“This Is Our Land!” Indigenous Rhetoric and Resistance on the Northern Plains by Daniel Morley Johnson A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Comparative Literature University of Alberta © Daniel Morley Johnson, 2014 Abstract This thesis examines Indigenous rhetorics of resistance from the Treaty Six negotiations in 1876 to the 1930s. Using methods from Comparative Literature and Indigenous literary studies, the thesis situates the rhetoric of northern Plains Indigenous peoples in the context of settler-colonial studies, Indigenous literary nationalism, and Plains Indigenous concepts of nationhood and governance, and introduces the concept of rhetorical autonomy (an extension of literary nationalism) as an organizing framework. The thesis examines the ways Plains Indigenous writers and leaders have resisted settler-colonialism through both rhetorical and physical acts of resistance. Making use of archival and published works, the thesis is a literary and political history of Indigenous peoples from their origins on the northern plains to the period of political organizing after World War I. ii Acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge and thank the Indigenous peoples of Treaty Six who have generously allowed me to live and work here in their territory: I hope this thesis honours your histories, is respectful of your stories, and can – in some small way – contribute to your futures. I am grateful to my doctoral committee for their support and guidance: my supervisor, Professor Jonathan Hart, and committee members and examiners, Professors Keavy Martin, Isabel Altamirano-Jiménez, Ellen bielawski, and Odile Cisneros. I am also grateful to Professor Priscilla Settee of the University of Saskatchewan for serving on my committee as external examiner. My doctoral research was funded by the Joseph-Armand bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship (2007-2010). Over the course of my graduate studies, I received generous administrative support from Janey Kennedy (OIS), Eva Glancy (MLCS), and Dr. Irene Sywenky (past Graduate Coordinator, Comparative Literature). I am grateful to the librarians and staff of the Bruce Peel Special Collections at the University of Alberta Libraries, as well as librarian Anne Carr-Wiggin who has been a great support of my teaching and research. I would like to acknowledge my teachers in Nêhiyawêwin: Linda Krupnik, Dolores Sand, Audrey Night, and Dorothy Thunder. Between 2007 and 2012, I had the honour and privilege of teaching at Maskwacîs Cultural College and at the University of Alberta (faculty of Native Studies, Department of English and film Studies, and the Comparative Literature program). I would like to acknowledge my colleagues and especially my former students, who taught me so much and helped to shape the ideas in this thesis. I would also like to thank the staff and participants at The Learning Centre Literacy Association for their guidance and for iii welcoming me into their community, particularly Dr. Mary Norton and Denis Lapierre. Dr. Joanne Muzak introduced me to The Learning Centre in 2008 when we collaborated on the Humanties 101 program. I am also grateful to Professor Christine Stewart (English and film Studies) for her friendship and support, as well as our collaborators and co- researchers at Writing Revolution in Place. My coworkers at boyle Street Community Services have taught me so much and have been overwhelmingly supportive. I would like to acknowledge the inner-city community members who have welcomed me into their territory and into their family. I would like to honour those community members who have moved on to the spirit world, in particular, the late Diane Wood. The number of people who have provided support and friendship over the years is too large to thank here; the following people have provided hospitality, mentorship, conversation, and teachings for which I’ll always be grateful: Leona Carter, Dwayne Donald, Marilyn Dumont, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Sarah Evis, Jason friedman and Jennifer Ritchie, Grace Hunt and Matthew Arlyck, Adam Gaudry, Kailey Imes, Shalene Jobin, Daniel Heath Justice, Hazel Martial, Sylvia McAdam, Naomi McIlwraith, Gina McIntyre, Jaimy Miller, Jason Moccasin, Simon J. Ortiz, Davida Reingold, Deanna Reder and Linda Morra, Jean-Paul Restoule, Daniel Rueck, Jodi Stonehouse, Inga Taube, Zoe Todd, and Richard Van Camp. In particular I am grateful to Matthew Wildcat for his friendship, for sharing his depth of knowledge about the Nêhiyaw rhetorical and political traditions, and for the opportunity to work as an instructor at Maskwacîs Cultural College. I am grateful to my family for their support and encouragement. In particular, I would like to thank my sister, Katie Johnson, for her love and friendship. Last, and first, and throughout, I acknowledge Holly Gunderman, with love. iv Table of Contents Introduction 1 SECTION I: METHODOLOGY AND LITERATURE