Descripción de las investigaciones sobre el video digital 70

The treaty-making process was not the first “civilizing” mission of the Canadian bourgeois in Indian country, rather, treaties were one of a pastiche of tools for social control at the time. In the mid-nineteenth century, Catholic missionaries began to explore the region of the Hudson Bay and the Attawapiskat River, visiting local Indigenous people and families who were camping on their winter trap lines. By 1893, the

missionaries built a church on the shores of the river and by 1901 the Hudson Bay had established a trading post where the church was located (Obomsawin 2012). It is the simultaneous formation of these institutions that have led some authors to claim that “Catholic priests founded Attawapiskat in 1893” (Halfe 2014:46), after the missionaries built a physical location for the trade of spiritual and material currency. It is through the “civilizing” missions of this time that we are able to understand the link between religion and economics.

Before the missionaries came to spread the word of a Christian God, the Omushkegowuk already possessed a strong sense of “spirituality” (Hookimaw-Witt 1998:99). Witt

explains that when the missionaries arrived, the Inninew blended the two worldviews, accepting Christianity, while maintaining their original spirituality (1998:95). In modern

times, nearly everyone in Attawapiskat is Christian, either Catholic or Pentecostal (Witt and Hookimaw-Witt 2003:382), and the result is that when elders speak of spirituality and responsibility to the land, terms such as: “the Creator,” “Kitche Mando,” and “God” are used interchangeably. It would seem from the interviews with elders that the Inninew already possessed a monotheistic worldview, as exemplified by statements which allude to the Creator/Kitche Mando/God having created the Universe to be used fairly and equally by all beings (For some examples, see: Hookimaw-Witt 1998:

145,147,148,153). That the Inninew possessed a belief in a singular Creator, likely made the spread of Christianity easier. However, the spiritual worldview of the Inninew was very different from the formal organization and institutional structure of the Catholic Church. As Mary Wabano expresses:

Our forefathers prayed a lot, even before the man in the black long dress came. There were medicine men that used their powers in good ways, and sometimes also in bad ways. The good shamans were like doctors and they could cure people that were sick. Our grandfathers had drums when they prayed a lot. Nevertheless St. Xavier wrote in the Great Book that our ways were mandocheo (satanic) and that our people did not know Kitche Mando. The use of traditional rituals was said to be pagan in the book. We had a priest who used to meet the community regularly to talk to the people and to advice [sic] them, when the children had to be home. From then on, the kids were whipped when they did not listen (Hookimaw-Witt 1998:177).

In order to annex the land upon which Indigenous people depended for their spiritual, physical, and emotional well-being, the bourgeois class—who at the time consisted largely of government and religious officials—had to replace the object/subject of Indigenous dependence. In introducing formalized religion, and the “laws” bestowed in the Indian Act, the bourgeois sought to trade traditional interpretations of the universe, for values and beliefs bestowed in Christianity and capitalism. This new system of dependence introduced rigid laws, institutional permanence, rationalized social hierarchy, wealth accumulation, enterprise, and predictability (Novak 2000:8). As Fanon reminds us, the colonizing bourgeoisie are aided by formal religion, which teaches populations to emulate “saints who turned the other cheek, who forgave those who trespassed against them, [and] who, without flinching, were spat upon and insulted” (1963/2004:28). Through the adoption of Christianity, the Inninew would be pacified while they were

dehumanized and separated from the land where their identities are embedded. These social control mechanisms had been influencing the people who lived north of Fort Albany since the time that the church was built, nearly fourty years before Treaty No. 9 was amended to create the reserve now known as Attawapiskat.

Once Treaty No.9 was amended in 1930, the Attawapiskat reserve was created where the church and the HBC trading post was located. Slowly, houses were built to

accommodate the local priest, nuns, and the manager of the local Hudson Bay trading post. Eventually, Inninew families began to spend increasingly more time on the reserve (Honigmann 1957). And in time, some log cabins were built for the “Indians”, replacing the traditional teepee or wigwam (Hookimaw-Witt 1998:34), lending a sense of

permanence to living on the reserve. An important thing to consider here is that until the reserve was created, most families lived on their own in the bush, not in big collectives or “bands”. The people belonged to the land, and other than family, that was their main unit of identity (Ibid:112). This is contrasted by the Eurocentric worldview that the land belongs to the people.

Based on the belief that people can “own” title to land, the governments needed to assure that they had properly extinguished any such ownership from the Indigenous people. In order to make it faster and easier to extinguish Inninew title over the land, the

“negotiators” had to create a group of people whom they could convince to sign the treaty. “Instead of visiting the people living on the land, the negotiator went to the Hudson’s Bay Trading Posts, and the people trading there were considered a ‘band’” (Hookimaw-Witt 1998: 112-113). The concept of “band membership” is a Euro-

Canadian creation (Ibid:112) which extends back to the Indian Act—a document which homogenizes and controls “who” is legally allowed to be considered an “Indian”.

Around the time that Inninew families were moving to Attawapiskat, land “development” by the invaders had killed much of the game of the area. Families were forced to seek assistance from the government due to food shortage, and government assistance came in the form of money (Honigmann 1957:366). Money and furs were traded for imported food stuffs such as wheat and bacon that were available at the trading post (Hookimaw-

Witt 1998:34). HBC also introduced alcohol through the trading post at the time (Ibid: 173). This dietary change had detrimental effects on the physical and spiritual health of the people as it was foreign to their bodies and was spiritually detached from traditional understanding of relationships to the universe (Mosby 2013). The slow integration of the Inninew into European ideology resulted in a new system of dependence, away from the land and toward capitalism, as witnessed by anthropologist John Honigmann, whose fieldwork in Attawapiskat during the years 1947 and 1948:

In overwhelming part the Indians are economically as dependent on the outside society for food as for clothing, tents, lumber, traps, and weapons. In exchange for these goods they offer furs. But the fur resources of the area became largely exhausted shortly after the turn of the century and restocking the streams with beaver has not been highly successful (1957:366).

Once furs were depleted, the Inninew became dependent on what Honigmann calls “generous government relief” for survival (Ibid).

4.2.2

The dehumanization of the Omushkegowuk: “Indians” as objects