Jay Silverheels

Jay Silverheels (May 26, 1912 – March 5, 1980) was a Canadian Mohawk First Nations actor. He was well known for his role as Tonto, the faithful American Indian companion of the character, The Lone Ranger in a long-running American television series.

Early life

Silverheels was born Harold J. Smith on the Six Nations of the Grand River First Nation, near Brantford, Ontario, Canada, the son of a Canadian Mohawk tribal chief and military officer, A.G.E. Smith. Silverheels excelled in athletics and lacrosse as a boy before leaving home to travel about North America, having competed in boxing and wrestling tournaments. In the 1930s, he played indoor lacrosse under the name of Harry Smith with the “Iroquois” of Rochester, New York in the North American Amateur Lacrosse Association. He lived for a time in Buffalo, New York. In 1938, Silverheels placed second in the middleweight section of the Golden Gloves tournament.

Film career

Silverheels began working in motion pictures as an extra and stunt man in 1937. During the early years of his screen career, he was billed variously as Harold Smith or Harry Smith, and appeared in low-budget features, westerns, and serials. He adopted his screen name from the nickname he had had as a speedy lacrosse player. From the late 1940s he played in more prestigious pictures, including Captain from Castile starring Tyrone Power, I Am an American (1944), Key Largo with Humphrey Bogart (1948), Lust for Gold with Glenn Ford (1949), Broken Arrow (1950) with James Stewart, War Arrow (1953) with Maureen O’Hara, Jeff Chandler and Noah Beery, Jr., Drums Across the River (1954), Walk the Proud Land (1956) with Audie Murphy and Anne Bancroft, Alias Jesse James (1959) with Bob Hope, and Indian Paint (1964) with Johnny Crawford. He made a brief appearance in True Grit (1969) as a condemned criminal about to be executed. He played a substantial role as John Crow in Santee (1973), starring Glenn Ford. One of his last roles was a wise white-haired chief in The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing (1973).

Television career

Silverheels achieved his greatest fame as the The Lone Ranger’s friend, Tonto. Being irreplaceable as the Lone Ranger’s best friend he subsequently also appeared in films, The Lone Ranger (1956) as well as in The Lone Ranger and the Lost City of Gold (1958).

Following the end of The Lone Ranger television series, Silverheels found himself firmly typecast as an American Indian. On January 6, 1960, he portrayed an Indian fireman trying to extinguish a forest fire in the episode “Leap of Life” in the syndicated series, Rescue 8, starring Jim Davis and Lang Jeffries.

Eventually, Silverheels went to work as a salesman to supplement his acting income. Simultaneously, he began to publish poetry inspired by his youth on the Six Nations Indian Reserve and appeared on television to recite his works. In 1966, he guest-starred as John Tallgrass in the short-lived ABC comedy/western series The Rounders, with Ron Hayes, Patrick Wayne, and Chill Wills.

Despite the typecasting, Silverheels in later years often poked fun at his character. In 1969, he appeared as Tonto without The Lone Ranger in a comedy sketch on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. The sketch was featured on the 1973 record album Here’s Johnny: Magic Moments From The Tonight Show. “My name is Tonto. I hail from Toronto and I speak Esperanto.” In 1970, he performed in a commercial for Chevrolet as an Indian chief who rescues two lost hunters who ignored his advice in that model year’s Chevy Blazer with the William Tell Overture playing in the background.

Silverheels also spoofed his Tonto character in a famous Stan Freberg Jeno’s Pizza Rolls TV commercial opposite Clayton Moore, as well as in The Phynx, opposite John Hart, both actors having played The Lone Ranger in the original television series.

He appeared in three episodes of NBC’s Daniel Boone starring Fess Parker as the historical frontiersman.

Among his later appearances were an episode of ABC’s The Brady Bunch, as an Indian chief who befriends the Bradys in the Grand Canyon, and in an episode of the short-lived Dusty’s Trail, starring Bob Denver of Gilligan’s Island.

In the early 1960s, Silverheels supported the Indian Actors Workshop, as an institution where American Indian actors refine their acting skills in Echo Park, California.Today the workshop is firmly established.

Personal life

Silverheels raised, bred and raced Standardbred horses in his spare time. Once, when asked about possibly running Tonto’s famous Paint horse Scout in a race, Jay laughed off the idea: “Heck, I can outrun Scout!”

Married in 1945, Silverheels was the father of three girls and a boy.

Death

Silverheels died from complications of a stroke in 1980, at age 67, in Calabasas, California. He was cremated at Chapel of the Pines Crematory. His ashes were returned home to Six Nations Indian Reserve. He had his final great appearance when he was awarded a star in the Hollywood Walk of Fame

Legacy

In 1993, Silverheels was inducted into the Hall of Great Western Performers at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. He was named to the Western New York Entertainment Hall of Fame, and his portrait hangs in Buffalo, New York’s Shea’s Buffalo Theatre. He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6538 Hollywood Boulevard.

George Elliott Clarke

George Elliott Clarke, OC ONS (born 12 February 1960) is a Canadian poet and playwright. His work largely explores and chronicles the experience and history of the Black Canadian communities of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, creating a cultural geography that Clarke refers to as “Africadia”.

Life

Born to William and Geraldine Clarke in Three Mile Plains, Nova Scotia, Clarke has spent much of his career writing about the black communities of Nova Scotia. Clarke worked as a parliamentary assistant to Howard McCurdy, MP in Ottawa. He also taught for a time in the African-American Studies department at Duke University.

Clarke earned a B.A. honours degree in English from the University of Waterloo (1984), an M.A. degree in English from Dalhousie University (1989) and a Ph.D. degree in English from Queen’s University (1993). He has received honorary degrees from Dalhousie University (LL.D.), the University of New Brunswick (Litt.D.), the University of Alberta (Litt.D.), the University of Waterloo (Litt.D.), and most recently, Saint Mary’s University (Litt.D). He is currently an English professor at the University of Toronto.

Clarke is a sought-after conference speaker and is active in poetry circles. He is currently promoting his latest book, I & I (January 2009). It delves into layers of spiritual meanings involving a couple traveling from Halifax to Texas and encountering tragedies of racism and sexism.

He currently teaches at the University of Toronto.

Writing career

Clarke was recognized for collecting and promoting stories of African writers and poets. Clarke lives in Toronto and began teaching Canadian and African diasporic literature in 1999 at University of Toronto where he is currently completing a second volume of essays on African-Canadian literature.

He views “Africadian” literature as “literal and liberal—I canonize songs and sonnets, histories and homilies.”  Clarke has stated that he found further writing inspiration in the 1970s and his “individualist poetic scored with implicit social commentary” came from the ‘Gang of Seven’ intellectuals, “poet-politicos: jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, troubadour-bard Bob Dylan, libertine lyricist Irving Layton, guerrilla leader and poet Mao Zedong, reactionary modernist Ezra Pound, Black Power orator Malcolm X and the Right Honourable Pierre Elliott Trudeau.”Though flawed, Clarke found “as a whole, the group’s blunt talk, suave styles, acerbic independence, raunchy macho, feisty lyricism, singing heroic and a scarf-and-beret chivalry quite, well, liberating.”

Clarke’s literary emphasis is on the perspectives of the African descendents in Canada and Nova Scotia, focusing on the African American slaves’ descendents who settled in the East coast of Nova Scotia, whom he calls “Africadian.” He writes that it is a word that he “minted from “Africa” and “Acadia” (the old name for Nova Scotia and New Brunswick), to denote the Black populations of the Maritimes and especially of Nova Scotia”.

Clarke maintains that Africadians originated in 1783 and 1815, when Black Loyalists and refugees arrived in Nova Scotia.

Clarke continues to address and challenge the historic encounters with racism, segregated areas, discrimination, hatred, forced relocation and a loss of a sense of identity and a sense of belonging experienced by the Black descendents though they had settled in Canada for hundreds of years. Black immigrations to and within Canada have been compared to a biblical journey beginning with Lamentations and ending with Exodus.

Similarly, Clarke explores specific beliefs, longings and experience of oppression and resistance, the desire for safety, freedom, equality and other basic human rights, shared among the immigrants, historically and contemporaneously. In his anthology Fire On The Water Clarke uses biblical timeline, Genesis, Psalms and Proverbs and Revelation to present Black writings and authors born within a specific period. These names reflect the Africadians’ and other Black peoples’ forebears and the first singers’ own preferences for singing “the Lord’s song in this strange land.”

Clarke is known for his lyrical style, and his other intellectual contributions involve both his ability to combine literary criticism and theatrical forte and his continuance of the themes of cultural inclusiveness and Canadian iconic symbolism. In his 2007 play Trudeau: Long March, Shining Path, Clarke features his Liberal hero Trudeau (1919–2000) describing him as “the Shakespearean character: … He’s a figure about whom it is almost impossible to say anything definitive, because he is encompassed by so many contradictions but that’s what makes him interesting.” In presenting a multicultural Trudeau on the international stage, Clarke seeks to capture the human dimensions, the personality of Trudeau rather than his politics so as to emphasize the dialogues among key characters to “show the people as people not just exponents of ideas”.

Family

Clarke is a great-nephew of the late Canadian opera singer Portia White, politician Bill White and labour union leader Jack White. Clarke is a seventh-generation African Canadian and is descended from African American refugees from the War of 1812 who escaped to the British and were relocated to Nova Scotia. Clarke is the great grandson of William Andrew White, an American born Baptist preacher and missionary, army chaplain, and radio pioneer, who was the only black officer in the British army worldwide during World War I.

Awards and Merits

Clarke has received several awards. The most recent (2009) was as co-recipient of the William P. Hubbard Award for Race Relations from the City of Toronto for his outstanding achievements and commitment in making a distinct difference in racial relations in Toronto. Clarke was cited for “his local and national leadership role in creating an understanding and awareness of African and black culture and excellence in his contribution to redefining culture.” He was a featured writer/instructor at the 2007 Maritime Writers’ Workshop & Literary Festival in Fredericton, New Brunswick.

