an equally diverse press, some of which defended segregationist practices, challenged discrimination, or were indifferent to its existence. As a result, while this thesis critiques the role of the media, it must to some extent heed their version of events. Although Native-produced sources like oral interviews and publications such as the Native Voice were consulted in this project to qualify specific events, for some incidences non-Native reportage is the only source of evidence. This raises the crucial issue regarding the coverage of the available sources. While efforts have been made by various organizations to preserve this region’s newspaper publications, such as Vanderhoof’s Bill Silver Digital Newspaper Archive and the online digitization of Prince George’s various newspapers, there are several gaps in the existing sources. For example, many issues of Vanderhoof’s Nechako Chronicle during the years between 1945 and 1959 are unaccounted for in the town’s local archives or in the BC Archives in Victoria. Several editions of the Prince George Citizen are available only at the Victoria archives. Similarly, there are gaps in the documentary evidence in terms of municipal council minutes. For example, the village council minutes for Burns Lake have either gone missing or were never preserved. As a result, while this thesis is an attempt to 25 Lorna Roth, Something New in the Air: The Story of First Peoples Broadcasting in Canada (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2005), 62. 8 establish a documentary base for future research projects in this field, it has been influenced by the fragmentary nature of documentary evidence. Finally, this thesis untangles the braided histories that contribute to the story of racial discrimination and segregation in post-war northern British Columbia. Equality did not come to Native people in 1949 with the provincial vote, in 1951 when Ottawa repealed the Indian Act’s more coercive measures, in 1960 with federal enfranchisement, or in 1962 when the provincial government abolished its restrictions on native alcohol consumption. Discrimination against Native people continues to this day. However, these post-war developments, although not abolishing race-based prejudice, did call into question the assumptions that motivated such discrimination. Similarly, these developments also illustrate the multiplicity of hurdles that Native people had to overcome throughout the post-war era in challenging racial discrimination and their second-class citizenship. The legal right to drink outside of one’s reserve, for example, was just as important as earning the vote in asserting Native people’s newly forged identity as equal citizens since both restrictions served to differentiate status Indians from other Canadians. In short, the history of Native segregation, discrimination, and activism in northern British Columbia in the immediate post-Second World War era is intimately connected to their fight for equal citizenship. This study argues that Native people challenged racial discrimination and segregation by asserting their claims to citizenship whilst simultaneously challenging the structural and social obstacles that permitted their exclusion from the public sphere. It demonstrates this decades-long struggle thematically by the major flashpoints which marked this period of discrimination and activism. However, it is important to acknowledge that these protests and bouts of political activism were episodic in nature as there was no unifying force that linked all these separate incidences into a single and cohesive campaign. Chapter 1 argues that 9 Indians and sympathetic Whites in northern British Columbia drew inspiration from American Civil Rights activists to bolster demands for citizenship. Chapter 2 shows that Indians in northern British Columbia leveraged their burgeoning political rights, such as provincial enfranchisement, and their growing economic power in the region, to assert their claims for equal citizenship. Chapter 3 argues that the gradual overturning of the legally enforced prohibition on Native drinking from 1951, when Indians were initially allowed into beer parlours, to 1962 challenged widely held assumptions that had been used to justify discrimination against Indians. Finally, Chapter 4 asserts that the media played an active role in shaping public discourse surrounding racial discrimination, segregation, and Native activism and protest. However, this chapter also argues that the media’s reportage on these issues was in turn influenced by the public’s overly racialized perception of Indians. While racial discrimination was certainly not limited to this era or region, for a variety of reasons the choice was made to limit this project’s research to this time and place. In terms of the project’s geographic scope, Native-White relations in rural northern British Columbia (from Prince George west to Prince Rupert) were different than in the multiethnic metropolises in the province’s south simply due to the larger percentage of Native residents. For example, Prince Rupert’s Native population during the 1950s was proportionately the largest of any city in British Columbia – of the town’s ten thousand inhabitants, three thousand were Indians.26 This population difference is probably closely tied to the prevalence of anti-Native prejudice.27 As Rosanne Waters contends in her study of discrimination against African Canadian communities, “Jim Crow style discrimination was 26 Ron Thornber, “Public Barred at Probe into Riot,” Vancouver Sun, August 8, 1958, 46. 27 Terrence M. Cole observes that a similar phenomenon occurred in Alaska as Jim Crow policies were directed at Alaskan Natives, who outnumbered the territory’s White population, rather than at Blacks, who were so few that they encountered “little organized discrimination.” Cole, “Jim Crow in Alaska,” 429. 10 often, though not exclusively, most apparent and pronounced in locales” where the target population was large in comparison to the perpetrator’s.28 Elizabeth Furniss similarly asserts that this tension between Native and non-Native people was “reinforced by the openly negative and prejudicial attitudes about Aboriginal people that prevail in these settings.”29 Similarly, temporal restrictions were placed, to use Scott Rutherford’s words, to “explore how the post-1945 language of rights and global anti-colonial liberation movements” shaped local protests.30 Although segregation of Native people occurred before the Second World War and continued well beyond the 1960s, the way Native communities resisted it during this era was unique. During the study period Indians and activists appealed to the discourse of human rights and anti-racism that emerged at the war’s conclusion. They also incorporated notions of “Indian Rights” – an inclusion which challenges the assumptions of scholars such as Alan Cairns who incorrectly assumes that this rhetoric was unique to the 1969 White Paper debacle and the global nature of political protest in the 1960s and 1970s.31 Therefore, this paper supports the argument made by British Columbian scholars Holly Nathan and Paul Tennant that Native activism predated 1969. It is also crucial to define racial segregation and discrimination in the context of northern British Columbia. Although Indians and activists in the region frequently referred to local incidents of racial discrimination as a Canadian version of the Jim Crow laws of the southern United States, the race-based policies of exclusion or segregation practiced by businesses in this region were never codified in any sort of legislation – except for drinking regulations as discussed in Chapter 3. In Vanderhoof restaurant owners personally decided 28 Rosanne Waters, “African Canadian Anti-Discrimination Activism and the Transnational Civil Rights Movement, 1945-1965,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 24, no. 2 (2013): 393. 29 Furniss, The Burden of History, 4. 30 Rutherford, “Canada’s Other Red Scare”, 18. 31 Alan Cairns, Citizens Plus: Aboriginal Peoples and the Canadian State (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2000), 7-8. 11 to refuse Indians service in their establishments. 32 Thus, this thesis defines acts of racial segregation and discrimination in northern British Columbia according to the concept of “Jaime Crow” as described by historian Albert M. Camarillo, which was “anchored more by social practice and cultural customs, though the institutional policies and practices [it] shaped did arise to restrict opportunities and rights.”33 Consequently, this thesis will not discuss discrimination as it pertains to employment or education in the form of residential schools, despite the abundance of evidence for both.34 Consequently, this study also examines why business owners excluded Indians. Defenders of racial segregation, as Chin Jou observed of similar proponents in post-war New York, may have viewed restaurants, diners, and beer parlours as fragile venues that “had to be preserved as racially ‘pure’ spaces lest intimate exchanges between the races occur.”35 As the numerous related examples in this study suggest, the very act of public dining was a political venture insofar as Native people asserted and reinforced their position in predominantly non-Native domains – an incursion which “could call into question the entire logic of racial hierarchy.”36 Although Elizabeth Herbin-Triant’s study of segregationist 32 Esmeralda M. A. Thornhill, “So Seldom for Us, So Often Against Us: Blacks and the Law in Canada,” Journal of Black Studies 38, no. 3 (January 2008): 321-337. 33 Albert M. Camarillo, “Navigating Segregated Life in America’s Racial Borderhoods, 1910s-1950s,” Journal of American History 100, no. 3 (December 2013): 650; Alex Lichtenstein similarly observed the difference between the “total system of racial domination that reigned in the South and the myriad yet permeable forms of racial discrimination pervasive in the rest of the nation.” Alex Lichtenstein, “The Other Civil Rights Movement and the Problem of Southern Exceptionalism,” Journal of the Historical Society 11, no. 3 (September 2011): 370. 34 Discrimination against Indians through employment often manifested itself in an explicit aversion to hiring Native workers or through the promotion of one’s establishment of having “all White help.” “Situations Wanted,” Prince George Citizen July 19, 1951, 12; “Advertisement,” Smithers Interior News, May 10, 1944, 4; Barrie Wells, “Indian Agent Here: This man would like to lose his job,” Prince George Citizen, December 5, 1963, 1; Lutz, Makuk, 254. Commentators, Indians, or activists also argued that the residential school system was akin to the forces of segregation prevalent in the southern United States. “Segregation of Indians,” Burns Lake Review, June 8, 1950, 2; “Churchman Says B.C. Has Indian Color Line,” Prince George Citizen, May 19, 1960, 1; Bridget A. Moran, “Segregation Here,” Prince George Citizen, September 12, 1956, 2. 35 Chin Jou, “Neither Welcomed, Nor Refused: Race and Restaurants in Postwar New York City,” Journal of Urban History 40, no. 2 (2014): 232. 36 Ibid: 232-233. 12 law in North Carolina focused primarily on economic factors, her contention that support for segregation amongst lower and middle-class Whites stemmed from their fear of economic competition can apply to northern British Columbia.37 Conversely, Renisa Mawani argues that the act of working with Indians and other ethnic minorities not only damaged the “virtuous qualities of White masculinity”, but also demonstrated that Whites engaged in these sites of racialized labour had a “tenuous hold on racial privilege” which separated them from their less-esteemed colleagues.38 This logic could also contribute to the aversion White customers felt sharing facilities and services with Native people. It is also possible that many non-Native business owners clung to discriminatory policies as a sort of last vestige of citizenly superiority against the rapid uplift of Native people. Conversely, some businesses that practiced segregation may have been inspired to do so by a form of benevolence – however mutated by conceptions of White paternalism – that presumed a need to protect the “vulnerable” Indian race from the evils of White society.39 However, it must be noted that any attempt to pin down the underlying motivations for segregation would be an imprecise exercise as the justifications business owners employed in defense of their policies was as varied as their businesses. Similarly, one cannot assume that these business owners honestly expressed their motivations when asked or challenged. Just as the reasons for segregation and discrimination varied, so too did the ways in which these practices were implemented. For example, restaurant owners sometimes prohibited Native people from sitting at their diner’s tables and only served them at the 37 Elizabeth A. Herbin-Triant, “Race and Class Friction in North Carolina Neighborhoods: How Campaigns for Residential Segregation Law Divided Middling and Elite Whites in Winston-Salem and North Carolina’s Countryside, 1912–1915,” Journal of Southern History 83, no. 3 (2017): 537. 38 Renisa Mawani, Colonial Proximities: Crossracial Encounters and Juridical Truths in British Columbia, 1871-1921 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011), 67. 39 Ibid, 68. 13 counter – as was the case in Burns Lake.40 Similarly, a Native woman living in Smithers remembered how she was not allowed to sit in the back of a local restaurant with her White friends and was instead forced to drink her beverage at the front of the establishment.41 Other times, business owners forced Native patrons to enter the premises through separate entrances – as veteran Dick Patrick recalled of grocery stores in Vanderhoof, or the experience of Indians when visiting the Smithers Hotel.42 Native people also recalled having to sit in separate seating while at local theatres in both Burns Lake and Prince Rupert.43 A Native man in Burns Lake testified that, in addition to being barring from certain stores, he “was not permitted to walk on the same side of the street as White people.”44 One café in Vanderhoof hung a sign on its front which simply read “No Indians Allowed.”45 In instances when Native patrons transgressed these policies, business owners would often demand the trespasser leave, and if they refused, contact the police.46 There are several crucial lessons that should be gleaned from these practices. First, as scholars Elizabeth Furniss and David Stymeist contend, segregation was sometimes the result of voluntary decisions amongst Native people.47 Understandably, tensions between Native and non-Native patrons had the potential to create implicit and informal zones of 40 “Magistrate Roasted for Backward Policy Toward B.C. Interior Natives,” Native Voice, May 1954, 3. 41 McCreary, Shared Histories, 112. 42 Kitty Sparrow, “Stoney Creek Band Mourns Passing of Second World War Veteran, Dick Patrick,” The Indian Voice, December 1980, 1; McCreary, Shared Histories, 114. 43 Craig Oliver, Oliver Twist: The Life and Times of an Unapologetic Newshound (Toronto: Penguin Group, 2011), 3; “Magistrate Roasted for Backward Policy Toward B.C. Interior Natives,” Native Voice, May 1954, 3. 44 Pius Charlie, Statutory Declaration in the Matter of John Furlong and Immaculata School sworn before Warren Chapman, 1 May 2012, as found at https://www.scribd.com/document/291181568/Pius-Charlieaffidavit. It is important to note that no other documentary sources have been found to corroborate this testimony. As such, future research into this topic will necessitate the use of extensive oral interviews to understand the lived experiences of Native people in these communities – a process that falls outside the scope of this project. 45 Lisa Striegler, Saik’uz and Settlers: A Weave of Local History: Expanded Play Program, An Initiative of the Good Neighbours Committee (Prince George: College of New Caledonia Press, 2011), 15. 46 Moran, Stoney Creek Woman, 36. 47 Furniss, The Burden of History, 10; David H. Stymeist, Ethnics and Indians: Social Relations in a Northwestern Ontario Town (Toronto: Peter Martin Associates Limited, 1975), 70. 14 segregation within an establishment. Craig Oliver expressed his opinion that while Indians were seated in special sections when attending Prince Rupert’s theatres or churches, the Natives themselves “felt ownership in having their own seating and did not want to sit with White people anyway.”48 However, Oliver’s statement could be interpreted as justifying why Native people were ostracized in the first place or as deflecting any remorse he later felt about the situation. Mary John similarly remembers her community’s collective aversion to entering select establishments in Vanderhoof for fear of humiliation, eviction, or legal punishment.49 Second, it is important to remember that the employees of a given business did not always share their employer’s wish to limit, or outright deny, Native trade. Scholars such as Gregory Nickerson have detailed the subversion of employees in simply ignoring their employer’s racially discriminatory policies when they were free from managerial supervision. Other employees were more vocal in their protests.50 One Vanderhoof resident recalled her difficulty in “trying to understand why she was not allowed to serve her friends who were First Nations.”51 This effort was short-lived, however, as “she did not last long in the job.”52 Finally, Native people fiercely contested these mainly extra-judicial practices. In an interview conducted for the Shared Histories Project in Smithers, Charlotte Euverman recalled how she, her sister, and her mother quit working for the Hudson Hotel after learning that the restaurant had barred Native customers.53 According to Euverman, when the boss declared that “we do not serve Native people here,” her mother responded with, “oh, well 48 Oliver, Oliver Twist, 3. 49 Moran, Stoney Creek Woman, 36. 50 Nickerson, “All-American Indian Days”, 8. 51 Striegler, Saik’uz and Settlers, 15. 52 Ibid. 53 McCreary, Shared Histories, 121. 15 you do not have Native people working for you anymore either.”54 Another such example was the unique defense that an Alaskan Native and a local Indian woman employed when they were asked to move to the “Indians” section at a Prince Rupert theatre. Reverend Peter Kelly reported in the May 1947 edition of the Native Voice that when the usher demanded an Alaskan Indian and his wife move, despite charging them the same price as everyone else, the couple appealed to the manager on the grounds they were Alaskan citizens. The manager promptly apologized and allowed them to sit where they wanted.55 The couples’ stance against the theatre’s segregating seating may have been emboldened by the recent victory of Alaskan Natives in pressing their government to legislate against the informal practice of racial discrimination.56 A few years later, Jane Adams, the daughter of the Native Brotherhood’s former President Alfred Adams, challenged the theatre’s policies after she accidently sat outside the segregated section. When the projectionist refused to start the film and sent a young usher to move her, Jane adamantly refused to move – a standoff that Jane later recalled as embarrassing for both her and the young man. Jane’s persistence paid off, however, as the projectionist soon relented, and the movie began shortly thereafter.57 In summary, this confrontation between anti-Native prejudice and Indians is the narrative focal point of this thesis. This study contends that Indians challenged racial segregation and discrimination in post-war northern British Columbia by demanding equal citizenship rights while simultaneously challenging the assumptions that underpinned their social exclusion. Similarly, this project contributes to a small but growing scholarship relating 54 Ibid. 55 “Ottawa Special – Experience Pays Off,” Native Voice, May 1947, 9. 56 Cole, “Jim Crow in Alaska,” 429–49; Arnett, “Unsettled Rights in Territorial Alaska,” 233-254. 57 Eric Jamieson, The Native Voice: The Story of How Maisie Hurley and Canada’s First Aboriginal Newspaper Changed a Nation (Halfmoon Bay, BC: Caitlin Press, 2016), 84. 16 to post-war Native protest and racial segregation by providing a new perspective in which to study questions of race, citizenship, and colonialism in northern British Columbia. 17 Chapter 1 – The “Little Rock of the North”: Indian Segregation and The Transnationality of the Civil Rights Movement Writing in 1949, Maisie Hurley, publisher of the Native Voice newspaper, condemned the “unchristian discrimination shown towards Indians” by Vanderhoof’s restaurants, hotels, and cafes which refused to serve Native customers. Although the editors of the Prince George Citizen considered the allegation worthy of a front-page story, Hurley’s denunciation of the village’s businesses did not elicit any tangible reaction or outcry from the public.1 General indifference to this accusation may have stemmed from the Citizen’s slanted reporting on the story as the editors sarcastically described Hurley as being on the “warpath” for her Indian friends – language which resonated with the stereotypical image of the fierce and savage Indian warrior.2 Conversely, while Hurley’s indictment possibly evoked sympathy amongst the communities’ inhabitants, public support may have been expressed in private conversations rather than through a letter to a newspaper or through public protest. Whatever the cause behind this seeming apathy, Hurley’s 1949 indictment of Vanderhoof quickly faded from public awareness vis-à-vis newspaper reportage and was finally laid to rest two weeks later when the village’s newspaper, the Nechako Chronicle, refuted Hurley’s claim by saying that the O.K. Hotel and Café had become the “headquarters of all Indians stopping over” in the village.3 Hurley criticized the village’s policy of racial segregation nine years later in support of Peter Henslowe, a Prince George lawyer and a member of the Cariboo Young Progressive Conservative Association. However, unlike in 1949, her denunciation immediately sparked 1 “Indians’ Champion Whams Vanderhoof,” Prince George Citizen, May 26, 1949, 1. Unfortunately, the Bill Silver Digital Newspaper Archive, along with the Vanderhoof Museum, do not hold many of the Nechako Chronicle’s publications from the period between 1949 and 1959. 2 Ibid. 3 “O.K. Hotel Always Caters to Indians,” Prince George Citizen, June 9, 1949, 19. The Citizen reprinted the Nechako Chronicle’s story a few days after it was published in Vanderhoof. The Citizen’s reprinting of the story was used here as the original is not held at the Vanderhoof Museum or the BC Archives in Victoria. 18 controversy. The activist’s disturbing accusation, typed in bold font, that “Indian segregation in the region was as bad as the segregation of Negroes in the southern United States” dominated the front page of the 22 January 1958 edition of the Prince George Citizen.4 Hurley, described more respectfully this time by the editors as a “life time crusader for the rights of Indians,” chastised her fellow Canadians for smugly decrying racial segregation in the southern United States while placidly accepting similar practices in their own communities.5 Vanderhoof’s police corporal, D.G. Williams, when pressed by the Citizen’s journalists, stated that although racial discrimination was rampant in the village a “few years ago, it does not exist anymore.”6 The corporal’s reluctant admission was matched by the province’s Indian Commissioner’s disbelief in claiming that, although he had heard of difficulties in Vanderhoof, which he classified as “behavioural problems,” he had not realized the situation “was so serious.”7 The local Indian agent declined to comment on the issue on the grounds that, although he had heard of similar incidents, the difficulty in verifying their authenticity led him to believe that Hurley’s allegation had been exaggerated.8 The chairman of the Vanderhoof Village Commission similarly rejected Hurley’s statement as unfounded and, in an opportunistic impulse to promote the village, invited the public to visit the community and see for themselves the lack of discrimination.9 The shockwaves from Hurley’s accusation quickly reached the provincial government when W.H. Murray, a Social Credit member from Prince Rupert, raised the 4 “In Some Parts of B.C. Indian Segregation as Bad as Negroes in U.S.: Declares Publisher of Paper for Indians” Prince George Citizen, January 22, 1958, 1. 5 Ibid., “Discrimination in B.C. Rapped,” Native Voice, February 1958, 3. 6 “In Some Parts of B.C. Indian Segregation as Bad as Negroes in U.S.: Declares Publisher of Paper for Indians” Prince George Citizen, January 22, 1958, 1. 7 “Discrimination in B.C. Rapped,” Native Voice, February 1958, 3. 8 “In Some Parts of B.C. Indian Segregation as Bad as Negroes in U.S.: Declares Publisher of Paper for Indians” Prince George Citizen, January 22, 1958, 1; “Discrimination in B.C. Rapped,” Native Voice, February 1958, 3. 9 “Vanderhoof Indians Not Discriminated Against,” Prince George Citizen, January 24, 1958, 1. 19 troubling issue in legislature - picking up in the process Hurley’s invidious comparison between Canada and the United States. A hotelier himself, Murray reflected Hurley’s sentiments when he questioned how his colleagues “glibly criticized the segregation prevalent in the U.S. when we ourselves tolerate a similar practice here on our own doorstep.”10 He urged the British Columbia Indian Commissioner to address the issue, arguing that inaction would equate to “burying our heads in the sand” and would place the province in an “extremely bigoted and discriminatory light in the eyes of the world.” While news of Hurley’s statement reached Ottawa, the unwillingness of federal officials to consider the plight of Native people located in the obscure northern frontier of British Columbia muffled the shockwaves of these allegations.11 To be sure, Frank Howard, the NDP Member of Parliament from the Skeena riding, juxtaposed the commonplace yet erroneous belief that Canada served as a bastion of racial tolerance with “the events at Little Rock and the situation in South Africa” by testifying that he personally knew of cafes and hotels which refused Native patronage. Discrimination, Howard continued, was sometimes “expressed subtly, or is under the surface, but in other instances it is blatant and in the open.” B.R. Leboe, the Social Credit Member of Parliament in the Cariboo Region, responded to Howard’s attack by dismissing his claims as being “behind the times” – an exoneration of Vanderhoof made possible by the latest edition of the Prince George Citizen, which reported that the village had denied the allegations as unfounded. The argument between the two politicians ended when the Acting Minister of Citizenship and Immigration subsumed the claims of racial segregation into a much broader field of inquiry. Howard’s 10 For the notes in the following paragraph, see “Discrimination Against Indians Does Exist in B.C.,” Prince George Citizen, February 5, 1958, 1. 11 For the notes in the following paragraph, see Canada. Parliament. House of Commons. Debates. 23rd Parliament, 1st Session, Vol. 4 (January 30th – 31st, 1958): 4048 and 4130. 20 protest had been effectively silenced, and the voices of segregated Indians in the province’s northern interior were lost on the deaf ears of federal bureaucracy. Although Howard was shunned in Ottawa, the controversy forced the scrutinized communities to re-examine their relationship with their Native neighbours. Within weeks of the incident, Hurley cautiously lauded the village’s “reformation” regarding “their feelings towards the Indians” in an editorial of Native Voice.12 However, the activist voiced her doubts that the village’s sudden conversion was genuine – noting the community’s legacy of “terrible unfair discrimination” which made her wonder “whether a skunk can change its stripes so quickly.” Though it is difficult to assess the lasting impacts of Hurley’s comments on the village, the stark contrast between the silence of her 1949 accusation and the dramatic fallout following her 1958 condemnation raise important questions regarding the effectiveness of her rhetoric. Why was her 1949 attack on racial discrimination less successful in generating public controversy than her attempt in 1958? Although Hurley grounded her criticisms on the same line of evidence – that local businesses refused to serve local Indians – the difference in how she framed her comments may have contributed to the publicity the latter denunciation garnered. While her statements in 1949 appealed to a vague concept of religious morality and tolerance, her 1958 indictment deliberately and explicitly drew upon analogies between the experiences of Native people and the cruel prejudice that nine Black students encountered throughout the fall of 1957 when attending a high school in Little Rock, Arkansas – a struggle that captivated North American news reportage. 12 For the notes in the following paragraph, see Maisie Hurley, “This is Real Democracy,” Native Voice, February 1958, 4. 21 Hurley’s explicit reference to the plight of the Little Rock Nine reflected the growing prominence that transnational discourse, namely the American Civil Rights Movement, played in contextualizing Native confrontations with racial discrimination throughout postwar British Columbia. As Scott Rutherford observes in his study of Indian activism against racial segregation in 1960s to 1970s Kenora, Ontario: Native “political protests … is a global history written through the windows of local experiences.”13 This chapter argues that Indians, activists, and White commentators ascribed meaning to and understood protests against anti-Native discrimination in the framework of the contemporary civil rights movements and global hotspots of racial conflict. In turn, these symbolic and emotional connections served to resonate with a Canadian zeitgeist that had become increasingly critical of racial discrimination following the conclusion of the Second World War and increasingly sensitive to the country’s human rights reputation on the international stage. 14 However, it is important to recognize that the context in which Indians in northern British Columbia made connections between their experiences and the segregationist policies of the American south was vastly different than, for example, their compatriots in Kenora a decade later. In the case of latter, activists were privileged with the powers of retrospect in that the major victories of the American Civil Rights movement had already been achieved – which would reasonably serve to further galvanize their efforts. Likewise, activists in Kenora – residing near a centre of the American Indian Movement in the United States, mobilized against racial discrimination during an era in which Indian political protestors increasingly 13 Scott Rutherford, “Canada’s Other Red Scare: Rights, Decolonization, and Indigenous Political Protest in the Global Sixties” (PhD diss., Queen’s University, 2011), 2. 14 Rutherford, “Canada’s Other Red Scare,” 54, 135. 22 envisioned themselves as being a part of a larger, transnational, campaign for “anti-colonial liberation.”15 Similarly, it is crucial to acknowledge that the use of analogies with the American south in northern British Columbia – or in Canada in general – during the post-war era was not unique to Indian protestors. For example, Jonathan Swainger, in his study of the moral panic that engulfed post-war Prince George over the perceived rise of juvenile delinquency, observes that some teenagers expressed outrage by drawing parallels between their alleged persecution and the segregationist policies of the southern United States.16 This example merits further consideration as, although the experiences of Indians with racial discrimination was vastly different than that of teenagers with growing paternalistic surveillance, both articulated their protests through the medium of transnational language. In other words, the analogies that Indians and activists made between their plight and the segregation prevalent in the southern United States – and by extension other international sites of political and social upheaval – often served as a convenient tool for protestors to direct attention to their cause. However, the potential issue with such sensational language – as discussed later – was that it could gloss over the particularities that characterized local protests. The conditions that American Blacks faced in the southern United States, or the Jews in Nazi Germany, were very different than the circumstances encountered by Native people in northern British Columbia. Despite this, the use of these analogies did prompt dialogue between protestors and the general public regardless of however skewed that discourse was. Although the use of these references could hamper 15 Ibid, 18. 16 Jonathan Swainger, “Teen Trouble and Community Identity in Post-Second World War Northern British Columbia,” Journal of Canadian Studies 47, no.2 (Spring 2013): 166. 23 Indian protests by establishing a distorted account of their specific grievances, this language was essential in starting a discourse which may have not otherwise happened. The role this transnational language played in shaping local, regional, and even national episodes of intense political activism has garnered mounting scholarly interest – a fascination that has in part laid the foundations for this chapter. J.R Miller and Holly Nathan both situated the growing visibility and political leverage of Native people in the country to the precipitous decolonization of post-war Africa and Asia and the American Civil Rights Movement as these theatres forced Canadians interrogate their country’s own colonial legacies. 