'Enough to Keep Them Alive': Indian Welfare in Canada, 1873-1965 (review)

Reviewed by: 'Enough To Keep Them Alive': Indian Welfare in Canada, 1873-1965 Robin Jarvis Brownlie 'Enough To Keep Them Alive': Indian Welfare in Canada, 1873-1965. Hugh Shewell. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Pp.xii, 441, illus. $35.00 Canadian scholars have produced a substantial body of literature over the past few decades detailing encounters of First Nations with capitalism and the enabling colonial state. Yet certain critical issues remain seldom explored. In particular, despite attention to the economic damage caused by dispossession, resource exploitation, and the administrative regime of the Department of Indian Affairs, there has been little analysis of the creation and management of welfare dependency. As Hugh Shewell points out in the first chapter of 'Enough to Keep Them Alive': Indian Welfare in Canada, this relative silence is remarkable, given the issue's centrality in public debate. For social, economic, and political reasons alike, 'welfare is, arguably, the issue that motivates most discussion within and outside Indian communities' (3). As a regional supervisor of welfare services for Indian and Northern Affairs Canada in British Columbia, Shewell personally experienced First Nations people's intense dislike of the welfare system that has powerfully shaped their communities. In his research, he set out to understand why welfare functioned as such a powerful symbol of colonial oppression, cultural destruction, and social degradation. This is an ambitious work. Shewell has tackled the vast records produced by the Indian Affairs bureaucracy over nearly a century, advancing a coherent analysis to explain the development of Indian welfare policy and its underlying rationales. His major objective is to show that First Nations welfare dependency is not simply an unfortunate by-product of dispossession and colonization, much less an outcome of state benevolence. Rather, it has been a key feature of the state's subjugation of First Nations and has been systematically deployed as a tool in Canada's assimilation campaign. As the book asserts, the extreme poverty and dependency of many Aboriginal people is 'the inevitable result of both the [End Page 111] history of Indian-European encounters in Canada and the ultimate domination of Western liberal capitalism and ideology' (5). Shewell painstakingly demonstrates the ways that hegemonic liberal ideology underpinned the Indian Affairs experiment in social engineering, by which the people were to be reconstructed as autonomous, market-oriented, wage-dependent individuals who bore sole responsibility for their own plight. While 'Indians,' as the 'other,' were a problem because of their difference, the government's goal was to erase this difference by treating them as the same. The central tenet of Indian welfare policy, according to Shewell, was to treat Indian poverty and Indian welfare recipients as being identical to Euro-Canadian poverty and Euro-Canadian welfare recipients. This meant supplying relief only as a last resort and at levels barely sufficient to sustain life, since anything more was supposed to create dependence. Yet the attribution of moral inferiority to 'Indians' marked them as particularly likely to rely on outside help, and thus as candidates for especially harsh relief policies. The book's analytical framework rests on the psychosocial insights of post-colonial thinkers such as Edward Said and Albert Memmi, a material analysis that emphasizes the role of capitalism and accumulation in colonial policy, and a critique of the ideology of liberal democracy. In practice, the last critique is by far the most prominent. After outlining this framework, Shewell proceeds to investigate the Indian Affairs records that constitute the basis of his study. Among other things, he examines the formation of early welfare policy, developed as nearly universal Aboriginal poverty and widespread starvation made relief increasingly necessary. In places it is harrowing reading. For example, in the 1870s government bureaucrats treated the endemic starvation among Montagnais people on Quebec's North Shore as a temporary aberration and sent only meagre amounts of relief for two years. Again and again the primary documents reveal a sickening willingness among government administrators to jeopardize Aboriginal lives for the sake of liberal prescriptions and a policy of parsimony. Shewell divides state policy toward First Nations people into two major periods - 1873-1944 and 1945-65 - subdividing the lengthy first period into two (1873-1913 and...

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