On 16 January 2008 Clarke was made an honorary Fellow of the Haliburton Literary Society, the oldest literary society in North America, at the University of King’s College, Halifax. He was also inducted as an Officer of the Order of Canada in 2008.

In 2001 Clarke won the Governor General’s Award for poetry for his book Execution Poems.

Clarke’s Whylah Falls was selected for the 2002 edition of Canada Reads, where it was championed by Nalo Hopkinson.

 

Rocky Johnson

Rocky Johnson (born Wayde Douglas Bowles; August 24, 1944) is a retired Canadian professional wrestler. Quite popular in his own right in the 1970s and 1980s, he is also known for being the father of American actor and professional wrestler Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. During his wrestling career he became a 1-time National Wrestling Alliance (NWA) Georgia Champion and also became a 1-time NWA Southern Heavyweight Memphis Champion as well as winning many other championships. Along with his partner Tony Atlas, Johnson was a part of the first black tag team to win the World Tag Team championship in the World Wrestling Federation (WWF).

Early life

Rocky Johnson was born Wayde Douglas Bowles in Amherst, Nova Scotia, where he was raised, the fourth of five sons of Lillian and James Henry Bowles. A Black Nova Scotian, he is descended from slaves who escaped from the American South. At the age of 16, Johnson moved to Toronto, Ontario, where he began wrestling and worked as a truck driver. Initially, he trained to be a boxer and eventually sparred with greats such as Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, but he was always fascinated by wrestling.

Professional wrestling career

National Wrestling Alliance

Johnson began his career as a professional wrestler in the mid-1960s. He was a top contender in the National Wrestling Alliance in the 1970s, receiving title matches against then-World Champions Terry Funk and Harley Race. He was well-suited to tag team wrestling, winning several regional tag team championships in the NWA. He also wrestled under a mask as “Sweet Ebony Diamond” in the Mid-Atlantic area as well.

World Wrestling Federation

In 1983, he was recruited by the World Wrestling Federation where he feuded with Don Muraco, Greg Valentine, Mike Sharpe, Buddy Rose, and Adrian Adonis. He was then paired with Tony Atlas as a tag team. They defeated the Wild Samoans (Afa and Sika Anoai) for the Tag Team Championship on November 15, 1983. They were the first black tag team to hold the tag title. Together, Johnson and Atlas were known as “The Soul Patrol”.

Retirement

After retiring in 1991, Johnson along with Pat Patterson, trained his son Dwayne to wrestle. While he initially resisted his son’s entry into the business because he knew it was extremely difficult, he agreed to train his son on the condition that he would not go easy on him. Johnson was instrumental in getting Dwayne (later dubbed “Rocky Maivia” after both Rocky Johnson’s and Peter Maivia’s ring names) signed to a WWF developmental deal. Initially, Johnson had an on-camera presence at his son’s matches, jumping into the ring on his son’s behalf after he was attacked by The Sultan and the Iron Sheik at WrestleMania 13. Johnson was not seen on-camera again after the Rocky Maivia character flopped, but this was actually a blessing, as his son achieved crossover popularity as a cocky heel, The Rock.

Johnson was hired as a trainer for the WWE developmental territory, Ohio Valley Wrestling, in early 2003 but was let go in May of that year. On February 25, 2008, Johnson was announced as an inductee for the 2008 class of the WWE Hall of Fame along with his father-in-law “High Chief” Peter Maivia. Both he and his father-in-law were inducted into the Hall of Fame on March 29, 2008 by his son and professional wrestler, The Rock. One week earlier on March 22, Rocky Johnson wrestled his retirement match in Toronto for Stranglehold Wrestling.

Personal life

Johnson married into the prolific Samoan wrestling family, which included the Anoa’i family, by marrying “High Chief” Peter Maivia’s adopted daughter Ata Maivia. Ata met Rocky after Maivia and Johnson were tag team partners in a match on the independent scene. Maivia disapproved of the relationship—not because of anything personal against Johnson, but because of Johnson’s chosen profession. The couple had a son, Dwayne, in 1972. Dwayne Johnson portrayed his father in an episode of That ’70s Show.

Johnson lived in Davie, Florida with his wife, Ata. He also has two other children, as he announced in his 2008 HOF induction, a son Curtis, and a daughter Wanda from his first marriage in 1967. Johnson is honored being the first non-Samoan to be named High Chief. His title is High Chief Tafiaiafi.

 

Principality of Outer Baldonia

The Principality of Outer Baldonia is a now defunct micronation whose territorial pretensions comprised the roughly 4 acres (16,000 m²) of Outer Bald Tusket Island 8 nautical miles (15 km) off the southern tip of the Canadian province of Nova Scotia.

Origins

Founded in 1948 by Russell Arundel, who was an American business man and lobbyist for Pepsi Cola Company (today: PepsiCo), and entitled the “Prince of Princes” of Outer Baldonia, the Principality is often classed as a ‘whimsy state’. Endowed with a charter, flag, and organized military, it was one of the more developed, and highly populated of the various historical micronations. Coinage and passports were also issued.

Apparently, Arundel stumbled upon the island while fishing recreationally for tuna. While there are reports that the island was used as a base for fishing (possibly seasonally), and was also used as a sheep pasture, Arundel negotiated its purchase for $750, and constructed a stone edifice for himself and his friends to use as a fishing lodge during the sport fishing season. Legend has it that it was, in fact, while Arundel and his friends were engaged in an episode of rum drinking, that they conceived, wrote, approved and published the Declaration of Independence of Outer Baldonia. Reflecting the primacy of sport fishers such as Arundel in its leadership, the trappings of the state seem to have teemed with aquatic life. The currency, for example, was called the Tunar.

Geography and demographics

The island is situated to the south of Nova Scotia and a few kilometers off the coast of Yarmouth, belongs to the group known as the Tusket Islands, and is relatively flat and treeless. While it is said to have had until the 1960s a local population of Acadian fishermen and at least one shepherd, it may be assumed that their habitations were temporary, rather than permanent. It is likely that the fishermen had a few shanties, now rotted away, where they would stop from time to time, or stay for a matter of convenience. The shepherd’s use of the island is attested to by a term of the 1973 sale, which promised the extension of grazing rights until the death of the shepherd, which, it seems, was not likely to be much longer. The only structure of human origin on the island at this date in 2006 is the 30 by 20-foot (6 m) stone building that was built by Russell Arundel, and served as the capitol of Outer Baldonia. This building is in some disrepair, but the initial ‘A’ is still visible above the mantle. The vegetation of the island is predominantly Aster, with Queen Anne’s lace, tall grasses and Vetch as well. The fauna is primarily avian and arthropodic in nature.

Political pretensions

The exact governmental structure of Outer Baldonia is now difficult to discern. All citizens of the Principality who caught a Bluefin Tuna and paid a $50 fee were accorded the rank of Prince. The ranks of the peerage were limited to 100. It is unclear whether there were any citizens of the state who did not belong to this class. The known figures of government are as follows:

Head of State: Prince of Princes Russell Arundel
Chancellor: Elson Boudreau
Ambassador Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary: Ron Wallace

While never legally recognized by any government other than that of Nova Scotia, Outer Baldonia managed to acquire a certain amount of prestige on the international stage. Simply by listing his law office’s phone number as that of the Consulate of Outer Baldonia in the telephone registry of Washington, D.C., Prince Russell received many invitations to gatherings which he attended in his diplomatic garb, which some say was decorated largely with sardine cans and bottle caps. Outer Baldonia was even invited to apply for membership to the then nascent United Nations. The publication of the Charter of Outer Baldonia brought giggles from some quarters, but stern denunciations from the parodically humourless Soviet Union. This precipitated a series of events leading to the downfall of the political pretensions of Outer Baldonia.

Charter and Communist critiques thereof

The text of the Charter of Outer Baldonia is preserved today in the Yarmouth County Museum, but we must rely on what few details have been repeated by those familiar with its contents. The general drift may be surmised by the following extract from the Declaration of Independence:

That fishermen are a race alone. That fishermen are endowed with the following inalienable rights: The right to lie and be believed. The right of freedom from question, nagging, shaving, interruption, women, taxes, politics, war, monologues, care and inhibitions. The right to applause, vanity, flattery, praise and self-inflation. The right to swear, lie, drink, gamble and silence. The right to be noisy, boisterous, quiet, pensive, expensive and hilarious. The right to choose company and the right to be alone. The right to sleep all day and stay up all night.

The Charter was surprisingly broad ranging, setting out tax policy, codes of conduct for its citizens, a military hierarchy, as well as trade and industrial policy. For example, taxes, ‘double-talk’, and inhibitions were proscribed, while drinking, swearing, and exaggerations of the size of fish were enjoined. Women were banned entirely from the island, but not apparently, from citizenship. Arundel’s secretary is known to have been granted the title of Princess. The activity of fishing seems to have been at least implicitly enshrined as a constitutionally mandated activity as well as the production and exportation of empty rum and beer bottles. Naturally, the charter was generally received in the spirit in which it was intended, but not universally. A communist writer in the Soviet Union published an attack upon the content of the Charter, which she claimed dehumanised and decivilized the citizenry, and upon the person of the Prince of Princes, whom she denounced as a ‘savage’ Western Imperialist. This attack upon the reputation and way of life of Outer Baldonia could not be tolerated, and Prince Russell’s response led to the most famous episode in the history of the micronation.

Military history

The state’s constitutional characteristics seem to have been largely military. Its 70 person population were all titularly, or actually involved in the defense of the island through military means. The Military itself seems to have been limited to a navy of indeterminate size: its personnel was constituted by 69 Admirals of the Fleet, but it is unclear how many ships were at their disposal. Reasonable estimates range between 20 and 100 vessels of varying size, from dories to larger vessels, used primarily for commercial, sport or sustenance fishing.