17 Likewise, Scott Rutherford has argued that re-envisioning Kenora as synonymous with other arenas of racial conflict and discrimination provided Indians, activists, and observers with an expedient reference through which to contextualize local protests.18 While exploring the growth of Black Canadian activism during the post-war period, Rosanne Waters similarly identified the parallels between homegrown protests and activist organizations to the intensifying news coverage afforded to the American Civil Rights Movement.19 However, it is crucial to remember that correlation did not equate to causation: Waters observes that Black Canadian activism appeared in full force even before its American counterpart became internationally prominent.20 Similarly, Nathan argues that Native issues in northern British Columbia were partially molded by the media’s growing dependence on cheaper wired news stories from the United States and thus sometimes took prominence over local events.21 17 Holly Nathan, “Building Dams, Constructing Stories: The Press, the Sekani, and the Peace River Dam, 1957- 1969” (M.A. diss., University of Northern British Columbia, 2009), 79; J.R. Miller, Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens: A History of Indian-White Relations in Canada, 3rd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 328. 18 Rutherford, “Canada’s Other Red Scare,” 54. 19 Rosanne Waters, “African Canadian Anti-Discrimination Activism and the Transnational Civil Rights Movement, 1945-1965,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association 24, no. 2 (2013): 389. 20 Ibid: 390. 21 Nathan, “Building Dams,” 78. 24 Nevertheless, Native people strategically and deliberately linked their struggle to international arenas of racial conflict to lend strength, and in some cases legitimacy, to their cause. To some degree, this decision was borne out of necessity. Hurley’s 1949 indictment in part failed to galvanize public support as its plea to an ambiguously defined sense of religious tolerance and equality apparently proved too abstract for its intended audience to act upon. However, the explicit references Hurley established between the discrimination against Indians and the abject segregation experienced by Blacks in the American south demystified the abstract concepts of racism and made them relevant to contemporary observers.22 Furthermore, these connections allowed Indians to tap into the morality theatre emerging from the Nuremburg Trials and the American south that increasingly re-imagined Black struggles as conflicts between “good and evil” as well as between personal liberty and racial tyranny.23 Commentators, Indians, and activists initially denounced acts of racial discrimination as vicious relics of Nazi ideology. Margaret Ormsby’s observations in her 1958 study of the province’s history reflected the change in times: “shocked into sensitivity by atrocity stories which had issued from Nazi Germany, British Columbians had began to feel during the war no little shame for their own past record.”24 If Ormsby is right – even if the analogies were overwrought – British Columbians found any suggestion that the treatment afforded to Indians faintly resembled Nazi Germany to be compelling. In 1947, the Native Voice emphasized comparisons with Nazi Germany to strike horror with a country and society left traumatized by the barbarism and destruction of the Second World War. It condemned the 22 Doug Owram, Born at the Right Time: A History of the Baby Boom Generation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 167. 23 Ibid, 166-167. 24 Margaret Ormsby, British Columbia: A History (Toronto: McMillan, 1958): 492. 25 segregation of Indians in movie theatres throughout the region by arguing that the Swastika of Nazi Germany, although defeated on the battlefields of Europe, continued to grow on Canadian soil.25 Similarly, following a riot in Prince Rupert during the summer of 1953 – which will be discussed more in depth in Chapter 3 along with its 1958 successor – commentators readily compared the rough-handling of town’s Indians by the local RCMP force to the brutality of the Third Reich. Liberal-Progressive federal candidate Ann Minard blamed the inequality embedded into the Indian Act as the riot’s primary instigator. 26 According to Minard: We now have a police force fostering racism and practising brutal Nazi methods. The Natives live every day under the shadow of the Indian Act which makes them second-class citizens as long as they live on the reserve, and when they leave the reservation - giving up their native rights - they find that the equality exists only on paper, but that in reality they are treated as inferior.27 Minard’s condemnation of the police reflected a growing trend of protest against the police’s alleged harshness in putting down the riot. Another resident, Ivan Adams, likewise juxtaposed the loyalty of Native soldiers who fought the brutal Gestapo tactics of unlawfully searching people and homes without permits, with the fact that Indians in Canada were subjected to the same alleged treatment owing to the Indian Act’s stringent liquor restrictions.28 Adams argued that: The average Indian wants to become a good citizen of our great country, but if the police continue to use methods, too closely allied to the former Nazi S.S. methods, we may have an “Indian riot” over which we have no control, and I am sure the Indians shall be blamed for it at the end. Let us not have another Mau Mau over here.29 25 “The Swastika Still Grows,” The Native Voice, January 1947, 8. 26 Ann Minard, L-PP Federal Candidate, “Revise Indian Act,” Prince Rupert Daily News, August 1, 1953, 2. 27 Ibid. 28 Ivan Adams, “Loyal Citizens,” Prince Rupert Daily News, August 1, 1953, 2. 29 Ibid. “Mau Mau” refers to the unsuccessful revolt launched by the Kenya Land and Freedom Army in 1952 to eject British colonists from Kenya and gain national independence. 26 Another riot would engulf Prince Rupert five years later. Although the use of international metaphors became scarce in this new climate as commentators sought to alleviate the resentment that Indians felt towards provincial drinking laws and brutal policing tactics, the few metaphors that were made pointed to a shift in the global moral-political landscape. The Native Voice, in decrying the alleged police brutality in handling the town’s Natives, questioned whether the “Indians of northern British Columbia are in the same category as the COLORED PEOPLE in Little Rock, Arkansas.”30 Like Hurley’s 1958 testimony, the horror stories emanating from the American south had replaced those of with Nazi Germany, now too distant to elicit the same emotional response it once did, to become the new example of racial hatred and intolerance in the West. While references to the American south often prefaced Native complaints against racial segregation as early as the war’s conclusion, its use intensified after regional newspapers began following the events in Little Rock during the fall of 1957.31 In August 1961, a Native woman wrote to the Smithers Interior News to accuse the village of doing “its best to be known as the ‘Little Rock of the North’” in response to a letter in which the author, under the moniker “Stupid White Man,” sarcastically lamented his lack of Indian heritage: Since I came back to the Smithers District, I have come to the conclusion that my Mother and Father committed a grave error, when they married each other. My Mother should have married “A BRAVE” or my father should have married a “SQUAW” - that would at least have made me half Indian. Then I could draw Welfare Cheque, drive car, and sit back on my hindquarters, and laugh at stupid white man, who has tough time getting Welfare Cheque. If I go to jail Welfare keep my family; and when I come out Welfare keep me.32 30 “The Riot Act - Prince Rupert: Are the Police Peacemakers … or?” Native Voice, September 1958, 4. 31 See “Indian Chiefs Delegated for Ottawa Parley,” Prince George Citizen, June 6, 1946, 5. 32 Stupid White Man, “Letters to the Editor,” Smithers Interior News, August 2, 1961, 7; Bernadette Grey, “Letter to the Editor,” Smithers Interior News, August 16, 1961, 7. 27 While the woman’s letter was based in the microcosm of village life, it called into question the same supposed moral legitimacy that White authorities claimed when obstructing the personal liberties of Blacks in the southern United States. The woman juxtaposed the egalitarian principles promoted by her supposedly Christian homeland, as well as by the “‘hulla-ballo’ of the Bill of Rights” passed by Prime Minister Diefenbaker one year earlier, to her observation that “the White man teaches democracy but makes laws and gives them an opportunity to act as little tin gods with their feet on someone else.”33 Similarly, a guest editorial published by the Burns Lake Review on September 21, 1950, connected a local café’s refusal to serve a local Native man and forcing him to leave the premises to the grander narrative of civil rights. 34 The contributing editor – writing under the nom de plume of Omega – lambasted British Columbians’ shameful capacity to “sit back in superior amazement and criticize the stupid intolerance that envelope the racial strife in the southern United States,” and the “few violent outbreaks of racial hatred” in Eastern Canada and Detroit whilst oblivious to the same discrimination that plagued their hometowns. Omega similarly dismissed the café’s and his detractors’ logic in proposing that there must have been legitimate grounds to warrant the Native man’s eviction as fundamentally flawed and morally dubious: Now you may say that there are two sides to every question, that for certain very good reasons Indians should be barred from the cafe in question. Such is the argument of the racists in Georgia. But the fact remains that there are not two sides to every question. If there were it would be both right and wrong at the same time for one to rob a bank, which of course, is ridiculous! Either the Indians are an inferior race of people to Whiteman or they are equal. The American Civil War was fought over just such an issue and the victors proclaimed that all men are equal. 33 Ibid. 34 Until otherwise noted, the following notes are from Omega, “Racism,” Burns Lake Review, September 21, 1950, 2. 28 Omega’s last contention, that the American Civil War heralded in an era of Black equality, exemplifies the ignorance that commentators exhibited of the historical reality. Although the decade of Reconstruction following the Civil War abolished slavery and culminated in legislation ensuring that Black Americans had access to basic civil rights such as property ownership and the right to vote throughout most of the country, the resistance of Whites eventually stripped many Blacks of their rights – thus facilitating the rise of segregationist Jim Crow laws throughout the southern United States.35 Omega’s historical revisionism may have been borne out of sheer ignorance, or perhaps more significantly, an active attempt to whitewash the muddied waters of history to further his rhetoric. Omega’s editorial also illustrated an alarming realization amongst Canadians that the country’s prided façade of racial tolerance had been tarnished by local stories of discrimination. It was not coincidental that Omega differentiated the systemic racial discord and violence in the American south to the supposed occasional outbursts of racial tensions through the northern United States and Canada. As Owram observed, Canadian and northern American commentators could comfortably condemn the practices in the southern United States during the movement’s infancy as an uncharacteristic affront to the democratic principles of equality and tolerance. For example, although a wired news story shocked Prince George readers with the headline that Canadians were “bigots about colour,” the article eased the impact it generated by claiming that despite these troubles – which was partially blamed on American influence – the country was “still pretty good for Negroes.”36 However, as the movement – and the transnational protests it inspired – matured, these 35 Michael J. Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 10. 36 “Country Living Monstrous Lie: Canadians Bigots About Color, Negro Says,” Prince George Citizen, August 5, 1960, 6. 29 same commentators encountered the disturbing reality that racial discrimination had escaped its alleged ancestral homelands in the American south and had begun to relentlessly creep northwards past the Mason-Dixon Line.37 This alarm was amplified by, as Frank Drea of the Toronto Telegram observed, Canadian’s peculiar identity as “the most hypocritical people in the world when it comes to taking a stand on the issues of racial discrimination.”38 Canada’s alliance with the United States during the Cold War made the country vulnerable to international scrutiny regarding the treatment the country afford to its Native people. Similar to the United States, Canada encountered a challenge when it entered an ideological conflict with the Soviets, as it could not champion the democratic ideals of individual liberty and freedom while accepting racial discrimination and segregation.39 As Mary Dudziak and Thomas Borstelmann assert, the United States, and by extension Canada, needed to resolve this contradiction if the Western bloc was to win the support of the non-aligned countries in the developing world.40 Reconciling this image problem was challenging as the Soviet Union lambasted the United States, and to a lesser degree its satellite of Canada, for any transgressions in their promises towards racial equality. For example, according to former Prince Rupert Mayor, Peter Lester, news of the town’s 1958 riot was broadcasted throughout the Eastern Bloc on Soviet short radio wavelengths as an example of the horrors caused by “capitalist decadence.”41 This alleged foreign attention was matched by local interest as all the newspapers in northern British Columbia showed an intense concern with the conflict. From the wired world news 37 Owram, Born at the Right Time, 167. 38 Frank Drea, “A national disgrace,” Prince George Citizen, November 19, 1963, 4 39 Mary L. Dudziak, “Josephine Baker, Racial Protest, and the Cold War,” Journal of American History 81, no.2 (September 1994): 544. 40 Ibid; Thomas Borstelmann, “‘Hedging Our Bets and Buying Time’: John Kennedy and Racial Revolutions in the American South and Southern Africa,” Diplomatic History 24, no. 3 (Summer 2000): 436. 41 Peter Lester, interview by Neil Gillion, North Country Fare, CBC, CD #70, Tape #182, October 31, 1984. Lester’s statements cannot be verified owing to a lack of available sources. 30 stories found in the more cosmopolitan newspapers in Prince George and Prince Rupert to the local shockwaves that international tensions had on community planning in the smaller villages – regional reportage illustrated that the Cold War had come to northern British Columbia in one way or another. This fascination amongst northern British Columbians was not lost on Native activists and White commentators. Andrew Paull, then member of the Native Brotherhood, told a delegation of interior Indians that “the White man feels shocked in Canada over the ‘Jim Crow’ laws in those sections of the United States where Negroes are treated as though still slaves, but they in the United States must feel just as indignant over treatment accorded Indians in some parts of Canada.”42 However, Paull never bothered to mention who these incensed Americans were or explain why they were invested in Native issues. In 1954, Paull told the Vancouver Province that he read about the recent ban placed on Burns Lake’s Natives from entering the local beer parlour, as discussed in Chapter 3, “with regret – but I am glad that this is still Canada and Russian laws are not to be exercised here.”43 Similarly, the editors of the Prince Rupert Daily News appealed to this growing awareness in a brief editorial campaign it launched on February 6, 1959. The editors, inspired by the recent decision in Virginia to integrate Black and White children in public schools, urged its readership that “with action of this type this province can help lead Indians out of the morass of discrimination and second-class citizenship.”44 Ten days later, the editors inaugurated the start of Brotherhood Week by advocating that Canadians take “active gestures and extending the hand of friendship in our own communities.”45 The editors prefaced their request on the 42 “Indian Chiefs Delegated for Ottawa Parley,” Prince George Citizen, June 6, 1946, 5. 43 “Magistrate’s Stand on Indians Scored,” Vancouver Province, May 14, 1954, 2. 44 “B.C., like Virginia, can lead the way,” Prince Rupert Daily News, February 6, 1959, 2. 45 “Brotherhood... believe it, live it, support it!” Prince Rupert Daily News, February 16, 1959, 2. Although this editorial never explicitly mentions Native people, the time in which it was published – during the continuing 31 grounds that the country’s absence of the racial prejudice displayed in the American south was a “comfortable illusion.”46 Although Indians in northern British Columbia readily leveraged transnational rhetoric and international metaphors to challenge racial discrimination, what is striking about these regional protests is that they never adopted the tactics of resistance, such as marches and sit-ins, used by their compatriots in the American south. Opposition, except perhaps for the riots in Prince Rupert, never extended past the public objections of a key few individuals. What is interesting, however, is that these tactics were use in other protests elsewhere in Canada. For example, Rosanne Waters observes that Black Canadians emulated American protests to support their southern neighbours as well as to emphasize Canadian racial issues during the 1950s and 1960s.47 Similarly, Indians in Kenora Ontario, inspired by events in the American south, organized a march against local discrimination in 1965.48 Furthermore, as Myrna Kostash shows, Indian and Metis activists in eastern Canada often had direct contact with prominent figures in the Civil Rights movement and American protest groups – a transnational network that the Native Brotherhood had similarly established with its American allies.49 Why did Indians in northern British Columbia not use the tools of protest that American Blacks were wielding so successfully? Although the evidence may be insufficient to conclude with absolute certainty, there are several possible factors that could explain this fallout of the 1958 Centennial riot, suggests that the article was an attempt by the news staff to reconcile relations between the town’s Native and non-Native populations. The riot, and its 1953 predecessor, are discussed more in-depth in Chapter 3. 46 Ibid. 47 Waters, “African Canadian Anti-Discrimination Activism and the Transnational Civil Rights Movement,” 405-6. 48 Rutherford, “Canada’s Other Red Scare,” 52. 49 Myrna Kostash, Long Way from Home: The Story of the Sixties Generation in Canada (Toronto: James Lorimer & Company, 1980), 149. 32 difference. First, the Cold War paranoia that had become entrenched in everyday life may have stifled or discouraged public protests for fear of being branded communistic – an obstacle that discouraged American protests in 1940s and early 1950s.50 Omega reflected upon this Canadian style of McCarthyism in decrying that: Fascism is seen in and around Burns Lake in such thing as racial discrimination, the prevention of the public meeting their leaders, the fixing of elections, etcetera. The fascist’s first cry against his freedom-loving enemy is “He’s a Red!” with all the ugly connotation of such a cry. It seems nowadays that no one can suggest reform or improvements without being branded a “red.”51 Cold War paranoia continued to mar Native political protestors throughout the 1960s and 1970s as well. As Rutherford observes, the FBI and the RCMP infiltrated the organizations which mobilized protests in Kenora, Ontario, throughout the 1960s and 1970s on the grounds of preventing communistic agitation and terrorism.52 Interestingly, the threat of being labelled a communist never appears to have surfaced in the Alaskan Native protests that emerged throughout 1940s and culminated in the 1945 passing of the Alaska Anti-Discrimination Act. This may be the result of the fact that Natives and Whites saw communism in a more sympathetic light during the Second World War due to the West’s alliance with the Soviet Union. Similarly, protestors framed their comments during this era by juxtaposing the stated goals of the United States in ending the extremist racial ideologies espoused by the Third Reich with the discrimination Natives encountered at home.53 As a result, detractors may have been less inclined to associate 50 Dominique Clement, Will Silver, and Daniel Trottier, The Evolution of Human Rights in Canada (Canada: Canadian Human Rights Commission, 2012), 14; Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights, 376. 51 Omega, “Pride,” Burns Lake Review, November 23, 1950, 2. 52 Rutherford, “Canada’s Other Red Scare,” 225. 53 Terrence M. Cole, “Jim Crow in Alaska: The Passage of the Alaska Equal Rights Act of 1945,” Western Historical Quarterly 23 (November 1992): 429–49. 33 Native demands with communism for fear of unintentionally associating themselves with fascism. Second, the changing political climate in the United States that had laid the foundations for the outburst of direct-action protests in the late 1950s and 1960s did not have a Canadian equivalent. As Michael Klarman has suggested, the hallmark Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) – which struck down segregation in American public schools as unconstitutional – encouraged Blacks to litigate against Jim Crow rather than protest in the streets.54 It was only the stiffening resistance of White southerners in the late 1950s, according to Klarman, that prompted the evolution of Black resistance to include direct-action protests.55 Canadian Indians may have seen the successive line of federal committees that were appointed throughout the late 1940s to the early 1960s in a similar light to the American landscape molded by Brown in which Native people could fight discrimination and demand equal rights through legal forum. In short, the circumstances that motivated American Blacks in the southern United States to direct-action protests were not shared by Indians in northern British Columbia or in Canada during this era. The third suggestion, although pessimistic, comes from then Reverend Peter Kelly, a Haida activist prominent in the Native Brotherhood leadership. In recalling an incident in 1947 in which an Alaskan Indian successfully leveraged his nationality against a theatre manager in Prince Rupert who told him to sit in the cinema’s “Indian” section, Kelly reported that: “The effect [of segregation], psychologically, I think is damaging. Treatment such as that unconsciously breeds and inferiority complex […] Our people have not done that. I was going to say they have been browbeaten to a point where they simply accept 54 Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights, 377. 55 Ibid. 34 those things. I mean to say [that] personal dignity, somehow, can be just beaten down until it is broken down.”56 This factor deserves further elaboration as comparisons with Alaskan Native protests throughout the 1940s, as well as with the later movements in Kenora, illustrate that northern British Columbia was strikingly different in this regard. Unlike Kelly’s compatriots, the Alaskan Native who triumphed over the theatre’s discriminatory policies came from a territory that had only two years prior passed the Alaska Anti-Discrimination Act. This piece of legislation was achieved in large part through the lobbying efforts of the Alaskan Native Brotherhood and Alaskan Native Sisterhood. Similarly, protestors in Kenora – although suffering the demoralizing effects of segregation at home – found motivation in the victories achieved by the American Civil Rights movement. Unlike Indians in northern British Columbia, who would have been unable to ascertain the effectiveness of direct-action tactics as they played out within the pages of their local newspaper, the protests in Kenora emerged during the closing stages of the American Civil Rights movement – and thus would have been privy to the successes that Black protestors had won. This galvanizing effect of the American Civil Rights movement may also be observed in the fact that direct-action protests became more widespread in Canadian protests throughout the 1960s.57 Fourth, as Rosanne Waters contends, activists’ efforts were directed locally since anti-racist measures and legislation fell largely under municipal or provincial jurisdiction.58 This would also explain why Indians in northern British Columbia did not organize into a cohesive body that would have been better able to achieve change in the region. This point 56 “Ottawa Special – Experience Pays Off,” Native Voice, May 1947, 9. 57 Rutherford, “Canada’s Other Red Scare,” 38. 58 Waters, “African Canadian Anti-Discrimination Activism and the Transnational Civil Rights Movement,” 389. 35 is further supported by a striking contrast between the American south and the British Columbian north. While American Blacks increasingly moved into urban locales – which better facilitated mass organization and mobilization – a large number of Native people in the province’s interior lived in reserves that were secluded from White communities. 59 This isolation was further compounded by the numerous divisions that separated Indian communities living in this region. Linguistic, tribal, religious, and economic diversity may have played an important role in preventing Indians in northern British Columbia from unifying their protests under a single and cohesive banner. The effect that this lack of regional unity had in discouraging direct-action protests should not be understated, as it is unique in the context of other Indian rights movements. Although some Alaskan Native protests were limited to the actions of a single person – as was the case of Alberta Schenck and her demonstrations against segregated seating in a theatre in Nome – American scholars credit the success of their campaign in the 1940s to the sympathy of Governor Ernest Gruening and, more importantly, to the lobbying efforts of the Alaskan Native Brotherhood and the Alaskan Native Sisterhood.60 Similarly, Indians in Kenora mobilized under the banner of the Indian White Committee during their 1965 march through the town. Likewise, the hundred and fifty armed Indian protestors who blockaded a Kenora park in 1974 did so under the flag of the Ojibway Warrior’s Society. In the case of 1965, the Indian White Committee was able to muster an impressive number of protestors by sending local Indian leaders to social gatherings for the purposes of recruitment.61 The unified fronts maintained by both the Indians in Alaska and Kenora may 59 Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights, 374; Waters, “African Canadian Anti-Discrimination Activism and the Transnational Civil Rights Movement,” 389. 60 Cole, “Jim Crow in Alaska,” 429–49; Arnett, “Unsettled Rights in Territorial Alaska,” 235; Drucker, The Native Brotherhoods, 71. 61 Rutherford, “Canada’s Other Red Scare,” 46-47. 36 have also been helped by the fact that their campaigns were sustained over a relatively long time unlike northern British Columbia where protests were both episodic and sporadic. Conversely, the Native Brotherhood, which was influential along the northwest coast, had experience in challenging racial discrimination throughout the province as a somewhat centralized organization owing to its multitude of provincial, national, and even international connections to other rights groups. In 1950, the Native Voice encouraged readers left victimized by thefts from their hotel rooms to submit their grievances to the newspaper so that it could publish the names of any repeat offenders.62 While the newspaper never mentioned this initiative again, the short-lived campaign shared a striking similarity to the Green Book - an annual guidebook originally published in the United States by Victor Hugo Green which listed businesses and accommodations that were friendly or hostile to Black business. Four years later, the Brotherhood and the Union Steward’s Shop Committee successfully lobbied the Namu Cannery to remove a pair of signs that segregated the two adjoining ladies’ restrooms for Native use and White use.63 The reasons behind the Brotherhood’s limited penetration into northern British Columbia highlights a final possible factor as to why no organized protests occurred in the region despite its symbolic connections with the American south. The organization, primarily based in the province’s central coast communities, as well as its Tsimshian enclave near Prince Rupert, only seriously considered expanding its reach into the central interior after membership from those bands increased during the post-war period.64 The resulting expansion into the interior, according to the Native Voice, was extremely fruitful as the 62 “Victimized? Take Note,” The Native Voice November 1950, 7. 63 “Discriminatory Signs Removed at Brotherhood Request,” Native Voice, August 1954, 3. 64 Paul Tennant, Aboriginal Peoples and Politics: The Indian Land Question in British Columbia, 1849-1989 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1991),119; Gene Joseph, A Brief History of the Native Brotherhood of British Columbia (Vancouver: Native Brotherhood, 1981), 10. 37 organization received the enthusiastic cooperation from bands near Vanderhoof and Burns Lake.65 However, as Philip Drucker observed in his study of the organization in 1958, the Burns Lake region was “more impressive on paper than in actuality […as] only a relatively small proportion of the interior Indians seemed to feel that they have any stake in the goals of the Brotherhood.”66 This discrepancy also held true for Vanderhoof as the organization never publicly appeared in any protests launched by the Stoney Creek reserve. Although the Brotherhood was militant in demanding equal citizenship throughout northern British Columbia during this era, it appears that it only sustained its highly vocal campaign along its support base on the northwest coast. As a result, the organization’s reluctant incursion into the interior failed to garner popular support and the group never expanded past its northern coastal enclave. In part, this resulted from a difference in religious denominations: while the Brotherhood’s coastal strongholds were predominantly Protestant, the overwhelming majority of interior Indians were Catholic.67 Moreover, interior Natives such as the those at Burns Lake and Vanderhoof could not readily associate with the Brotherhood’s main activities as a primarily fishing organization.68 This difficulty in penetrating into the interior was also exacerbated by worsening frictions between the organization and Andrew Paull. Relations between the Brotherhood’s leadership and Paull, who had served the organization with distinction during the early years of the war, disintegrated during the 1940s - culminating with his ouster in 1945 on 65 “To Organize All Interior,” Smithers Interior News, October 21, 1948, 6; “The Native Voice,” Burns Lake Review, September 19, 1946, 4; O.D. Peters, “My Visit to the Northern Interior,” Native Voice, June 1947, 2. 66 Philip Drucker, The Native Brotherhoods: Modern Intertribal Organizations on the Northwest Coast (Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1958), 114; Eric Jamieson, The Native Voice: The Story of How Maisie Hurley and Canada’s First Aboriginal Newspaper Changed a Nation (Halfmoon Bay, BC: Caitlin Press, 2016),52. 67 Tennant, Aboriginal Peoples and Politics, 119; Jamieson, The Native Voice, 52. Jamieson suggests that there was a possibility that Catholic missionaries operating throughout north-west B.C. may have discouraged First Nations from joining what was seen as an alien Protestant organization. 68 Jamieson, The Native Voice, 52. 38 allegations of embezzlement.69 The two organizations clashed in 1947 over the planned enfranchisement of provincial Indians. On one hand, the Brotherhood enthusiastically supported the proposed scheme, as they believed that it did not threaten existing Native rights.70 Paull, on the other hand, quickly rejected it for fear that it would serve as a harbinger for Indian assimilation and the destruction of Native privileges.71 The provincial legislature resolved the dispute several weeks later by removing all racial restrictions from the provincial franchise.72 The rogue activist soon became leader of what would later be called the North American Indian Brotherhood, as well as the Confederacy of the Interior Tribes of British Columbia whose “lack of structure allowed maximum freedom, and maximum publicity for Andrew Paull” and operated primarily in the Salish tribal groups near Kamloops.73 Despite the sporadic meetings that the Confederacy held in the southern interior until the mid-1950s, neither of Paull’s flagship organizations took any decisive political action during this era and continued to primarily concern themselves with issues raised by their Salishan support base. 74 As a result, Andrew Paull, like the Native Brotherhood, did not establish any long-lasting inroads into the province’s northern interior despite occasional forays. Although Paull’s activity granted him a significant following amongst some interior Native people, Indians in northern British Columbia were mostly unaffiliated with either Paull’s organizations or the Native Brotherhood.75 69 Tennant, Aboriginal Peoples and Politics, 120-121. 70 Ibid, 121; Jamieson, The Native Voice, 80. 71 Ibid. 72 Tennant, Aboriginal Peoples and Politics, 121. 73 Ibid, 120-121. 74 Ibid, 122. 