Before the Age of the Donald - by Dave Jaffe. Part Seventeen

          Before the Age of the Donald. Part Seventeen.


         Long before Donald Trump was elected America's 45th president, many people in North America felt the lash of white racism. One group that surely got hurt by this wave of hate were native Americans or First Nations as they're known in Canada.
     Trump's home state of New York had many native Americans four hundred years ago. Today white people and others rule the state.
     So-called explorers from Europe ranged across North America from the 16th century on. In their wake they spread wars, violence and disease among native peoples. Indigenous people fought back. Yet in the end, the white man's weapons crushed most native resistance. Soon white settlements sprung up across the United States on land that once was native Indian territory. Things were no different in Canada.
    "We will be just in our time," Pierre Elliot Trudeau said shortly after his election as Canada's Prime Minister in 1968. Soon after this, Trudeau assigned his eager Liberal ally Jean Chretien to wipe out the status of indigenous Canadians, now known as 'First Nations'. First Nations people, Trudeau believed, should be completely absorbed into the Canadian mosaic. This meant stripping them of any special status they had. Trudeau also aimed to wind down all the First Nations reserves, where many First Nations people lived.
     The First Nations didn't agree with this. They protested and forced Trudeau and Chretien to give up their plans. "You gave me hell," a still ambitious Chretien told a First Nations crowd in effect, when he first ran for the leadership of the Liberal Party in 1984.
    To-day there are close to one and a half million indigenous people in Canada. Some are First Nations people. Others are Metis. Across northern Canada, there are quite a few thousand Inuit, formerly called 'Eskimos'. Like their brothers and sisters across the U.S., First Nations people have been hammered by white racist policies. So-called explorers from Europe used them to find their way across Canada. Then white people's diseases often decimated one nation after another. Soldiers attacked the indigenous people and then herded the survivors onto ever shrinking reserves. As writers Suzanne Fournier and Ernie Crey have shown, in the late 19th century tens of thousands of young First Nations were jammed into so-called 'Residential Schools'.
      Here far from their homes, children endured loss of their language, molestation, sexual abuse and murder. "Over 60,000 First Nations children died in residential schools," says the defrocked United Church minister Kevin Annett. Annett was thrown out of the United Church for uncovering the brutal treatment of aboriginal children at the hands of United Church, Catholic and Anglican clergy and church women. Other experts think Annett's figures are too high. Still, there's no doubt that thousands of First Nations youngsters did die while attending the residential schools. It was just another example of white racism.