Indigenous People, Wage Labour and Trade Unions: - The Historical Experience

labour and trade unions has to take place in the Nevertheless, as non-Indigenous settlers in- context of the historical experience of coloni- creasingly populated all parts of the country, alism, and the racism that was a part of that Indigenous workers were, in a great many cas- process and that persists to this day. [...] many cases elimination of their economic and political systems, the constant attacks against and in some cases the outlawing of their cultural Indigenous Peoples’ Experience as Wage and spiritual practices, and the incarceration of Workers many tens of thousands of Indigenous children Indigenous people were especially active as in residential schools where they were taught wage workers in British. [...] On the other side of the country, Mi’kmaq By the second half of the twentieth century, 40 men and women from Nova Scotia worked for percent or more of the men in Kahnawake were wages at the turn of the twentieth century in high steel workers (Blanchard 1983: 52; Katzer IndIgenous PeoPle, Wage l abour and Tr ade unIons: The hIsTorIc al exPerIence In c anada 3 1988: 46). [...] The Indian Agent at Fisher transportation workers, timber cutters, and River wrote of the success of the band “due to general labourers during the Lake of the Woods their having three lumbering mills in the vicin- gold rush of the 1880s. [...] The federal government played a argues that Indigenous people were pushed out IndIgenous PeoPle, Wage l abour and Tr ade unIons: The hIsTorIc al exPerIence In c anada 5 of the paid labour force “when the white popu- case across Canada, because Indigenous work- lation in a given region of the province became ers maintained access to and skills in the pre- sufficiently dense to end the demand for In.