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Speaker 1 [00:00:06] In 1885, in the face of Canada's failure to fulfill its promises to the Metis or to respect our rights, the Metis established the provincial government of Saskatchewan under the leadership of Louis Riel and Gabriel Dumont. Canada crushes the Metis government in what is remembered as the battle of Batoche. Louis Riel is captured and later he is executed. Beginning in 1885, Canada offers scrip that is a coupon to be traded for land or money to Metis residing in the Northwest Territories, including present day Alberta. This scrip system was rife with fraud and abuse. The bulk of the scrip ended up in the hands of land speculators and the Metis received next to nothing for it. The Supreme Court of Canada has said that the history of scrip, speculation and devaluation is a sorry chapter in our nation's history.
Speaker 2 [00:01:07] We know as Canadians, almost nothing about scrip what we learn about as to the general Canadian population what we learned about Metis ends with Louis Riel in the Red River. If we even get to Batoche, then we've had an extensive education. But the fallout and the legacy of all that, the next chapter in it is scrip. So it goes like this. Canada is a young country and their ambitions are looking west. And there's a provision in the original Constitution that says that a further deal can be made with the Hudson's Bay Company to transfer Rupert's land and the northwestern territories, which is a huge amount of land, which is all of the land that drained into the Hudson's Bay and the Arctic Ocean. And as soon as Canada becomes the country. John A. McDonald puts his mind to this because they want to link the then colony of British Columbia to the new Canada. They strike a deal between England, the Hudson's Bay Company and Canada to make the transfer. The Thames being what they were they never talk to the people living in the territory about it. They never talk to the indigenous people in the Northwestern territories. And overwhelmingly, the biggest population center at the time is Red River. And overwhelmingly the people in Red River are Metis. So the Metis quite rightly, it turns out, are very concerned that the new government won't protect their rights to the land, won't respect them as Indigenous people in the territory. And as you know, Louis Riel declares the provisional government and that becomes the Red River resistance. And eventually they negotiate terms of union. Those terms of union set aside 1.4 million acres of land to the Metis children in southern Manitoba in the what we call the postage stamp, but it's really the Red River and area. That land was never really given to the Metis children. In great Canadian fashion, the new government, ragged to the puck on delivering the land. Didn't really deliver the land did at one point and then took it back and recounted it and redistributed it and came up with a system for fulfilling the promise on paper, but not in practice. And that system was scrip. They ended up issuing what was called a subscription certificate scrip for short, which was a piece of paper coupon. But overwhelmingly these coupons were not redeemed in Manitoba and largely the Metis were dispossessed. In that part of the country there was a military reign of terror and a lot of them fled to other parts of the northwestern territory. That, though, was not the only promise that was made to the Metis at confederation and when the Northwest Territories joined the union. There was another promise, a promise that this larger territory, which became eventually the prairie provinces and the northwestern territory, wasn't at the time, would be transferred to Canada on the condition that Canada settled the claims of the Indigenous people living there equitably. And right from the beginning there was acknowledgment that there was two groups of Indigenous people living in this part of the world. There were First Nations or Indians, as they called them at the time, and there were Metis or half breeds using the language of the time. And they dealt with the First Nations more or less right away. Although, depending on where you are it went into the 1900s. And they did that using treaty. At first they never addressed the Metis claims. It wasn't until the end of the Northwest Resistance. Batoche, the execution of Riel, that this became a really live issue in the Canadian consciousness. People realized that the major claims couldn't be ignored and something had to be done about it. They struck commissions, scrip commissions to go out and issue scrip to Metis to resolve their claim to the land of Indigenous people. To resolve their Indian title as Metis using the language of the day. There were all kinds of problems with this process. It took years for one. Another issue, and this is particularly true in Northern Alberta and treaty territory, which is why I took the example, was that overwhelmingly the places that Metis people were living on the prairies are not places that were being surveyed for settlement. Metis tended to live in the parkland in the boreal forest in the northern, at least in Saskatchewan, in Alberta, in the northern parts of the province. And the land that was being surveyed for settlement immediately was in the southern plains because it was easy to open up for farming. So if a Metis person did want to locate their coupon and take their land, they would have had to dislocate themselves from their home land, move themselves to a different part of the world. People didn't want to do that. Even the bureaucratic process itself was hard. There were no Dominion Lands offices in northern Alberta until about the 19 tens, and the scrip Commission went through in 1899. So you'd have to wait ten years before there was an office in your area, or you'd have to travel a huge distance, you know, the thousands of kilometers to Edmonton and Calgary, Moose Jaw, one of the places where there were Dominion Lands offices. All of this combined to make scrip something that was very cumbersome for Metis people to redeem for the land as it was intended. Colonists, however, had a solution, and that was that the commissions themselves were accompanied by speculators. They traveled together. They were on the same boats. Some of these speculators were privately financed and some weren't. A lot of them were financed by big banks, and they would wait like immediately outside of the tent where scrip was being issued and right away offered to buy the original receipt off a claimant for pennies on the dollar. So scrip was issued in increments of 160, 240 acres or 160 240 dollars, and for ten cents on the dollar for a sum of something like $30. A speculator would purchase scrip worth $240 or 240 acres, and then they would go through the process of eventually redeeming it. The Metis person had some money. And that was it. That was really their whole inheritance. Think about that. That's everything that Metis people inherited in law in terms of their Indigenous and Aboriginal rights. Eventually they were given $30 for and told it was all gone. It was all extinguished.