75 Ibid. 39 Global comparisons presented a risk to Native people in northern British Columbia; while employing these metaphors allowed Indians to maximize the impact their protests generated, these connections also obscured the locally specific demands they were impressing upon their communities. As Denise E. Bates wrote of the American Indian rights movement which emerged in parallel to the Civil Rights movement: “Indian activists felt empowered by the revolution in race relations initiated by the Civil Rights movement, but reinforcement of a southern biracial image continued to marginalize them.”76 Rutherford likewise cautioned that there was a “danger in too broadly collapsing histories merely to fit out own desires.”77 In other words, by using the American Civil Rights movement as their inspiration, Indians risked weakening their own demands by supporting a two-sided view of racial equality – between Blacks and Whites – in which Native people played an non-existent or marginal role.78 These analogies, by establishing a false racial dichotomy, also ignored the linguistic, tribal, economic, and religious distinctions that divided Native communities in northern British Columbia and instead presented the region’s Indians as constituting a homogenous and unified group. Considering the effects that this dichotomy had in shaping the rhetoric of some sympathetic White observers is complex. While White commentators supported the emancipation of Native people from the yoke of racial discrimination, many were hesitant to admit that the practice was rampant in their hometowns. As a result, this reluctance to engage in genuine self-reflection manifested itself in efforts by non-Native commentators to 76 Denise E. Bates, The Other Movement: Indian Rights and Civil Rights in the Deep South (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 2012), 174. 77 Rutherford, “Canada’s Other Red Scare,” 21. 78 Jessica Leslie Arnett, “Unsettled Rights in Territorial Alaska: Native Land, Sovereignty, and Citizenship from the Indian Reorganization Act to Termination,” Western Historical Quarterly 48 (Autumn 2017): 240. 40 deflect criticism away from their communities.79 As Rutherford argues, these international connections often acted as a convenient “tool for the national imagination to erase racism from its emerging global identity.”80 For instance, although the regional liaison officer for the Department of Citizenship shocked Prince George audiences by proclaiming that the “Canadian Indian suffer[ed] as much from race prejudice and discrimination as [did] the American Negro,” he placed much of the blame on Native people themselves who needed to “learn to dress and act properly instead of wearing blue jeans and forgetting to comb their hair.”81 The officer also reassured listeners that a combination of education and the fact that people were “much more broad-minded now than they were 10 years ago,” were gradually dismantling race-based prejudice.82 A more striking example comes from the reversal of opinion amongst those who had originally inspired Hurley’s 1958 denunciation of Vanderhoof’s discriminatory business practices. The activist’s statement was delivered in support for the vice-president of the Prince George’ Young Cariboo Progress Conservative Association and his proposed resolution to protest the barring of Indians from the village’s restaurants.83 This proposal directed local outrage away from Prince George as the vice-president finished his call-toarms by stating that there “was little evidence of outright racial discrimination” in his hometown.84 When the Prince George Citizen published the story, which in effect started the weeks-long controversy, the organization’s president condemned the editors for deliberately 79 Rutherford, “Canada’s Other Red Scare,” 60. 80 Ibid, 64. 81 Barry Hamelin, “Citizenship Department Man Says: Indian as Downtrodden as Negro” Prince George Citizen, November 10, 1960, 1. 82 Ibid. 83 “Young Tories Concerned: May Protest Barring of Indians from Restaurants,” Prince George Citizen, January 20, 1958, 1. 84 Ibid. 41 construing the vice-president’s speech to bolster the newspaper sales.85 The resolution, the president contended, was “thrown up… merely as a point of discussion [and] it was the feeling of the membership that the Indians throughout this area and Canada as a whole are not being seriously discriminated against and that the proposal was not worthy of further investigation or discussion.”86 On the other hand, some non-Native commentators and protestors avoided the distressing task of implicating their communities by framing local acts of racism as being unrelated to the cruel segregation which had catalyzed Black protests in the American south. In part, this narrative transformation was possible owing to the prominence that White commentators had in publicizing questions of racial discrimination. As Robert Weisbrot asserts, a similar interplay occurred in the United States as the coalition between Black and White liberals proved to be “a source of both power and disillusionment to civil rights advocates.”87 Weisbrot explains that this contradiction stemmed from the self-limiting revolution that this alliance achieved which systematically dismantled official barriers to equality whilst retaining the foundational structures that subtly, yet powerfully, portrayed Blacks as occupying only a marginal and subordinate role in the movement.88 This “White Saviour Complex” could not only hinder Indian protests, but re-affirm and re-establish colonial imagery which perceived Native people as infantile and of needing White protection. In the case of northern British Columbia, while some White commentators were determined to support their Indian allies against the tyrannies of racial prejudice – they also sought to define the standards of what was, and more importantly, what was not, racial 85 R.G. Stromberg, “Pro-Con Protests Story Coverage,” Prince George Citizen, January 22, 1958, 2. 86 Ibid. 87 Robert Weisbrot Freedom Bound: A History of America’s Civil Rights Movement (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1990), XIII. 88 Ibid. 42 segregation. As a result, these observers and commentators simultaneously promoted the core features of racial equality while understating local Native concerns.89 One such instance was exemplified in the exchange between Bridge A. Moran and the editors of the Prince George Citizen during the fall of 1956. Moran, in a letter published in the Citizen on September 12, condemned the hypocrisy of Canadians’ shock at “the reaction to integration in Virginia or South Africa, while we placidly accept segregation here in Canada.”90 For Moran, “this self-righteous assurance has no real basis [as] in Canada, our native population, the original Canadians, are segregated not only for educational purposes, but for residential purposes as well.”91 This segregation, for Moran, warranted attention: “We had no race riots when we opened our schools last week, because we have again, silently and successfully separated our Indians and non-Indian children for another year. Are not race riots preferable to an apathetic and disinterested acceptance of discrimination and segregation?” More than a month later, on October 18, the editors retorted that, although Indians living in the region were “exploited and discriminated against to some degree and that relations between them and the White population are often marked by intolerance on the part of the latter,” it did not compare to the discrimination practiced against Negroes in the southern United States.92 For the editors, the difference was that American segregation was brutally enforced by state laws while Canadian prejudice was defined by the inhospitable business tactics employed by a few unsavory owners – an observation which ignored the various provisions established in the Indian Act that differentiated status Indians from other 89 Nathan, “Building Dams,” 78. 90 Bridget A. Moran, “Segregation Here,” Prince George Citizen, September 12, 1956, 2. 91 Ibid. 92 Until otherwise noted, the following notes are from “Segregation is Not the Word,” Prince George Citizen, October 18, 1956, 2. 43 Canadians which encouraged, and even permitted, their social exclusion. Despite this, the editors praised the efforts taken by the government and the public in general to integrate Indians into national life. However, the editors warned that: The indiscreet use of the word “segregation” is dangerous and misleading. The ideal society is not one in which every racial group is required to live with and conform to the culture of the White race. On the contrary, it is sometimes only by the retention of racial identity that any particular group can cultivate and contribute their share of cultural gifts to the rest of society. In many ways the Indian race would lose – if they have not already lost – what bit of pride and respect they still retain if the opposite of segregation (integration) was the answer to all their problems. Moran responded on November 9 to challenge the editors’ definition of the word “segregation” which permitted Canada from “having to say that it has segregation.”93 The word’s interpretation, according to Moran, was flexible: “separation and it is beyond dispute with our Native population with Indian status is separated from White neighbours both in physical location and for educational purposes.” In her concluding remarks, Moran questioned whether the editors would “deny that tradition, institutions, customs, and fears can be binding as law itself, and that each of these leaves the Indians with Indian status [and] little real freedom to choose where he will live or receive his education?” Indians challenged racial discrimination and segregation in northern British Columbia by connecting local prejudice to the grander narrative of global civil rights movements and international theatres of racial conflict. Primarily, these global analogies served to shock Canadians who had long believed their country was spared the racial hatred that permeated the southern United States and the genocidal Third Reich. To this end the international metaphors were partly successful. On one hand, these parallels forced commentators and audiences to address the uncomfortable prejudices that existed in their 93 Unless otherwise noted, the following notes are from Bridget A. Moran, “Status of the Indian,” Prince George Citizen, November 9, 1956, 2. 44 hometown as well as establishing a framework in which to facilitate discourse. On the other hand, these connections hindered Native protests by encouraging commentators to reimagine these protests through a bi-racial lens – which ignored local Native concerns – or to use the plight of southern Blacks to discount the experiences of northern Indians. 45 Chapter 2 - “Although I’m an Indian by Birth I’m a Canadian Citizen”: Blurring the Lines Between “Indian” and “Citizen” The Native Brotherhood, in its January 1947 edition of the Native Voice, warned its readers that the insidious seeds of Nazi racial hatred had stretched across the Atlantic and were beginning to take root in Canadian soil. The organization raised the alarm after hearing reports of anti-Native discrimination in communities throughout the province’s north as well as on Vancouver Island. The irony of the war’s objectives – the destruction of fascist totalitarianism and the defense of egalitarian democracy – and the treatment afforded to Canadian Indians after the fighting, despite the large contributions which Native people made to the war effort, was not lost on the editors: Native youth and White youth fought alongside each other in Europe and on the hillsides of Hong Kong accepting and giving each other that comradeship so needed under tense circumstances. Native workers and White workers work alongside in our mills, canneries, logging camps and most of the other industries in B.C. with a mutual respect for each other. Some theatre managers on Vancouver Island and Northern B.C. do not believe that there should be joint enjoyment of pictures and carry out of segregation program. We have been told of a small town in the Northern interior where Natives are refused service in restaurants and where the local medical practitioner has one waiting room for Natives and one for Whites. The concepts of democracy both of Native and White youth laying alongside and other on the battlefields of the world were at a variance of these smug practices of democracy in certain B.C. communities.1 The article’s emphasis on the contradictions inherent in Native people’s participation in British Columbia’s social, economic, and political life with their social exclusion appealed to the sweeping changes in how non-Native Canadians reconsidered their relationship with their Indian neighbours. First, the Brotherhood’s reference to Native-White comradery during the war pointed hopefully to a gradual dismantling of Canada’s unofficial racial hierarchy that categorized Indians as inferior to their White neighbours. Second, the article expressed optimism that the post-war economic boom would bring Native communities out 1 Michael J. Klarman, From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 4; “The Swastika Still Grows,” The Native Voice, January 1947, 8. 46 of economic irrelevance and increasingly into the mainstream of provincial industrial development. Finally, the article questioned why the very “concepts of democracy” that Native soldiers died to protect – equal citizenship rights – had been systematically withheld from Native people even after the 1947 Canadian Citizenship Act which deliberately excluded Indians from receiving Canadian citizenship. Understanding the history of local Native protest in northern British Columbia demands an analysis of the changing political and social climate which emerged in post-war Canada – an undertaking that is the primary objective of this chapter. Frankly, the transnational comparisons that Native people leveraged against racial discrimination and segregation, as discussed in Chapter 1, would not have resonated with legislators and the public had non-Native Canadians been comfortably entrenched in their views of racial superiority. The war’s traumatic effect on western democracies thus threw open the doors for a new era of Indian political engagement and activism. As Scott Sheffield argues, the existential threats that emerged during the Second World War forced western societies, including Canada, to “re-examine and reimagine themselves, their values, and their wider world.”2 Similarly, J.R. Miller asserts that the war questioned the validity of Canadian Indian policy as the war against “institutionalized racism and barbarity” starkly contrasted with legislation founded in “assumptions about the moral and economic inferiority of particular racial groupings.”3 While this dynamic political climate provided new opportunities for Native people to demand equal citizenship rights, it simultaneously established new obstacles that challenged 2 Scott R. Sheffield, The Red Man’s on the Warpath: The Image of the “Indian” and the Second World War (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2004), 10. 3 J.R. Miller, Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens: A History of Indian-White Relations in Canada, 3rd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 324. 47 their ability to effect change. As Maureen Atkinson contends, Canada’s pioneering experiment in twentieth-century statecraft – the construction of a national identity – served as a seemingly infallible tool for the country’s dominant society to project its own agenda through “political, social, and cultural institutions.”4 As a consequence, the unwillingness of government officials and the public to critically assess the shortcomings of this political and cultural interference threatened to frustrate the efforts of Native people in demanding citizenship.5 Indians and activists in northern British Columbia navigated through this fertile, yet vexing, social and political landscape to gain equal citizenship rights. This chapter argues that Native people, by asserting themselves as Canadian citizens deserving of equal citizenship rights, blurred the lines between “Indian” and “citizen” that had justified racial segregation throughout the region. The era of post-war rebuilding witnessed a shift in governmental language, as well as public sentiment, which increasingly sought to ameliorate the deplorable living conditions of Indians. For the federal government, the momentum that carried on from Canada’s shift to a peacetime economy created, as John Leslie asserts, an atmosphere of “reconstruction and reestablishment” that would assist officials in lifting the socio-economic standards of the country’s Indians.6 Tracking the public’s motivations when supporting these projects, however, is more difficult. On one hand, Canadians believed that these policies would rapidly bring their country into accord with the concepts of equality, tolerance, and freedom that had been consecrated in the Atlantic Charter and the subsequent United Nation’s 4 Maureen Atkinson, “Replacing Sound Assumptions: Rediscovered Narrative of Post War Northern British Columbia” (PhD diss., University of Waterloo, 2017), 8. 5 Miller, Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens, 325. 6 John F. Leslie, “Assimilation, Integration or Termination? The Development of Canadian Indian Policy, 1943-1963” (PhD diss., Carleton University, 1999), 9. 48 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.7 On the other hand though, as Scott Sheffield argues: “a case can be made that Canada’s newfound generosity of spirit for the plight of First Nations in the immediate postwar period … [was due to the fact that] Canadians felt a special obligation towards them as they had not chosen to become a part of Canada.”8 The fact that Native people could not renounce their non-existent citizenship further exacerbated the sting that Canadians felt from this colonial legacy.9 This combination of guilty consciences, public confidence, and intensifying government intervention established the socio-political context in which a series of parliamentary committees, legislative reforms, and government studies directed future policy. 10 While future legislation and parliamentary committee findings throughout this period spoke to Native issues, they were simultaneously used to reinforce the status quo of federal Indian policy. As a result, policy makers during this era – reluctant to criticize their own legislation – controlled deliberations with Indians and only seriously considered Native political interests when they coincided with the government’s pre-determined agenda. Furthermore, translating these half-hearted reforms into the context of northern British Columbia proved extremely challenging for Native people. As Robert Campbell observes, Ottawa’s attempts to cajole British Columbia into implementing its policies were often met with stiff resistance by provincial and local officials who wanted the federal government to shoulder the responsibilities, and the ensuing consequences, for the legal emancipation of Indians.11 John Frederic Gibson, a social worker who worked in Smithers throughout the 7 Ibid; Sheffield, The Red Man’s on the Warpath, 146. 8 Sheffield, The Red Man’s on the Warpath, 146. 9 Alan Cairns, Citizens Plus: Aboriginal Peoples and the Canadian State (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2000), 27. 10 Leslie, “Assimilation, Integration or Termination,” 9. 11 Robert A. Campbell, “A ‘Fantastic Rigmarole’: Deregulating Aboriginal Drinking in British Columbia, 1945- 62,” BC Studies 141 (Spring 2004): 82. 49 early 1960s, juxtaposed this rhetoric of change to the often-harsh reality of implementing such reforms in northern British Columbia: “The Indian superintendent talked about selfdetermination for the Indian people. But self-determination did not mean that men could write to their member of parliament in Ottawa. There were limits. Everyone talked about integration, yet Indians were not served in local restaurants.”12 For instance, on February 17, 1958, Vanderhoof’s Board of Commissioners determined that the municipal government had “no power to require restaurants to serve Indians and that the Commissioners feel the situation will only clear up when the Federal Government gives more freedom to the Indians.”13 Similarly, numerous commentators in the region’s newspapers goaded Ottawa to resolve local incidents of discrimination by granting Native people more rights. By shifting the onus of responsibility in ending racial discrimination to the federal government, commentators comfortably distanced themselves and their neighbours from the discrimination practiced throughout their communities. For example, the Village Commissioner of Vanderhoof told journalists in January 1958 that the government, and not the village’s businesses, were guilty of anti-Native discrimination by “holding back some of the rights they should have.”14 Similarly, although Omega condemned the ejection of a Native man from a local café in his 1950 guest editorial for the Burns Lake Review, he ultimately blamed the government for withholding enfranchisement and citizenship rights from Indians.15 The irony of the fact that the government’s policies reflected the public’s wishes was perhaps lost on Omega. 12 John Frederic Gibson, A Small and Charming World (Smithers, BC: Creekstone Press Ltd., 2001), 15. 13 Village of Vanderhoof Council Meeting Minutes, 17 February 1958. 14 “Vanderhoof Indians Not Discriminated Against,” Prince George Citizen, January 24, 1958, 1. 15 Omega, “Racism,” Burns Lake Review, September 21, 1950, 2. 50 For Indians in northern British Columbia, this tepid commitment to reform amongst the various levels of government insulted the sacrifice of Native soldiers who served in the Second World War. Maisie Hurley buttressed her 1958 condemnation of Vanderhoof’s unofficial “Jim Crow law” by addressing the plight of Dick Patrick of the Stoney Creek reserve. 16 Patrick, who was awarded the Military Medal by King George VI for “saving the lives of hundreds of Canadian soldiers” after dislodging a German machine gun encampment and capturing over fifty enemy combatants, was refused service in the village’s hotels and restaurants upon his return.17 In describing his wartime heroism, Hurley lamented that Patrick was “good enough to die for them, but not good enough to live for them.”18 Hurley concluded her article by cautioning the Native Voice’s readers: “Brothers and Sisters do not expect a hundred percent win all at once. This fight for freedom is only started. We have won the first round. Doggedly we will fight on until justice is won – but there must be unity, cohesion of purpose, and determination.”19 Hurley’s idealistic version of a unified front against racial discrimination in northern British Columbia, however, would not be realized owing to the various divisions that separated Native communities. Dick Patrick’s story demands further exploration as a case study into the galvanizing force that Native veterans had in protesting racial segregation in the region. During an interview with Kitty Sparrow, Patrick recalled using his personal audience with King George 16 Maisie Armitage-Moore, “Discrimination,” Native Voice, June 1949, 1. Maisie Moore later married Tom Hurley and assumed his last name. This paper refers to her through her married surname rather than her maiden name as the former appears more frequently in news reportage. 17 Maisie Armitage-Moore, “Northern Report,” Native Voice, June 1949, 4. 18 “Discrimination in B.C. Rapped,” Native Voice, February 1958, 3. 19 Ibid. Dick Patrick was arrested after he shot a cow moose to “feed his starving family” and served time in Oakalla Prison before a “lawyer friend of the Native Voice gave the publisher two hundred dollars to pay Patrick’s fine as well as his fare home.” The newspaper’s publishers retorted that as a result of the incident the “touch of tarnish of Indian Dick’s five medals will be a little darker, but who cares? You can’t eat medals? Seems that he made his country safer for the skunks who persecute him. Too bad.” “You Can’t Eat Medals,” Native Voice, June 1950, 4. 51 after the war to speak of the humiliation that Stoney Creek Indians experienced in Vanderhoof: “When my people went into Vanderhoof, they were not allowed to go into restaurants, use public toilets, and had to come in the back door of a grocery storey to buy groceries. We spoke for a long time about the injustice to my people. He told me he would endeavour to help my people.”20 However, Patrick did not content himself with the monarch’s sympathies and pursued more direct forms of protest upon his return to the village. According to his interview with Kitty Sparrow, Patrick marched into a local café which refused to serve Indians, sat down, and waited to be served. Patrick was arrested shortly after when the manager called the police and was sentenced to a six-month term at Oakalla Prison in Burnaby on charges of disturbing the peace. He was freed only after Maisie Hurley contacted Attorney-General Gordon Wismer who then ordered his release. Dick Patrick, as soon as he got off the prison bus in Vanderhoof, marched right back into the same restaurant. Patrick was arrested and released from Oakalla eleven times that year for his attempts to eat at the restaurant – a bid he later recounted was intended to “show [the owners that] they could not treat my people like animals.” Although it is difficult ascertain the lasting effects of Patrick’s protest in Vanderhoof, his legacy in fighting for equal citizenship rights continues. Eric Jamieson, in his study of the Native Voice newspaper’s origins, observes that Patrick’s 20 Unless otherwise noted, the following notes are from Kitty Sparrow, “Stoney Creek Band Mourns Passing of Second World War Veteran, Dick Patrick,” The Indian Voice, December 1980, 1. Although Dick Patrick’s account is corroborated by interviews given by his sister, Arlene John, there is no mention of his arrests in the Vanderhoof Nechako Chronicle or any other regional newspaper during the time between 1946-47 when they allegedly happened. Similarly, none of the newspapers on the B.C. Historical Newspapers database mention Dick Patrick during this period. However, as noted before, there are large gaps in Vanderhoof’s Bill Silver Digital Newspaper Archive from the years 1945-1959. Another possible explanation behind this discrepancy is that newspaper editors and journalists at the time may not have considered Patrick’s multiple arrests to be worthy of serious reportage. Regional newspapers regularly listed the names of Native people arrested for repeat offences – and in some cases would provide colourful commentary for the amusement of their readers. Similarly, newspapers during the time may have possibly found it difficult to connect Patrick’s multiple arrests to an overarching act of political protest – hindsight that Patrick and John would have decades later during their interviews. 52 activism situated him as the “Rosa Parks of B.C.’s First Nations.”21 Similarly, Patrick’s sister Arlene John recalled in a 2013 interview with the Vanderhoof Omineca Express that her brother “opened the door for us natives” during the post-war era.22 However, Native communities in northern British Columbia had leveraged their wartime sacrifices to demand citizenship rights throughout the course of the war itself. 23 For example, in February 1944, the Burns Lake band petitioned the Department of Indian Affairs to honour the sacrifices made by their young men serving overseas and grant them the same rights afforded to White people: We are all on our feet marching with the soldiers. We “Indians” do not know what we are fighting for. King George have called up the boys, our Indian boys have taken up very difficult task they may not return home at all. We will write again if we fail to get what we ask for. We are good enough to have the same privileges as the White people. Our young Indian boys are called in the army. Our Indian boys have thrown open the door for us to go together with White people. For the Burns Lake band, the segregation they experienced in Burns Lake merited an ultimatum: We are following the law of our King, yet they never even let us in the hotel or in the beer [parlour] and so forth. If you are not going to give us the same privileges as the White people, then we want you to bring the Indian boys back to Canada who [are] overseas. They divide us two ways between our Indian boys and ourselves here at home. They separate us from the White people here at home and mix our Indian boys with the White in the army. Just as the conflict had galvanized the protests of Indian soldiers, Native participation in the local economies of northern British Columbia motivated Indians to further their demands for equal citizenship.24 In 1952, Chief Harold Sinclair of the Kitwanga 21 Eric Jamieson, The Native Voice: The Story of How Maisie Hurley and Canada’s First Aboriginal Newspaper Changed a Nation (Halfmoon Bay, BC: Caitlin Press, 2016), 104. 22 Sam Redding, “Remembrance Day ceremonies at school,” Vanderhoof Omineca Express, November 13, 2013, 16. 23 For the notes in the following paragraph, see Library and Archives Canada, Indian Affairs fonds, RG 10, “Letter from Burns Lake First Nations to Department of Indian Affairs, February 7, 1944,” vol. 6769, file 45220-3. 24 J.R. Miller, Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens, 327. 53 band declared that 5,000 Indians in northern British Columbia were poised to break a “terrible discrimination against them in earning their daily bread” after suffering mistreatment at the hands of several Smithers businesses.25 While the Smithers Chamber of Commerce agreed to discuss the validity of the charge with Indian representatives, Indian councillor Tommy Tait threatened that the band would boycott Smithers and take their money elsewhere.26 Sinclair again leveraged the spending power of the region’s Natives during the fallout of the 1958 Prince Rupert riot when, acting on behalf of the town’s Indian population, demanded that a provincial RCMP commissioner and a lawyer from the Native Brotherhood should attend any investigation into the ill-treatment of Native people by the local police on the basis that they had “proved their loyalty to the town by patronizing the city’s firms.”27 Similarly, in 1961, a Native woman wrote to the Smithers’ newspaper to refute claims that Indians were dependent on welfare by observing that local Indians formed a powerful economic bloc through the taxes they paid.28 The writer expressed her dismay that while the town welcomed the Indian’s money, they did not accept the Indian.29 Charlotte Euverman, in an interview conducted for the Shared Histories Project, remembered how a White grocer in Smithers defended Indians visiting from Moricetown during a town meeting by focusing on their spending power: And there was discussion on the floor that whether or not they should allow Moricetown people to come shopping in Smithers. And they were going to take a vote. And one of the [grocers]… stood up, and banged his fist on the table, and he said, ‘Look here, we’ll have no such vote. Do you know who keeps our businesses going? It’s not you people here in Smithers, it’s the people of Moricetown! … [Y]ou people from Smithers come in and buy five pounds of sugar, they’ll come and buy a 25 “Indians Charge ‘Discrimination’,” Prince George Citizen, May 22, 1952, 8. 26 Ibid. 27 “Rupert Labor Council asks resignation of riot committee,” Prince Rupert Daily News, August 7, 1958, 1. 28 Bernadette Grey, “Letter to the Editor,” Smithers Interior News, August 16, 1961, 7. 29 Ibid. 54 ton at a time when they’re having a feast! And everything they buy is bought in bulk because the men go out trapping all winter, they need lots of supplies. That’s where our money comes from! We will not vote on whether or not to allow the Native people in this town,’ and he was adamant. Mom said a lot of people stood up with him and clapped at his speech when he was finished. So that was very heartwarming to hear.30 Likewise, in 1959, Louis Erich, an “Indian by birth but having neither the position of an Indian after being married off the reserve or that of a Canadian citizen,” asked the Native Voice’s readership what his status was after being expelled from a local dance at Fort St. James following a raffle for a car.31 Erich recalled the event before questioning what community he belonged to: Everyone turned out Indian and White, the greatest amount of money being spent by the Indian and part-Indian people when the bingo was over none of the Indian or part-Indian people were allowed to remain for the dance and car draw. We were bluntly told: “No Indians Allowed.” Although I’m an Indian by birth I’m a Canadian citizen and a taxpayer of the community. Can someone tell me tell what my status is? Neither I nor my family are welcome at the Indian hall cause we are Canadian citizens. At our community hall we are pushed out because they think us as Indians.32 Erich and other local Indians also encountered this question of statelessness when attending the village’s community centre to watch movies as they were “forced to sit on the side of the hall commonly referred to as the ‘Indian side.’”33 Erich’s dual social status reflected how many Native people invoked notions of citizenship to fight racial discrimination. A few months later, in July, the Native Voice urged its audience that if they “presented a united stand throughout Canada and become enfranchised on that basis, we shall have gained the biggest step towards a Renaissance.”34 In 1949, Maisie Hurley triumphantly claimed that “the Indians of British Columbia cannot be 30 Tyler McCreary, Shared Histories: Witsuwit’en-Settler Relations in Smithers, British Columbia, 1913-1973 (Smithers, BC: Creekstone Press Ltd, 2018), 124. 31 Louis Erich, “’No Indians Allowed’,” Native Voice, October 1959, 2. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid. 34 “Who Wants the Vote?” Native Voice, July 1948, 8. 