The Alberta Labour History Institute collects, preserves, and disseminates the stories of Alberta’s working people and their organizations. This website includes full transcripts, podcasts, and profiles of our interviewees. It also includes videos, booklets, themed essays, annual calendars, and a link to a book created by ALHI. To learn more about us, visit About. For help with navigating the site, visit How To Use This Site.
What’s New?
2027 ALHI Calendar: Labour’s Role in Winning and Extending Social Legislation
Event: Maria Dunn: Packingtown
New and updated worker profiles: Karen Kennedy; John Wilgus; Maria Halushka; Clarence Lacombe
New themes: Precarious Workers in Alberta; Hunger March (1932)
Booknotes: The Red Baron of IBEW Local 213: Les McDonald, Union Politics, and the 1966 Wildcat Strike at Lenkurt Electric by Ian McDonald; Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It by Cory Doctorow
Systemic Racism in Alberta
By Alvin Finkel
Interviews Relating to Systemic Racism in Alberta
Systemic racism has a long history in Alberta that dates back almost to the arrival of Europeans in this territory. The first Europeans were fur traders. They required Indigenous people to serve as the work force that trapped animals and prepared furs for market, guides throughout the territory, and transporters of furs to the Great Lakes and Hudson Bay. Unlike plantation labour, the fur trade ruled out unfree labour.
A Buffalo Rift, by Alfred Jacob Miller, 1867. Courtesy of Library and Archives Canada, C-000403.
But within the fur-trading companies, no one whose blood was not fully European could rise above menial labour positions. And as the fur trade ceded to agricultural settlement, Indigenous people were viewed as obstacles to the “white man’s progress.” Treaties that hemmed Indigenous people in on small reserves were imposed. The Department of Indian Affairs set 10 acres as the size of an Indigenous farm while Euro-Canadian homesteaders received 160 acres of generally more fertile land. The system regarded First Nations as potential subsistence peasants and Euro-Canadians as commercial farmers. Metis were ignored altogether and given no land. Forced to establish shacks along “road allowances” and move when those were developed, they were threatened with extermination by tuberculosis and malnutrition in the 1930s. The Alberta government then established modest Metis settlements.