Separate but Unequal by Frances Widdowson

Author:Frances Widdowson [Widdowson, Frances]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780776628547
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: University of Ottawa Press
Published: 2019-11-05T00:00:00+00:00

The Obstacles to Indigenous Proletarianization

In attempting to understand indigenous involvement in early industrial activity, it is necessary to examine the qualitative and quantitative differences in indigenous peoples’ participation rates in comparison to their non-indigenous counterparts. These specific factors are not analyzed by the royal commission because it seems to assume that any participation by indigenous peoples, no matter how marginal, is an indication that they “were successfully making the transition from a traditional to a ‘modern’ economy.” Such a circumstance, of course, could be due to a few exceptional cases, and might be contrary to the experiences of the majority of indigenous peoples.

The study of indigenous participation in early industrial development has been largely confined to the case of British Columbia—the area also focused on by the royal commission. Most studies of indigenous participation in British Columbia’s industrialization, such as the work of Rolf Knight and Steven High, maintain that it declined in 1930, when the Depression brought an end to small-scale native ventures.146 John Lutz, however, argues in his early work that indigenous involvement was essential to capitalist development only until about 1884, when increasing settlement meant that indigenous peoples became a minority in the province.147

As well as having a high rate of participation in British Columbia’s early economic development, Knight and Lutz maintain that indigenous peoples worked in a wide range of occupations, including coal mining, sawmilling, fishing, and canning.148 Other forms of labour documented include indigenous peoples’ service to settlers and Hudson’s Bay Company posts, and their employment as guides, freighters and porters,149 loggers, longshoremen, and railway-maintenance workers. Knight also devotes chapters to indigenous farming/ranching and the production of artifacts for museums and private collections in the nineteenth century.150 This is in contrast to Lutz’ early work, which concludes that by 1891 native participation was largely confined to fishing, canning, and agriculture.151 Lutz’ later work puts forward a slightly different argument, maintaining that indigenous dependency only really became entrenched in the 1950s, when discriminatory government policies drove indigenous peoples out of productive processes (actions that he calls “the white problem”).152

After the Second World War, indigenous participation certainly became more limited. It is estimated that more than two-thirds of the indigenous workforce was in only two industries—fishing and logging/sawmilling—and farming, trapping, longshoring, railway maintenance, and construction made up the remainder of their employment. At this point, indigenous people were also dependent on welfare and other subsidies from Indian Affairs and other government agencies. By far the most significant source of income, however, came from the catching and processing of fish.153

As well as working in fewer industries than non-indigenous people, indigenous employment in the post-war era in British Columbia differed in that it tended to be concentrated in primary, rather than secondary or tertiary, sectors of production. In the forest industry during the 1950s, for example, few indigenous peoples were employed except in logging and seasonal “rough” sawmilling, and none had jobs in the pulp-and-paper industry, even though some of the mills were close to large native communities.154 Indigenous

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