55 ignored” in the coming provincial election, the first in which Indians were allowed to vote, and warned that “Mr. Politician had to be careful, or the door will be closed on you this time.”35 When asked by journalists her opinion on this election, Hurley stated her optimism that the Indian vote would usher in a new wave of Native equality and activism: Only the Indians can say the way they will vote but I can assure you they are giving the matter very serious thought and will not be influenced by political promises. They quite realize the punch they pack as a united body of voters and know that the door has now been opened to them. If they stick together, then a new day will dawn for them. One day the Whites will thank the world that the Indian has come into his own.36 Likewise, Hazelton Chief Harold Clifford celebrated the vote with a delegation of interior tribes by stating that the “door is now opened to us and a light is shining on the Native people of this province.”37 Although Indians in northern British Columbia blurred the lines that differentiated “Native” from “citizen” through the gradual acquisition of citizenship, these same people pragmatically avoided erasing these lines altogether as they sought to retain their Indian rights alongside enfranchisement. 38 In 1949, Larry Baird wrote to the Prince Rupert Daily News in disgust after his friend was asked to provide his “papers” at a local hotel. For Baird, the incident was an affront to the “freedom which one would think might still be in our inheritance today” and an insult to the dominion that Native people held over the country before European colonization.”39 Three years later, Harold Sinclair proclaimed at a Liberal rally held in Smithers that while they were Canadians, the Kitwanga were proudly “the first upon the land and along the shores of the Skeena” and that his community held Native 35 Maisie Armitage-Moore, “Northern Report,” Native Voice, June 1949, 4. 36 “Indians’ Champion Whams Vanderhoof,” Prince George Citizen, May 26, 1949, 1. 37 “Interior Natives Laud Vote,” Smithers Interior News, May 19, 1949, 2. 38 Rutherford, “Canada’s Other Red Scare,” 63. 39 Larry Baird, “Proud Indian,” Prince Rupert Daily News, February 17, 1949, 2. 56 rights alongside the privileges they held as Canadian citizens.40 Similarly, Native chiefs, councillors, and band spokesmen in the Native Rights Committee of Interior Tribes of British Columbia were summoned to a meeting in Prince George during September 1959 to discuss a brief on Native rights which would be presented to a parliamentary committee on Indian Affairs.41 Peter Kelly of the Native Brotherhood, who accompanied this delegation, urged that the federal vote be given without the necessity of waiving Indian rights – which included exemption from taxes – as a basis of enfranchisement and noted that British Columbia Natives had become more confident in their demands after being “given the provincial vote.”42 While George Manuel, an organizer of the association, voiced his group’s support for the federal government’s bid to give Indians full voting privileges, he voiced his commitment to safeguard the hereditary rights awarded to local Native people by treaties or other promises.43 Although the articulation of these demands in northern British Columbia does not present an exception to the evolution of Native political activism throughout Canada during this era, the period in which they began to emerge in this region – the late 1940s – is earlier than the scholarly literature leads us to expect. Scholars have dated the origins of this political transformation to the late 1950s, with acceleration during the 1960s, when it famously culminated into the mobilizing banner of “Citizens Plus” that Native activists employed to defeat the 1969 White Paper.44 John Leslie argued that the growing demand for Indian rights was partially facilitated by the emergence of Canadian cultural pluralism during the late 1950s which acknowledged the “contribution of non-traditional cultures to the 40 “Discrimination Decried by Indian Chief,” Native Voice, June 1952, 11. 41 “Rights Discussed,” Prince George Citizen, September 24, 1959, 12. 42 “Indians Criticize ‘Petty Tyranny,’” Prince George Citizen, July 6, 1959, 8. 43 “Natives Form Committee,” Nechako Chronicle, January 28, 1960, 1. 44 Leslie, “Assimilation, Integration or Termination?” 391. 57 Canadian mosaic.”45 Similarly, J.R. Miller tracked the roots of this movement to the term’s coining in the 1966 Hawthorn Commission’s federal report which recommended that Canada’s Native people “should be regarded as “citizens plus”; in addition to the normal rights and duties of citizenship, Indians possess certain additional rights as charter members of the Canadian community.”46 In this case, northern British Columbia – from Prince George west to Prince Rupert – presents an oddity: no treaties were ever signed in this region. While these historians, and the scholarship, acknowledges the advocacy for Indian rights before its formal articulation as policy during the late 1960s, the case of northern British Columbia may assist future research by tying immediate post-war activism and political protest more directly to its later revival as “Citizens Plus.” This dichotomy – in which the struggle for equal Canadian citizenship seemingly contrasted with the desire to retain Indian rights – was best exemplified in the support Native people lent to the practice of medical segregation in the region’s hospitals. In theory, this segregation was not designed to perpetuate racial intolerance; but was rather a response to local Indians who demanded specialized treatment for diseases which had impacted their communities. Chief Paddy Isaac, chairman of the Central Interior Indians association, received unanimous agreement amongst Burns Lakes’ Indians when he petitioned the provincial government in 1952 to build a hospital in the Central Lakes District to treat tuberculosis for Native people only.47 Similarly, the Native Voice celebrated the federal government’s 1951 decision to expand the existing network of “hospitals, sanatoria, nursing stations, dispensaries and other health facilities exclusively for Indians.”48 45 Ibid. 46 H.A.C. Cairns, S.M. Jamieson, K. Lysky, A Survey of the Contemporary Indians of Canada: A Report on Economic, Political, Educational Needs and Policies, vol. 1, ed. H.B. Hawthorn (Ottawa: Indian Affairs Branch, 1967), 13. 47 “Indians Air Grievances at Big Burns Lake Rally,” Prince George Citizen, April 21, 1952, 11. 48 “Improved Indian Health Services,” Native Voice, March 1951, 4. 58 Segregation in the region’s numerous medical buildings, as Mary John recalled in her memoirs, played an important social function in Native communities. Although John protested the separation of the Indian and White wings of Vanderhoof’s St. John’s Hospital – which was justified as being implemented for the Indians as “they would feel safe” in their section – she remembered “we used to say that the only time we could socialize in Vanderhoof with any pleasure was when we were admitted to what was called the Indian Wing of St. John’s Hospital.”49 Furthermore, the isolation between the hospital’s Native and White charges may have created a more comfortable environment to facilitate the limited interaction John and her fellow Indian patients had with the White staff. However, these exchanges were not always positive. John remembers that although some of the doctors were respectful, some of the staff were rude to her, and at one point a doctor jokingly told the nurses to “give her lots of moose meat” – an allusion which played upon the stereotype of the “wild” and “uncivilized” Indian hunter.50 The attitudes of John’s doctors reflected the often-ugly reality of medical segregation in northern British Columbia. As Mary-Ellen Kelm has argued, segregation in the region’s various hospitals and medical offices was often the uneasy concession care staff made to ease White hostility towards the care that Native patients received from the Department of Indian Affairs.51 Many doctors, to avoid conflict with White patients – who were expected to Mary John, typescript of notes from interviews with Mary John by Bridget Moran, c.1986-c.1988, “Stage 2: Putting it all together: ‘Stoney Creek Woman’, Accession #2008.3.1.3, Box 1, Folder 3, Bridget Moran fonds. Northern BC Archives, University of Northern British Columbia, Prince George, British Columbia, Canada; Bridget Moran, Stoney Creek Woman: The Story of Mary John (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2007), 131. 50 Mary John, typescript of notes from interviews with Mary John by Bridget Moran, c.1986-c.1988, “Stage 2: Putting it all together: ‘Stoney Creek Woman’, Accession #2008.3.1.3, Box 1, Folder 3, Bridget Moran fonds. Northern BC Archives, University of Northern British Columbia, Prince George, British Columbia, Canada. 51 Mary-Ellen Kelm, Colonizing Bodies: Aboriginal Health and Healing in British Columbia 1900-1950 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1998), 136. 49 59 pay for their care – separated them from the facility’s Native charges.52 However, separation did not necessarily equate with a lesser quality of care delivered to Indian patients. Although medical inspector H.A. Proctor reported in 1947 that Vanderhoof’s St. John’s Hospital was racially segregated, he observed the treatment afforded to its Native and White charges was equitable.53 In some cases, however, doctors neglected their Indian patients in favour of feepaying White patients.54 This difficult negotiation, as John A. Kirk observed in his study of the desegregation of Little Rock’s public swimming pools in the late 1960s, was confounded by the fact that the rural locales these hospitals serviced could oftentimes be more resistant to racial integration than urban centres.55 Furthermore, while it is reasonable to suspect that some medical staff in the region similarly opposed this integration, those who supported nonprejudicial care were often isolated in their communities, thus reducing their ability to withstand public opinion.56 The most spectacular example of this acute social pressure occurred in a fierce exchange between the editor of the Smithers Interior News and the management of the village’s Sister of Bulkley Valley District Hospital in 1945. On February 15, the newspaper’s editor objected to the hospital’s use of the “best private rooms at the hospital for patients other than those for whom they were intended” after two Indians were treated for communicable diseases in a private room.57 Despite this condemnation, however, the editor never specified who these misplaced patients were. Instead, the editor contented the audience’s curiosity, or 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid, 137. 54 Ibid, 133. 55 John A. Kirk, “Going Off the Deep End: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Desegregation of Little Rock’s Public Swimming Pools.” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 73, no. 2 (Summer 2014): 139. 56 Ibid. 57 “Editorial,” Smithers Interior News, February 15, 1945, 2. 60 perhaps affirmed their assumptions, in stating that the only remedy for the hospital’s overcrowded conditions was the construction of another wing or a “separate building for such patients.”58 The hospital’s medical superintendent, L.M. Green, clarified the editor’s statements a week later. Green, in a letter to the newspaper, slammed the editor for criticizing the hospital – a “Christian organization working in a supposedly Christian land” – for carrying out its mission “to care of the sick regardless of race, colour, or religion.”59 Although Green considered the possibility of establishing a separate Indian hospital building after the war, he remained steadfast that the hospital would provide care to patient despite their creed or race.60 Green’s comments were seconded by the hospital’s chairman, J.W. Turner, who denounced the newspaper for its “unwarranted attack” on the facility’s procedures.61 The decision to move the Indian wards into the private room, Turner contended, was based on the rationale of preventing further infection in the building.62 Two years later, Inspector Proctor observed that care for Native patients at the Smithers hospital was deteriorating. In his report, the inspector alleged that there was “some racial discrimination” in the operation of the hospital’s duties, as its Indians charges, although well nursed, were completely isolated from the rest of the hospital – a situation which Proctor noted would only provide “bad propaganda” for the facility.63 In one case, he observed that a shortage of hospital staff and wandering tuberculous children led the nurses 58 Ibid. 59 L.M. Green, “Letters to the Editor,” Smithers Interior News, February 22, 1945, 2. 60 Ibid 61 J.W. Turner, “Letters to the Editor,” Smithers Interior News, February 22, 1945, 2. 62 Ibid. 63 Kelm, Colonizing Bodies, 137. 61 to tie the young patients to their basement beds in body jackets which led to a stink in the room.64 Native people navigated the rapidly transforming social and political Canadian landscape during the post-war period to further their demands for equal citizenship rights. This negotiation extended onto several fronts: the growing economic participation of Native communities in post-war provincial and local economies, the emerging political clout of Indian veterans who challenged the persistent discrimination in their communities, and the mounting demands made by increasingly politically agitated Indians. However, this surge in political protest and activism encountered stiff resistance in the form of tepid governmental reform and local hostility. Despite these challenges, Native people – in conjunction with the deconstruction of formerly repressive Indian policy – endeavoured to blur the lines between “Indian” and “citizen” which had previously justified race-based discrimination in northern British Columbia. Moreover, these protests allowed Native people to further their demands to encompass both citizenship rights and Indian rights. 64 Ibid. 62 Chapter 3 – “Now We’re as Good as White People!” Fighting for Liquor Equality, 1951 - 1962 The owner of a Smithers’ hotel complained to the Terrace Omineca Herald on January 18, 1952, that the newspaper’s report of Hazelton Natives being “run into our local lock-up” after leaving his beer parlour gave his village a “black-eye.”1 The correspondent retorted that the newspaper’s objective was not to slander the community but to bring attention to those who “tried to make the whole suffer for the misdeeds of a few rowdies.”2 A few months later, the hotelier’s opinions on Native drinking led to a dramatic confrontation with the editor of the Smithers Interior News during a Liberal rally held at the village.3 Frictions between the hotelier and the editor began to simmer during the rally’s inaugural presentation, where Chief Harold Sinclair of the Kitwanga band delivered an “impassioned speech” against the racial discrimination that Indians experienced at hotels, restaurants, and barber shops in the village. Tensions rose to a climax following Sinclair’s speech when Attorney-General Gordon Wismer declared his support for liquor equality. According to the Native Voice, the hotel owner “shouted from the back of the hall: ‘You make the laws and we have got to suffer for them’ […before] condemning the Indians for rowdy behaviour in the beer parlours and demanded that the privilege of drinking in them be withdrawn from the Natives ‘until they clean themselves up.’” In response, the editor alleged that the hotelier “filled the Indians up with beer and then blamed them for their condition” before the ensuring uproar drowned out the editor’s stream of insults. The commotion from the assembly reportedly spilled onto Smithers’ streets as the “grievances of Indians and Whites were aired Wednesday night at numerous corner meetings, in the three 1 J.J. Watson, “Smithers Protest,” Terrace Omineca Herald, January 18, 1952, 5. 2 Hazelton Correspondent for the Omineca Herald, “To Smithers,” Terrace Omineca Herald, January 25, 1952, 5. 3 “Discrimination Decried by Indian Chief,” Native Voice, June 1952, 11; “Natives Claim Discrimination,” Terrace Omineca Herald, May 30, 1952, 1. 63 parlours, and in private houses.” Sinclair made one last protest against local discrimination by travelling to the local jail after the rally to find a cell to sleep, claiming that no hotel would accept his business. Wismer found Sinclair accommodation at a private house. This episode centred on the behaviour of Indians when they drank at beer parlours; a newfound privilege considering that the provincial government only begrudgingly permitted Native people to drink in “licensed public places” on December 15, 1951, when it heeded an amendment made to the revised Indian Act which allowed Natives to buy liquor “for consumption in a public place in accordance with the law of the province.”4 However, even this step towards full citizenship came with its own setbacks; the provincial Liquor Control Board (LCB) stringently interpreted the government’s reforms and ruled that hotel beer parlours were the only establishments where Indians could drink.5 Native drinking was still prohibited on reserve and in every other public place. Although the pursuits of Native people in achieving equal citizenship rights were partially realized in 1960 when the federal government extended the vote to status Indians, restrictions on Native drinking throughout British Columbia continued to be strictly enforced until 1962 when Attorney General Robert Bonner announced that the province would no longer enforce any of the liquor provisions found within the Indian Act.6 Furthermore, the limited respite offered by the 1951 decision to Native drinkers was often challenged by White patrons and parlour owners who sought to prevent an Indian incursion into their retreat. 4 Robert A. Campbell, “A ‘Fantastic Rigmarole’: Deregulating Aboriginal Drinking in British Columbia, 1945- 62,” BC Studies 141 (Spring 2004): 83; Robert A. Campbell, Sit Down and Drink Your Beer: Regulating Vancouver’s Beer Parlours, 1925-1954 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000), 99; Canada, Statutes of Canada, 15 George VI (20 May 1951), c. 29 (Indian Act), s. 95. 5 Campbell, “A Fantastic Rigmarole,” 89. 6 Ibid, 99. 64 The tumultuous history of Native drinking in northern British Columbia demands attention because it sheds light on Native people’s fight to achieve equal citizenship rights while challenging racial discrimination. As Robert Campbell asserts, the restrictive liquor provisions found in the Indian Act regulated, defined, and even “created” Indians by legally categorizing them “somewhere between minors and interdicts.”7 Public perceptions of Indians fared no better as communities readily associated Native identity with drunkenness, violence, and degradation. Mary John, from the Stoney Creek reserve, put it bluntly: White society would “see a drunken Indian and … think all Indians are like that.”8 These perceptions motivated acts of racial discrimination and segregation throughout the region and continued to underpin the exclusion of Native people from public life long after other such justifications lost legitimacy. Consequently, the act of drinking became an overtly political endeavour that challenged racial discrimination. For example, a few weeks before the December 1951 reform, Chief Draw 100 responded to the Prince George Citizen’s suggestion that “the Indian is not the White man’s equal” by arguing that Indians would quickly demonstrate their ability to drink alcohol with moderation and civility if given the chance: “So it may be said, take the drinking from the back alleys, take the bottles out of the hidden teepee, loose the Indian from the power of unscrupulous bootleggers and we will see him emerge as sane a drinker as the average White man and a good deal saner than the alcoholic derelicts which litter the streets of Prince George and many other Canadian cities.”9 Similarly, in an article published by the Native Voice in 1950, Alfred Scow of the Native Brotherhood questioned the validity 7 Ibid, 93. 8 Mary John, typescript of notes from interviews with Mary John by Bridget Moran, c.1986-c.1988, “Stage 2: Putting it all together: ‘Stoney Creek Woman’, Accession #2008.3.1.3, Box 1, Folder 3, Bridget Moran fonds. Northern BC Archives, University of Northern British Columbia, Prince George, British Columbia, Canada. 9 Chief Draw 100, “Ouch! … An Arrow,” Prince George Citizen, November 8, 1951, 3. 65 of barring Indians from drinking after they “became citizens in the 1949 provincial election.”10 He further condemned this contradiction by stating that there was no justification in “unjustly making criminals of us because we follow the trends of the society in which we are obliged to live.”11 Scow finished his criticism by demanding that the provincial government let the “Indian decide for himself legally instead of illegally, whether he shall or shall not drink?”12 Poignantly, the 1955 Hawthorn Report observed the political dimensions of Native drinking: Today, public debate continues over questions related to liquor and those Indians who wish to drink. There are those who argue for a return of prohibition, there are those who argue for the continuation of the present system; and those who argue for the increasing liberalization of liquor law. There is indeed probably no issue affecting the Indians which is so much in the public eye.13 Drinking for Indians, as Campbell contends, became synonymous with “political consciousness and has grown into a symbol of Native solidarity.”14 This chapter argues that the fight and eventual acquisition of drinking rights further blurred the distinction – created by official decree and public hostility – between “Native” and “citizen.” Campbell, a prominent historian of public drinking in British Columbia, argues that provincial regulation for public drinking was “almost racially invisible” during the period between 1925-54 as “race and ethnicity appeared to be small considerations” in the formulation of alcohol policy.15 However, as Campbell further contends, this seemingly egalitarian approach was deceptive, as the formation of policy was not the same as its enforcement in local establishments. Racial regulation continued to dominate the manner in 10 Alfred Scow, “Drinking Liquor Should be Matter for Natives Themselves to Decide,” Native Voice, January 1950, 3. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 H.B. Hawthorn, C.S. Belshaw, and S.M. Jamieson, The Indians of British Columbia: A Survey of Social and Economic Conditions (Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 1955), 806-807. 14 Campbell, “A Fantastic Rigmarole,” 92. 15 Campbell, Sit Down and Drink Your Beer, 80. 66 which officials and beer parlour owners maintained order in their establishments.16 Although the war discredited overt racial discrimination in the operation of beer parlours, officials continued to regulate the behaviour of non-White customers by attempting to enforce a homogeneous culture of respectful conduct and moderate drinking based on the comportment of the ideal White person. 17 The centrality of behaviour, rather than skin colour, thus allowed non-White patrons to cross the color lines and “become White” if their tableside conduct was appropriate.18 As a result, the very act of entering a beer parlour challenged notions of racial superiority and White privilege – or a least blurred them when one drank. The reaction of Stoney Creek villagers to the December 15 decision to allow Indians into beer parlours, as Mary John remembered, was one of exaltation as some remarked that they were “as good as White people now.”19 However, despite the opportunities this method of regulation provided Native drinkers to assert their equality with White patrons, racial prejudices often hindered their efforts. For example, the LCB’s Director of Licensing chastised the manager of a Smithers hotel beer parlour after one of his bartenders served an Indian who had previously been evicted for misbehaviour. The Director complained that, if “the ejection of an Indian and his wife is as rare as it ought to be in a well-managed establishment,” the bartender should have been able to recognize the troublemaker and refuse him service. Conversely, the Director suggested a disturbing alternative in which race played a major role in determining who could visit the beer parlour: “It seems to the writer, also, that if the ejection of Indian and his 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid, 84. However, as Campbell observes, the conduct of White people in beer parlours was equally as diverse and problematic for authorities. Campbell, Sit Down and Drink Your Beer, 84. 18 Ibid, 80; Albert M. Camarillo, “Navigating Segregated Life in America’s Racial Borderhoods, 1910s-1950s,” Journal of American History 100, no. 3 (December 2013): 645-662. 19 Bridget Moran, Stoney Creek Woman: The Story of Mary John (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2007), 131. 67 wife from the premises is such commonplace that it would not be noticed at the time by [the bartender], this is a very considerable reflection on the efficiency of the management and the type of people who feel themselves, one might surmise, almost welcome in the licensed premises.”20 Public hostility and prejudice similarly led to controversy in Burns Lake during the period from 1952-54 over the policing of Native people in the town’s only beer parlour. While the Burns Lake Review optimistically noted in January 1952 that the town’s Indians were becoming accustomed to buying beer and were “no longer inclined to abuse the privilege” following the lifting of restrictions the previous December, issues regarding the appearance of these new customers began to simmer at the local Tweedsmuir Hotel.21 One month after the newspaper voiced its optimism, the manager of the hotel petitioned the LCB’s regional inspector for the “installation of a separate rest room, in the Ladies’ section, for the use of the Native women only.”22 The manager’s rationale for the request was that it would “assist both sanitarily and socially” by alleviating the “reluctance of the White women patrons” to use the restrooms after Native women – who were described as “extremely dirty and infected with kinds of body lice.”23 The inspector instructed the manager that he was obliged to “treat the Indians as they would treat their White patrons under similar conditions.”24 The chief inspector seconded his colleague’s decision and denied the request on the basis that “Indian women are Canadian citizens” and, therefore, it was impossible for the LCB to “direct that any 20 E.W.C. Sharpe to Laurence W. Perry, 26 November 1953, BCA, GR52, Box 10, File 121-291. 21 “Natives Become Accustomed to Buying Beer,” Burns Lake Review, January 17, 1952, 5. Lythgoe to Supervisor, 26 February 1952, BCA, GR52, Box 10, File 121-386. Ibid. 24 Ibid. 22 23 68 discrimination be shown in connection with them when using licensed premises.”25 As a result, the chief inspector advised that while the manager could evict filthy individuals from the parlour, he had to ensure that he applied the same ruling for any White women who should “appear in your premises in an uncouth state.”26 Although the manager was sympathetic to the LCB’s stance on the issue, he expressed the difficulty in explaining the “situation to the local White trade whose regard for the Native has never been very high.”27 While the LCB’s response reflected the larger forces of social justice and human rights that were popularized in Canada following the conclusion of the Second World War, the organization’s commitment to the principles of egalitarianism was dubious. The chief inspector, although denying the manager’s request to construct a new washroom for segregating Native women from White women, told the manager that “if you wish to supply another toilet in your premises for women, there is nothing to stop you.”28 This was an odd concession for the chief inspector to make in light of the prevailing sentiment of equality found in his correspondence to the manager. However, as Robert Campbell observes, this disparity could be explained as a tacit suggestion from the chief inspector that the restrooms could be segregated if the LCB was not formally aware of practice.29 Like Campbell, this study finds that the LCB’s application of non-prejudicial administration in Burns Lake, despite its best intentions, was marred by racial prejudice.30 For example, the chief inspector responded to allegations that the hotel’s dining-room was operated by the Chinese, who kept it in a “deplorable condition,” by compelling the manager to rectify the issue in 1951.31 A Haywood to Kelway, 26 February 1952, ibid. Ibid 27 Lythgoe to Supervisor, 26 February 1952, ibid. 28 Haywood to Kelway, 26 February 1952, ibid. 29 Campbell, Sit Down and Drink Your Beer, 101. 30 Ibid. 31 Haywood to Kelway, 25 September 1951, BCA, GR52, Box 10, File 121-386. 25 26 69 month later, the manager informed the chief inspector that the Chinese had been replaced by “all White help.”32 Despite these obstacles, the LCB had momentarily dissuaded the hotel from openly discriminating against its Native customers. However, by the spring of 1952, the local RCMP corporal had grown increasingly critical of the hotel’s perceived inability to supervise its customers. The manager countered that bootleggers were the far more pressing concern along with the public’s hostility to Native drinkers in the parlour: One thing is very noticeable and that is the general public particularly in this area do not approve of Indians entering beer parlours. Consequently, they are talking and spreading misleading information. For instance, last week I happened to enter a home where six people at that moment were discussing Indians in beer parlours. They were saying that Indians were made drunk in the beer parlour and then thrown out. I disputed this statement very strongly but noted at the same time that all six people concerned never frequented beer parlours and were not patrons of the Tweedsmuir beer parlour. I have mentioned the foregoing because I have concluded that a lot of people are discussing the situation unfavourably and never stopping to think that they are jeopardizing the hotel that has this problem to contend with.33 Although the manager contacted the elders of the local Native community, who assured him that his concerns regarding the behaviour of Indian patrons would be presented to the Babine Lake bands later in the summer, he doubted the elders’ promise as he was “beginning to suspect my efforts are not being appreciated.”34 Strikingly, the police corporal’s sentiment towards Native customers was similar to the manager’s. On April 14, 1952, the corporal submitted a report to the LCB in which he partially disagreed with the hotel staff’s indictment of Native drinking behaviour. While the corporal observed the accusation was “understandable,” he downplayed the significance of the Indian element in countering that there were “many White persons who are a lot worse 32 Kelway to Haywood, 31 October 1951, ibid. 33 Kelway to Haywood, 23 June 1952, ibid. 34 Ibid. 70 when intoxicated than any Native” before assigning the blame on the management’s poor supervision as patrons had allegedly been known to smuggle hard liquor onto the premises.35 However, Burns Lake Indians called into question the corporal’s official stance in treating Natives as equal to White patrons. On April 21, only days after the corporal had submitted his report to the LCB, the Prince George Citizen reported that, during an Indian rally held in Burns Lake, a Native accused the village’s police force of “confining their prosecutions to Indians until it amounted to persecution.”36 Similarly, the LCB inspector noted a few months later that, “according to local remarks,” there was “little trouble” between the parlour’s patrons and the police when the corporal was out of the village.37 However, unlike the local Indians, the inspector did not specify whether those subjected to the corporal’s strict method of policing were Native or not. Tensions between the police corporal and the manager intensified to the point that the regional inspector expressed his opinion in a letter to his supervisor that the corporal’s “crusade against the Tweedsmuir Hotel approaches the personal rather than the official” as the man appeared to “have the fixation that everyone in Burns Lake is laughing at the police force.”38 It was to both the inspector’s and hotel manager’s relief, then, that the corporal was relocated and his replacement was much more approving of the hotel’s management.39 However, on November 1, 1952, police were called to restore order in the beer parlour after a handful of Native patrons caused a fracas. The new corporal blamed the disturbance not in the business’s management but in the “supplies of hard liquor” the Natives had obtained 35 Report of Cpl. W. West, 14 April 1952, ibid. 36 “Indians Air Grievances at Big Burns Lake Rally,” Prince George Citizen, April 21, 1952, 11. 37 Lythgoe to Director of Licensing. 13 August 1952, BCA, GR52, Box 10, File 121-386. 