Victor O'Connell's Blog
June 15, 2015
Gold and the Americas
Gold and the Americas – El Torre del Or – the Golden Tower in Seville – symbolises one the main motivations for the Spanish and European conquest of the Americas – the search for gold and other riches. In my novel, Eaglechild, there is a scene in Seville involving Rupert, the 13 year-old son of María Concepción, a Spanish Countess, and Miguel, Rupert’s young Jesuit tutor who is working on his doctoral thesis about the Spanish Conquest of the Americas.
They decided that a good starting-point was the discovery of the New World by Christopher Columbus in 1492. The most memorable fact about it, from Rupert’s point of view, was that Columbus had taken his thirteen-year-old son with him on one of his voyages of discovery
“He was so lucky,” said Rupert, referring to the boy.
“He probably said the same about the children in your family – his father wanted a noble title so badly. Columbus liked to make friends with noble families like yours in the hope they would put in a good word for him at the royal court. Of course, your ancestors wanted something from him, too – they wanted gold and profit from his discoveries in the Americas.”
On their first walking tutorial, Miguel took Rupert to the twelve-sided Golden Tower on the banks of the Guadalquivir River. They climbed its winding staircase to the top and took in the view it offered of the river and the city.
“It’s hard to believe, isn’t it, that this tower was here about two hundred years before Columbus set sail.” Miguel was looking south, downriver. “It would have been the last major monument to the Old World that he would have seen before he left for the New World and the first when he returned.”
“But he sailed from Palos.” Rupert had learned this from geography classes at Summer Meadows.
“ Yes, he did, on the first voyage. But he sailed there from here. And he put things together in Seville, got his first permissions from the royal court here and most of his money.”
“It was like a lighthouse, wasn’t it?” asked Rupert referring to the Golden Tower. “It was covered in gold and shone in the sunlight.” He was repeating a local legend.
“That’s a nice idea. But if gold on its walls reflected in the sun, it would have been the golden colour in its Moorish tiles. I like the other theory better – that it got its name when it was converted into a warehouse for the gold that arrived from the Americas. There were huge quantities. That’s why they set up royal mints in Seville – to turn the gold into coins and medals soon after it arrived.”
“How did we find so much gold, Miguel?”
“Well, it wasn’t we who found it, to be accurate. The Indians found it. We gave them trade goods for it – knives and cloth and so on. But if the truth were to be told, much of the first gold to be sent back here was confiscated from the Indians – in other words we stole it. I’m afraid we also took most of their gold ornaments and works of art and religious statues and vessels and melted them all down – very little survived. Your mother has a few pieces, and there are some in museums. But we have archaeologists to thank for recovering most of them. And after we took their gold, we seized their gold mines and opened new mines, too, and put the Indians to work in them as our slaves.”
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June 13, 2015
Lost Opportunity – the real tragedy of Indian Residential Schools
Can anger about the education a boy receives at 13 years of age motivate him politically into his late 80’s? I know it can. I knew John B. Tootoosis.
When John spoke about the residential school for Indian boys to which he was sent at 13 years of age, he did not talk so much about the physical, sexual and racial abuse many others have attested to in the Truth and Reconciliation hearings in Canada, between 2008 and 2015 (http://tinyurl.com/2ua5or2 ).
He spoke mainly of the lost opportunity. You see, John wanted to learn. He even wanted to learn from the Whiteman. But his school was more interested in having him do domestic chores, learn the Catholic Catechism and memorise reading texts in order to fool the government school inspectors into believing that he and the other students could read English fluently, when they couldn’t.
In 1982, John was 82 years of age. He went to England and Scotland to demand passionately that the British Parliament honour the promises Queen Victoria made to his grandfather’s generation on the Canadian prairies in 1876 when they signed Treaty 6.
He carried with him to London the silver treaty medal the British had given to Poundmaker. John’s grandfather was Yellow Mud Blanket, Poundmaker’s brother. A few years after the treaty, the two brothers were imprisoned by the British general in charge of the Canadian militia and by the colonial court. Their crime? Organising a peaceful protest outside the gates of a British/Canadian fort in Battleford in modern day Saskatchewan. They wanted to discuss British breaches of the treaty. When the officials refused to talk, Poundmaker withdrew and led his people 55 kilometres west to Cut Knife Hill where they pitched their tipis.
That small community on the hill included women and children and the elderly. In this location, they were subject to a sneak attack by the British/Canadian military armed with cannons and a Gatling gun. The Indians suffered some losses, the military suffered more. Led by Poundmaker’s War Chief, Fine Day, they defended themselves successfully and drove the invaders away. This defensive action was classified by the military and the court as an act of treasonous rebellion, worthy of hanging, in some cases, and imprisonment in others.
The main breach of treaty the Indians wanted to discuss that day outside the gates of the fort, was the shortage of food that had reduced them to the point of near starvation. It had been brought about by the disappearance of the buffalo herds as a result of British settlement. This possibility had been foreseen by Poundmaker during treaty negotiations. He persuaded the British to promise that they would provide emergency rations in the event of famine and pestilence. But those rations were not forthcoming. In addition, the cattle and farm tools the British had promised to enable the Indians to develop an alternative economy were also not provided in the promised quantities or quality.
But a more enduring complaint over the century since has been the British and Canadian reluctance to provide schools for Indian children controlled by Indian communities, as promised in the treaty, and the consequent neglect of so many potentially brilliant Indian minds. John’s frustration at the lost opportunity for an adequate education drove him to develop a comprehensive political analysis. He campaigned all his life for aboriginal and treaty rights which would involve the recognition of Indian sovereignty and self-government within the Canadian confederation. In particular, he argued that the government-funded, church-administered residential schools should be replaced by Indian schools, and other educational institutions, which would be responsive to Indian communities. John has described all this in his own words as told to his daughter Jean Goodwill and her co-author Norma Sluman in his fascinating biography: Sluman, Norma and Goodwill, Jean Cuthand. John Tootoosis: Biography of a Cree Leader. Ottawa: Golden Dog Press, 1982.