The bellicose nature of the state was manifested in the most celebrated event in the history of the Principality: its confrontation with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). It seems that while there were no previous diplomatic relations between the two entities, nor any direct interaction, the fighting spirit of the Outer Baldonians was roused by the appearance of a slanderous critique of Outer Baldonia’s charter, as described above, in the USSR state publication Literaturnaya Gazeta. When the Soviet Government declined an invitation to visit and observe the wholesomeness of the micronation’s way of life with an eye to retracting its insults, a declaration of war was issued on March 9, 1953. The Baldonian navy put to sea upon a war footing, one that, one may assume, involved a remarkable amount of fishing. Ron Wallace, Ambassador Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary of Outer Baldonia, secured the alliance of the nearby Armdale Yacht Club, which committed its own fleet to the defense of the island Principality. The response from the USSR was, by all accounts, highly satisfactory to Outer Baldonian popular sentiment. Not daring to challenge the Baldonian Navy on the high seas, the USSR merely issued a series of condemnations through their various press outlets.

Alas, the press coverage that resulted involved investigative reporting, which could only have the result of the exposure of the Principality as a humorous half-truth. Accusations of fraud were splashed across the pages of the world’s newspapers, the invitations to diplomatic soirées dried up, and Outer Baldonia ceased to exist in the eyes of the world.

Later history of the territory

In 1973, Outer Bald Tusket Island was sold by Russell Arundel for the price of one Canadian dollar to the Nova Scotia Bird Society, who are the current owners. The island has been designated the Earle E. Arundel Breeding Bird Sanctuary. It is open to the public, but may have a tern rookery, and should not be visited during breeding season. Hunting is permitted in season.

 

Flathead Nation

 

The Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Nation are the Bitterroot Salish, Kootenai, and Pend d’Oreilles (Kalispel) Native American tribes. They followed the lifestyle of the Plateau Indians, traveling to hunt buffalo and living in tipis like the Plains Indians, but also having access to reliable food sources in the form of fish, particularly salmon, in the many rivers and streams of their homelands; they also gathered berries and roots, particularly camas.

These tribes were peaceful, except for historical enmity with the Blackfeet, and welcomed white explorers and traders. They learned of the Catholic religion through the Iroquois and requested missionaries to come and minister to them. When missions were established they converted to Christianity. They signed the Treaty of Hellgate in 1855. There was misunderstanding on the part of the tribal leaders, as the treaty ceded most of their homelands to the United States government, leaving them a smaller portion, the Flathead Reservation, to which most tribal members were eventually relocated, some forcibly. Hard working and adaptable, the majority of these people were able to adjust to the reservation lifestyle and today have some successful business and educational ventures. They have made efforts to maintain and revitalize their cultural heritage in ways that are compatible with contemporary society.

History

Pre-contact

The Pend d’Oreilles, also known as the Kalispel, lived around Lake Pend Oreille, the Pend Oreille River, and Priest Lake in the northern Idaho Panhandle. They lived separately from the Bitterroot Salish and the Kootenai until after the signing of the Treaty of Hellgate in 1855.

The Bitterroot Salish and Kootenai tribes originally lived in the areas of Montana, parts of Idaho, British Columbia, and Wyoming. During the 1700s, these two tribes shared common hunting and gathering grounds.

The Bitterroot Salish (Flatheads) initially lived entirely east of the Continental Divide but established their headquarters near the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains. Occasionally, hunting parties went west of the Continental Divide but never east of the Bitterroot Range. The easternmost edge of their ancestral hunting forays were the Gallatin, Crazy Mountain, and Little Belt Ranges. Their language is part of the Salishan languages group.

Unlike most other tribes in Montana, the Bitterroot Salish migrated from the west. The Salish occupied territory in Washington, Idaho, and western Montana but ventured as far east as the Bighorn Mountains. After acquiring horses in the early 1700s, they moved east, changing from a lifestyle based on salmon fishing to one more dependent on native plants and buffalo (Waldman 2006).

The Kootenai, however, are native to Montana. Archaeological evidence shows that Native Americans inhabited Montana more than 14,000 years ago, and artifacts indicate that the Kootenai have roots in the area’s prehistory. The Kootenai inhabited the mountainous terrain west of the Continental Divide, venturing only seasonally to the east for buffalo hunts. The Kootenai were divided into two main groups. One band lived to the northeast and had a lifestyle based on buffalo hunting. The other band lived in the mountainous west and their lifestyle centered around rivers and lakes.

Post-contact

The first written record of these tribes is from their meeting with the Lewis and Clark Expedition, where the “Flatheads” are described in detail and the Kalispel are mentioned under the name “Coospellar” (Lewis and Clark 2002). The “Flatheads” also appear in the records of the Catholic Church at St. Louis, Missouri to which they sent four delegations to request missionaries (or “Black Robes”) to minister to the tribe (Shea 1855). The Kootenai had also encountered traders through the Hudson’s Bay Company. David Thompson, the explorer, had crossed the Rocky Mountains and established trading posts in Northwestern Montana, Idaho, Washington, and Western Canada; including Kootenae House and later Saleesh House, the first trading post west of the Rockies in Montana, thereby successfully extending North West Company fur trading territories.

Treaty of Hellgate

The Treaty of Hellgate was signed on July 16, 1855, between Indian commissioner Isaac Stevens and the tribes located in western Montana. The treaty was ratified by Congress, signed by President James Buchanan, and proclaimed on April 18, 1859 (Prucha 1994).

The tribes involved in the signing of the treaty were the Bitterroot Salish, Pend d’Oreilles, and the Kootenai. Based on the terms of the accord, the Native Americans were to relinquish their territories to the United States government in exchange for payment installments that totaled 120,000 dollars. The original territory comprised about 22 million acres (89,000 km²) at the time of the treaty. The territories ceded were from the main ridge of the Rocky Mountains at the 49th parallel to the Kootenay River and Clark Fork to the divide between the St. Regis Borgia River and the Coeur d’Alene River. From there, the ceded territories also extend to the southwestern fork of the Bitter Root River and up to Salmon River and Snake River. This area totaled approximately 20 million acres; the remainder of their homeland became the Flathead Reservation.

From the start, the negotiations were plagued by serious translation problems. Father Adrian Hoecken, said that the translations were so poor that “not a tenth of what was said was understood by either side.” However, as in the meeting with Lewis and Clark, the pervasive miscommunication ran even deeper than problems of language and translation. Tribal people came to the meeting assuming they were going to formalize an already-recognized friendship. Non-Indians came with the goal of making official their claims to native lands and resources. Isaac Stevens, the new governor and superintendent of Indian affairs for Washington Territory, was intent on obtaining cession of the Bitterroot Valley from the Salish. Many non-Indians were already well aware of the valley’s potential value for agriculture and its relatively temperate climate in winter. Due to the resistance of Chief Victor (Many Horses), Stevens ended up inserting into the treaty complicated (and doubtless poorly translated) language that defined the Bitterroot Valley south of Lolo Creek as a “conditional reservation” for the Salish. Chief Victor put his X mark on the document, convinced that the agreement would not require his people to leave their homeland. No other word came from the government for the next fifteen years, so the Salish assumed that they would indeed stay in their Bitterroot Valley forever.

Over time, the real reason for the Hellgate treaty meetings became clear to the Salish and Pend d’Oreilles people. Under the terms spelled out in the written document, the tribes ceded to the United States more than twenty million acres (81,000 km²) of land and reserved from cession about 1.3 million acres (5300 km²), thus forming the Jocko or Flathead Indian Reservation. After the 1864 gold rush in newly established Montana Territory, pressure upon the Salish intensified from both illegal non-Indian squatters and government officials. In 1870, Chief Victor died, and he was succeeded as chief by his son, Chief Charlot (Claw of the Little Grizzly). Like his father, Chief Charlot adhered to a policy of nonviolent resistance. He insisted on the right of his people to remain in the Bitterroot Valley. However, territorial citizens and officials thought the new chief could be pressured into capitulating. In 1871, they successfully lobbied President Ulysses S. Grant to declare that the survey required by the treaty had been conducted and that it had found that the Jocko (Flathead) Reservation was better suited to the needs of the natives. On the basis of Grant’s executive order, Congress sent a delegation, led by future president James Garfield, to make arrangements with the tribe for their removal.

Conditions had become intolerable by the late 1880s, after the Missoula and Bitter Root Valley Railroad was constructed directly through their lands, with neither permission from the native owners nor payment to them. Chief Charlot finally signed an agreement to leave the Bitterroot Valley in November 1889. Inaction by Congress, however, delayed the removal for another two years, and according to some observers, the tribe’s desperation reached a level of outright starvation. In October 1891, a contingent of troops from Fort Missoula forced Chief Charlot and the remaining tribal members out of the Bitterroot and roughly marched the small band sixty miles to the Flathead Reservation.

Bitterroot Salish

Called the Flathead Indians by the first white men who came to the Columbia River, the Bitterroot Salish call themselves Salish (“the people”). The term “Flathead” derives from the flat skull produced by binding infant’s skulls with boards. However, this tribe never practiced head flattening, but rather were called “Flat head” because the tops of their heads were not pointed like those of neighboring tribes people who did practice vertical head-binding. The sign language used by neighboring tribes to distinguish the “Flatheads” consisted of “pressing each side of the head” with the hands.

Their lifestyle was typical of the Plateau Indians, gathering wild roots, particularly camas, and living in mat-covered lodges, and also hunting buffalo and living in tipis part of the year. They were reported to be peaceful, except for historical enmity with the Blackfeet (Mooney 1909).