38 Ibid. 39 Until otherwise noted, the following notes are from Lythgoe to Director of Licensing, 11 November 1952, ibid. 71 from a bootlegger. Nevertheless, at a meeting attended by stipendiary magistrate L.G. Saul, the police corporal, the hotel’s general-manager and manager, a local chief, and thirty local Indians, the “question of the inability of the Natives to conduct themselves in a proper manner, while in a licensed premises, was the point under discussion and it was the concurred opinion that Natives should be barred from obtaining beer for at least two months.” The chief and a majority of the elder Native people in attendance seconded the suggestion. While the manager stated he would cooperate, he went on record to state that the “hotel was not discriminating against the Native as such but because he had become an unruly and troublesome patron.” The inspector, who had tepidly denied the construction of segregated washrooms at the start of the year, forwarded news of this meeting onto his supervisors. He would only address the matter again in a follow-up report in February 1953 where he observed that the ban had been extended until “spring at least” and that the “barring of this unruly element” had decreased the workload of both the RCMP and the hotel’s management despite a drop in the parlour’s revenue.40 The ban was still the standing order in May 1954 when Andrew Paull publicly demanded that Attorney General, Robert Bonner, dismiss the magistrate on charges of discrimination after his mass interdiction of Burns Lake Indians from the beer parlour.41 Paull reproached the magistrate for overstepping his authority and depriving the Indians the “personal liberties guaranteed by provincial and federal laws.”42 Paull argued that “hundreds of Indians fought in Germany and Korea to protect the rights of all Canadians and it is too 40 Campbell, Sit Down and Drink Your Beer, 102; Inspector’s Follow-Up Report, 17 February 1953, BCA, GR52, Box 10, File 121-386. 41 “Indian Asks for Jurist’s Dismissal” Prince George Citizen, May 25, 1954, 2. Although Attorney-General Bonner promised to investigate into the controversy, Bonner supported L.G. Saul in his unsuccessful bid to become a Stipendiary Magistrate two years later. While it appears that Saul did not receive this appointment, he continued to serve as the village’s magistrate throughout the 1950s and 1960s. 42 Until otherwise noted, the following notes are from “Magistrate’s Stand on Indians Scored,” Vancouver Province, May 14, 1954, 2. 72 bad that anyone, especially a magistrate, should make such a statement.” Paull also likened the magistrate’s announcement to the despotism of Stalinist rule: “I read the statement with regret – but I am glad that this is still Canada and Russian laws are not to be exercised here.” Paull further alleged that discrimination extended beyond the Tweedsmuir however: “when I was in Burns Lake, I saw that Indians who went into restaurants were only served at the counter. They could not get their meals at tables. In the theatres, they are herded into a corner like a bunch of dogs.”43 Missing from Paull’s many statements, however, was the acknowledgement that Saul had not acted alone in formulating the ban. When questioned by UBC anthropologist Harry Hawthorn at a provincial Magistrate’s convention, Saul defended his decision by asking what the difference “was between interdicting them all at once or one at a time” before concluding that the ban was “for their own good.”44According to the Native Voice, Saul allegedly claimed to reporters in Vancouver that: “we have a different brand of Indians up there. They are a lower type than you have around Vancouver. When they were given drinking privileges, it was like taking a person out of darkness and putting him into the light.”45 Paull’s public profile in the controversy illustrated the struggle that emerged between the flamboyant activist and the Native Brotherhood to expand their influence over the central interior. Like Paull, A.J. Scow of the Brotherhood voiced scorn in the organization’s official statement over Saul’s alleged shift in career from a judge to a legislator as it “would establish precedent hitherto unknown in the mechanics of British Justice.”46 Scow argued that Natives “have no objection to being punish for doing wrong but to be deprived of a 43 “Magistrate Roasted for Backward Policy Toward B.C. Interior Natives,” Native Voice, May 1954, 3. 44 “Indian Asks for Jurist’s Dismissal” Prince George Citizen, May 25, 1954, 2. 45 “Magistrate Roasted for Backward Policy Toward B.C. Interior Natives,” Native Voice, May 1954, 3. 46 A.J. Scow, “We Hope Common Law … Applied in Every Court,” Native Voice, May 1954, 3. 73 privilege for the alleged wrongs of someone else is beyond all reasons and on top of that very undemocratic.”47 Maisie Hurley seconded Scow’s stance and argued that the Indians should only be punished if they broke the law – and not be “punished before.”48 It appears from the limited press coverage the controversy received in the regional newspapers that Paull had scored a victory in maintaining his influence over the region as the press did not mention the Native Brotherhood in connection to Burns Lake. Furthermore, the only letter to the Burns Lake newspaper that was inspired by the event, encouraged a meeting between Paull and Saul as the former could be “a great help in bettering the lot of the Burns Lake Indians since he has proved his ability elsewhere as a wise mediator for the Indians.”49 While the Vancouver newspapers scornfully reported on the ban, no newspaper in the central interior took a stand on the controversy apart from the Burns Lake Review, which devoted a single front-page news snippet to illustrate its argument that southern urbanites did not understand the issues that northerners encountered when dealing with Native problems. Specifically, the editors dismissed a prominent Vancouver lawyer’s vow to fight the magistrate’s ruling by stating that the “Indians at Burns Lake were making such a nuisance of themselves in the beer parlour that hotel authorities and local citizens asked that they be barred from the beverage rooms.”50 While spectacular, the Tweedsmuir incident and its various components were not unique to the village. Rather, there were parallels in other communities after the Natives were allowed to enter beer parlours in December 1951. For example, the elders’ support of Saul’s ban bore a striking resemblance to an order given by Stoney Creek’s Governmental 47 Ibid. 48 “Magistrate Roasted for Backward Policy Toward B.C. Interior Natives,” Native Voice, May 1954, 3. 49 H.G., “Letters to the Editor,” Burns Lake Review, May 27, 1954, 2. 50 “Vancouver Lawyer Wants Indians in Beer Parlours,” Burns Lake Review, May 20, 1954, 1. 74 Chief, presumably in 1954, to hotel owners in Vanderhoof to bar Indians from their parlours after 7:30 P.M. on Saturday.51 Four years later, he wrote to the local newspaper to rescind the order on the basis that the “Indians have learned to behave themselves” and that it was “not fair to keep out all of us just on the account of a few disagreeable ones.”52 Another such parallel concerned the reaction of White patrons to the sudden influx of Indians into “their” beer parlours. As John A. Kirk observed in relation to the obstacleladen desegregation of Little Rock’s public swimming pools in 1964, White customers perceived the apparent incursion of Black swimmers as a threat, and retreated from public facilities to private neighbourhood pools.53 In Burns Lake, the hotel manager reported to the police corporal that the parlour’s beer sales had dropped since the local Indians could drink. The hostility amongst the village’s White clientele towards the Native patrons, as observed by the manager in his correspondence with the LCB, was later confirmed by magistrate Saul during his outburst at the magistrate’s conference, when he asserted that “after the Indians were admitted to the Burns Lake beer parlour, the police had 75 percent more work on their hands; the Indian’s families suffered, and the Whites were ‘scared to death.’”54 These fears were in part rooted in the legacy of the “drunken Indian” stereotype which merged notions of Native identity with alcoholism and its resulting social degradations. As Mark Anderson and Carmen L. Robertson observed, the perpetuation of this myth so normalized negative images of Native drinking – and images of Native identity altogether – that extraordinary tales of Native drunken debauchery became the standard, 51 E. Alexis, “Open Letter: Let Natives Drink Beer Saturday Nights…,” Vanderhoof Nechako Chronicle, April 17, 1958, 2. As mentioned earlier, numerous editions of the Vanderhoof Nechako Chronicle, including publications during most of 1954, are lost to both the Bill Silver online database as well as the Vanderhoof Museum. 52 Ibid. 53 John A. Kirk, “Going Off the Deep End: The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Desegregation of Little Rock’s Public Swimming Pools,” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 73, no. 2 (Summer 2014): 141. 54 “Magistrate Roasted for Backward Policy Toward B.C. Interior Natives,” Native Voice, May 1954, 3. 75 rather than the exception, when conceptualizing Indians.55 However, there had been a shift in the political, and to a lesser extent public, zeitgeist by the time Native drinkers were terrifying White patrons in Burns Lake: it had reached a crossroads between the “firewater myth” and the post-war deconstruction of racial discrimination. The result was a somewhat moralistic, yet genuine, re-attempt to re-assess Native drinking and its socio-political repercussions. The 1955 Hawthorn Report, a milestone in the province’s discussion of the post-war Indian, embodied the transitioning views regarding the degree that alcohol defined Native identity. On one hand, the study advocated for the liberalization of liquor laws as a means of dismantling racial discrimination and personal struggle.56 On the other hand, the reasoning for these suggested reforms depicted a dark underworld of Indian decay and lawlessness which readily played upon well-established tropes.57 For example, the report claimed that “some of the bad effects of opening the beer parlours include the suffering of Indian families, continuation of bootlegging, damage of cars and uniforms due to throwing up and urinating of those arrested, loss of White trade in beer parlours, and the general lowering of moral standards of Indians.”58 Furthermore, although the scholars investigated the motivations behind Native drinking, they described their findings with romantic flair: “They drink to get drunk. There is little prestige in “holding liquor.” For many of them, driven by the personal and social tensions of their confused life, intoxication is a blessed escape; a 55 Mark Cronlund Anderson and Carmen L. Robertson, Seeing Red: A History of Natives in Canadian Newspapers (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2011), 8. 56 Hawthorn, Belshaw, Jamieson, The Indians of British Columbia, 814. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid, 724. 76 release from thought and responsibility for a few hours; a state which turns tiredness and despondency into wellbeing or aggressive energy.”59 What was missing from Hawthorn’s report, however, was the acknowledgement that the ills associated with Native drinking – rather than being the result of pre-determined cultural traits – was more a manifestation of White discomfort with Indians entering “their” domain and upsetting their tenuous hold on racial privilege. The perverse logic that upheld White fears of Native drinking and which sustained the trope of the “drunken Indian” – although revealing the anxieties of Whites in abandoning their last bastions of racial purity – ultimately assigned to Indians the task of alleviating this distress. In other words, if Indians were to drink as equal citizens in beer parlours, they would first have to disprove the notion of the “drunken Indian” – which itself was a manifestation of White alarmism – and thus bear the brunt for White discomfort. Unlike the Hawthorn Report, the Prince George Citizen substituted sociological analysis for “common sense” knowledge in their editorial campaign against Indians entering beer parlours during the winter of 1951-52. The goal of the campaign however, according to an editorial on November 5, was to provide a second, sober, opinion to the proposed reforms.60 This impartiality soon disappeared as the editors declared that it was widely known that the degrading effects of alcohol, physically and morally, was more acute in Indians than in White men – “hence the common use of the word ‘Indian’ as an adjective to describe a violent or rowdy individual of any race who is under the influence of liquor.” The discrepancy between the proposed reforms and the reality of Native drinking led the editors to believe that support for the motion came “not in the homes of the average British Columbia citizen or 59 Ibid, 808. 60 “Beer for Braves,” Prince George Citizen, November 5, 1951, 2. 77 even among the Indians themselves.” Rather, the editors argued that the protection “from the evils of liquor” provided by the “original framers of Canada’s Indian Act” were being eroded by “booze barons” who had corrupted the LCB and the government. The conspiracy of the booze barons, according to the editors, thus logically explained the spate of drunken mayhem that erupted across northern British Columbia in the weeks after December 15. On January 7, the editors cited the “recent series of drunken brawls at Smithers, in which gangs of beer-guzzling Indians and a few Whites staged battles with Mounted Police” as evidence that the majority of Indians were unable to “remain off the war-path while consuming alcohol.”61 The editors again strove to expose this conspiracy in stating that the legislation was formulated by those who “were little concerned with the welfare of the Indians and were actually motivated by a selfish desire for profits.”62 While some of the hostilities cited by the newspaper were substantiated by a report made by the sergeant of the regional RCMP, the editors of the Prince George Citizen described the disturbances with a sensationalist flair.63 In Smithers “two hundred rampaging alcoholmaddened … braves and their squaws” battered the village’s four-man police force. The grisly scene of violence and chaos escalated as the “belligerent Indians” terrorized locals and at one point “commenced fighting among themselves and squaws carrying papooses on their backs were seen striking at their men.”64 The editors described the filling to capacity of the Vanderhoof cell block by drunk Natives has having “badly shaken the confident opinion 61 “Tomahawks in the Taverns,” Prince George Citizen, January 7, 1952, 2. 62 Ibid. 63 RCMP Sgt. Potterton, in his report of 22 February 1952, observed that the “situation has become worse since the Indians were admitted into the beer parlours” as “when they become intoxicated they become abusive and want to fight, and do fight amongst themselves, thus creating many disturbances on the streets, using much profane language. Report of Sgt. Potterton regarding the Enforcement of Indian Act in the Smithers Detachment, 22 February 1952, BCA, GR52, Box 10, File 121-242; “200 Indians Stage Riots in Smithers,” Prince George Citizen, December 31, 1951, 9. 64 Ibid. 78 held by most residents that local Natives would practice restraint in exercising their newly gained beer parlour privileges” – a statement that the newspaper never attempted to verify.65 The imagery that the editors evoked when describing drunk Native men and women deserves further elaboration, as it resonated with a general trend amongst White commentators to depict the horrors of Native drinking through the prism of deteriorating gender roles. On one hand, the editors’ fascination with the belligerence of Native women revealed a deep concern that this aggressiveness defied “womanly,” or White, gender roles which celebrated the traits of refinement, gentleness, and perhaps even domestication. Furthermore, this breach, threatened to ruin the sanctity and purity of motherhood for many commentators. The image of a Native child sitting on a curb beside the beer parlour – neglected by their drunken mother – was frequently used in accounts designed to pull at one’s heartstrings and discredit Native drinking. For example, the police corporal for the Smithers regional district observed that an Order of Interdiction had been filed against nine Indians in the village on the ground that their children were “being left out on the streets while their parents were in the beer parlours, and that they were not being properly fed, or cared for.”66 Similarly, it is no coincidence that editors of the Prince George Citizen highlighted the fact that Native women had children in their papooses while rampaging through Smithers. When a concerned citizen wrote into the Burns Lake Review in 1954 to encourage cooperation between Stipendiary Magistrate L.G. Saul and Andrew Paull, he proposed that if the latter “could see the little Indian children sitting on the sidewalk at night waiting for the beer parlour to close on the night when the family allowance cheques have just come in he 65 Untitled, Prince George Citizen, December 31, 1951, 9. 66 Report of Sgt. Potterton regarding the Enforcement of Indian Act in the Smithers Detachment, 22 February 1952, BCA, GR52, Box 10, File 121-242. 79 might agree that Gin Saul, the RCMP, and Father Callaly, are right in taking the law in their own hands.”67 Determining the extent to which commentators associated the dangers of Native men when drinking to the framework of gender roles is much more difficult to ascertain. While accounts of drunken Native women were often placed under the microscope by observers who paid special attention to characterize their failings as a woman, and more importantly, a mother, reportage on drunken Native men never seems to have prompted a similar analysis. Intoxicated Native men, as seen throughout this chapter, were almost always depicted as being aggressive and belligerent without further commentary. However, this language may suggest that commentators depicted the shortcomings of Native men in their masculinity – or at least the negative and exaggerated aspects of such. In other words, the issue with Native men when they drank, according to this logic, was that it allowed the excesses of masculinity – aggression and violence – to bubble to the surface unrestrained by sober thought. Regardless, this question of gender roles and Native drinking in northern British Columbia merits further exploration and research. Nevertheless, two weeks later, a Prince George resident responded to the January 7 editorial to question whether the editors had seriously considered the plight of the Indians.68 While the writer wanted Native people to pay for their alcohol through their own “independent industry” and not through welfare, he proclaimed that he “would not begrudge him his glass of beer” as a matter of principle: the “welfare of our Native population is intricately tied with their acceptance of our way of life.”69 The writer’s opinion 67 H.G., “Letters to the Editor,” Burns Lake Review, 27 May 1954, 2. Interestingly, Father John Callaly is never mentioned in any other account regarding the decision to ban Indians from entering the Tweedsmuir. 68 WM. R. Drinkwater, “Independent Indians,” Prince George Citizen, January 14, 1952, 2. 69 Ibid. 80 echoed a counter-campaign that Indians and activists, and namely the Native Brotherhood, launched against dominant news narratives. For example, the Native Voice continued to demand equal liquor rights even after the 1951 decision to allow Natives into the beer parlours. In 1959, the newspaper argued that “no false concepts of ‘paternalism’ can excuse the present discrimination” that Natives experienced under the Indian Act as they were prohibited from drinking on reserve and in every other public place until 1962 when the provincial government lifted all restrictions on Native drinking.70 Likewise, when Indian Superintendent F.E. Anfield was goaded into addressing the evils of liquor during an interview with the CBC, Anfield noted that there was “no serious concerns but a few problems” such as “an increasing number of social problems like deserted or neglected children.”71 The Vanderhoof Chronicle approached the question of Native drinking more sympathetically and more tactfully than the Citizen. The editors encouraged communal unity when they responded to the “disgraceful situation” that occurred during that year’s Easter weekend, when the local jail was filled with intoxicated Native workers following the seasonal closure of the nearby sawmills. The editor lamented the treatment the community afforded to visiting Native people: How anyone professing belief in Christian principles can condone the conditions confronting our Native brothers is beyond comprehension. On the local level, from a radius of over 40 miles distant the Natives visit our community in large numbers particularly prior to and during holiday periods. This is the way it should be, and these visits should be received with the same warmth extended by Christians to all Christians. Instead, foolish regulations and prejudices set them apart.72 70 “End Discrimination,” Native Voice, November 1959, 2. 71 “Introducing Prince Rupert,” interview by Bob Harlow, Introducing B.C., CBC, CD # 20, Cut 2, Tape #49, November 25, 1959. 72 Editorial, “Our Brothers Keeper,” Vanderhoof Nechako Chronicle, April 7, 1956, 2. 81 Specifically, the editor argued that the high incidence of Indian drinking in the village was owing to the lack of facilities which accepted Native patronage.73 This lack of entertainment thus encouraged idleness, loitering, and inevitably, heavy drinking. The editor noted that only one restaurant in the village – which was forced to close its doors during the weekend for a lack of supplies – accepted Native business.74 While newspaper sensationalism, such as that found in the Citizen, linked the spate of mayhem to the inability of Indians to manage their drinking – an accusation which often downplayed White inebriation – it ignored the faulty or non-existent supervision that bar owners exercised over their patrons. A cursory glance through the LCB Inspector Files reveal that beer parlour management from Prince George west to Prince Rupert could be neglectful at best and criminal at worst. Operators often continued to serve Native customers past the point of intoxication, or illegally supplied them with liquor.75 For example, in 1953, the LCB issued a memorandum to all hotel operators in Prince Rupert demanding that strict supervision be maintained over the selling of liquor to prevent the “sale to Indians to take off the premises” after the board discovered that illegal supplying was rampant in the town.76 The news media’s fascination with Native drinking also reflected a deeper concern regarding the north’s seemingly disproportionate fondness for liquor. According to K.E. Luckhardt, Prince Rupert’s population amounted to only 1.2 percent of the provincial total 73 Ibid. 74 Ibid; “Easter Holiday Period Was Hectic Time for Local Police” Nechako Chronicle, April 7, 1956, 1. 75 Such instances of over-supplying can be found in the following LCB files. Theodore Hagblad to Chairman of LCB, 19 February 1953, BCA, GR52, Box 10, File 121-244; Report of Cpl. G. Youngberg, 5 February 1953, ibid; E.A Pettit and E.W. Mew to McGugan, 11 August 1953, BCA, GR52, Box 10, File 121-253; Inspector’s Follow-Up Hotel Report, 23 February 1952, BCA, GR52, Box 10, File 121-292; T.R. Berry to John Wilfred Watson, 19 November 1953, BCA, GR52, Box 10, File 121-291. 76 Memorandum of D. McGugan, 13 August 1953, BCA, GR52, Box 10, File 121-255. 82 but accounted for 2.6 percent of provincial liquor sales in 1952.77 In 1966, the LCB’s annual report stated that Prince Rupert’s residents spent close to $150 per capita on liquor the previous year – a figure which significantly exceeded the provincial average of only $75 per capita.78 Likewise, numerous communities throughout northern British Columbia surpassed the provincial average: Smithers at $141 per capita, Prince George at $193, Vanderhoof at $249, and Burns Lake at $303.79 This propensity to drink prompted local discussion. The Vanderhoof Nechako Chronicle exclaimed in 1956 that nearly 80 percent of criminal convictions in the village were related to public intoxication, supplying alcohol to Natives or minors, and incidents arising from the abuse of liquor.80 The editors of the Prince George Citizen questioned in 1959 why the city spent $2,200,000 “on booze last year” but only mustered $2000 for a recent Red Cross fundraiser.81 Furthermore, newspaper reportage failed to acknowledge that drinking for many Native people was an act of political protest against the very authorities who enforced liquor laws. As Nancy O. Lurie suggests, the act of drinking – even to the point of “getting purposefully drunk to confirm the stereotype of the ‘drunken Indian”’ – served as a defensive form of protest amongst Native people as it allowed them to assert one’s “Indianness” during Indian-White encounters.82 Similarly, the Hawthorn report observed Indians had “personified White authority in the police” as “to them the laws have come to 77 K.E. Luckhardt, “Prince Rupert: a ‘Tale of Two Cities’,” in Sa ts’e: Historical Perspectives on northern British Columbia, ed. Thomas Thorner (Prince George: College of New Caledonia Press, 1989), 329. 78 The figures presented in this citation and in the following one were calculated by dividing the gross sales from local government liquor stores – as recorded in the LCB’s Annual Report for the year 1965 to 1966 – by the community's total population as recorded in BC Stats’ Municipal Census Data. Canada, British Columbia, Liquor Control Board, Forty-Fifth Annual Report: April 1, 1965, to March 31, 1966. Victoria: A. Sutton, 1966; Canada, Statistics Canada, Census of Canada: British Columbia Municipal Census Populations, 1921-2011, Prepared by BC Stats, May 2012, http://www.bcstats.gov.bc.ca/StatisticsBySubject/Census/MunicipalPopulations. 79 Ibid. 80 “Did You Know…,” Vanderhoof Nechako Chronicle, June 16, 1956, 2. 81 “Booze Budget,” Prince George Citizen, March 18, 1959, 2. 82 Nancy Oestreich Lurie, “The World’s Oldest On-Going Protest Demonstration: North American Indian Drinking Patterns.” Pacific Historical Review 40, no. 3 (1971): 315, 332. 83 stand for all the ways in which they feel misused of belittled by authority.”83 Similarly, in February 1952, a police sergeant explained that the difficulty of enforcing the Indian Act in Smithers in part came from the resentment that local Native people felt towards the police.84 One year later, Harold Sinclair organized a meeting in the village so that local Indians could air their grievances against the “rough handling” by police, and the discrimination practiced by businessmen.85 Although he encouraged cooperation with the authorities, he stressed that the police “could go just so far in handling them,” and that any complaints should be made through him and the Brotherhood.86 The police corporal responded by denying that “the police were waiting for them when they came out of the beer parlours.”87 Similar issues emerged in Vanderhoof regarding the high-handed tactics of the police when enforcing the Indian Act during the village’s 1958 Stampede festival when seventy-three celebrants, sixty of whom were Native, were arrested for intoxication or possession.88 While one concerned citizen expressed her disgust with local bartenders for overserving patrons, another condemned the police for their “rough handling of Natives.”89 The writer exclaimed that the police’s conduct, as well as the town’s subjugation of its Indians, was contrary to the image of a racially tolerant Canada: “it is a common thing for Canadians to loudly decry racial discrimination, when practised south of their border, yet overlook evidences of the same thing here at home.”90 83 Hawthorn, Belshaw, Jamieson, The Indians of British Columbia, 730; Ibid: 754. 84 Report of Sgt. Potterton regarding the Enforcement of Indian Act in the Smithers Detachment, 22 February 1952, BCA, GR52, Box 10, File 121-242. 85 “District Natives Urged to Obey All Laws,” Smithers Interior News, October 8, 1953, 1. 86 Ibid. 87 Ibid. 88 “73 Convictions in Week in Local Police Court,” Vanderhoof Nechako Chronicle, July 21, 1956, 1. 89 Muriel G. Rowe, “Letters to the Editor,” Vanderhoof Nechako Chronicle, July 21, 1956, 4; Bert and Mary Bowman, “Letters to the Editor,” Vanderhoof Nechako Chronicle, July 21, 1956, 4. 90 Ibid. 84 However, the most dramatic merger between legislative discrimination and police violence occurred in Prince Rupert. On July 27, 1953, every officer of the Prince Rupert RCMP and reserves from the regional sub-division arrested 59 people for intoxication or for obstruction of police officers after a mob numbering around three hundred to four hundred people began throwing rocks through the windows of the city hall as well as those of the RCMP barracks in an apparent act of drunken rebellion.91 The mob, which began its march on Third Avenue by flipping a panel truck on its side, only dispersed after the police used tear gas bombs.92 By August 3, five Whites and two Indians were charged of unlawful assembly and seventeen were charged with intoxication under the Indian Act for their role in the riot, which was believed to have been sparked by the influx of hundreds of Native people that “flocked to the city” during the weekend owing to the week-long closure of the Skeena River fisheries.93 Despite a passing comment by the Prince Rupert Daily News urging the cooperation of White and Native citizens with the police, early reactions towards the riot in the newspaper’s open letter section from July 28 to July 30 did not mention any racial dimension to the riot. Early correspondence was dominated by discussion of the legality of the police’s rough handling of spectators, and the evils of liquor as it pertained to fuelling the riot.94 Moreover, readers expressed their disillusionment with the difficulty in maintaining law and order in the city. The news editors, in their plea with their readers to obey the police rather than hindering them, noted that it was “a known fact that policing in this city is different than in 91 “59 Persons Arrested by Police on Obstruction, Drunk Charges,” Prince Rupert Daily News, July 27, 1953, 1; “Unlawful Assembly Charges Laid After Stoning of City Hall,” Prince Rupert Daily News, August 3, 1953, 1. 92 “Unlawful Assembly Charges Laid After Stoning of City Hall,” Prince Rupert Daily News, August 3, 1953, 1. 93 “59 Persons Arrested by Police on Obstruction, Drunk Charges,” Prince Rupert Daily News, July 27, 1953, 1; “Unlawful Assembly Charges Laid After Stoning of City Hall,” Prince Rupert Daily News, August 3, 1953, 1. 94 “Help, Don’t Hinder Police,” Prince Rupert Daily News, July 28, 1953, 2; Silent Sam, “Citizens’ Rights,” Prince Rupert Daily News, July 28, 1953, 2; Jungle Jim, “Cheap Amusement,” Prince Rupert Daily News, July 29, 1953, 2. 85 any other.”95 This sentiment was reflected by magistrate W.D. Vance who observed that there was “no parallel in British Columbia to the situation that exists on that one block of Third Avenue after the beer parlours close [… as] there are three hotels and about five restaurants and at 11:30 at night there are between 300 to 400 people dumped in one small area.”96 Even official dispatches, such as mayor H.S. Whalen’s proclamation classifying spectators as law breakers, were silent on matters of race.97 Commentary in the newspapers drastically changed on July 31 as discussion veered towards identifying the riot’s origins – an investigation which gradually implicated the town’s Native population as the culprits and the Indian Act’s restrictions on liquor as the motivation. On July 31 a Native man under the moniker “An Indian” wrote to the paper to argue that the town’s police force should enforce laws, presumably around the Indian Act, consistently “rather than all in one night.”98 Furthermore, the writer suggested that future uprisings could be prevented by opening more entertainment venues as Indians allegedly only had the “shows and beer parlours to go to” and “if they do go, many feel out of place by a lot of White people.”99 The editors of the Prince Rupert Daily News similarly voiced their support for reform when it republished an article found in the Financial Post: “There is much to be done besides merely granting the franchise and the right to acquire alcoholic beverages. But one of the great hypotheses of liberty is that which was stated recently by Professor G.B. Watson of Columbia: ‘People treated as if they were able to decide wisely for themselves become so.’”100 95 “Help, Don’t Hinder Police,” Prince Rupert Daily News, July 28, 1953, 2. 96 “Rights of Citizens Defend in Obstructing Police Charge: Case Dismissed, Accused Warned,” Prince Rupert Daily News, July 29, 1953, 1. 97 Mayor H.S. Whalen, “Proclamation to all the People in the City of Prince Rupert,” Prince Rupert Daily News, August 6, 1953, 1. 98 An Indian, “Need Entertainment,” Prince Rupert Daily News, July 31, 1953, 2. 99 Ibid. 100 “Obsolete and Wrong,” Prince Rupert Daily News, August 14, 1953, 2. 86 Prince Rupert was aware, however, of the police force’s discriminatory practices when handling liquor infractions amongst the town’s Native population long before the July 1953 disturbance. Four years earlier in March 1949, regional Indian Superintendent F.E. Anfield spoke to the Prince Rupert Chamber of Commerce on behalf of the Native Brotherhood to express complaints that the town’s Indians felt “they are being discriminated against and not being given a fair deal” after encountering “poor accommodation at hotels … [and] what they consider is persecution by the police.”101 While Anfield never explicitly identified liquor liberalization as a remedy for police discrimination, many of the aldermen did, and advocated for revising the Indian Act or for the enfranchisement of Indians.102 The Chamber encountered the question again one month later, in April 1949, when aldermen testified that although some police interactions with local Native people were marred by “persecution,” the treatment afforded to Whites and Indians by the police was the same.103 In March 1953, only months before the riot, a letter to the editor publicly urged the police to ramp up its patrols along Third Avenue and suggested that miscreants should be being afforded “some of the treatment at present reserved for drunken Natives.”104 Native suspicions and distrust of the RCMP reached its climax during the first week of August 1953 as rumors began circulating throughout Native communities that police brutality led to the death of a young Indian boy and the near deaths of several others present at the riot. In response, Superintendent Anfield appealed to the region’s six thousand Indians over CFPR radio to disregard the gossip.105 He further urged that “careful thought and research by all concerned” would be needed to mend relations between Indians and 101 City of Prince Rupert Council Meeting Minutes, 7 March 1949. 