Readers of my novel, Eaglechild, may have guessed by now that John was one of the inspirations for the fictional character, Clearvoice. I spent time with John B. Tootoosis in England and Scotland in 1981 and 1982, and other times in Canada before and since. I was honoured to be a guest in his home at the Poundmaker First Nation in Saskatchewan. At my request he spent time with my Indian, Métis and Inuit students in the University program I designed and directed in Alberta. He agreed, to serve on the board of directors of the Kanata Institute, which I founded. I write of John at greater length and more detail in my forthcoming non-fiction book, Nation to Nation – A memoir of the Canadian Indian constitutional campaign in London (1979-1982)
If you would like to be informed when that book and my other publications are released please sign up for that specific newsletter: ( http://bit.ly/1dRsQhH ) Meanwhile, here is a short excerpt from my novel about Cleavoice’s first day at residential school with his younger brother, Swimmer:
“Clearvoice lay in his bed, worrying about Swimmer, listening to the furtive last mutterings of boys in the dark and trying to understand his profound sense of unease. In his old age he would look back on that first night in residential school as the source of the realization that came to haunt him for the rest of his life – that he had become a stranger in his own land.”
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June 10, 2015
Foxhunting in the UK as witnessed by a Cree Indian from Canada
Foxhunting in the UK has an extraordinary ability to inflame passions.
In my novel, Eaglechild, I make several references to the Heythrop Hunt. ( http://tinyurl.com/olpnd2z )
Prime Minster, David Cameron, is alleged to have ridden with that particular hunt which is close to his home in Chipping Norton. It has existed in its present form since 1835 although foxhunting, in general, had been going on in that region since at least the 1600’s. The Heythrop Hunt takes its name from the fact that some of its main events happen on the former country estate of the 1st Earl of Leicester at Heythrop – although the hunt has always ranged far and wide throughout the counties of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.
Foxhunting was made illegal in Britain in 2005, but there has been a concerted campaign to legalise it again. However, that campaign was recently defeated. ( http://tinyurl.com/p3ouvoo )
In my novel, Joe-Bear is a young Cree recently arrived back in Canada from the UK. In one scene, he playfully describes the peculiarities – or absurdities – of the Heythrop Hunt to an audience of Blackfoot children in Alberta who can hardly believe what they are hearing.
“He built up the expectations of his audience. What would justify such an enormous and elaborate hunt? He listed the possibilities. Was it a grizzly standing eight feet tall on its back legs baring its teeth and roaring? No! Was it a cunning black bear with a taste for human flesh? No! How about a moose or caribou bull in heat? No! Could it have been a swift elk? No! Then it must have been a cougar or a wolf or a pack of crazy coyotes? No! What then, he asked, rhetorically, what kind of prey would justify so large and powerful a hunting party, so many dogs and horses, so numerous a tribe of followers and such ornate ceremony? It was a mahkêsîsi, he said – a young red fox! “
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GOODREADS FREE EAGLECHILD COMPETITION
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Goodreads Book Giveaway
Eaglechild
by Victor O’Connell
Giveaway ends September 04, 2015.
See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.
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GOODREADS FREE PAPERBACK COMPETITION
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Eaglechild
by Victor O’Connell
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See the giveaway details
at Goodreads.
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Assimilation by Legislation – the realpolitik of Canada’s Indian policies before 1982
In my novel, Eaglechild, two characters, Ray Mackie, a cynical bureaucrat attached to the Canadian “embassy” and Percy Simpson, a British MI5 officer investigating the 1982 Indian constitutional campaign in London, discuss the difference between genocide and assimilation. Mackie speaks first:
“The way the Indians see it, it’s a never-ending story – get rid of the Indians – in a nice way, of course. Canadians are always nice.”
“That doesn’t sound very nice. It sounds awfully like genocide,” Simpson replied. “But genocide is quick, violent and illegal. Assimilation is slow and legal.”
“And nice,” Mackie added.
In London, no Indian organization used the word “genocide” to describe Canada’s Indian polices. That term implies a systematic program of physical extermination such as happened in Nazi Germany. Nothing like that happened in Canada.
However, the Indians did use the term “assimilation”. The realpolitik of Canada’s Indian policies had always been to get rid of the Indian nations as political entities with rights to territories and a special constitutional status within Canada. The method preferred by successive Canadian administrations was “assimilation by legislation”.
To understand the intensity of the London campaign pursued for three years between 1979 and 1982 by many Indian nations, one has to appreciate their existential fear that once Canada secured its formal political independence from Britain there would be no effective international restraint on this realpolitik.
Therefore, it was crucial that Britain observe the principles of its own Royal Proclamation 1763. It required that before there was any disposition of the land in Canada there should be agreement with the indigenous peoples arrived at in open meeting and approved by the Crown. Ominously, the Canadian government had locked Indians out of constitutional negotiations.
Some Indian nations had already reached historical agreements with Britain, and arguably with Canada, in the form of treaties which, in the words of the British, would last forever “as long as the sun shines, the grass grows and the rivers flow”. In the face of the UK Government’s claim that, as a practical matter, Britain could not continue to honour those treaties once Canada became politically independent in 1982, then the UK Parliament and Crown should ensure that Canada assume British responsibilities to observe the Royal Proclamation 1763 and the treaties forever.
That is the gist of the analysis I delivered to members of the UK Parliament and media in London in 1980-1982 on behalf of those several Indian nations who appointed me as their spokesman. I have reported this my fully in my memoir Nation to Nation.
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