Originally the Salish practiced an animistic religion with ceremonial dances, notably the Sun Dance. However, when they met the Iroquois through trade with the Hudson’s Bay Company they learned of the Catholic religion. In 1831, they sent a delegation to St. Louis requesting missionaries be sent to them. In 1840, Jesuit Father Pierre-Jean De Smet responded to this request. Welcomed by a gathering of some 1600 members, he established the mission of St. Mary on the Bitter Root river. Although this was later abandoned due to incursions by the Blackfeet, conversion to Catholicism was successful and a new mission of St. Ignatius was established in 1845, by Fathers De Smet and Adrian Hoecken; in 1854, that mission was moved to its present location in St. Ignatius, Montana, and has continued in operation to contemporary times (Krause).

In 1855, they signed the Treaty of Hellgate ceding the majority of their homeland to the Americans. Although there was misunderstanding, and the Salish expected to be able to continue to live in the Bitterroot area, they were eventually relocated to the portion of their lands that had become the Flathead Reservation in Montana.

By the early twentieth century it was reported that the Salish were increasing in population on the Flathead Reservation. They were considered “moral, devoted Catholics, and in every way a testimony to the zeal and ability of their religious teachers,” and had adjusted their lifestyle to become “prosperous and industrious farmers and stockmen” (Mooney 1909).

Pend d’Oreilles

The Pend d’Oreilles, also known as the Kalispel, lived around Lake Pend Oreille, as well as the Pend Oreille River, and Priest Lake although some of them live spread throughout Montana and eastern Washington. The primary tribal range from roughly Plains, Montana westward along the Clark Fork River, Lake Pend Oreille in Idaho, and the Pend Oreille River in Eastern Washington and into British Columbia was given the name Kaniksu by the Kalispel peoples. The name Pend d’Oreilles is of French origin, meaning “hangs from ears,” which refers to the large shell earrings that these people wore. Their language, Kalispel-Pend d’Oreille, belongs to the Salishan languages family.

The Pend d’Oreilles were generally peaceable. They made tools from flint, and many other things were shaped with rocks. For housing, the Pend d’Oreilles lived in tipis in the summer, as well as lodges in the winter time. These houses were all built out of large cattails, which were available in abundance. These cattails were woven into mats called “tule mats” which were attached to a tree branch frame to form a hut.

The traveled to gather their food on a seasonal basis, while also maintaining more permanent areas that they farmed. Camas was a staple, baked and dried to preserve it not only through the winter but for several years. They caught salmon, which they dried and thus preserved a year’s supply. Berries were also gathered and dried. In the winter they hunted and trapped, trading furs for supplies.

The horses they needed came from trading buffalo skins. They people wore robes as well as skins for clothing. They decorated themselves with dyes, paints, beads, and sometimes even animal quills.

In 1844, the Jesuit Father Adrian Hoecken began missionary work with the Pend d’Oreilles, establishing the St. Ignatius Mission with Father Pierre-Jean De Smet. Through this missionary work the Pend d’Oreilles were successfully converted to Christianity, as were the other tribes in the area.

In 1855, the “Upper band” who lived around the lake joined with the Salish and Kootenai in signing the Treaty of Hellgate, and were settled on the Flathead Reservation in Montana. Some of the “Lower band” who lived on the river joined them; others of this group settled on a reservation in Washington state.

Kootenai

The Kootenai (also spelled Kutenai) or Ktunaxa (pronounced in English as /k.tuˈnæ.hæ/) are one of three tribes of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Nation in Montana, and they form the Ktunaxa Nation in British Columbia. There are also populations in Idaho and Washington in the United States.

The tribes constitute a distinct stock (Kitunahan). They were known by the neighboring Salish as Skalzi (lake or water people), and to the French as Arez-à-plats (Flatbows). There is evidence that they formerly lived in the eastern plains, east of the Rockies, but were driven into the mountains by the Blackfeet (Mooney 1910b).

The Kootenai had a similar subsistence lifestyle to the Salish and Pend d’Oreilles—hunting, fishing, and gathering wild berries and camas roots, and living in tipis and lodges. They dressed in buckskin, painted their faces, and wore their hair long. Their social organization was simple, with each band having a chief and council. They had none of the secret societies that were found in other tribes (Mooney 1910b).

Prior to converting to Catholicism when Father De Smet established the mission among the Salish, they practiced shamanism and held animistic beliefs, particularly worshiping:

the sun, personified as a woman, as the highest and most beneficent deity, to whose home the spirits of the dead journeyed, to rejoin their friends later in this world at a place of sacred pilgrimage, on the shore of Lake Pend d’Oreille (Mooney 1910b).

The Kootenai were friendly toward whites, and David Thompson, the Canadian explorer who established trading relations for the North West Company with many tribes, established a trading post called Kootenai House in 1807. In his visits to the area, Thompson encountered Kaúxuma Núpika, a Kootenai woman. According to the entries Thompson made in his journal concerning her, she spent time as a sort of second wife to a man named Boisverd, who was one of Thompson’s men. Thompson eventually sent her away.

Kaúxuma then claimed to have been transformed by the whites into a man and now had spiritual powers. From this time Kaúxuma took several wives, served as a guide to traders, as well as fighting as a warrior with the Kootenai men and taking the role of shaman and prophet (Waldman 2008). Kaúxuma is thus an example of a female-bodied two-spirit person, a transgender type not uncommon among Native American tribes, many of whom foretold the future. When Thomson encountered Kaúxuma again in 1809, he wrote:

She had set herself up for a prophetess and gradually had gained, by her shrewdness, some influence among the natives as a dreamer, and expounder of dreams. She recollected me before I did her, and gave a haughty look of defiance, as much to say, I am now out of your power (Tyrrell 2008).

In 1811, Kaúxuma walked into Thomson’s camp seeking asylum. Thompson described this “Manlike Woman” as “apparently a young man, well dressed in leather, carrying a Bow and Quiver of Arrows, with his Wife, a young woman in good clothing” (Tyrrell 2008). Kaúxuma continued to act as a shaman and prophet, predicting large numbers of white people coming to the area and bringing diseases. In 1837, while acting as a mediator between the Blackfeet and the Salish, Kaúxuma was killed by the Blackfeet.

The majority of Kootenai within the United States moved to the Flathead Reservation in Montana following the Treaty of Hellgate in 1855. The Oblate Fathers established a mission in British Columbia and Kootenai in that region were educated there.

By the beginning of the twentieth century the Kootenai were considered “civilized” and dedicated Christians, who carried out farming, stock-raising, and working in the lumber camps. Despite epidemics of European introduced diseases, notable smallpox, which reduced their number, they had a stable population. They were described as “industrious, steady, and law-abiding,” “temperate and moral” (Mooney 1910b).

Contemporary life

Contemporary Salish, Kootenai, and Kalispels live on reservations that form a small part of their ancestral territory. Although their population is small, they have maintained their identity and have made great efforts to adapt to the contemporary situation while never forgetting their heritage, history, and culture. Visitors are invited to learn this history at their museums, which contain tribal artifacts and exhibits, and to attend pow-wows, held annually on the reservations, in order to learn more of their culture.

Flathead Indian Reservation

The Flathead Indian Reservation of around 1.3 million acres (5,300 km²), located in western Montana on the Flathead River, is home to the Bitterroot Salish, Kootenai, and Pend d’Oreilles Tribes, together known as the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Nation. The Reservation was created through 1855 Treaty of Hellgate and includes parts of four Montana counties: Lake, Sanders, Missoula, and Flathead. The Flathead Indian Reservation is an area of of forested mountains and valleys just west of the Continental Divide.

The total population of the Flathead Indian Reservation is 26,172 as of the 2000 census, which includes members of the Confederated Tribes as well as Native Americans from other tribes and non-Native Americans. The largest community on the reservation is the city of Polson, which is also the county seat of Lake County.

As the first to organize a tribal government under the Indian Reorganization Act of 1936, the tribes are governed by a tribal council of ten members. The tribal government offers a number of services to tribal members and is the chief employer on the reservation. The tribes operate a tribal college, the Salish Kootenai College, and a heritage museum called “The People’s Center” in Pablo, the seat of the tribal government.

Salish Kootenai College (SKC) is a Native American tribal college based in Pablo, Montana which serves the Bitterroot Salish, Kootenai, and Pend d’Oreilles tribes. There are approximately 1,100 students attending the college; enrollment is not limited to Native American students. Prior to 1978, it was a branch campus of Flathead Valley Community College (FVCC). In 1981, the college formally disassociated itself from FVCC and became completely self-governing. It is member of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium.

Flathead Lake is the largest lake in the western part of the coterminous United States, surpassing Nevada/California’s Lake Tahoe by .5 miles (0.80 km) in surface area, 5 miles (8.0 km) in length, and about 3.5 miles (5.6 km) in width, Flathead Lake is also the largest lake in the state of Montana. This lake is one of the cleanest in the world for its size and type. Once known as “Salish Lake,” this body of water takes its name from the tribes who live at the southern end of the lake on the Flathead Indian Reservation. Kerr Dam, near Polson, regulates the lake’s water level and provides hydroelectric power and water for irrigation. Flathead Lake is 30 miles (48 km) southwest of Glacier National Park and is flanked by two scenic highways, which wind along its curving shoreline. The lake is a popular tourist attraction, offering fishing and other water activities as well as scenic views and hiking in the mountains which border its shores. The KwaTaqNuk resort on Flathead Lake brings in revenue from tourism. The tribes also receive revenue from the valuable hydropower dam, Kerr Dam.

Kalispel Indian Reservation

The Kalispel Indian Reservation is northwest of Newport, Washington, in central Pend Oreille County. The total land area of the Kalispel Indian Reservation is 18.840 km² (7.274 sq mi). The main reservation is an 18.638 km² (7.196 sq mi) strip of land along the Pend Oreille River, west of the Washington-Idaho border. There is also a small parcel of land in the western part of the Spokane metropolitan area in the city of Airway Heights, with a land area of 0.202 km² (49.92 acres), the site of Northern Quest Casino which is operated by the tribe. The Northern Quest Casino provides nearly 1,000 jobs for members of the local community.

