Interviews relating to Indigenous Workers in Alberta
The history of Indigenous workers in Alberta is poorly understood by most non-Indigenous Albertans. Most of us have only the vaguest notions of the work activities of Indigenous people during the many millennia when they were the only people living in the province. Their crucial role in making the European fur trade possible has been vastly understated in histories that overstate the influence of the small group of Europeans who were actually resident in what became Alberta. Finally, the role of Indigenous people in building Alberta in the period after European-origin settlers dispossessed them of most of their land and imposed foreign cultural norms upon them is almost totally ignored. It is true that colonialism disrupted Indigenous cultural and work activities. Their family lives were shattered by the residential school policy that stole children from their parents and placed them in church-run schools where they were only allowed to speak European languages and the cultural practices of their ancestors were denounced as savage and ungodly.
But the stereotype that views most Indigenous people as having become simply marginal actors, doomed to collect welfare and unable to participate in the economy of foreigners who treated them with disdain is inaccurate. Despite the discrimination that Indigenous people faced, which did indeed ruin many of their lives, the majority have participated throughout the colonial period in the colonial economy. They have been present in almost every profession. While ALHI has only just begun its exploration through interviews of the vocations of Indigenous people on reserves and in towns, cities, and non-reserve rural areas, it is clear that there are few areas of work where Indigenous people cannot be found. Among our interviewees there are people who have worked as artists, university professors, nurses, emergency medical technicians, social workers, construction workers, office workers, retail workers, correctional officers, oil workers, flight attendants, ranchers, members of the military, police officers, and more.
As the ALHI video, “Waltzing with the Angels,” shows, the ironworkers who performed the most dangerous jobs in building Edmonton’s downtown skyscrapers in the 1960s and 1970s, including the CN Tower, were almost exclusively Métis. Edmonton’s first woman foreperson for the City, Doreen Wabasca, is a Cree woman who had spent seven hideous years in a residential school. Dallas Young Pine, born and raised on the Blood Indian Reserve, became a professional rider in top rodeo competitions across North America as well as a stunt rider in movies. Colette Cullen is an Indigenous woman who has served in the Canadian military, and has also worked as an emergency medical technician, a cementer, a police officer, a prison guard, and a vehicle salesperson. Jim Cardinal, raised in a Cree-speaking Indigenous family in Owl River, became a welder at Suncor and became president of his union local. Angela Grandbois is a Dene who has over 10 years of experience as a pipefitter and steamfitter and who has completed her certification as a power engineer. Their stories are among those of a variety of individuals who are proud of their Indigenous heritage but whose work lives have been spent in good part within settler society. While they may have lost a great deal because of colonialism, they have contributed to building the colonial society while many have also fought for the right of Indigenous people to preserve their heritage while having a much larger land base in Alberta.
While many of the jobs Indigenous people perform reflect the needs of modern society, the skills that they bring to their work just as often reflect skills learned during the millennia that preceded contact with Indigenous people. Colonial images of pre-contact society often make their social organization and work appear easy and without sophisticated skills required. That’s false. Indigenous peoples developed extremely close understandings of their environment and all of the plants, animals, and inanimate objects within that environment. From an outside point of view, they had achieved mastery of that environment. But in their view, “mastery” was not a goal; rather, the goal was to achieve greater contact with the Creator who had made all of the animate and inanimate subjects of Nature, of whom humans were a part. Humans were not meant to be masters of other species but to be partners with them and to honour them. First Nations attributed their intimate knowledge of nature, such as where to find game and plants, to their rituals of respect for the Creator and the Creator’s many creations.
Complex technologies arose over time as First Nations experimented with their natural surroundings. Archaeologist Jack Brink comments on the complexity of what they learned and put into practice in his study as head of the team that reconstructed Head Smashed-in Buffalo Jump, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, in southwestern Alberta. In his book, Imagining Head-Smashed In: Buffalo Hunting on the Northern Plains, Brink writes:
Alone in that basin that day, I know that I stood among the remains of a huge construction project involving the collection and careful placement of thousands of individual rocks. Each one was selected for certain size and weight and placed in a spot deemed just right by a team of people who must have discussed and debated how the map was to be made. What started off as simple clusters of stone had morphed into a mental blueprint of complex, group-based decision-making on a scale and for a purpose that had mostly eluded consideration by archaeologists, anthropologists, animal ecologists, and pretty much everyone else.
Over thousands of generations of invention and experimentation Indigenous people learned where and how they could herd buffalo over cliffs with the fewest risks to hunters’ lives. They also learned how to quickly assess which buffalo among those who had fallen over the cliffs had sufficient fat to provide the nutrients that First Nations required. Indigenous women made the decision about which buffalo to harvest by investigating the hair over their eyes and on the horn and stripes on their spines. Their intimate knowledge of the buffalo allowed Indigenous people to make use of various parts of their bodies to make clothing, toboggans, cutlery, and powder flasks, among other products.
Indigenous people organized their work collectively and shared the products of their labour equally. With long histories of trade with peoples across the Americas, they did not initially find it difficult to trade with the Europeans who came to their region in search of furs. Without Indigenous labour, the fur trade would have been impossible. Indigenous workers hunted the fur-bearing animals and prepared the furs for market. The European fur-trading companies gave all of the profitable positions in their companies to Europeans. But those profits could not have been made without the essential labour of First Nations and Metis workers. The Metis served as boatmen, guides and interpreters for the French and later the English as they made their way from today’s eastern Canada to its western regions.
Settlement proved far more disruptive to Indigenous people on the Prairies than the fur trade. The numbers of Europeans who settled in the west during the fur trade were small. They did not threaten Indigenous control of the region. The settlers, aided by the Royal North West Mounted Police, forerunner of the RCMP, and the military, did pose a threat. Indigenous people signed treaties with the government of the newcomers. But the understandings of the two sides regarding treaties were different. The Indigenous people believed that they were sharing their lands with the newcomers rather than ceding lands felt betrayed as the newcomers restricted their rights to live and work as they had since time immemorial. But they did join the labour force of the settlers to the extent that they were allowed to do so. At the same time they resisted dispossession and the stealing of their children in the genocidal residential school policy. That policy had as its stated goal the destruction of Indigenous culture through the assimilation of the children into European society. The Dominion of Canada had as its objective the elimination of Indigenous languages, social values, and cultural practices. But Indigenous resistance resulted in those objectives being frustrated.
Today, as our interviewees suggest, Indigenous people continue their struggles to reconstruct their original societies, languages, and values while attempting to also participate within the colonial societies that surround them.
Interviews relating to Indigenous Workers in Alberta
HOW INDIGENOUS WOMEN AND MEN EXPERIENCE THE OIL INDUSTRY IN ALBERTA
This important study from the Parkland Institute was prepared by sociologist Dr. Angele Alook, a labour relations officer with AUPE and an instructor at Concordia University College who teaches Public Health and Labour Market Disadvantage as well as Public Health and Socially Marginalized Populations. Angele also serves on ALHI’s Indigenous Labour History Committee.
WALTZING WITH THE ANGELS
A short ALHI documentary video where Métis Ironworkers describe building Edmonton’s CN Tower.
This project was funded in part by the Government of Alberta.
