![An un-named Naskapi family at DAvis Inlet, Labrador, 1961. [Photo by Barbara Hinds, a Halifax journalist]](http://www.philpaine.com/wp-content/uploads/2006/01/06-01-07-READ-Robert-Paine-–ed.-Patrons-and-Brokers-in-the-East-Arctic-pic-1-1024x673.jpg)
An un-named Naskapi family at Davis Inlet, Labrador, 1961. [Photo by Barbara Hinds, a Halifax journalist]
When this collection of papers came out, in the 1970’s, studies of “patrons and clients” were in vogue in social anthropology. The editor begins by expressing some doubts about the validity of the terminology. He is well aware of the ambiguities involved in defining a “patron” role, with its presumption that one party is the social superior of the other, and the difficulties of determining just who is beholden to whom in any social exchange. The studies in the collection are mostly from the Canadian Arctic (in some cases, communities with which I have some familiarity). The society in these northern communities has changed a lot since then. Most arctic and subarctic communities had little interaction with the Canadian government until after World War II. A handful of missionaries, the Mounties, and Hudson’s Bay Company factors had formed a thin layer of outsiders for generations. But after World War II, the HBC’s role was displaced by the Provincial and Federal Governments, and those Governments were determined to transform and manage “native” life and society.What bothers me about all of these papers is that they consistently talk about how the Naskapi and Innuit people were being exposed to “the values of Euro-Canadian society” and “a market economy”. Now, this is nonsense. First of all, the economic arrangements forced on them by the various governments had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with any “market economy”. Quite the opposite. What was newly imposed on them was a centrally directed, State-owned and operated Command Economy. For example, the Naskapi who came under the aggressive social engineering of the Newfoundland Government (which operated Labrador more or less as a distant colony), suddenly found that imported goods were available only through the government-run “store”. The store-keeper was a civil servant, whose primary function was to control and deliver welfare payments and other government services. Nobody could compete with him, and there was no incentive or reward for him to, for example, improve service or stock what people wanted. Invariably, he saw his “commercial” functions as merely part of his role as a welfare officer. The tea and tobacco that people purchased with their earnings were essentially re-classified as just more “gifts” from the government. Such officials usually felt they had the right to pass judgment on peoples’ choices and purchases, and to prevent purchases they disapproved of. To describe this kind of thing as the Naskapi being “introduced to a market economy” is just plain silly. It is double nonsense to talk about it as the intrusion of “southern” or “Canadian” values. Outside of prisons, ordinary Canadians are not subjected to economic processes and relationships even remotely like this.
Naskapi traders outside the Hudson’s Bay Company post at Davis Inlet, August 1903
In fact, there was nothing alien or surprising about a “market economy” to the Naskapi when the Newfoundland government barged in, in the 1950s. In the winter, the Naskapi lived primarily by hunting big game in the interior. To do this, they scattered across the landscape, in micro-bands and family partnerships. As is usual in this kind of hunting, the acquired game was distributed through a network of family and partnership obligations. But in the summer, they engaged in fishing, usually singly or in families, and there were no customary redistribution requirements for the fish. For centuries, surplus fish and furs were traded to the south, at first through the complex trade networks that had criss-crossed North America for thousands of years, then with French Canadian and Métis traders. Cash was not involved, but modern readers have an uninformed habit of assuming that cash is the significant feature of a “market economy”. In fact, until the middle of the 19th century, “Euro-Canadians” used hardly any more cash that the aboriginal population. There simply wasn’t much hard currency circulating, and what little there was, was usually broken up pieces of Spanish money, or stray American currency. Almost all pioneer-era exchanges were barter, or entries “on account” in store ledgers, absolutely identical to the transactions with the Hudson’s Bay Company that Inuit and Naskapi were accustomed to. Even military officers in colonial Canada were seldom paid in cash, but rather with cutlery and dishes, reserved spots in church pews, and other perquisites. The extensive use of cash transactions entered “native” and “Euro-Canadian” culture at the same time.
With religion, it is exactly the same story. It’s quite wrong to speak of the intrusion of missionaries into the lives of subarctic peoples as being the introduction of Canadian religious and social values. While the early missionaries were sincere, and the Naskapi found them helpful, these were soon enough replaced by a hardened bureaucracy with a paternalistic ideology and unlimited powers, backed by the government. Religion, as promulgated by this institution, bore no resemblance to religion as it was practiced in Toronto, Montreal, or Winnipeg. In Toronto, a local minister or parish priest is not in a position to determine whether you get a car loan, or to barge into your home and blackmail you into giving up drinking, or monitor your private behaviour. Churches and clerics in normal Canadian society must compete for your interest and attention, are not tolerated as meddlers, and certainly do not have the power to interfere in the economic life of our households. But that is precisely the kind of power that missionaries wielded in Naskapi and Innuit communities, and it was exercised relentlessly and unabashedly.
Could a Methodist pastor in normal Canadian society force you to part with your children, and send those children off to a remote boarding school (often to be humiliated, physically abused and, in some cases, raped)? Could he punish them for speaking their family language, so that they could barely talk to their parents and not at all to their grandparents? Would they be allowed to brainwash your children into despising you and everything about their life in your home? Of course, not. People in normal Canada would rise up as one and burn every church to the ground if their priests and ministers perpetrated such crimes.
These crimes were possible because the missionaries had a cowed, unsuspecting, and economically vulnerable population in their grasp, on which they could perform totalitarian social engineering experiments which are fundamentally alien to everything Canadians stand for, believe in, and live by. The missionaries had the overwhelming power of the State to back them up. Children whom they could not hustle into the Residential School System by intimidation would simply have been seized at gunpoint. The victims were not, repeat not citizens of Canada. They were “wards of the state”, without the right to vote until the 1960s, and stripped of all the normal legal protections of Canadian citizenship. To talk of this shit as a form of “acculturation” to Canadian society is nonsense piled on nonsense. I will not even concede that the missionaries should be called “Christians”… Their actions were more in line with the thoughts of Chairman Mao than with anything that Canadians would recognize as Christianity.
contents:
14533. (Robert Paine) A Theory of Patronage and Brokerage [article]
14534. (Georg Henrikson) The Transactional Basis of Influence: White Men
. . . . . Among Naskapi Indians [article]
14535. (Milton Freeman) Tolerance and Rejection of Patron Roles in an
. . . . . Eskimo Settlement [article]
14536. (Jean Briggs) Strategies of Perception: The Management of Ethnic
. . . . . Identity [article]
14537. (James Hiller) Early Patrons of the Labrador Eskimos: The Moravian
. . . . . Mission in Labrador, 1765–1865 [article]
14538. (Robert Paine) Conclusions [article]
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