Kootenai Indian Reservation

The Kootenai Indian Reservation lies in central Boundary County, Idaho, about 40 kilometers (25 mi) south of the Canadian border, and about 3 kilometers (1.9 mi) west-northwest of the city of Bonners Ferry. It has a land area of only 0.076575 km² (18.922 acres) and a 2000 census resident population of 75 persons.

On September 21, 1975, the Kootenai Tribe headed by Chairwoman Amy Trice declared war on the United States government. Their first act was to post soldiers on each end of the highway that runs through the town and they forced people, at gunpoint, to pay a toll to drive through the area that had been the tribe’s aboriginal land. The money was to be used to house and care for elderly tribal members. The tribe also issued “Kootenai Nation War Bonds” that sold at $1.00 each. Most tribes in the United States are forbidden to declare war on the U.S. government because of treaties, but the Kootenai Tribe never signed a treaty. The dispute resulted in concession by the United States government and a land grant of 12.5 acres that became the Kootenai Reservation (Andrews).

Since that time, the Kootenai have worked to preserve their traditions, language, and culture while at the same time establishing economic independence. An important step in their economic growth was the opening of the Kootenai River Inn in 1986. A decade later this inn became the site of the Kootenai Casino and was fully renovated to become a luxury resort and spa. The success of this Best Western Plus Kootenai River Inn Casino & Spa has enabled Kootenai youth to pursue higher education and career goals.

Kootenay Reserves in British Columbia

Four bands of Kootenay (preferred spelling in Canada) live on various reserves in the southeastern corner of British Columbia, from the U.S. border north to the Invermere area, and as far west as Creston: The Lower Kootenay Band (Yaqan nu?kiy) have eight reserves established in 1906 on 2,553 hectares of land on the Kootenay River. The St. Mary’s Band (?Aq’am) live on five reserves established in 1884 on 7,850 hectares of land; their main community is on the west bank of the Kootenay River at the mouth of the St. Mary’s River. The Tobacco Plains Band has two reserves on 4,418 hectares of land adjacent to the U.S. border, established in 1884. The Columbia Lake Band (Akisq’nuk) has two reserves on 3,412 hectares of land at Windermere Lake, established in 1884.

These bands are affiliated with the Ktunaxa Nation Council, formerly known as the Ktunaxa/Kinbasket Tribal Council. At the beginning of the twenty-first century there were approximately 1,000 registered members of the Ktunaxa Nation in British Columbia.

The Kootenay are active in business initiatives such as golf courses, campgrounds, a guide outfitting territory, and housing developments, in addition to more traditional activities such as trapping, hay and livestock ranching, and arts and crafts. In October, 2010 the Province of British Columbia and the Ktunaxa Nation Council signed the Ktunaxa Strategic Engagement Agreement (SEA) providing for government-to-government discussions on natural resource decisions within Ktunaxa territory.

 

Ilse Koch

Ilse Koch (née Köhler; 22 September 1906 – 1 September 1967) was the wife of Karl-Otto Koch, commandant of the Nazi concentration camps Buchenwald (from 1937 to 1941) and Majdanek (from 1941 to 1943). She was one of the first prominent Nazis to be tried by the US military.

After the trial was remitted under worldwide media attention, survivor accounts of her actions resulted in other authors describing her abuse of prisoners as sadistic, and the image of her as “the concentration camp murderess” was current in post-war German society. She was accused of taking souvenirs from the skin of murdered inmates with distinctive tattoos. She was known as “The Witch of Buchenwald” (“Die Hexe von Buchenwald”) by the inmates because of her alleged cruelty and lasciviousness toward prisoners. She is also called in English “The Beast of Buchenwald”, “The Bitch of Buchenwald”, “Queen of Buchenwald”, “Red Witch of Buchenwald”, and the “Butcher Widow”.

Early life

Koch was born in Dresden, Germany, the daughter of a factory foreman. She was known as a polite and happy child in her elementary school. At the age of 15 she entered an accountancy school. Later, she went to work as a bookkeeping clerk. At the time the economy of Germany had not yet recovered from Germany’s defeat in World War I. In 1932 she became a member of the rising Nazi Party. Through some friends in the SA and SS, she met Karl Otto Koch in 1934, marrying him two years later.

War Crimes

In 1936, she began working as a guard and secretary at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin, which her fiancé commanded, and was married the same year. In 1937 she came to Buchenwald when her husband was made Commandant.

In 1940, she built an indoor sports arena, which cost over 250,000 reichsmarks, most of which were seized from the inmates. In 1941 she became an Oberaufseherin (“chief overseer (female)”) over the few female guards who served at the camp. In 1941 Karl Otto Koch was transferred to Lublin, where he helped establish the Majdanek concentration and extermination camp. Ilse Koch remained at Buchenwald until 24 August 1943, when she and her husband were arrested on the orders of Josias von Waldeck-Pyrmont, SS and Police Leader for Weimar, who had supervisory authority over Buchenwald. The charges against the Kochs comprised private enrichment, embezzlement, and the murder of prisoners to prevent them giving testimony.

Ilse Koch was imprisoned until 1944 when she was acquitted for lack of evidence, but her husband was found guilty and sentenced to death by an SS court in Munich, and was executed in Buchenwald in April 1945. She went to live with her surviving family in the town of Ludwigsburg, where she was arrested by U.S. authorities on 30 June 1945.

Imprisonment and death

Koch and 30 other accused were arraigned before the American military court at Dachau (General Military Government Court for the Trial of War Criminals) in 1947. Prosecuting her was future United States Court of Claims Judge Robert L. Kunzig. She was charged with “participating in a criminal plan for aiding, abetting and participating in the murders at Buchenwald.”

Ilse Koch announced in the courtroom that she was pregnant. She was indeed 8 months pregnant. Frau Koch already had a reputation for being promiscuous. According to the Buchenwald Report, it was rumored that Ilse Koch was having simultaneous love affairs with Dr. Waldemar Hoven, a Waffen-SS Captain who was the chief medical doctor at Buchenwald, and Hermann Florstedt, the Deputy Commandant. Dachau court reporter, Joseph Halow, in his book “Innocent at Dachau,” there were unverified rumors that Frau Koch had engaged in numerous affairs with SS officers, and even with some of the inmates at the Buchenwald concentration camp and her marital relationship was an open one. Ilse Koch’s announcement of her pregnancy stunned the court because she was 41 years old at the time and was being kept in isolation with no contact with any men except the American interrogators, most of whom were Jewish. He also mentions that he was shocked to learn that Ilse Koch may have turned to other men because her husband was a “homosexual”. Buchenwald records revealed that he had been treated for syphilis. Halow further claimed, there was speculation among the court reporters that the father was Josef Kirschbaum, a Jewish interrogator who was one of the few men who had access to her prison cell. On 19 August 1947 she was sentenced to life imprisonment for “violation of the laws and customs of war”.

After she had served two years of her sentence, General Lucius D. Clay, the interim military governor of the American Zone in Germany, reduced the judgment to four years’ prison on 8 June 1948 on the grounds “there was no convincing evidence that she had selected inmates for extermination in order to secure tattooed skins, or that she possessed any articles made of human skin.”

Jean Edward Smith in his biography, Lucius D. Clay, an American Life, the general maintained that the leather lamp shades were really made out of goat skin. The book quotes a statement made by General Clay years later:

There was absolutely no evidence in the trial transcript, other than she was a rather loathsome creature, that would support the death sentence. I suppose I received more abuse for that than for anything else I did in Germany. Some reporter had called her the “Bitch of Buchenwald”, had written that she had lamp shades made of human skin in her house. And that was introduced in court, where it was absolutely proven that the lamp shades were made out of goat skin.

According to the Buchenwald Report, there was a factory at Buchenwald, which produced leather goods out of animal skins, but it had caught on fire during an Allied bombing raid on the camp on August 24, 1944.

News of the reduced sentence did not become public until 16 September 1948. Despite the ensuing uproar, Clay stood firm. Under the pressure of public opinion Koch was re-arrested in 1949 and tried before a West German court. The hearing opened on 27 November 1950 before the Assize Court at Augsburg and lasted seven weeks, during which 250 witnesses were heard including 50 for the defense. Koch collapsed and had to be carried from the court in late December 1950, and again on 11 January 1951. At least four separate witnesses for the prosecution testified that they had seen Ilse Koch choose tattooed prisoners, who were then killed, or had seen or been involved in the process of making human-skin lampshades from tattooed skin. However, this charge was dropped by the prosecution when they could not prove lampshades or any other items were actually made from human skin.

On 15 January 1951, the Court pronounced its verdict, in a 111-page long decision, for which Koch was not present in court. It was concluded that the previous trials in 1944 and 1947 were not a bar to proceedings under the principle of ne bis in idem, as at the 1944 trial Koch had only been charged with receiving, while in 1947 she had been accused of crimes against foreigners after 1 September 1939, and not with crimes against humanity of which Germans and Austrians had been defendants both before and after that date. She was convicted of charges of incitement to murder, incitement to attempted murder, and incitement to the crime of committing grievous bodily harm, and on 15 January 1951 was sentenced to life imprisonment and permanent forfeiture of civil rights.

Koch appealed to have the judgment quashed, but the appeal was dismissed on 22 April 1952 by the Federal Court of Justice. She later made several petitions for a pardon, all of which were rejected by the Bavarian Ministry of Justice. Ilse protested her life sentence, to no avail, to the International Human Rights Commission.

Karl and Ilse Koch had two sons, including one who committed suicide after the war, allegedly because he couldn’t live with the shame of the crimes of his parents. Ilse also had another son, the one that was conceived while she was in a prison cell at Dachau. He was born in the Aichach prison near Dachau where she was sent to serve her life sentence, and was immediately taken from her. At the age of 19, he found out that Ilse Koch was his mother, and he began visiting her regularly at Aichach. They got along well and Ilse wrote poetry for her son.