102 Ibid. 103 City of Prince Rupert Council Meeting Minutes, 4 April 1949. 104 Eric Faure, “Patrol at Night,” Prince Rupert Daily News, March 12, 1953, 2. 105 Ibid. 87 police. Any “honest grievances” amongst the Indians, he noted, should be taken to the police inspector, the Native Brotherhood, Anfield himself, or the commissioners and ministers in Vancouver or Ottawa.106 The superintendent’s efforts to improve shaky relations led to a summit in early August attended by himself, eighteen Indian Chiefs, Mayor Whalen, and the police inspector at which the Native delegation assured the authorities that, as mayors themselves and loyal subjects to the Queen, they would “do everything in their power to maintain law and order” in their communities.107 One chief lamented the negative attention that the disturbance attracted towards his community members: “the publicity of the so-called riots had set the clocks back years for the Natives. We have been classed as a bunch of savages.”108 Interestingly, while debate surrounding the riot was primarily fuelled by the public image of the “drunken Indian,” commentary and the outcomes of the riot primarily centred on repairing relations between the police and Native people rather than on addressing the Indian Act’s liquor restrictions. Although commentators did discuss the liquor question, such conversation was encompassed as part of a larger rhetoric regarding police and social injustice. Alfred Scow addressed this discrepancy in an article published in the September edition of Native Voice in which he lamented that the Natives had “been on trial” ever since they were permitted in the beer parlours, because public opinion overlooked the majority instances of good behaviour, and instead confirmed their own assumptions that Indians could not hold their liquor when they drank.109 This prejudice revealed itself, according to Scow, when news of intoxicated and rowdy Indians elicited nothing more than knowing 106 Ibid. 107 “Citizens Co-operate with Authorities to Enjoy Quiet, Happy Saturday Night,” Prince Rupert Daily News, August 10, 1953, 1. 108 Ibid. 109 Alfred Scow, “Liquor Emancipation Looked,” Native Voice, September 1953, 5. 88 nods of affirmation amongst “skeptics in the gallery of judges” who would proclaim that “see I told you so.”110 Scow condemned the fact that the news in Prince Rupert quickly “played up” the stereotype of the drunken Indian since it was later revealed that the “socalled ‘mob’ consisted mainly of ‘White people’” and that a “prominent psychologist in Vancouver had commented on the good behaviour of the Natives” when in beer parlours.111 As it stood, action on the liquor action had been safely deferred in Prince Rupert. However, this silence would be shattered in the early hours of August 3, 1958, when Prince Rupert fell under siege as one thousand rioters swarmed the city’s police station and city hall after a supposedly routine arrest of two Natives for drunkenness escalated to mob violence.112 The town’s police regiment, reinforced by military reserve units, and local firefighters, members of the US Coast Guard, and several “onlooking civilians” who were equipped with helmets and pressed into service to “restor[e] peace,” repulsed waves of stone-throwing demonstrators with fire hoses and tear gas bombs until the crowd began to dissipate.113 Mayor Peter J. Lester climbed on top of a nearby fire engine amongst the chaos and twice read aloud the Riot Act through a loud speaker which established a maximum penalty of life imprisonment for those refusing to break-up protests and gatherings.114 By the end of the riot, fifteen civilians and five police officers were injured, and thirty-nine people, twenty-four of whom were Native, were charged with various crimes.115 News of the riot was immediately carried by the local CBC station – whose broadcasts were heard as far east as 110 Ibid. 111 Ibid. 112 Peter Lester, interview by Neil Gillion, North Country Fare, CBC, CD #70, Tape #182, October 31, 1984. 113 “Clamp-down on street fighting to follow riot near City Hall,” Prince Rupert Daily News, August 4, 1958, 1. However, the RCMP Inspector denied reports that the US Coast Guard were directly used to quell the riot and that the “coast guard patrol was in the streets only as shore patrol, interested in looking after their own personnel.” 114 Ibid. 115 Ibid; Campbell, “A Fantastic Rigmarole,” 81. 89 Vanderhoof – and repeated in Calgary, the United States, and as alleged by Mayor Lester, Moscow short radio wavelengths throughout the Eastern Bloc as an example of “capitalist decadence.”116 Local Indians and non-Native allies immediately denounced the conditions that had ignited the fracas.117 Harold Sinclair, acting on behalf of the Indians in the area, charged that Prince Rupert had forsaken its Native population despite their loyalty and investment in the town. The Prince Rupert Labour Council, representing two thousand trade unionists, defended Sinclair’s protests in petitioning for the resignation of the city committee tasked with investigating the riot in favour for a Royal Commission that it argued would be more neutral in its examination. The president of the Council justified the demand by stating that it would enable authorities to conduct a “complete inquiry into law enforcement in this city and the alleged discrimination against the Native population.” The Fishermen and Allied Workers Union, representing eight hundred Prince Rupert fishermen and fishery workers, supported these demands in a telegram sent to Justice Minister Davie Fulton, in which the organization echoed complaints regarding the mistreatment of local Indians.118 The federal government refused to intervene on the basis that it did not have the authority to investigate municipal matters, which fell under provincial jurisdiction, and the City Council dismissed the union’s demands as “a matter of opinion.”119 Rebuffed by the federal government, the 116 Harold Sinclair, “Northern Natives Fight Rupert Charge of Riot,” Native Voice, October 1958, 4; Maureen Atkinson, “Replacing Sound Assumptions: Rediscovered Narrative of Post War Northern British Columbia” (PhD diss., University of Waterloo, 2017), 71; Peter Lester, interview by Neil Gillion, North Country Fare, CBC, CD #70, Tape #182, October 31, 1984. There is no evidence to verify Lester’s statements – which leaves one to wonder whether the mayor fabricated the story to sensationalize the riot and draw attention to local grievances. However, this allegation never appears in any of the local reportage during the aftermath of the riot, which would suggest that Lester learned, or fabricated, the story later on in his life. 117 For the notes in the following paragraph, see “Rupert Labor Council askes resignation of riot committee,” Prince Rupert Daily News, August 7, 1958, 1. 118 “Fishermen Blame Discrimination,” Prince George Citizen, August 12, 1958, 3. 119 “A-G asked for inquiry after federal refusal,” Prince Rupert Daily News, August 12, 1958, 1; “Certain action promised by council if charges substantiated,” Prince Rupert Daily News, August 29, 1958, 1. 90 Labour Council unsuccessfully appealed to Attorney-General Robert Bonner to support a provincial commission.120 For his part, Sinclair continued his campaign against police discrimination by organizing a meeting between the mayor, the RCMP inspector, all the northern chief councillors, and members of the Native Brotherhood to discuss an investigation into the police’s unfair treatment of Native people during the riot and its 1953 predecessor.121 As newspaper reports and city investigations began to explore the causes behind the unrest, it became apparent that the 1958 riot was a “symptom of a deeper, more general problem” in which the stigma of liquor and drunkenness had defended the discrimination of Indians under the law.122 This sentiment was best encapsulated by an observation made by the editors of the Northern Sentinel: “officially or unofficially the situation was brought by one thing: liquor.”123 The riot was quickly re-imagined in local discourse as symbolizing the Natives’ struggle for racial liberation from both paternalistic law and those who enforced it. The resulting campaign, which was increasingly fought by City Council in conjunction with the Native Brotherhood, sought to address two longstanding grievances: the shaky interracial relationships in Prince Rupert and the stringent liquor clauses found in the Indian Act. Officials immediately recognized the need to rebuild relations between the Native and non-Native population. On August 8, only five days after the riot, City Council and the Native Brotherhood organized a forum to resolve “mutual differences” between Native and White residents.124 At the end of the month, Mayor Lester proposed to a delegation of Native councillors the creation of an Indian committee, composed of elected village 120 “A-G asked for inquiry after federal refusal,” Prince Rupert Daily News, August 12, 1958, 1. 121 Harold Sinclair, “Northern Natives Fight Rupert Charge of Riot,” Native Voice, October 1958, 4. 122 “Visiting Natives should bring own policemen,” Prince Rupert Daily News, August 1958, 1. 123 “The Price of a Good Time,” Northern Sentinel, August 4, 1958, 1. 124 “Firm hand by RCMP suggested in report by special committee,” Prince Rupert Daily News, August 8, 1958, 1. 91 representatives, which would help ameliorate “mutual difficulties” such as the “improper action on part of the RCMP.”125 However, the Native councillors did not elect representatives – perhaps due to the busy fishing season, or a reluctance to work within the pre-established framework set by the Council. This tacit refusal stung the editors of the Prince Rupert Daily News who claimed that the Natives had to decide between either remaining as “permanent wards,” or “shoulder some of responsibilities that go with good Canadian citizenship” and become more involved with the process.126 Ironically, the insistence of the editors that this was an Indian problem to be solved by the Indians themselves ignored the fact that Native people lacked the very political power necessary to effect such large-scale reform. Despite the obstacles that City Council faced in its aspirations for creating a Native committee, the initiative to improve relations between the town’s White and Native population led to major reforms in the RCMP’s treatment of Indians. The committee that Lester appointed, including speaker of the house Bill Murray, Ken Hardy, and the manager of the local pulp mill John Guthrie, believed it was “generally accepted, whether it was written or not” that both the police and those involved in the disturbance were at fault.127 The Native Voice’s findings reflected those of the committee: the “undue and unnecessary” force displayed in beating two drunken Indian women with flashlights enraged nearby spectators and fanned “what should have been a smouldering cigarette … into a forest fire.”128 Although Mayor Lester publicly defended the police, he later recalled he did so “with the understanding of course that there would be some changes made” as the policemen “had 125 “Certain action promised by council if charges substantiated,” Prince Rupert Daily News, August 29, 1958, 1. 126 “Natives must take concrete action,” Prince Rupert Daily News, September 25, 1958, 2. 127 Peter Lester, interview by Neil Gillion, North Country Fare, CBC, CD #70, Tape #182, October 31, 1984. 128 “The Riot Act - Prince Rupert: Are the Police Peacemakers … or?” Native Voice, September 1958, 4. 92 to be more experienced or oblige to conduct themselves in a different manner than they had done before.”129 What is interesting, however, is that the committee found no evidence to support allegations of police brutality in its report, although it observed that White individuals had “capitalized on discrimination against Indians and incited them to ‘acts of defiance.’”130 Nevertheless, the police sergeant was quickly replaced and the RCMP were stripped of their emergency powers in January 1959 owing, allegedly, to their conduct in the riot.131 According to Lester, however, tensions began to subside owing to a combination of changes to the liquor act as well as growing awareness amongst the police regarding their responsibilities and rights of the public.132 The Centennial Riot catalyzed local protest to repeal the Indian Act’s drinking laws. Robert Campbell, in his study of the riot, argues that the disturbance “set in motion a series of events that helped achieve legal liquor equality for British Columbia First Nations people in 1962.”133 Soon after the riot, a resolution tabled by Lester calling for full liquor rights for the Indians passed through City Council with overwhelming support.134 Alderman Norman Bellis praised the resolution’s victory, stating that the province’s current alcohol legislation sowed the seeds of “resentment and discrimination towards the Native” that erupted into chaos.135 Both the Native Brotherhood and the editors of the Prince Rupert Daily News voiced their enthusiastic support for the initiative.136 In turn, Lester assured the Brotherhood that 129 Ibid. 130 “Pr. Rupert Riot Partly Fault of the Whites,” Prince George Citizen, June 24, 1959, 3. Peter Lester, interview by Neil Gillion, North Country Fare, CBC, CD #70, Tape #182, October 31, 1984; “RCMP lose emergency powers,” Prince Rupert Daily News, January 13, 1959, 1. 132 Peter Lester, interview by Neil Gillion, North Country Fare, CBC, CD #70, Tape #182, October 31, 1984. 133 Campbell, “A Fantastic Rigmarole,” 81. For a more in-depth exploration into eventual dissolution of native specific liquor laws in B.C., see Campbell’s “A Fantastic Rigmarole”. 134 “City Council to seek changes in Liquor Act for B.C. Indians,” Prince Rupert Daily News, September 9, 1958, 1. 135 Ibid. 136 “Riot traced to liquor discrimination,” Prince Rupert Daily News, August 13, 1958, 2; “Liquor law revision long overdue,” Prince Rupert Daily News, September 11, 1958, 2. 131 93 they were “not alone in your struggle for equal rights.”137 A few months later, Lester, on the behalf of the town and its City Council, sent a letter to Bonner which requested the provincial government end its restrictions on Native drinking: We feel the law as it presently stands, is not only unjust but unenforceable. We think that a law, such as this, which denies social equality to any group is a form of ‘Apartheid’ that has no place in Canada.’ … Church groups, labor unions, political parties, independent groups and lately even judges have announced publicly that they think it is time for the Provincial government to exercise its powers and to take the necessary action which would be a step toward the integration of the Indian population.138 Despite the resolution, the provincial government deferred action on the grounds that further pursuits would have to come from the Indians – who lacked political power – and the federal government.139 In response, a series of requests swamped the Indian Affairs Branch during the latter months of 1960 from Nishga communities to allow alcohol on the reserve, all of which were drafted by Lester’s lawyer. The campaign worked; referendums occurred in these communities in 1961 and passed with overwhelming support. It is not surprising then, given this climate of political protest, that Native communities in the northwest coast were among the first in British Columbia to abolish liquor prohibitions on their reserves. The legacy of the Centennial Riot manifested itself in the City of Prince Rupert’s newfound inclination for dialogue with Native people. Maureen Atkinson suggests that the creation of the Miller Bay Indian Hospital reports aired on CBC radio was plausibly a “conscientious effort to reach across the social division between Indigenous listens and the non-Indigenous community.”140 In 1969, Norman Newton – a CBC announcer and 137 Campbell, “A Fantastic Rigmarole,” 96. “Prince Rupert Mayor Seeks Equal Native Liquor Rights,” Native Voice, October 1960, 1. Until otherwise noted, the following notes are from Campbell, “A Fantastic Rigmarole,” 96. 140 Atkinson, “Replacing Sound Assumptions,” 177. 138 139 94 producer who moved to the city seven years prior – ominously alluded to the riot’s racial dimension in his novel Big Stuffed Hand of Friendship. Set in the fictional town of Port Charles – which bore a striking similarity to Prince Rupert – Newton’s cynical illustration of postmodern Canadian society culminated in a devastating riot incited by the discrimination local Indians suffered under the police force. In one telling line Newton wrote that the town’s Skid Row, bearing an uncanny resemblance to Third Avenue but referred to as “Wounded Knee” was the place “where Indians were destroyed in the gentler Canadian way, which cripples but does not dispatch.”141 Untangling the riot’s historical legacy from contemporary historical reconstructions and imaginings, however, is more problematic. Nevertheless, it is necessary to understand this evolution in historical interpretation as subsequent histories written about the riots unintentionally neglected the racial roots behind them. Although Mayor Peter Lester and scholars such as Campbell explicitly attributed the origins of the riot to racial discrimination – whether that be in the form of legal paternalism or police brutality – Atkinson observes that in contemporary local historical narratives, the riot became associated only with mayoral heroics and not with Native issues.142 This confusion is revealed in some of the scholarship. In 1989 K.E. Luckhardt’s simplistically argued that the riot would be better thought “as social expressions of protest,” solely to the “lowly economic position” of the Native people recently unemployed during 1953 and 1958.143 Attorney-General Bonner chose Dominion Day in 1962 to announce that British Columbia would no longer impose the Indian Act’s liquor restrictions. While 1962 ushered another achievement for Indians in their pursuit of citizenship, it did not permanently end 141 Norman Newton, The Big Stuffed Hand of Friendship (London: Peter Owen Limited, 1969), 4. 142 Atkinson, “Replacing Sound Assumptions,” 169. 143 Luckhardt, “Prince Rupert: A Tale of Two Cities,” 329. 95 the legacies of alcohol enforcement and racialization that justified its existence. For example, in the late 1960s, a group of Prince George lawyers checked the number of people who served jail time for violating the Interdict List which prohibited those convicted from drinking. They found that of the one hundred and seventy-three people on the list, one was White, and the rest were Native.144 When their discovery was sent to Victoria the Interdict List was repealed for northern British Columbia.145 Nevertheless, by challenging the validity of the Indian Act’s stringent provisions on liquor Indians and White allies contributed to the legislation’s eventual downfall. The 1962 decision thus gradually dismantled another justification, and the legal backing, that discriminatory businesses had in refusing Native patronage. This campaign encountered fierce resistance by local authorities and the general public who conflated Native identity with alcoholism and its resulting depravities. In this case, the process of dismantling of the “drunken Indian” stereotype further allowed Indians to press for equal citizenship rights – thus further blurring the lines between “Native” and “citizen.” 144 Moran, Stoney Creek Woman, 130. 145 Ibid. 96 Chapter 4 – “Just How Misleading a Straight News Item Can Be”: The Role of Newspapers in Shaping Public Discourse on Anti-Native Prejudice On May 18, 1950, R.H. Kidston wrote to the Prince George Citizen to decry “just how misleading a straight news item can be” after reading an article in which a local Indian was charged for possession of liquor and a White man for supplying.1 Kidston’s complaint with the newspaper was for its failure to mention the heroic circumstances surrounding the event. Minutes before the police and the paper’s “roving” reporter arrived, the Native man risked his life to wade into the thawing Fraser River to rescue the White man and his friend who had fallen in. Kidston concluded his letter by arguing that the wandering reporter, had he been faced with similar circumstances, would have been fined for giving the Native man a case of beer in gratitude. As Holly Nathan argued, historians have the tendency to “mine editorial content as evidence of thinking of the day, unaware that media institutions … played an active gatekeeping role in determining the topics of public debate and how that debate was conducted.”2 Surely enough, the Citizen’s reporting on the incident and Kidston’s rebuke of those practices reflected the active gatekeeping role that newspapers played when informing the public about Native issues. On one hand, the newspaper constructed a narrative of the incident which reinforced its negative depiction of Native people – an image that resonated all too well with the public. On the other hand, a member of the public used the forum provided by the Citizen’s letterbox to refute the newspaper’s narrative and advance their own interpretation of the story. 1 For the notes in the following paragraph, see R.H. Kidston, “Not Equity,” Prince George Citizen, May 18, 1950, 3. 2 Holly Nathan, “Building Dams, Constructing Stories: The Press, the Sekani, and the Peace River Dam, 19571969” (M.A. diss., University of Northern British Columbia, 2009), 111. 97 Newspaper reportage in northern British Columbia during the post-war period was dominated by a combination of Cold War fear and the endless optimism promised by the start of industrial mega projects in the region. Despite this, the number of articles published about Indians during this era suggests that Native people were a “constant factor in local public consciousness” – whether their imprint on their respective communities was tangible or the result of a hyperactive White imagination.3 Regardless, newspapers in northern British Columbia used their position as the public’s primary source of information on Native issues to pursue their own agenda of local boosterism and promotion for northern economic development.4 As a result, newspapers themselves became a site for racialization of Native people.5 The process of racialization, as described by Karla Greer and Jennifer Nelson, is the act of constructing knowledge about the characteristics and attributes of a group of people based upon their race.6 For this process to work, however, the concept of “race” must be accepted as an uncontested and objective reality. While Jennifer Nelson focused her work on Black Canadians living in Africville, the infamous shantytown on the fringes of Halifax, the implications of racialization apply to Native people in northern British Columbia: the efforts of the majority to “define” the “other” often lead to the ostracization of the latter. In the eyes of the majority, the deviance of the coloured “other” was explained through their inherent savagery and depravity. This in turn justified control, and segregation in northern British Columbia, to prevent “cultural contamination.”7 3 Nathan, “Building Dams,” 17; Karla Greer, “Race, Riot, and Rail: The Process of Racialisation in Prince Rupert, B.C., 1906-1919” (M.A. diss., Queen’s University, 1994), 85. 4 Michael Meadows, Voices in the Wilderness: Images of Aboriginal People in the Australian Media (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001.), 6. 5 Greer, “Race, Riot, and Rail,” 70. 6 Ibid, ii; Jennifer Nelson, Razing Africville: A Geography of Racism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 19. 7 Nelson, Razing Africville, 55. 98 This chapter addresses the process of racialization that newspapers engaged in when depicting issues of Native discrimination, segregation, and political protest. The media’s participation in defining the “other” presented a major bulwark for Native efforts. Accordingly, in their pursuit for equal citizenship, Native people and sympathetic Whites often voiced their demands through the very medium which depicted Indians as lesser. While Native media, such as the Native Voice, existed to counter these depictions and to provide a forum for Indian dialogue, this chapter deals exclusively with what could be called the “White-newspapers,” or the newspaper publications that served the general public in northern British Columbia.8 This decision was based on a single rationale: most non-Native, and many Native residents, did not read Native-produced media. The Native Voice, which became the most widespread piece of Native produced news, did not enjoy the readership in the north like it did in the south. As a result, “White-newspapers” were the predominant source of information for readers regarding Native issues. This chapter argues that newspapers actively shaped the parameters on the discourse surrounding racial discrimination and segregation to shield their communities from criticism and to cast antiNative prejudice as a problem that Indians needed to solve for themselves. Historians such as Scott Sheffield, Mark Cronlund Anderson, Carmen L. Robertson, Bruce G. Miller, and Daniel Francis have contributed to the scholarly consensus that newspapers and other forms of media were not politically or culturally neutral sites for objective reporting when it came to Indians in both Canada and the United States.9 Rather, 8 Shannon Avison, "Aboriginal Newspapers: Their Contribution to the Emergence of an Alternative Public Sphere in Canada" (M.A. diss., Concordia University, 1996), 104. 9 Scott R. Sheffield, The Red Man’s on the Warpath: The Image of the “Indian” and the Second World War (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2004),13; Daniel Francis, The Imaginary Indian: The Image of the Indian in Canadian Culture (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1993), 81; Mark Cronlund Anderson, and Carmen L. Robertson, Seeing Red: A History of Natives in Canadian Newspapers (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2011), 7; Bruce G. Miller, “The Press, the Boldt Decision, and Indian-White Relations,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 17, no.2 (1993): 80. 99 newspapers propagated, normalized, and reflected the cultural norms and values of their societies and readily “drew from an existing cultural toolbox, employing language and imagery that their readership would recognize.”10 In the context of post-war news reportage, this cultural transaction manifested itself in the various tropes used when discussing Indians; Native people were regularly depicted in news reports as human-interest stories in which they were characterized as primitive, depraved, and sometimes even comical.11 “Indians” throughout northern British Columbia consequently became celebrities in newspaper police dockets which prompted bemused or scornful editorial commentary. Indians in this region were also frequently featured in reportage concerning folklore stories – a trend which often depicted Native people as historical relics unable to adjust to modern society. In contrast, Native people only merited serious reporting when, as Holly Nathan observed, “they were celebrated as individuals apart from their social, cultural, and historical context, furthering the notion of cultural assimilation.”12 However, readers could rest easy knowing that the various perceptive barriers put in place by regional newspapers effectively hindered the 10 Sheffield, Red Man’s on the Warpath, 13. Such depictions were also present in contemporary historical works produced in the region. For example, R.G. Large’s 1957 history of the Skeena described the local Indians as a “primitive people” who “strangely enough … had no fermented drink, and the winter orgies were free from drunkenness until the coming of the White man.” R.G. Large, The Skeena: River of Destiny (Vancouver: Mitchell Press Limited, 1957), 7. 11 Sheffield, The Red Man’s on the Warpath, 14; Mark Cronlund Anderson and Carmen L. Robertson, Seeing Red: A History of Natives in Canadian Newspapers (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2011), 7; Bruce G. Miller, “The Press, the Boldt Decision, and Indian-White Relations,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 17, no.2 (1993): 80. Scholars have disputed the frequency and intensity in which these tropes were employed in the latter half of the twentieth-century. Sheffield argues that the Second World War and its emphasis on racial equality led the press to construct a more respectable image of Indians which in turn influenced growing demands for improving their living conditions. However, others such as Anderson and Robertson argue that this “honeymoon” of respectable editorial commentary towards Indians ended a few years after the war as popular opinion “self-corrected” after experiencing wartime strain. Sheffield, The Red Man’s on the Warpath, 138; Anderson and Robertson, Seeing Red, 138. 12 Nathan, “Building Dams,” 86. 100 possibility of a Native uplift which would demand wide-spread reform in reporting practices.13 The press’s role in determining the limits of public debate was further amplified by the post-war coalescence between public and private authority. Shannon Avison argues that the emergence of private organizations into the realm of public power and the resulting incursion of the state led to a blurring of lines between the private and public domain.14 This usurpation of public authority granted private organizations the ability to influence, and even affect, change in lieu of governmental intuitions in the public domain. In this atmosphere, the state “became public only insofar as it was the executor of the will of the public” – which itself was formulated in conjunction with private news media. As a result, newspapers frequently leveraged themselves as essential to the continued survival of democracy in the Cold War period by acting as a counter-ballast to state hegemony.15 In northern British Columbia, all the newspapers celebrated their commitment to “objective reporting” – as exemplified by the Burns Lake Review’s statement that it was the “jealous guardian of all freedoms.”16 13 William P. Hustwit, “From Caste to Color Blindness: James J. Kilpatrick’s Segregationist Semantics,” Journal of Southern History 77, no. 3 (August 2011): 653. 14 Avison, "Aboriginal Newspapers,” 31. 15 Ibid, 37. However, as scholars Nathan and Minko Sotiron observe, newspapers were often as equally concerned with promoting their owner’s business interests as they were in telling news stories. In particular, as Nathan observes, news conglomerate W.B. Wilner and his company, Northwest Publications, purchased and ran the Prince George Citizen from three reporters who had bought the paper in 1954 from Harry Perry, a “publisher in the tradition of the political-editor.” Even Perry had his own business interests, however, as he purchased both the Vanderhoof Nechako Chronicle and the Prince Rupert Daily News in the late 1940s. Similarly, Ken Warner of the Smithers Interior News purchased and ran the Burns Lake Review sometime in the late 1950s. So, it is important to note that editorial commentary for large swathes of northern British Columbia. were dominated by the voices of a few business interests. Nathan, “Building Dams,” 23; Minko Sotiron, From Politics to Profit: The Commercialization of Canadian Daily Newspapers, 1890-1920 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2014), 136. 16 “The Press - Dedicated to Freedom,” Burns Lake Review, October 2, 1947, 2; "The Citizen Takes Its Stand on the Frontier of Freedom," Prince George Citizen, 10 October 1961, 2; “We Make Our Bow,” Burns Lake Review, July 11, 1946, 2; “Newspapers on Thin Ice,” Smithers Interior News, February 7, 1957, 2; “Problems of the Press…” Prince Rupert Daily News, January 28, 1943, 2. 101 However, the rhetoric of objective journalism and the reality of news reportage were worlds apart. While newspapers promoted the essential features of democracy, such as unrestricted access to information and public debate, news media hindered political discourse by restricting access to “mobilizing information” that could allow citizens, if they so chose, to challenge the status quo in relation to Native issues.17 Instead, newspapers substituted this mobilizing information for trivial human-interest stories which maintained Native people’s position on the margins of society. Francis Henry and Carol Tator identified this discrepancy in part as democratic racism where “racist beliefs and behaviours remain deeply embedded in ‘democratic societies,’” as well as peoples’ everyday lived experiences, as a convenient shorthand for understanding society’s complex and evolving structures.18 A defining tenant of democratic racism, according to Henry and Tator, is its entrenched opposition to structural reform. Although democratic racism supports combatting racism, it only considers solutions that preserve the “basic economic structures and societal relations” of Canadian society to be viable forms of protest.19 While the Second World War provided a crucible for Canadians to re-examine their country’s tumultuous racial record, the pervasive influence of this racial ideology immediately discounted any large-scale structural reforms on the grounds that such intervention directly opposed the “egalitarian principles of liberal democracy.”20 As a result, newspapers in northern British Columbia understood discrimination against Native people as an inherently Indian problem. Discrimination would only end when Indians assimilated into the cultural and social mores of “Canadian” community life rather 17 Avison, "Aboriginal Newspapers,” 39. 