Farley Mowat - People of the Deer [Paperback]

At the time People of the Deer was published, in 1952, it was impossible for me to obtain documentary corroboration for much of the story. The book dealt harshly with the Old Empires of the Norththe missions, the RCMP, the trading companies and the federal governmentwho between them possessed all of the official evidence. They were not about to give me access to the documentary proof of their errors of omission and commission. I was therefore forced to be somewhat circumspect. Some of the names used had to be pseudonyms. Furthermore, I was sometimes forced to refrain from correctly identifying events in terms of time and locale.

By 1959, when I wrote The Desperate People, conditions had altered drastically and I was able to obtain the requisite documentationthe paper proof of the truth. Consequently, in The Desperate People all names used were the correct ones and the events were presented in their actual spatial and temporal contexts. Where apparent discrepancies occur between the two books, the version given in The Desperate People is the correct one.

In the Preface to The Desperate People my 1959 sequel to People of the Deer I wrote: There are now belated signs of a lightening on the somber horizon of the Canadian arctic; but this may be no more than the illusion of a false sunrise in a polar winter...

It is now fifteen years since those words were written and the sunrise has proved to be an illusion in all truth. The physical disruptions which our society inflicted on the Eskimos during the first half of this century have been ameliorated to the extent that few Eskimos now die of physical neglect. Since about 1960 we have made considerable efforts to ensure that they will survive in the flesh; but at the same time we have pursued a policy which is very efficiently destroying them psychically. We have made a ruthless and concerted effort to dispossess them from their own age-old way of life and thought and to force them into the mold of our modern technological society. Assimilation has been our goal... and it has failed disastrously. In 1974 almost all Canadian Eskimos have been broken away from the support of their land (which is theirs no longer) and live clustered in modern slumsmany of them hardly better than ghettosin not many more than a score of artificial settlements along the rim of the Canadian North. Here they exist for the most part on welfare payments of one kind or anotherno longer taking sustenance from the land and the sea. Effectively they live in unguarded concentration camps, provided with the basic requirements for mere physical survival, but deprived of the freedom to shape and control their own lives. We have salved our national conscience by ensuring that they do not die anymore of outright starvation, but we have resolutely denied them the right to live according to their own inherent needsthe right to function as viable human beings according to their own desires and capabilities.

Genocide can be practiced in a variety of ways.

The Desperate People, of whom I wrote in 1952 and 1959, are desperate still. But now they include all the native peoples of CanadaIndian, Eskimo and mixed bloods. They are making what may be their last convulsive effort to achieve survival apart from, and despite, a society which will accept them only if they transform themselves into second-class simulacrums of Western man. They are fighting what may well be their ultimate battle to exist in the world according to their own concept of what their lives should be. They are making what is probably their final effort to achieve the freedom to be themselves.

We have long prided ourselves on being a democratic nation, dedicated to the altar of freedom. Freedom for whom? If it is only freedom for ourselves to do as we please at the expense of others, then our pious stance is even more abhorrent than that of any overt tyrantfor ours is based upon a vile hypocrisy.

To have freedom one must give freedom. Let us put our vaunted belief in freedom to the test. Let us give back the freedom that we have taken from the native peoples of this land. If we cannot do this, then not only are they doomed, but we will have doomed ourselves as well.

Because the time is short, and the time is now, and that time will not come again, I am reissuing this book in the hope that it may help us to understand and to acknowledge the crimes against humanity we have perpetrated here, in our country, under the aegis of a free democracy... crimes which we are perpetrating still in a more subtle guise.

F.M.
March 1974
Port Hope, Ontario

The Why and Wherefore