Koch committed suicide by hanging herself at Aichach women’s prison on 1 September 1967; she was 60 years old. On one of his scheduled visits, Ilse’s son was stunned to learn that she had killed herself the night before. Today the body of the “Bitch of Buchenwald” lies in an unmarked and untended grave in the cemetery at Aichach. According to Joseph Halow, author of “Innocent at Dachau,” her son disappeared after learning of his mother’s suicide.

 

Doukhobors

The Doukhobors or Doukhabors, earlier Dukhobortsy  are a Christian group of Russian origin. The Doukhobors were one of the sects—later defined as a religious philosophy, ethnic group, social movement, or simply a ‘way of life’—known generically as Spiritual Christianity. There were numerous Russian groups considered “spiritual Christians.” The only common denominator among them is that they rejected the trappings of traditional religion. Starting no later than the eighteenth century, they rejected secular government, the Russian Orthodox priests, icons, all church ritual, the Bible as the supreme source of divine revelation and the divinity of Jesus. They “believe that Jesus Christ is a spiritually advanced teacher and example to others. They also believe that people are capable of divine reason and can spiritually develop without the help of intermediaries…. The only symbols Doukhobors commonly recognize are those of bread, salt and water, the basic elements needed to sustain life. These are on a table at all Doukhobor meetings and important events.

Their Pacifist beliefs and desire to avoid government interference in their life led to an exodus of the majority of the group from the Russian Empire to Canada at the close of the nineteenth century. However, their interaction with the Canadian authorities was anything but peaceful.

Assimilated to a various extent into the Canadian mainstream, the modern descendants of the first Canadian Doukhobors continue to live in south-eastern British Columbia, southern Alberta and Saskatchewan. Today, the estimated population of Doukhobors in North America is over 20,000, with 15,000 in Canada and about 5,000 in the USA.

History

Early days – Ukraine and southern Russia

The origin of the Doukhobor movement dates to seventeenth and eighteenth century Russian Empire. Believing in God’s presence in every human being, they considered clergy and rituals unnecessary. Their rejection of secular government, the Russian Orthodox priests, icons, all church ritual, the Bible as the supreme source of divine revelation, and the divinity of Jesus elicited negative response from the government and the established church, as attested by the 1734 Russian Government edict issued against ikonobortsy (Iconoclasts).

The first known Doukhobor leader, in 1755-1775, was Siluan (Silvan) Kolesnikov (Russian: Силуан Колесников), originating from the village of Nikolskoye in Yekaterinoslav Governorate in what’s today south-central Ukraine. He was thought to be a well-read person, familiar with the works of Western mystics, such as Karl von Eckartshausen and Louis Claude de Saint-Martin.

The early Doukhobors called themselves “God’s People” or simply “Christians.” Their modern name, first in the form Doukhobortsy (Russian: Духоборцы, Dukhobortsy, ‘Spirit wrestlers’) is thought to have been first used in 1785 or 1786 by Ambrosius, the Archbishop of Yekaterinoslav or his predecessor, Nikifor (Nikephoros Theotokis) The archbishops intent was to mock them as heretics fighting against the Holy Ghost (Spirit; Russian: Святой Дух, Svyatoy Dukh); but later (around the beginning of the nineteenth century, according to S.A. Inikova) the dissenters picked the name, usually in a shorter form, Doukhobory (Russian: Духоборы, Dukhobory), implying that they are fighting not against, but along with the Spirit.

As pacifists, the Doukhobors also ardently rejected the institutions of militarism and wars. For these reasons, the Doukhobors were harshly repressed in Imperial Russia. Both the tsarist state and church authorities were involved in the persecution of these dissidents, as well as taking away their normal freedoms.

The first known use of the spelling Doukhobor is attested in a government edict of 1799, exiling 90 of them to Finland (presumably, Vyborg area, which was already part of Russian Empire at the time) for their anti-war propaganda.

In 1802, Tsar Alexander I encouraged resettlement of religious minorities to the so-called ‘Milky Waters’ (Molochnye Vody): the region of Molochnaya River (around Melitopol in contemporary southern Ukraine). This was motivated by the desire to quickly populate the rich steppelands on the north shore of the Black and Azov Seas, and to prevent the “heretics” from contaminating the population of the heartland with their ideas. Many Doukhobors, as well as Mennonites from Prussia, took up on the Tsar’s offer, coming to the Molochnaya from various provinces of the Empire over the next 20 years.

Transcaucasian exile

As Nicholas I replaced Alexander, he issued a decree (February 6, 1826), intending to force assimilation of the Doukhobors by means of military conscription, prohibiting their meetings, and encouraging conversions to the established church. On October 20, 1830, another decree followed, specifying that all able-bodied members of dissenting religious groups engaged in propaganda against the established church should be conscripted and sent to the Russian army in the Caucasus, while those not capable of military service, as well as their women and children, should be resettled in Russia’s recently acquired Transcaucasian provinces. It is reported that, among other dissenters, some 5000 Doukhobors were resettled to Georgia between 1841 and 1845. The Akhalkalaki uyezd (district) of the Tiflis (Tbilisi) Governorate (in Georgia’s region of Samtskhe-Javakheti) was chosen as the main place of their settlement. Doukhobor villages with Russian names appeared there: Gorelovka, Rodionovka, Yefremovka, Orlovka, Spasskoye (Dubovka), Troitskoye, and Bogdanovka (now renamed Ninotsminda). Later on, other groups of Doukhobors—resettled by the government, or migrating to Transcaucasia by their own accord—settled in other neighboring areas, including the Borchaly uyezd of Tiflis Governorate (in today’s Georgia) and the Kedabek uyezd of Elisabethpol (Ganja) Governorate (in the north-west of today’s Republic of Azerbaijan).

After Russia’s conquest of Kars and the Treaty of San Stefano of 1878, some Dukhobors from Tiflis and Elisabethpol Governorates moved to the Zarushat and Shuragel uyezds of the newly created Kars Oblast (north-east of Kars in today’s Republic of Turkey).

The leader of the main group of Doukhobors that arrived to Transcaucasia from the Ukraine in 1841 was Illarion Kalmykov (Russian: Илларион Калмыков). He died in the same year, and was succeeded as the community leader by his son, Peter Kalmykov (? – 1864). After Peter Kalmykov’s death in 1864, his widow Lukerya Vasilyevna Gubanova (? – December 15, 1886; (Russian: Лукерья Васильевна Губанова); also known as Kalmykova, by her husband’s surname) took his leadership position.

The Kalmykov dynasty resided in the village of Gorelovka, one of Doukhobor communities in Georgia. (Shown on one of J. Kalmakoff’s maps.. Lukerya (Lukeria) was respected by the provincial authorities, who had to cooperate with the Doukhobors on various matters. The number of Doukhbors in the Transcaucasia reached 20,000 by the time of her death in 1886. By that time, the Doukhobors of the region had become vegetarian, and become aware of Leo Tolstoy’s philosophy, which they found quite similar with their traditional teachings.

The religious revival and the crises

The death of “Queen Lukerya,” who had no children, was followed by a leadership crisis. Lukerya’s own plan was for leadership to pass after her death to her assistant, Peter Vasilevich Verigin. However, only part of the community (“the Large Party”; Russian: Большая сторона Bolshaya Storona) accepted him as the leader; others, known as “the Small Party” (Малая сторона Malaya Storona), sided with Lukerya’s brother Michael Gubanov and the village elder, Aleksei Zubkov.

While the Large Party was a majority, the Small Party had the support of the older members of the community and the local authorities. So on January 26, 1887, at the community service where the new leader was to be acclaimed, the police walked in and arrested Verigin. He was to spend the next 16 years in exile in Russia’s Far North; some of his associates were sent to exile as well. The Large Party Doukhobors continued to consider him their spiritual leader and to communicate with him, by mail and via delegates who traveled to see him in Obdorsk, Siberia.

At the same time, the government applied greater pressure to enforce Doukhobors’ compliance with the laws and regulations that they found vexatious, such as registering marriages and births, contributing grain to state emergency funds, or swearing oaths of allegiance. Even worse, the universal military conscription that had been introduced in most of Russian Empire, was now (in 1887) imposed in its Transcaucasian provinces as well. While the Small Party people would cooperate with the state, the Large Party, wounded by the arrest of Verigin and other leaders, and inspired by his letters from exile, only felt strengthened in their desire to abide in the righteousness of their faith. They stopped using tobacco and alcohol, divided their property equally between the members of the community, and resolved to adhere to the principles of non-violence. They would not want to swear the oath of allegiance required by the new Czar Nicholas II in 1894.

To avoid the temptation to use the weapons they possessed, even in an emergency (say, to resist a robber), the Doukhobors of the three Governorates of Transcaucasia made the decision to destroy them. As the Doukhobors assembled to burn their weapons in the night of on June 28/29 (July 10/11, Gregorian Calendar) 1895, with the singing of psalms and spiritual songs, arrests and beatings by government’s Cossacks followed. Soon, Cossacks were billeted in many of the Large Party Doukhobors’ villages, and over 4000 of their original residents were dispersed through villages in other parts of Georgia. Many of those died of starvation and exposure.

Migration to Canada

Persecution was unsuccessful in coercing the Doukhobors comply with the conscription laws. The entire affair proved an embarrassment in front of international public opinion, so the Russian government agreed in 1897 to let the Doukhobors leave the country, subject to a number of conditions. The emigrants were required to:

• never return;
• migrate at their own expense;
• community leaders currently held in prison or in exile in Siberia had to serve the balance of their sentences before they could leave the country.