18 Francis Henry and Carol Tator, Discourse of Domination: Racial Bias in the Canadian English-Language Press (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 21-22. 19 Henry and Tator, Discourse of Domination, 24. 20 Ibid. 102 than through a systematic change in the communities themselves.21 In this racially deterministic framework, Native issues and people became anonymized – and delocalized – in the face of the region’s post-war economic boom.22 In turn, the persistence of poverty in Native communities gave credence to the notion that “Indian” suffering was due to their inability to integrate into modern society. This belief, as discussed by scholars such as Nelson and Sheffield, subsequently became a convenient shorthand for commentators to prescribe remedies, based upon racial theories delegitimized by the Second World War, to Indians through the proxy of “culture.”23 The editors of the Prince George Citizen, one of the only two daily newspapers in northern British Columbia, exemplified this hostility to structural reform. While the newspaper wished to see the end of the “smouldering issues of half-recognition” for Indians such as liquor equality and citizenship rights – a desire which periodically manifested itself into galvanizing editorial campaigns – the editors harboured an immense distrust for statedriven reform.24 In part, this was due to the newspaper’s conviction that social change, although inevitable, required strategic patience. For example, while the injustices committed in the southern United States disturbed the editors, they assured readers in the editorial 21 Nelson, Razing Africville, 62. 22 Holly, “Building Dams,” 18. 23 Nelson, Razing Africville, 18; Sheffield, The Red Man’s on the Warpath, 178. 24 “Commons Should Put Stop to Indians’ Half-Recognition,” Prince George Citizen, February 26, 1959, 2. One such example of the Citizen’s sporadic attempts to localize Native issues can be illustrated in the series of articles published by Pat Denton during the winter and spring of 1961 in which the reporter sought local Native voices. Pat Denton, “Re-Assessment of Gov’t Help Sought: Indians Will Take Case to B.C. Gov’t Next Month,” Prince George Citizen, February 14, 1961, 5; Pat Denton, “Canada’s Indians are ‘Left to Bum’ in Today’s Society,” Prince George Citizen, February 13, 1961, 1. However, as noted, the Citizen also expressed its distrust of centralized authority and federal initiatives aimed at dealing with local Native issues. While this topic is discussed further in Chapter 3, as well as in this chapter, one such example of this hostility can be in the bitter exchange between the Indian Department’s Director of Information and the newspaper’s editor in 1961, a feud which started when the latter accused the federal government’s newly published Indian News newspaper of being a “piece of propaganda” which did not reflect the lives of Canada’s Indians. “A Propaganda Sheet,” Prince George Citizen, April 27, 1961, 2; G.R. Benoit, “Letters to the Editor,” Prince George Citizen, May 26, 1961, 2. 103 section that only “time and reason” rather than direct-action protests would lead to equality.25 However, the editors simultaneously denied the possibility that American racial hatred shared a Canadian equivalent in northern British Columbia. In 1956, a reporter for the newspaper cited the fact that a “widely respected Negro farmer from Colorado” organized the local choir was evidence that Prince George was “not in the backwoods as far as culture is concerned.”26 An article published ten years later by the newspaper again touched upon the absence of racial discord in Canada. This time, however, the editors fully embraced the racial thinking that fuelled segregation in the southern states in publishing an article on why Canada would never join the United States: No Canadian government will willingly subject Canadian cities to the pressures and tensions which now exist throughout the northern and western United States. Today immigration laws keep Negroes from seeking a haven in Canada. North American union would end this and would end also the relative lack of racial animosity and intolerance among Canadians, who are better behaved than their American cousins only because in Canada race is not a visible problem.27 The editors’ paradoxical approach to reporting on Indian affairs was most strikingly encapsulated in the editorial war waged in 1957 between Vancouver’s Province newspaper and the press media of the “young, aggressive crossroads metropolis of Canada’s new northwest” over the proposed construction of the W.A.C. Bennet Dam on the Peace River and its impact on the Sekani Indians living in the area.28 The Province saw the plight of the 25 “Time, The Best Medicine,” Prince George Citizen, June 23, 1959, 2; “Hurting the Cause,” Prince George Citizen, August 20, 1964, 2. 26 Harold Hilliard, “As Others See Us - A Pinch of Calgary, A Dash of Edmonton: That’s Prince George,” Prince George Citizen December 24, 1956, 8. 27 “Why Will Canada Remain Canadian?” Prince George Citizen, August 23, 1966, 2. 28 Harold Hilliard, “As Others See Us - A Pinch of Calgary, A Dash of Edmonton: That’s Prince George,” Prince George Citizen December 24, 1956, 8. Feelings of hostility between towns in north-western B.C. against the perceived political and cultural imperialism emanating from the province’s southern metropolis often bled into how newspaper editors reported on Native issues. Ken Coates and William Morrison, The Forgotten North: A History of Canada’s Provincial Norths (Toronto: Lorimer and Company, 1992), 4, 6; Margaret Ormsby, British Columbia: A History (Toronto: McMillan, 1958), 491; “Vancouver Hogs Everything Says Atlin Member,” Burns 104 supposedly impoverished Sekani in the face of monstrous modern industrial expansion as desperate, and rallied southern audiences to support the brief “Save the Sekanis” aid campaign which resulted in an airlift of seven and a half tons of reader-donated material goods to the region.29 In response, the Prince George Citizen defended the city’s perceived lordship over “the fringes of civilization” by claiming an intimate understanding of the region’s Native people – an understanding that located the plight of the Indians in their insufficiencies to adapt to the cultural, economic, and social norms of a modern Canadian society.30 The Citizen’s attempt to assert Prince George’s dominance over the province’s northern hinterlands led to a proliferation of news articles that increasingly relied on racial stereotypes to depict Indians.31 This spate of reporting culminated in “The Wasted People” on March 28 when the newspaper fully embraced its racially deterministic view on contemporary Native issues.32 Intended as a dramatic exposé about the Indians’ sorrowful conditions as found by the federal Hawthorn Commission to an unaware public, the editorial quickly adopted a fatalistic view regarding the capacity of Native people to assimilate into Canadian society. While the editors called for the absorption of the younger generations into the Canadian way of life, they resigned that “we must abandon existing generations which are beyond the age of adolescence and merely assist these people to lead as fully and happy a life as we can afford them.” Furthermore, although the editors mourned that Canadians could not, “with a clear Lake Review, March 13, 1947, 2; C.V. Harrison, “Are Our Indians Getting A Square Deal,” Burns Lake Review, January 18, 1962, 3. 29 Nathan, “Building Dams,” 2. 30 Where Ignorance is Bliss…” Prince George Citizen, March 8, 1951, 2; Nathan, “Building Dams,” 56.’ Elizabeth Furniss, The Burden of History: Colonialism and the Frontier Myth in a Rural Canadian Community (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1999.), 116. 31 Greer, “Race, Riot, and Rail,” 26; Miller, “The Press, the Boldt Decision, And Indian-White Relations,” 80; Nathan, “Building Dams,” 2. 32 “The Wasted People,” Prince George Citizen, March 28, 1957, 2. 105 conscience, continue to maintain them in a state of semi-charity and as second-rate citizens whose freedom is restricted by law,” they never attempted to translate this lament to a local context. Moreover, as Holly Nathan similarly observed, the editors were equally interested in using Native conditions to comment upon federal immigration policies as they were to analyze contemporary issues facing an undefined Indian population. While the editors claimed that “many of us perhaps tend to think that the problem created by the Native population was solved when the last scalp was hung up and the last shot fired in retaliation,” – elements of Native-White relations that were hardly features of local history – they never attempted to identify who the “us” or the “Native population” in question was. In contrast, the Vanderhoof Nechako Chronicle reflected upon the Sekani debacle by purposefully redirecting local discussion towards the “disgraceful situation which exists before our very eyes.”33 For its part, the editorial did employ the characteristic racialized language familiar to the Citizen when it claimed that adjusting Indians to the modern economy was difficult, as they continually rejected the opportunities to “forsake their homes in remote villages and a haphazard livelihood” to adopt comfortable lives as salaried workers because their “happiest moments are when they are roaming through uninhabited regions with carefree abandon.” However, the editorial primarily endeavoured to celebrate the advancement of the “predominantly progressive” local Natives in contributing to the town’s economic and social life as well as to tackle the discrimination that prevented this upward achievement. Specifically, the editor targeted a local restaurant for its logic in excluding all Native business after a series of incidents of rowdyism incited by a few troublemakers. Such rationale, the editor argued, if carried to its logical conclusion would see the termination of both racial discrimination and local business as these establishments would have to ban all 33 For the notes in the following paragraph, see “Natives in Spotlight,” Nechako Chronicle, March 30, 1957, 2. 106 White and Native trade to recompense for the disturbances made by a minority of each group. The editor further localized racial discrimination by condemning a recent “inhuman incident” where an elderly Native woman was denied service at a restaurant as a violation of “Divine Law and the rule of common decency.” Unlike the Citizen, the Nechako Chronicle identified who “we” and the “Native population” were. This was not first time that village’s newspaper addressed local discrimination. On February 18, 1951, the newspaper published the editorial “Remove the Thorn(s)” to call attention to the recent protest made by Stoney Creek Indians regarding the lack of hotel accommodations and toilet facilities in Vanderhoof.34 In its call for tolerance, the editorial railed against local apathy by stating that the village, as “good neighbours and humanitarians,” could not “be indifferent” to Native concerns. Although the village commission established a committee shortly thereafter to investigate the situation, Maisie Hurley’s 1958 denunciation of the village’s racial policies indicate that the matter was never formally concluded.35 Despite this outcome, the newspaper earnestly attempted to localize incidents of racial discrimination. Like the Prince George Citizen, the Smithers Interior News employed a non-interventionist logic when it launched an editorial offensive on January 16, 1958, against the CBC and the Canadian Press for publicizing what the newspaper deemed a falsified account of local discrimination. The story under dispute was the allegation made by a Burns Lake Native that he was refused meals at local establishments during a recent trip to Smithers and was only able to get accommodation by getting drunk and paying $16.50 for a jail cell.36 The 34 “Indians Air Grievance,” Nechako Chronicle, February 18, 1950, 1; “Remove the Thorn(s),” Vanderhoof Nechako Chronicle, February 18, 1950, 2. 35 “Lack of Facilities for Indians Highlights Meeting,” Vanderhoof Nechako Chronicle, March 18, 1950, 1. 36 “Discrimination Story Mainly Untrue,” Smithers Interior News, January 16, 1958, 1. 107 newspaper claimed that the local jail was “surprisingly empty” during the period in question and that the man was not seen by police.37 Despite the story’s supposed untruthfulness, the newspaper claimed on January 30 that it had served “its intended purpose of stirring up the question once again.”38 The editorial commentary that followed, which was later published on the front page of Vanderhoof’s Nechako Chronicle on February 8, blamed the provincial and federal governments for the discrimination that Indians faced: It is believed the onus for the existing situation in the case of the native Indian rests in Federal and Provincial legislation. So long as they are governed by a distinctive set of regulations granting them certain rights and privileges, yet denying them others for which they clamour, they will continue in their generally undesirable manner of living. Conversely, the editor also placed the onus of responsibility for any potential Native uplift upon the Indians themselves: Cleanliness, dress, and behaviour are the generally accepted standards for either of the businesses mentioned, regardless of the color of a prospective customer’s skin. No business with any standards, wherever it is located […] will cater to transients with undesirable elements, with prospects of losing regular clientele. There is sufficient evidence of Natives being given accommodation and meals when they have met acceptable standards… In both cases, according to the editor’s logic, the use of state intervention to promote equality was doomed to fail because it demanded an unbalanced upheaval of the status quo. Those least affected by discrimination would have to reform their ways, thus removing the incentive for those subjected to prejudice to change their lifestyles, escape their marginalized and downtrodden social positions, and assimilate into Canadian everyday life. As the editor observed, the upstanding members of “any race are faced with condemnation and criticism because of the unfortunate and undesirable habits of others.” In other words, it 37 Ibid. 38 Until otherwise stated, the following notes are from “Central Interior Not Alone in Qualified Discrimination,” Smithers Interior News, January 30, 1958, 1. 108 was the responsibility of the Natives to address and amend the factors which lead to their social exclusion. If Indians wanted to be free from discrimination, they needed to adhere to the contractual terms set by the perpetrators. This episode also reveals another crucial role that newspapers played in shaping the limits of public debate surrounding segregation and discrimination – the purposeful withholding of information from readers. When the Burns Lake Review received the same story of discrimination as the Smithers Interior News had, the newspaper quietly refused to publish it on the basis that it was in the “main part untrue.”39 The newspaper never mentioned this decision in its subsequent publication. The only reason that evidence of this act of censorship survives is because the Smithers Interior News lauded their fellow newspaper’s discretion. This is the only recorded occasion on which a newspaper in northern British Columbia overtly scrubbed a story of discrimination from its publication. While informative of the gatekeeping powers that newspapers wielded, the Burns Lake Review’s decision should also serve as a cautionary warning for historians who take up newspaper research. Editors’ decision concerning which stories to publish is a political one in of itself insofar as it effectively allows newspapers to encourage or support public discussion on important topics. As a result, acts of racial discrimination often only reached the public record when a concerned citizen wrote to the newspaper’s letterbox. For example, a Native man anonymously writing under the moniker of “All the Cariboo Indians” penned a letter to the Prince George Citizen on February 5, 1951, to inquire why local taxi drivers discriminated between White and Native money when refusing Indian fares.40 The writer argued that: “one 39 “Discrimination Story Mainly Untrue,” Smithers Interior News, January 16, 1958, 1. Until otherwise noted, the following notes are from ALL THE CARIBOO INDIANS, “Taxi!” Prince George Citizen, February 5, 1951, 3. 40 109 thing we want to say is the taxi drivers should be thankful for what we have done for them, we Indians have to pay our way, we do not get free rides in any taxis. If it was not for the Indians, they would not have their jobs in any part of Canada. They got the land free.” However, and perhaps more interesting, was the writer’s claim that local Indians have “been kicked around and called Dirty Indians the past three years” but had since “took it all to ourselves” and were now imploring the community to “take pity on us poor Indians.” The writer’s request was answered by the children at Airport Elementary School on February 22. They urged the town to destroy their “cruel thoughts” and “help us to give people of other races, colors, and religions the chance to lead a happy useful life in a free world.”41 In some cases, citizens recalled their encounters with discrimination in one community by writing to another community’s newspaper. While the Vanderhoof Nechako Chronicle reported that its 1951 annual Stampede was a success, one participant wrote to the Burns Lake Review to urge the village to “put on a show wherein consideration and fair play are shown to stock and contestants, regardless of experiences, residence, or race.”42 The author complained that two years prior the event organizers had changed the rules to the saddle riding “to add more men to the finals because the substitute rider who made the finals was an Indian and the object was to decimate his changes of finishing in the money.”43 Letters to the newspaper’s mailbox regarding racial segregation and discrimination occasionally spurred fierce debate among several readers. On July 24, 1963, a Native couple wrote to the Smithers Interior News after they were refused service at a local café even though their “money is just as green as the White man’s money.”44 Although the couple was happy 41 The Children of the Airport School, “Tolerance Advocated,” Prince George Citizen February 22, 1951, 8. 42 “Stoney Creek Stampede Draws Large Attendance,” Vanderhoof Nechako Chronicle, July 7th, 1951; Clarence R. Snyder, “The Vanderhoof Stampede,” Burns Lake Review, September 6, 1951, 2. 43 Ibid. 44 Mr. and Mrs. Peter David, “Letters to the Editor,” Smithers Interior News, July 24, 1963, 4. 110 that they were allowed to “dine in every other restaurant in town,” they expressed their humiliation and pain from this act of racial prejudice - which they claimed was based upon the faulty premise that all “Indians” were drunks and degenerates.45 The couple’s letter prompted a response the next week from a citizen writing under the nom de plume “Down to Earth” who, although agreeing that prejudice had “no room in today’s society,” ultimately blamed elements of the Native population for this act, as they had tarnished Indians’ reputations by not accepting the “minimum requisites of the social norm.”46 Pete and Kay Siwicki, who appear to be the owners of the café, responded to both letters a week later by claiming that they “willingly serve anyone regardless of their race, creed, or colour” and that only misbehaviour or drunkenness would result in an eviction from the premises.47 The owners then addressed “Down to Earth” to state that while their letter was “well written, worth reading, and worth keeping in mind,” the writer must have been “ashamed of it as you were ashamed to sign your name.”48 Oral testimonies collected for the Shared Histories Project, however, have called the café’s seemingly egalitarian sentiment into question. One Native witness recalled that the café hung a sign on the window which read “No Indians Allowed” – a ban his Indian friend circumvented on account of his “non-Native” appearance: “Henry [Alfred] comes along and he was very fair looking – he had blue eyes, he had really light hair. He said we was growing a little bit of a red beard. He walks in and they didn’t say anything to him, they served him thinking that he wasn’t Native. So, they served him his food – I don’t know what he ordered but it was supper I guess – and all of a sudden, they realized he was Native … They told him ‘No Natives Allowed.’ So, he just got up when he finished and walked out – didn’t pay, because they told him to leave …. [Later] he said, ‘At least I had a free meal out of it.’”49 45 Ibid. 46 Down to Earth, “Letters to the Editor,” Smithers Interior News, July 31, 1963, 2. 47 Pete and Kay Siwicki, “Letter to the Editor,” Smithers Interior News, August 7, 1963, 2. 48 Ibid. 49 Until otherwise noted, the following notes are from Tyler McCreary, Shared Histories: Witsuwit’en-Settler Relations in Smithers, British Columbia, 1913-1973 (Smithers, BC: Creekstone Press Ltd, 2018), 113-114. 111 Similarly, a former employee remembered the restaurant’s ban on Native customers: “when I worked [at Heggie’s Café], there was prejudice by the Heggies… Oh it was awful. They were not allowed to come in.” According to one account, a group of local Indians once followed this policy in an act of malicious compliance: One winter Heggie’s Café had a sign on their window, ‘No Indians Allowed.’ During that wintertime … Dick Heggie came running out on the street. There was about eight Native men standing at the corner. He came running with buckets. He said, “Help. Help. Help. I need help. My café is burning.” They all tell him, “No Indians Allowed.” They got him back. Oddly enough, however, was that the restaurant occasionally employed local Natives to help keep the establishment clean. The reason for this discrepancy may be explained by a possible change in the café’s ownership sometime between 1958 and 1963 when the newspaper published the Native couple’s complaint. Evidence of this change in part comes from oral testimony: one Native man recalled that the “No Indians Allowed” sign was removed sometime around 1958 when the restaurant was under the management of Dick Heggie. By 1963, it appears that Heggie either sold or transferred ownership of the café to Pete and Kay Siwicki – the couple who defended the restaurant in the newspaper. While the new ownership may have stopped overtly discriminating against Native patronage, the Native couple’s complaint strongly suggests that the café continued to discourage Indian trade. Nevertheless, two more letters were sent to the Smithers Interior News in connection with the incident. “A disgusted Teenager” expressed revulsion towards those who preached the “Golden Rule which states do unto others as you would have others do unto you” while discriminating against Indians, as such hypocrisy threatened to unravel the “unity between 112 the races.”50 D. Wardrop thanked the Native couple for publicizing their encounter with discrimination as it revealed how “smug and blind” Canadians were for believing that incidents of racial prejudice only happened in the southern United States. Wardrop then claimed that she sent the letter to a columnist for the Vancouver Sun who had recently published an exposé on the discrimination a Jamaican UBC student experienced in the southern metropolis as she was sure such a story would “help many people to realize these people have deep feelings also.”51 This episode of anti-Native prejudice and public outcry highlight two factors that shaped how segregation and discrimination were discussed in the region’s various newspapers. First, many of letters written on the topic of race-based prejudice were often not signed by the author’s name regardless of if they defended the practice or criticized it. Although the use of pen names was common practice when writing letters to one’s newspaper during this era, the frequency in which these names were used to conceal the identity of those discussing of topics racial discrimination merits attention. One explanation is that members of the public employed pen names to remain anonymous when participating in such a sensitive and politically charged debate. Maintaining one’s anonymity would allow one to express their views on the topic without risk of being ostracized by their community members if their beliefs ran contrary to public opinion. Conversely, people with highly public profiles such as politicians or activists like Bridget Moran and Maisie Hurley often identified themselves when writing into the newspaper – as doing so would reasonably give their argument a bit more credence. 50 A disgusted Teenager, “Letters to the Editor,” Smithers Interior News, August 7, 1963, 2. 51 Mrs. D. Wardrop, “Letters to the Editor,” Smithers Interior News, August 7, 1963, 2. 113 Second, Wardrop’s insistence upon the use of southern media to expose acts of northern discrimination illustrates a peculiar factor that influenced the shape the regional discourse took: the “existence and intensity of sub-regional and inter-community rivalry.”52 As K.S. Coates and W.R. Morrison observed, the efforts of northern British Columbian communities to secure government and private investments, especially in the rapidly industrializing era of the post-war, led to friction and competition with one another.53 In turn, this struggle allowed Vancouver to play communities off one another and subsequently forestall its obligations to the north. This rivalry also expressed itself in the region’s various newspapers. It is difficult to decipher the actual extent that this competition influenced how regional newspapers discussed racial discrimination owing to irregular printing schedules and the limited content they produced. While newspapers in Prince Rupert and Prince George began to print daily editions during the post-war period, most regional newspapers were published on a weekly basis. As a result, these smaller newspapers only reported on local news while the larger dailies were able to wire regional, provincial, and international news stories. For example, although the Prince George Citizen continually ran reports on the 1958 riot in Prince Rupert on its front pages, editions of the Smithers Interior News and the Burns Lake Review never mentioned the incident. Nevertheless, there are some clues that can be deciphered from these newspapers. First, there appears to have been some regional resentment towards the rapidly urbanizing Prince George, and its growing claim to be the region’s political and economic heartland. For example, two people from Smithers expressed their antagonism with the city through their village’s newspapers. The first lamented the 52 K.S. Coates and W.R. Morrison, “Reconciliation in Northern British Columbia?: Future Prospects for Aboriginal-Newcomer Relations,” Northern Review, no.25-26 (Summer 2005): 29. 53 Ibid. 114 “recent exodus of so many things from Smithers to Prince George,” while the latter mourned that the city had “been getting too big for its britches,” and had subsequently lost an undefined sense of its “old Northern B.C. spirit.”54 Similarly, one resident from the community of Priestly lambasted the Burns Lake Review for its presumption that, apart from Burns Lake, there were no notable communities between Prince George and Prince Rupert.55 This sentiment could have reasonably influenced the way residents in these smaller villages perceived both the frequency and intensity of discriminatory acts in their communities. Although the Citizen published stories regarding the general suffering Indians faced under governmental policy, it only reported on a single, and contested, act of discrimination during the post-war period within its own boundaries regarding the supposed reluctance of Shelley Elementary parents to let Native children attend classes.56 Apart from this, the newspaper did not publish local stories of discrimination despite, based upon personal correspondences and letters to the editor, ample material. When the Citizen did report on cases of discrimination and segregation, it reported exclusively on other communities – and Vanderhoof in particular. For example, Maisie Hurley’s 1958 denunciation of the village – which was voiced in support of Peter Henslowe’s proposed resolution to the Cariboo Young Progressive Conservative Association to protest the village’s restaurants and hotels – garnered regional attention largely thanks to the editors of the Citizen. On the day the Citizen published the story on its front page, R.G. Stromberg, the association’s president, wrote to the newspaper to accuse the editors of sensationalizing the story: 54 D.T. Greene, “Letter to the Editor,” Smithers Interior News, May 24, 1961, 11; Wiggs O’Neill, “Letter to the Editor,” Smithers Interior News, October 25, 1961, 10. 55 Disgusted, “Letters to the Editor,” Burns Lake Review, March 27, 1947, 2. 56 “Shelley Parents Deny Racial Discrimination,” Prince George Citizen, March 12, 1959, 1. 115 An informal discussion on possible resolutions to be presented to the resolution committee was held and the above-mentioned subject was thrown up by Mr. Henslowe merely as a point of discussion. It was the feeling of the membership that the Indians throughout this area and Canada as a whole are not being seriously discriminated against and that the proposal was not worthy of further investigation or discussion. It was definitely stated at the meeting that the subject would not be considered further and certainly not presented to the Provincial Convention in Vancouver. I see no reason why this error was made as your reporter, Mr. McCarthy, was in attendance at the meeting and heard all of the business and discussions. Although we would like to have as much publicity as possible about our Club and the business carried on at our meetings, we certainly want the facts presented to the public exactly as they are presented at our meetings and not slanted to make them more appealing to your readers.57 In response, the Citizen retorted that the president “cannot help but agree that the subject of racial discrimination is worthy of prominence in any newspaper.”58 While newspapers actively influenced the nature of regional discourse by establishing the parameters of debate and the legitimacy of its desired ends, their participation in this dispute was in turn shaped by local opinion. The process of racialization ebbed and flowed between the press media and local sentiments – sometimes in harmony, sometimes not. The process of racialization throughout frontier communities in North America has received extensive scholarly attention. As Elizabeth Furniss argues in her analysis of race relations in Williams Lake, the defining characteristic of a “colonial culture” in Canada was the “intense energy devoted to contemplating Aboriginal/non-Aboriginal relations either through the assignation of difference- negative, neutral, or positive - or through the denial of difference.”59 In turn, this investigation stemmed from the emergence of what Furniss terms a “frontier complex” – a historical awareness built upon the foundations of Canada’s colonial heritage which influences how those living in the “hinterlands” envisioned their 57 R.G. Stromberg, “Pro-Con Protests Story Coverage,” Prince George Citizen, January 22, 1958, 2. 58 “Pro-Con Protests Story Coverage,” Prince George Citizen, January 22, 1958, 2. 59 Furniss, The Burden of History, 12. 116 collective past.60 Specifically, in northern British Columbia, the frontier complex manifested itself in the historical reconstruction of White settlement to resemble a battle between the forces of “civilization” and the savage but empty wilderness that was free for exploitation.61 Furthermore, this frontier mythos shaped how White Canadians viewed their relationship with Native people “who are implied to be antagonists caught in a losing struggle against their eventual settlement and assimilation into civilization.”62 However, Native people needed to be understood as synonymous with the wilderness – savage, primitive, and at times, dangerous to White survival – for this historical re-imagination to be fully realized.63 For example, in 1957, R.G. Large optimistically wrote that the wilderness of the Skeena River – which he described as having a “dirty brown face and a violent disposition” – was “destined to be the gateway for the march of civilization across the northern half of the Province.”64 There is scholarly debate on whether this contrast was more pronounced in northern British Columbia. As Furniss contends, no third category such as the Metis emerged in northern British Columbia to alleviate tensions between the “Indian/White dichotomy.”65 Similarly, as David Stymeist argued in his study of a rural town in northwestern Ontario, although other racial groups, such as the Chinese, co-existed in this divide, their ethnicity was regarded as a “relatively minor social dimension,” as it did not constitute a bulwark to their assimilation as was the case with Native people.66 As a consequence, Stymeist asserts 60 Ibid, 17. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid, 17-18. 63 Daniel Francis, The Imaginary Indian: The Image of the Indian in Canadian Culture (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1993), 81. 64 Large, The Skeena, 3. 65 Furniss, The Burden of History, 119. 66 David H. Stymeist, Ethnics and Indians: Social Relations in a Northwestern Ontario Town (Toronto: Peter Martin Associates Limited, 1975), 6. 