REVIEW Chapter One 20 Chapter Two 50 Chapter Three 76 Chapter Four 107 SECTION II: RHETORIC AND RESISTANCE ON THE NORTHERN PLAINS Chapter Five 133 Chapter Six 165 Chapter Seven 196 Chapter Eight 230 Coda 262 Notes 272 Bibliography 307 v Introduction If we are to be part of the Canadian mosaic, then we want to be colourful red tiles, taking our place where red is both needed and appreciated. - Harold Cardinal (Sucker Creek Cree First Nation)1 What follows is the report of a journey. In 1999, I took an undergraduate class in history at the University of Toronto, a class about the colonization of the western hemisphere. Reading about Columbus, Cortez, and brébeuf – and reading what they had written – introduced me to historical inquiry and working with primary sources. but more importantly, it taught me that almost everything I had learned previously about the history of the Americas was inadequate, inaccurate, and/or distorted. In that class I was also introduced to the writing of Vine Deloria, Jr. (Standing Rock Lakota), the first Indigenous Studies scholar I had read. It was probably the first published work by an Indigenous person I had ever read. By the end of the year-long course, my life had changed. I learned that the University of Toronto offered a major in Aboriginal Studies. from my room in Sir Daniel Wilson residence at University College, I phoned the program’s director, the linguist Keren Rice, and asked if I could enroll as a major. The next fall, and for the rest of my degree, I took as many Aboriginal Studies courses as I could, classes on the Ojibwe language, as well as history, law, policy, spiritualties, literatures, and oral traditions. I felt called to use my degree in Aboriginal Studies and History to work toward social justice. In 2006, after completing a master’s at McGill where I was privileged to work with historians who had studied at some of the best universities in the world, I arrived in Amiskwacî, the Beaver Hills region (Edmonton), with a vague idea for a thesis in Comparative Literature, an idea that would morph and evolve until the day I read about the 1 injustices faced by the Papaschase band – over a year after I had moved to Edmonton – and in a book edited by a Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) graduate of my program and given to me by my doctoral supervisor.2 As I dug deeper and conducted research, I learned the reconstituted band had a land claim in progress. I e-mailed the band’s chief, Rose Lameman, and walked across the High Level bridge on a bitterly cold night to meet lawyer Ron Maurice, in an attempt to learn as much as I could about the band’s claim – which, as I discuss in Chapter Seven, would eventually be rejected by the Supreme Court without a fair hearing. I knew what I needed to write about: the displacement of Indigenous peoples from the Treaty Six region and the peoples’ resistance to this displacement. My friendship with Cherokee Nation scholar Daniel Heath Justice, whom I met at the University of Toronto, influenced the way I would conceptualize and frame my work; Indigenous literary nationalism, which I first learned about in a class taught by Simon Ortiz (Acoma Pueblo) and of which Justice was a leading theorist, would guide my thinking over the next several years. I am a settler-colonist, raised in a working class family in Wendake, the traditional territory of the Wendat confederacy. My maternal grandfather’s parents, William Albert Spiker and Sarah Ann (Pilkey) Spiker, moved to Midland, Ontario in the early 1920s, where my great-grandfather opened a barber shop in a hotel near the rail line that brought grain from the west to be loaded on freighters that carried it east via the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence River. My grandfather, Morley Grant Spiker, would work at the shipyards and then at the grain elevator, which would regularly be visited ships owned by Canada Steamship Lines. (I can still picture the CSL Tadoussac docked beside the grain elevator that now boasts a huge mural of Jean de Brébeuf.) I am the third generation of my family born 2 and raised in Midland; as a child I would get my hair cut by my great uncle, and later by my mother’s cousin, at Spiker’s barbershop, which my family continues to operate on the town’s main street. Aside from touristy visits to Sainte-Marie among-the-Hurons (the recreated 17th century Jesuit mission where my younger sister, Katie, once worked as an interpreter)3 and school projects on “the Hurons” – for which I once borrowed, as a secondary source, a similar assignment my uncle had done in the 1960s – I learned very little about the Wendat people who had built a densely populated horticultural society in the place my family has called home for almost a century. And now I have made a home in Edmonton, where my great-uncle Jack Hendrickson played for the hometown flyers during the 1957-58 and 1958-59 seasons between brief stints with the Detroit Red Wings.