Some of the emigrants went first to Cyprus, but the climate there did not suit them. Meanwhile, the rest of the community chose Canada for its isolation, peacefulness, and the fact that the Canadian government welcomed them. Around 6000 migrated there in the first half of 1899, settling on the land granted to them by the government in what is today Manitoba and Saskatchewan. More people, including the Cyprus colony, joined later that year, bringing the total count to 7,400–about one-third of the total Doukhobor population in Transcaucasia. Several smaller groups, directly from Transcaucasia or from various places of exile, joined the main body of the migrants in later years. Among these late-comers were some 110 leaders of the community that were in prisons or in exile in Siberia as of 1899; they had to serve their term of punishment before they could join their people in Canada.

The Doukhobors’ passage across the Atlantic Ocean was largely paid for by Quakers and Tolstoyans, who sympathized with their plight. Leo Tolstoy arranged for the royalties from his novel, Resurrection, (1899) his short story Father Sergius (written between 1890-1898), (Father Sergei,) and some other works, to go to the migration fund. He also raised money from wealthy friends. In the end, his efforts provided half of the immigration fund, about 30,000 rubles.

The anarchist Peter Kropotkin and James Mavor, a professor of the political economy at the University of Toronto, also helped the migrants.

On the Prairies of Canada

In accordance with the Dominion Lands Act of 1872, Canadian government would grant 160 acres (0.65 km²) of land, for a nominal fee of $10, to any male homesteader able to establish a working farm on that land within three years. Living on single-family homesteads would not fit Doukhobors’ communitarian tradition. Fortunately, the Act contained the so-called Hamlet Clause, adopted some 15 years earlier to accommodate other communitarian groups such as Mennonites, which would allow the beneficiaries of the Act to live not on the actual land grant, but in a village (“hamlet”) within 3 miles (4.8 km) from their land. This would allow the Doukhobors to establish a communal life style, similar to the Hutterites.

Even more importantly, in late 1898 the Canadian Government passed Section 21 of the Dominion Military Act, exempting the Doukhobors from military service.

The land for the Doukhobor immigrants, in the total amount of 773,400 acres (3,130 km²), was granted in three “block settlement” areas (“reserves”), plus an “annex,” within what was to soon become the Province of Saskatchewan:

• The North Colony, also known as the “Thunder Hill Colony” or “Swan River Colony,” in the Pelly and Arran districts of Saskatchewan. It became home to 2,400 Doukhobors from Tiflis Governorate, who established 20 villages on 69,000 acres (280 km²) of the land grant.
• The South Colony, also known as the “Whitesand Colony” of “Yorkton Colony,” in the Canora, Veregin and Kamsack districts of Saskatchewan. Some 3,500 Doukhobors from Tiflis Governorate, Elisabethpol Governorate, and Kars Oblast, settled there in 30 villages on 215,010 acres (870.1 km²) of land grant.
• The Good Spirit Lake Annex, in the Buchanan district of Saskatchewan, received 1,000 Doukhobors from Elisabethpol Governorate and Kars Oblast, Russia, who settled there in eight villages on 168,930 acres (683.6 km²) of land grant. The annex was along the Good Spirit River, flowing into Good Spirit Lake (previously known as Devil’s Lake).
• The Saskatchewan Colony, also known as the “Rosthern colony”, “Prince Albert Colony” or “Duck Lake Colony,” was located along the North Saskatchewan River in the Langham and Blaine Lake districts of Saskatchewan, north-west of Saskatoon. 1500 Doukhobors from Kars Oblast settled there in 13 villages on 324,800 acres (1,314 km²) of land grant.

Geographically, North and South Colonies, as well as Good Spirit Lake Annex (Devil’s Lake Annex, to non-believers) were around Yorkton, not far from the border with today’s Manitoba; the Saskatchewan (Rosthern) Colony, was located north-west of Saskatoon, quite a distance from the other three “reserves.”

At the time of settlement (1899), all four “reserves” were located in the Northwest Territories: Saskathewan (Rosthern) Colony in the territories’ provisional District of Saskatchewan, North Reserve, straddling the border of Saskatchewan and Assiniboia districts, and the other two entirely in Assiniboia. After creation of the Province of Saskatchewan in 1905, all reserves were located within that province.

Early struggles

On the lands granted to them in the prairies, the settlers established villages along the same lines as back in the old country. Some of the new villages were given the same Russian names as the settlers home villages in Transcaucasia (Spasovka, Large and Small Gorelovka, Slavianka etc); others were given more abstract, “spiritual” names, not common in Russia: “Uspeniye” (‘Dormition’), “Terpeniye” (‘Patience’), “Bogomdannoye” (‘Given by God’), “Osvobozhdeniye” (‘Liberation’).

The settlers found Saskatchewan winters much harsher than those in Transcaucasia, and were particularly disappointed that the climate was not as suitable for growing fruits and vegetables. Many of the men found it necessary to take non-farm jobs, especially in railway construction, while the women stayed behind to till the land.

Due to Doukhobors’ aversion to private ownership in land, Petr Verigin (who had served his sentence and was able to come to Canada in 1902) managed to have land registered in the name of the community. But by 1906, the Dominion Government, in the person of Frank Oliver, the Minister of Interior, started requiring registration of the land in the name of individuals owners. Many Doukhobors’ refused, resulting the Crown reclaiming more than a third (258,880 acres) of Doukhobor lands.

Oliver also posed another vexing issue when he required them to become naturalized citizens. The previous minister’s had given assurances before the Doukhbors arrival to Canada that they would not be required to swear an Oath of Allegiance to the Crown, which was against their principles. These problems led to a new crisis just a decade after the conscription crisis in Russia.

The crisis resulted in a three-way split of the Doukhobor community in Canada:

• The edinolichniki (‘Independents’), who constituted by 1907 some ten percent of the Canadian Doukhobors. They maintained their religion, but abandoned communal ownership of land, rejecting hereditary leadership and communal living as non-essential to their religion.
• The largest group—the Community Doukhobors—continued to be loyal to their spiritual leader, Peter V. Verigin. They formed an organization known as Christian Community of Universal Brotherhood (CCUB).
• The more radical Sons of Freedom group (also called the “Svobodniki” or “Freedomites”), which emerged in 1903, embraced Verigin’s writings in a more zealous manner than did even the CCUB.

The Independents were a group most easily integrating into the Canadian capitalist society. They had no problem with registering their land groups, and largely remained in Saskatchewan. It was they who, much later on (in 1939) finally rejected the authority of Peter Verigin’s great-grandson, John J. Verigin.

In British Columbia

To take his followers away from the corrupting influence of non-Doukhobors and Edinolichniki (‘individual owners’) Doukhobors, and to find better conditions for agriculture, Verigin, starting in 1908, bought large tracts of land in south-eastern British Columbia. His first purchase were near the US border around Grand Forks. Later, he acquired large tracts of land further east, in the Slocan Valley around Castlegar. Between 1908 and 1912, some 8,000 people moved to these British Columbia lands from Saskatchewan, to continue their communal way of living. In the milder climate of British Columbia, the settlers were able to plant fruit trees, and within a few years became renowned as orchardists and producers of fruit preserves.

As the Community Doukhobors left Saskatchewan, the “reserves” there were closed by 1918.

The Sons of Freedom, meanwhile, responded to the Doukhobors conflict with the Canadian policy by mass nudity and arson as a means of protesting against a host of complaints against the Canadian government and society, including materialism, the land seizure by the government, compulsory education in government schools and, later on, Verigin’s supposed assassination. This led to many confrontations with the Canadian government and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (continuing into the 1970s).

Peter V. Verigin was killed in a still-unsolved Canadian Pacific Railway train explosion on October 29, 1924 near Farron, between Castlegar and Grand Forks, British Columbia. The government initially (during investigation) had stated the crime was perpetrated by people within the Doukhobor community, while the Doukhobors suspected Canadian government involvement. To date, it is still unknown who is responsible for the bombing. Thus, while the Doukhobors were initially welcomed by the Canadian government, this assassination controversy, as well as Doukhobor beliefs regarding communal living and child education, among other beliefs, created an air of mistrust between government authorities and Doukhobors which would last for decades.

Peter V. Verigin was succeeded as the leader of the Community Doukhobors by his son, Peter P. Verigin, who arrived from the Soviet Union in 1928. He became known as Peter the Purger, and worked to smooth the relations between the Community Doukhobors and the larger Canadian society. His policies, seen by the radical (or zealous) Sons of Freedom as ungodly and assimilationist, were answered by increasing protests on the part of the latter. The Sons of Freedom would burn the Community Doukhobors’ property, and organize more nude parades.

The Canadian Parliament responded in 1932 by criminalizing public nudity. Over the years, over 300 radical Doukhobor men and women were arrested for this offense, which typically carried a three-year prison sentence.

In 1947-1948, Sullivan’s Royal Commission investigated arsons and bombing attacks in British Columbia, and recommended a number of measures intended to integrate the Doukhobors into the Canadian society, notably through the participation of their children in public education. Around that time, the provincial government entered into direct negotiations with the Freedomite leadership.

W. A. C. Bennett’s Social Credit government, which came to power in 1952, took a harder stance against the “Doukhobor Problem.” In 1953, 150 children of the Sons of Freedom were forcible interned by the government agents in a residential school in New Denver, British Columbia.

Abuse of the interned children was later alleged, and a formal apology demanded. The BC government made an official Statement of Regret that satisfied some, but not all. The Canadian Federal government still has not apologized for its role in the removal of children from their homes, saying that it is not responsible for actions taken by the government in place 50 years ago.

Many of the independent and community Doukhobors believed that the Freedomites violated the central Doukhobor principle of nonviolence (with arson and bombing) and therefore did not deserve to be called Doukhobors. However, rifts generated during the twentieth century between the Sons of Freedom and Community and Independent Doukhobors were later largely laid to rest.

Staying behind

After the departure of the more zealous and non-compromising Doukhobors and many community leaders to Canada at the close of the nineteenth century, the Doukhobor groups staying within the Russian Empire entered a period of decline. By 1905, hardly any Doukhobors remained in Elisabethpol Governorate (Azerbaijan); the former Doukhobor villages now were mostly populated by Baptists. Elsewhere, many Doukhobors joined other dissenter sects, such as Molokans or Stundists.