117 that while other ethnic groups were able to “prevail” over their cultural backgrounds and assimilate into Canadian life as respected community members, Whites perceived Indians as being unable to untangle themselves from their derelict past.67 Renisa Mawani, conversely, argues that Metis in British Columbia were subjected to severe scrutiny as White aspirations for a racially homogenous province identified mixedraced people as threats who “would comprise the futures of aboriginal populations and the longevity and well-being of white settlement.”68 Furthermore, Mawani contends that Metis people “provoked anxieties over racial purity and colonial futures because their racial ambiguity threatened the material and metaphorical boundaries of colonial categories” as they could cross through the racial divide and assume identities on either side.69 Accordingly, the intense energy with which White authorities conceptualized, and demarcated, racial distinctions between Indians, Whites, Metis, Chinese, and other ethnicities was in response to growing levels of proximity and interaction between these groups.70 Nevertheless, in the context of discrimination and segregation, public discourse never endeavoured to make a distinction between Indians and Metis people. Perhaps this silence was because commentators could not establish a working definition of what it meant to be “Indian” in the first place. As Mawani observes, “discourses of racial purity and contamination teetered undecidedly and ambiguously between genetic and environmental causes: was Indianness to be determined by blood, cultural affinities (i.e., habits and lifestyles), or both?”71 In the case of northern British Columbia, it appears that 67 Ibid, 8. 68 Renisa Mawani, Colonial Proximities: Crossracial Encounters and Juridical Truths in British Columbia, 1871-1921 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2011), 165. 69 Ibid, 200. 70 Ibid, 11. 71 Ibid, 166. 118 commentators regularly determined one’s “Indianness” by look alone – an evaluation that enabled some Native people to pass off as White. For example, Henry Alfred was able to dine at Heggie’s Café in Smithers – which refused to serve Native people – simply because the facility’s wait staff mistook him for being White.72 This special insight into Native culture contributed to the “profaning” of Indians during their everyday experiences in the region’s villages and towns. As Niels Winther Braroe explains, Native people experienced intense scrutiny in their everyday lives because information pertaining to their lowly status in society was already widely available to onlookers.73 In part, this information came from informal sources such as local folklore and the newspaper media. However, the codified distinctions that legally separated Native people from other Canadians served to further distinguish, or profane, Indians from their neighbours. For example, as Cole Harris observes, the “arbitrary boundaries identified on the reserve maps had become legal realities” for Native people as their “rights differed on either side of them.”74 In turn, the reserve system served as a site of racialization. Public and private opinions concurred that Native people were inherently ill-suited to modern Canadian living and needed paternalistic oversight from the Federal government.75 Indians encountered the full force of such logic in northern British Columbia owing to the reserve system as a considerable number of the region’s Native population lived on reserve. As such, most recorded incidents of racial discrimination occurred in a predominantly White community against a Native visiting from a reserve. This penetrating visibility, in coalescence 72 McCreary, Shared Histories, 113-114. 73 Niels Winther Braroe, Indian & White: Self-Image and Interaction in a Canadian Plains Community (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975), 34. 74 Cole Harris, Making Native Space: Colonialism, Resistance, and Reserves in British Columbia Vancouver: UBC Press, 2002), 271. 75 Greer, “Race, Riot, and Rail,” 41. 119 with the perceived degradation of Native people, transformed Indians into local spectacles who were expected to continue their destructive path towards destitution and irrelevance.76 Prince Rupert illustrates the intensity of these local communities’ devotion to identifying and perpetuating the contrasts between Indian and White relations. As Karla Greer asserts, from its inception, Prince Rupert’s cosmopolitan ambitions served to justify the demarcating of its inhabitants along racial lines.77 The city’s sensitivity to racial differences continued throughout the post-war period. In 1959, Bob Harlow, a Prince Rupert local, presented the city on CBC’s Introducing B.C. as a contrast between “the old and the new” – a statement he evidenced by juxtaposing the statue of an “Indian brave with hatchet raised high” with the modern transmission towers of the radio station.78 Harlow found another startling example of the town’s modernity was a “pretty Native girl with her White man lover.”79 Fraternization between Whites and Natives was not always viewed favourably. Six years prior, in 1953, the regional Liquor Control Board inspector expressed his dismay that several navy sailors had run off with “Native girls of the worse type” into the “the Jungle” – a rougher section of the town – with bottles in hand and in the “company of the town’s worst wine addicts.”80 A similar interest in the behaviour of local Indians was illustrated in 1949, when a local hotel initially refused to lodge a Native basketball team but relented in part due to the group’s cleanliness and good behaviour.81 However, the hotel refused to accommodate any of the team’s families or friends. 76 Furniss, The Burden of History, 115. 77 Greer, “Race, Riot, and Rail,” 15. 78 “Introducing Prince Rupert,” interview by Bob Harlow, Introducing B.C., CBC, CD # 20, Cut 2, Tape #49, November 25, 1959. 79 Ibid. 80 Lythgoe to Chairman, 10 July 1953, BCA, GR52, Box 10, File 121-258. 81 Regular Meeting of the Prince Rupert Chamber of Commerce, 4 April 1949, Prince Rupert & District Chamber of Commerce fonds, Prince Rupert City and Regional Archives. 120 The irony of this hypocrisy was often not lost on Native people. Mary John, from Stoney Creek, recounted her memories when the local priest invited her to a restaurant in Vanderhoof to celebrate her son’s first communion: an invitation she was reluctant to accept as the diner refused to allow Natives to enter.82 Despite her reservations, the priest discussed his plans with the restaurant owner who allowed her to enter. John’s first impression of the restaurant was disappointing: after finding gum on the table’s underside she remarked that the diner denied Native business even though the owner would be hard-pressed to find gum underneath her family’s table. Interestingly, Prince Rupert also provides a striking, even if brief, exception to the pervasive nature of racialization in northern British Columbia. In January of 1959, William H. Murray, a Prince Rupert MLA, denounced the Liquor Act’s restrictions on Native drinking claiming that “our west coast Indians have advanced socially and in every other way at a rate far exceeding of the Indians” throughout the rest of Canada.83 Murray came to this conclusion in conjunction with Rev. Peter Kelley and Senator James Gladstone, the first Native senator, during his recent attendance at a Native Brotherhood convention. The Prince Rupert Daily News incorporated Murray’s phraseology on February 6 when it argued that British Columbia, “with its more advanced Native Indian population,” could set an example for Canada when it came to matters of racial tolerance.84 Public scrutiny of Native people intensified throughout the era as the post-war economic boom lead to increased interaction. The Second World War had forcefully cracked open the province’s once impenetrable northern frontier as wartime logistics and the threat 82 Mary John, interview with Bridget Moran in Metlakatla, B.C., May 1994, “Mary John – Metlakatla, May 1994,” Accession #2008.3.1.202, Box 13 & 14, Folder 9, Bridget Moran fonds. Northern BC Archives, University of Northern British Columbia, Prince George, British Columbia, Canada. 83 “Murray Tells Legislature: Liquor Act obsolete for B.C. Indians,” Prince Rupert Daily News January 27, 1959, 1. 84 “B.C., like Virginia, can lead the way,” Prince Rupert Daily News, February 6, 1959, 2. 121 of foreign invasion compelled Canadian and American bureaucrats to invest in the region’s development and fortification – especially regarding the construction of the Alaska Highway.85 External interest in these frontier communities continued after the war, as southern politicians and businesses envisioned opportunities for future economic growth in the region.86 And despite a brief recession from 1958 to 1962, the era of economic prosperity and stability which emerged in British Columbia and Canada for the twenty years following the Second World War, provided policymakers and industrial tycoons the chance to address the disparities which existed between the rural north and the urban south.87 These attempts to place northern development in parity with the south manifested themselves in the surge of industrial mega-projects that transformed the region in the 1950s and 1960s. The effects of this industrial expansion were immediately felt in the communities throughout the region. For example, village commissioners in Smithers were surprised in 1954 to learn that community’s population had jumped “two short of 1700, an increase of 500 since the Federal census was taken in 1951.”88 Similarly, the two hotels in the village of Vanderhoof were quickly swamped by guests arriving from the Kenney Dam construction site which was part of a $500 million project initiated by the Aluminum Company of Canada in the region. In 1951, the owner of the Vanderhoof Hotel requested a shipment of steel pipe from the Steel Controller in Ottawa to expand his building’s lodgings so that he could better accommodate the surge of visitors he was receiving – an application which was denied since wartime rationing had not ended yet.89 Likewise, the owner of the Reid Hotel 85 Coates and Morrison, Forgotten North, 66; Large, The Skeena, 165. 86 Coates and Morrison, Forgotten North, 66. 87 Jean Barman, The West Beyond the West: A History of British Columbia, 3rd ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 286. 88 “Population Jump in Village Census,” Smithers Interior News, February 4, 1954, 1. 89 Frank M. Turley to Steel Controller (Ottawa), 10 August 1951, BCA, GR52, Box 10, File 121-243. 122 complained to the LCB in 1953 that the influx of construction workers, in combination with local Indians who flocked to the parlour to socialize, had continually thwarted the establishment’s attempts to maintain control over their premises.90 The owner concluded by observing that “a lot of things in this part of B.C. are rougher than a lot of us would like them to be, but perhaps that is the price of opening up a country.”91 The most spectacular example of this regional growth was in Prince George population’s explosion from 2,027 in 1941 to 33,101 just three decades later.92 In 1956, Prince George boasted a birthrate of 54.2 per 1000 residents, more than twice the provincial average of 25.9.93 Harold Hilliard, a reporter for the Prince George Citizen, excitedly relayed these indicators of a population boom on Christmas Eve 1956. Quoting a newcomer to the town, Hilliard proudly exclaimed that Prince George had a “higher birth rate than Bombay, India.”94 According to this same informant, this demographic explosion had virtually confined the town’s women to the hospital’s delivery rooms.95 Hilliard argued that Prince George was poised to become one of “Canada’s cities of tomorrow” by contrasting the town’s “cosmopolitan air” and its then population of 12,500 – a fivefold increase since the war – with its unsightly “appearance of an overgrown bush camp” only five years prior.96 Hilliard’s enthusiastic reporting on Prince George’s growth reflected the endemic boosterism in the region in which recruited newspaper editors, municipal politicians, and 90 Theodore Hagblad to Chairman of LCB, 19 February 1953, BCA, GR52, Box 10, File 121-244. 91 Ibid. 92 Canada, Statistics Canada, Census of Canada: British Columbia Municipal Census Populations, 1921-2011 Prepared by BC Stats, May 2012, http://www.bcstats.gov.bc.ca/StatisticsBySubject/Census/MunicipalPopulations; Barman, The West Beyond the West, 307. 93 Bev Christensen, Prince George: Rivers, Railways, and Timber (Burlington, Ont.: Windsor Publications, Ltd., 1989), 113. 94 Harold Hilliard, “As Others See Us - A Pinch of Calgary, A Dash of Edmonton: That’s Prince George,” Prince George Citizen December 24, 1956, 8. 95 Ibid. 96 Ibid. 123 members from the public joined forces to promote development in their communities. In 1957, R.G. Large, a councillor in the Prince Rupert Chamber of Commerce, published The Skeena: River of Destiny, which employed historical justification and contemporary boosterism to urge the people of the Skeena to capitalize on the “dawn of prosperity” the war brought to the region.97 Large also directed this appeal to “men of vision, initiative, and energy” to help invest in the Skeena and transform it into the “agricultural breadbasket of northern British Columbia.”98 Large exposed a comparable optimism during his leaving address as president of the Prince Rupert Chamber of Commerce in 1949 when he lauded the town’s diversifying economy to encompass the growing demand for lumber.99 Similarly, the editors of the Burns Lake Review encouraged its readers to promote settlement and development in their village.100 Likewise, the Smithers Interior News discounted local naysayers by arguing that the village’s steady expansion, despite recent hardships, reflected “confidence and optimism in the future based on expected development of the area as a whole.”101 However, this unprecedented development quickly began to create problems for the region, as rapid population growth increasingly strained the communities’ resources. For example, the demographic boom in Prince George lead to a housing crisis throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, as the city council found it increasingly difficult to accommodate its newer residents who arrived to work in the burgeoning lumber industry.102 Smithers also reported issues in its housing sector as residents’ demands for water service connections 97 Large, The Skeena, 171-172. 98 Ibid. 99 D.G. Large Address to Chamber of Commerce, 3 January 1949, Prince Rupert & District Chamber of Commerce fonds, Prince Rupert City and Regional Archives. 100 “Let’s Do a Little Boosting,” Burns Lake Review, January 6, 1949, 2; “A Good Place to Live, “Burns Lake Review, October 10, 1946, 2. 101 “No Room for Pessimism in ’61 as Community Progress Continues,” Smithers Interior News, January 18, 1961, 1. 102 Christensen, Prince George, 112. 124 began to exceed the village’s ability to deliver the service to an ever expanding population.103 Similarly, as K.E. Luckhardt observes, Prince Rupert began to experience problems in delivering basic services after the super-port project it staked its future development on, failed to materialize.104 These problems convinced several communities that their woes could only be resolved through territorial expansion into their surrounding hinterlands – a process which often meant settling lands surrendered by neighbouring Indians.105 In the case of Burns Lake, this expansion lead to friction with the neighbouring Native community. From 1946 to 1951, the Burns Lake Review launched an editorial campaign to justify White expansion onto reserve lands. On August 15, 1946, the editors warned their readers that the village had “reached the limit of growth offered by our present townsite” and would have to expand into the Indian village, which the editors described as being absent of “material value” and non-existent from a “picturesque standpoint.”106 Two years later, the editors supported the ongoing negotiations between village commissioners and the Indian Department for the partial surrender of reserve land by declaring that this expansion would alleviate the town’s “growing pains.”107 In 1951, Burns Lake acquired the land, but it was not until 1954 that tensions between the Indians and the village erupted. In April of that year, the newspaper reported that indignant Indians from all parts of the Lakes District protested the sale, as many had been given short notice to vacate their reserve before their cabins were destroyed.108 The article additionally noted that there were quoted instances of elderly Native 103 “Problems Increase as Village Grows in Size,” Smithers Interior News, October 11, 1956, 2. 104 K.E. Luckhardt, “Prince Rupert: a ‘Tale of Two Cities’,” in Sa ts’e: Historical Perspectives on northern British Columbia, ed. Thomas Thorner (Prince George: College of New Caledonia Press, 1989), 309. 105 “Expansion Seems Necessary,” Terrace Omineca Herald, February 2, 1956, 2; “Hazelton Secures 36 Acres as Indians Surrender Lands,” Prince George Citizen, June 17, 1948, 9. 106 “What of Future Growth?” Burns Lake Review, August 15, 1946, 2 107 “Room to Grow,” Burns Lake Review, July 22, 1948, 2. 108 The Platonic Bomb, “Natives Protest Sale of Local Reservation Lands,” Burns Lake Review, April 22, 1954, 1. 125 people who were now made homeless as a result, and were “too helpless and destitute to be able to move.”109 While Smithers similarly faced mounting pressures throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the village took drastic action in the early 1940s to mitigate what threatened to be its most acute growing pains. White residents increasingly desired the land the Indians inhabited along Smithers’ main road despite the contributions that Native people made to the village’s early settlement and development.110 During the summer of 1943, the Smithers village council began searching for other sites in which to relocate the Natives to free the land for White development.111 According to the acting chairman of the council: … the Village had intended never to let Indians live in the Municipality and had refused to sell them land. However, unfortunately, there was no way of stopping other property owners from selling lots to the Natives and this had been done. In a great majority of these cases the Indian families would be willing to move to some other suitable locality if they could do so without expense to themselves.112 Additionally, the council reasoned that its alternative site for Native residence offered “many advantages over their present holdings” and was close enough to the village to “suit their shopping needs.”113 While the Natives, said one councillor, had paid taxes on the land for several years, they abandoned the venture and allowed the land revert at tax sale after they “had not been allowed to send their children to school.”114 The council initially proposed to move the Indians to Moricetown, but it appears this plan was quietly ended after the community’s chief, Jimmy Morris, declared in a letter to the 109 Ibid. Interestingly, the delegation additionally bestowed Chief Paddy Isaac with the full authority to conclude future land deals after discovering that the chief who agreed to the original transaction did “not belong to Burns Lake and had his own Reservation at Sheraton” during the townsite’s demolition. 110 Melanie H. Morin, Niwhts’ide’ni Hibi’it’en: The Ways of Our Ancestors – Witsuwit’en History & Culture Throughout the Millenia (Smithers, BC: School District 54 and the Witsuwit’en Language Authority, 2011), 314. 111 “Council Wants Definite Proposal to Remove Indians,” Smithers Interior News, June 30, 1943, 1; Village of Smithers Council Meeting Minutes, 26 July 1943. 112 “Special Meeting Held - Discussed Indian Reserve,” Smithers Interior News, August 4, 1943, 1. 113 Ibid. 114 Village of Smithers Council Meeting Minutes, 2 August 1943. 126 Smithers newspaper that the reserve would need to be expanded to properly house and accommodate the possible newcomers.115 Interestingly, Morris also demanded in his letter that the village’s commissioners include Moricetown in future discussions pertaining to the proposed relocation.116 The village’s rationale in refusing to sell land to Indians remained in affect to at least 1947, when the council reiterated during a meeting that applications for Native land purchases would be turned down.117 Despite this, Native residents remained in Indiantown until May 1967 when the village council evicted the last Indian home-owner from the site to make way for a newly planned subdivision.118 According to McCreary, “when the […] home was burned down in June, the last physical remnant of Indiantown was erased.”119 Jimmy Morris’ consternation with Smithers’s village council helps illustrate that White northern British Columbians often saw reserve lands and the Indians that inhabited them as encompassing a colonial hinterland ripe for settlement and development. Margaret Ormsby suggested in her 1958 history of British Columbia that the province “had not quite relinquished its old aspiration to be an empire in itself.”120 While Ormsby refuted this claim in stating that “the people had forgotten their colonial heritage and broadened their vision,” Jean Barman contends that cities such as Prince George established a quasi-colonial dominion over its neighbouring hinterlands which included communities such as Vanderhoof and Fort St. James.121 115 Jimmy Morris, “Letters to the Editor,” Smithers Interior News June 2, 1943, 2. 116 Ibid. 117 Village of Smithers Council Meeting Minutes, 23 December 1947. 118 McCreary, Shared Histories, 193. 119 Ibid. 120 Margaret Ormsby, British Columbia: A History (Toronto: McMillan, 1958), 491. 121 Ormsby, British Columbia, 491; Barman, The West Beyond the West, 307. 127 Native people, owing to the unwillingness of their White neighbours to renegotiate the racial barriers surrounding community life in the north, often relied on businesses run by ethnic minorities – especially the Chinese – as an avenue for social engagement and comradery. For example, a travelling reporter for the Gibsons Coast News thought it noteworthy in 1949 to report that almost all the restaurants in Prince Rupert run by the Chinese were frequented almost solely by Indians.122 Four years later, the regional LCB inspector observed that the Chinese-run café his hotel was located next to had become a favoured locale for Native social gatherings which would last late into the night.123 Similarly, oral evidence collected for the Shared Histories Project found that Smithers’ Native population frequented the two local cafés run by Chinese owners because, in the words of one participant “we were accepted there without any problem; our money was good for [the owner].”124 A glimpse at the scholarship suggests that this cooperation between Indians and other ethnic minorities was a salient feature of an oftentimes complex relationship that ebbed and flowed between collaboration, competition, apathy, and hostility. Furthermore, this relationship was shaped by the White colonial aspirations for the society these “Other” groups cohabited. On one hand, scholars such as Stymeist and Gregory Nickerson have observed that businesses owners from ethnic minority groups were far more accommodating towards Native customers than their White counterparts in both the United States and Canada.125 The reasons most inevitably varied: perhaps these business-owners actively created spaces for others who inhabited the same marginal spaces, or perhaps it was due to a 122 “Rain, Winding Roads Feature Northern Towns,” Gibsons Coast News, September 24, 1949, 9. 123 Lythgoe to Chairman, 10 July 1953, BCA, GR52, Box 10, File 121-258. 124 McCreary, Shared Histories, 121. 125 Stymeist, Ethnics and Indians, 7; Gregory Nickerson, “All-American Indian Days and the Miss America Pageant,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 67, no.2 (Summer 2017): 7. 128 pragmatic desire to cash in on customers which White vendors refused to serve. In the case of British Columbia, Chinese miners and trappers had co-existed with Indian hunters for decades before the arrival of the railway into the region. This co-habitation sometimes became intimate, as according to Jean Barman, one in six Chinese men who lived in the province’s hinterland throughout the closing of the nineteenth century formed families with local Native women.126 However, this narrative of a relatively harmonious and cooperative relationship may have been the result of external pressures. As Mawani argues, although increasing proximity and contact with the non-White “Other” blurred the “racial taxonomies and boundaries” established by White society, it also incentivized that same society to more precisely demarcate what those distinctions were.127 While this clarification sometimes envisioned Indians and other ethnic minorities as occupying different roles in White society, it appears that by the post-war period, these definitions began to coalesce into a single entity. Although intended as a comment on contemporary politics, Harald Bauder’s assertion that “public and academic migration-related discourses treat Aboriginals not as a political community but a minority group that experiences social, political and economic marginalization similar to disadvantaged immigrant groups,” helps illustrate the post-war processes that increasingly imagined Indians as occupying the same political and social category as immigrants.128 Heidi Bohaker and Franca Iacovetta argue that, from 1950 to 1966, the Department of Citizenship and Immigration classified Indians as encompassing the same status as immigrants through defining Canadian citizenship “not only as the attainment of legal and political rights but also 126 Jean Barman, “Beyond Chinatown: Chinese Men and Indigenous Women in Early British Columbia,” BC Studies, no. 177 (Spring 2013): 40. 127 Mawani, Colonial Proximities, 8. 128 Harald Bauder, “Closing the Immigration – Aboriginal Parallax Gap,” Geoforum 42 (2011): 517. 129 an embrace of […] common ‘Canadian’ values of respect, tolerance, and liberal democracy, and a demonstrated conformity to Canadian models of social behaviour.”129 This policy reflected the federal government’s perception that Indians and immigrants were “marginal and foreign groups who had to be brought into the Canadian mainstream.”130 This sentiment was encapsulated by a statement made by prime minister Louis St. Laurent in 1950. When asked by a journalist why he brought the Canadian Citizenship Branch and Indian Affairs Branch together in a new Department of Citizenship and Immigration, the prime minister stated that the aim was “to make Canadian citizens of those who come here as immigrants and to make Canadian citizens of as many as possible of the descendants of the original inhabitants of this country.”131 Relations between Indians and other ethnic minorities – especially the Chinese and other Asians – were not always cooperative, however. For example, Karla Greer observes that Natives in Prince Rupert attempted to distance themselves from their Asian neighbours during periods of intense anti-Asian fervor.132 Similarly, Mawani argues that “European efforts to deterritorialize and ‘civilize’ aboriginal peoples and trans-Pacific flows of Chinese migration were not successive processes but unfolded in overlapping temporalities that produced uneven and contradictory colonial geographies of racial power.”133 While White society sometimes classified Indians and Chinese together as existential threats, Mawani asserts “that the prevailing distinctions separating European from Native that seemed so resilient along Canada’s west coast in earlier historical moments were profoundly unsettled 129 Heidi Bohaker and Franca Iacovetta, “Making Aboriginal People ‘Immigrants Too’: A Comparison of Citizenship Programs for Newcomers and Indigenous Peoples in Postwar Canada, 1940s-1960s,” The Canadian Historical Review 90, no. 3 (September 2009): 459. 130 Ibid: 430. 131 Ibid: 427-428. 132 Greer, “Race, Riot, and Rail,” 58. 133 Mawani, Colonial Proximities, 4. 130 and possibly even disrupted with the arrival of the Chinese” in the early twentieth century.134 The danger presented by Chinese immigration, thus, could threatened to “compromise the longevity of the settler regime and the place of the Indian within it.”135 Nevertheless, this history of inter-ethnic relations in northern British Columbia demands further investigation. Scholars such as Bruce Miller and Holly Nathan have cautioned that newspapers and the press media “must be regarded as participants in the sometimes-heated competition between Whites and Indians.”136 This warning held particularly true in northern British Columbia during the post-war era as the press actively shaped public discourse surrounding racial discrimination and segregation by defining the limits of debate and through censorship. Newspapers also contributed to the racialization of Native people in the region to support to achieve a variety of desired ends by readily employing racial stereotypes to depict Indians as static, primitive, and deviant. These constructions of Native people, although in part articulated by newspapers themselves, were also manifestations of a “frontier complex” which envisioned Indians as obstacles to the spread of White civilization and as inherently foreign to a community’s daily life. However, newspapers provided a forum for a community’s residents to identify, address, and debate incidents of racial discrimination. 134 Ibid. 135 Ibid. 136 Miller, “The Press, the Boldt Decision, and Indian-White Relations,” 91. 131 Conclusion This thesis has shown that Native people challenged racial discrimination and segregation during the post-war era by asserting their growing citizenship rights while simultaneously calling into question the racialized stereotypes that seemingly justified their social ostracization. Indians leveraged analogies with global hotspots of racial tension, especially the southern United States, to bolster their demands. Similarly, Native people articulated their demands for citizenship along interconnected channels including growing political rights, their contribution to defending Canada during the war, and their burgeoning economic prowess in post-war northern British Columbia. Throughout these years, Indians successfully lobbied for the liberalization of Native drinking laws and the culturally deterministic assumptions that underpinned such legislation. Lastly, public discourse on issues of racial discrimination were influenced and, to some extent, molded by newspapers and the public perceptions that informed regional reportage. This thesis addresses a significant gap in the historical scholarship in northern British Columbia. It challenges some misconceptions that have been made in the limited scholarly, and non-scholarly, analysis of the region. First and foremost, it contributes a new methodological consideration about the history of political protest and racial discrimination in this region – and its connection to contemporary global developments. Second, this thesis employs an analytical framework which envisions Native and non-Native populations in this region as living within the same cultural system as rather than in “two solitudes.” Finally, it provides a comprehensive analysis of the evolving discussion surrounding racial discrimination and segregation in north to link the various pieces of evidence provided by historians, public and scholarly alike, into a single narrative. 132 The use of interviews or oral history fell outside the scope of this project.1 Future research into this topic should consider the use of extensive oral interviews to supplement the documentary base that this thesis intended to provide. Similarly, future research into this topic should investigate whether the case of Native political protest and race-based discrimination in northern British Columbia was typical of other outlying regions in Canada or if this regional history was unusual. Likewise, further work should be done to determine whether Native responses to racial discrimination differed in settings that had a more pronounced presence from other ethnic minorities such as African or Asian-Canadians. I would like to consider one final aspect about sharing the experiences of those who suffered racial discrimination and segregation. Although newspaper reports, as flawed as they are, government reports, and oral interviews have shed some light on this history, there are countless other encounters with racial discrimination that remain shrouded in the darkness of the public’s historical consciousness. This thesis was in part an attempt to illuminate these otherwise forgotten pieces of an uncomfortable history. Mary John herself shared a similar conviction when reminiscing about the creation of her biography, Stoney Creek Woman. For John, telling her stories opened the region’s eyes to Native issues - a revelation that helped them treat their Indian neighbours “more like people.”2 1 While I did conduct interviews for my research, the subject matter discussed within them do not appear in this study. These interviews were either personal correspondences not approved by the Research Ethics Board or, in the case where REB approval was acquired, interviews in which the material discussed did not ultimately pertain to the present study. 2 File No. 2008.3.1.202 - Interview with Mary John at Metlakatla, May 12-14, 1994. 133 Bibliography Primary Sources Archival Collections British Columbia Archives (BCA) GR52 B.C. Liquor Control Board (LCB), Inspector Files. Canada. British Columbia. Liquor Control Board. Forty-Fifth Annual Report: April 1, 1965, to March 31, 1966. Victoria: A. Sutton, 1966. Canada. Parliament. House of Commons. Debates. 23rd Parliament, 1st Session, Vol. 4 (January 30th-31st, 1958). Canada. 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