Those that remained Doukhobors had to submit to the state. Few protested against the military service: for example, out of 837 Russian Court Martial cases against conscientious objectors recorded between the beginning of World War I and April 1, 1917, only 16 were for Doukhobor defendants–none of those hailed from the Transcaucasian provinces.

In 1921-1923, Verigin’s son arranged the resettlement of 4000 Doukhobors from the Ninotsminda (Bogdanovka) district in south Georgia into Rostov Oblast in southern Russia and other 500 into Zaporizhia Oblast in the Ukraine.

The Soviet reforms affected greatly the life of the Doukhobors both in their old villages in Georgia and in the new settlement areas in Russian and Ukraine. The state anti-religious campaigns resulted in the suppression of Doukhobor religious tradition, and the loss of books and archival records. A number of religious leaders were arrested or exiled: for example, 18 people were exiled from Gorelovka alone in 1930. On the other hand, Communists’ imposition of collective farming did not go against the grain of the Doukhobor way of life. The industrious Doukhobors made their collective farms prosperous, specializing e.g. in cheese-making.

Of the Doukhobor communities in the USSR, those in the south Georgia were the most sheltered from the outside influence, both because of the sheer geographical isolation in the mountainous terrain, and due to their location in an area near the international border, and concomitant travel restrictions for outsiders.

Present Day

Today an estimated 20,000-40,000 people of Doukhobor heritage live in Canada, some 4000 of them claiming “Doukhobor” as their religious affiliation. Perhaps another 30,000 live in Russia and neighboring countries. About 5000 live in the U.S. along the northernmost parts of the US-Canada border.

Canada

CCUB, the organization Orthodox Doukhobors or Community Doukhobors, was succeeded by Union of Spiritual Communities of Christ, formed by Peter P. Verigin (son of Peter V. Verigin) in 1938. The largest and most active Doukhobor organization, it is headquartered in Grand Forks, British Columbia.

During Canada 2001 Census, 3,800 persons in Canada (of which, 2,940 in British Columbia, 200 in Alberta, 465 in Saskatchewan, and 155 in Ontario) identified their religious affiliation as “Doukhobor.” As the age distribution shows, the proportion of older people among these self-identified Doukhobors is higher than among the general population:

E.g., 28 percent of the self-identified Doukhobors in 2001 were aged over 65 (i.e., born before 1936), as compared to 12 percent of the entire population of Canadian respondents. The aging of the denomination is accompanied by the shrinking of its size, starting in the 1960s:

Census year	Self-identified Doukhobor population
1921	12,674
1931	14,978
1941	16,898
1951	13,175
1961	13,234
1971	9,170
1981	?
1991	4,820
2001	3,800

Of course, the number of Canadians sharing Doukhobor heritage is much higher than the number of those who actually consider oneself a member of this religion. Doukhobor researchers made estimates from “over 20,000″ people “from [Doukhobor] stock” in Canada (Postnikoff, 1977) to over 40,000 Doukhobors by “a wider definition of religion, ethnicity, way of life, and social movement” (Tarasoff, 2002).

The Canadian Doukhobors no longer live communally. Their prayer meetings and gatherings are dominated by the singing of a cappella psalms, hymns and spiritual songs in Russian. Doukhobors do not practice baptism. They reject several items considered orthodox among Christian churches, including church organization and liturgy, the inspiration of the Scriptures, the literal interpretation of resurrection, the literal interpretation of the Trinity, and the literal interpretation of heaven and hell. Some avoid the use of alcohol, tobacco, and animal products for food, and involvement in partisan politics. Doukhobors believe in the goodness of man and reject the idea of original sin.

The religious philosophy of the Doukhobors is based on the ten commandments and the Golden Rule, “Love God with all thy heart, mind and soul” and “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” The Doukhobors have several important slogans. One of the most popular, “Toil and Peaceful Life,” was coined by Peter V. Verigin.

Georgia and Russia

Since the late 1980s, many of the Doukhobors of Georgia started emigrating to Russia. Various groups moved to Tula Oblast, Rostov Oblast, Stavropol Krai, and elsewhere. After the independence of Georgia, many villages with Russian names received Georgian names; for example, Bogdanovka became Ninotsminda and Troitskoe became Sameba. According to various estimated, in Ninotsminda District, the Doukhobor population fell from around 4000 in 1979 to 3,000-3,500 in 1989 and not much more than 700 in 2006. In Dmanisi district, from around 700 Doukhobors living there in 1979, no more than 50 seemed to remain by the mid-2000s. Those who do remain are mostly older people, since it is the younger generation who found it easier to move to Russia. The Doukhobor community of Gorelovka (in Ninotsminda District), the former “capital” of the Kalmykov family, is thought to be the best preserved in all post-Soviet countries.

Heritage: Historical sites and museums

The sites of Community Doukhobors’ headquarters in Veregin, Saskatchewan were designated in 2006 a National Historic Site of Canada, under the name “Doukhobors at Veregin.”

A Doukhobor museum, currently known as “Doukhobor Discovery Center” (formerly, “Doukhobor Village Museum”) operates in Castlegar, British Columbia. It contains over a thousand artifacts representing the arts, crafts, and daily life of the Doukhobors of the Kootenays in 1908-1938.

Although most of the early Doukhobor village structures in British Columbia have vanished or been significantly remodeled by later users, a part of Makortoff Village outside of Grand Forks, British Columbia has been preserved as a museum by Peter Gritchen, who purchased the property in 1971 and opened it as the Mountain View Doukhobor Museum on June 16, 1972. The future of the site became uncertain after his death in 2000. But, in cooperation with a coalition of the local organizations and concerned citizens, the historical site, known as Hardy Mountain Doukhobor Village, was purchased The Land Conservancy of British Columbia in March 2004, while the museum collection was acquired by the Boundary Museum Society and loaned to TLC for display.

The Canadian Museum of Civilization in Ottawa has a collection of Doukhobor-related items as well. A special exhibition there was run in 1998-1999 to mark the centennial anniversary of the Doukhobor arrival in Canada.

Eliot P. Ness

Eliot P. Ness (April 19, 1903 – May 16, 1957) was an American Prohibition agent, famous for his efforts to enforce Prohibition in Chicago, Illinois, as the leader of a legendary team nicknamed The Untouchables. He is associated with Chicago gangster Al Capone in the 1930s. While Ness didn’t catch Capone (who was jailed on tax violations) he and his agents routinely disrupted Capone’s illegal alcohol industry from 1929 until 1932. Ironically once he resigned his from his federal law enforcement career, his personal life unraveled due to his own problems with alcohol.

The cost of enforcing prohibition was high, and the lack of tax revenues on alcohol (some $500 million annually nationwide) affected government coffers. When repeal of prohibition occurred in 1933, following passage of the Twenty-first Amendment, organized crime lost nearly all of its black market alcohol profits in most states. Despite the repeal, states still had the right to enforce their own laws concerning alcohol consumption, competition with low-priced alcohol sales at legal liquor stores. This led organized crime to further expansions into other illicit and socially harmful criminal activities, such as narcotics.

Early life

Ness was born in Chicago, the youngest of five, to Norwegian bakers Peter and Emma Ness. As a boy, Ness was interested in reading, especially Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. He was educated at the University of Chicago, graduating in 1925 with a degree in business and law. Ness was a member of Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity. He began his career as an investigator for the Retail Credit Company of Atlanta, Georgia. He was assigned to the Chicago territory, where he conducted background investigations for the purpose of credit information. He returned to the University of Chicago to take a course in criminology, eventually earning a masters degree in the field.

Career

In 1926, his sister’s husband, Alexander Jamie, a Bureau of Investigation agent (this became the FBI in 1935), influenced him to enter law enforcement. He joined the United States Treasury Department in 1927 during a time when bootlegging was rampant throughout the nation. He headed a Federal enforcement unit which covered Illinois, Indiana, and Wisconsin.

Following the election of President Herbert Hoover, Andrew Mellon, Secretary of the Treasury was specifically charged with bringing down Al Capone. The federal government approached the problem of enforcing prohibition from two directions: income tax evasion and the Volstead Act. Ness was chosen to head the operations under the Volstead Act, targeting the illegal breweries and supply routes of the gangster Al Capone.

Because of his familiarity with the endemic corruption in Chicago law-enforcement, Ness went through the records of all the treasury agents to create a reliable team, initially of fifty, later reduced to fifteen and finally to just ten men. Raids against stills and breweries began immediately; within six months Ness claimed to have seized breweries collectively worth more than one million dollars. The main source of information for the raids was an extensive wire-tapping operation.

An attempt by Capone to bribe Ness’s agents was seized upon by Ness for publicity, leading to the media nickname “The Untouchables.” There were a number of assassination attempts on Ness, and one close friend was killed.

The efforts of Ness and his team had a serious impact on Capone’s operations, but it was the income tax evasion which was the government’s key weapon. In a number of federal grand jury cases in 1931, Capone was charged with 22 counts of tax evasion and also 5,000 violations of the Volstead Act. On October 17, 1931, Capone was sentenced to eleven years, and following a failed appeal, he began his sentence in 1932.

Later life and Legacy

Ness was promoted to Chief Investigator of the Prohibition Bureau for Chicago and in 1934 for Ohio. Following the end of Prohibition in 1935, he resigned his position as a federal agent and took a job with the local government of Cleveland, as Director of Public Safety. He headed up a campaign to clean out the corrupt police and fire departments, and also tackle illegal gambling and other criminal activity. Ness’s inability to capture the Cleveland Torso Murderer, a vicious serial killer operating in the Cleveland area during the mid-1930s, may have also contributed to his exit from what was otherwise a successful criminal justice career in Cleveland. He resigned abruptly in 1942 after his involvement in an early morning auto collision—he had been drinking, hit another car and then left the scene of the accident.

Ness then moved to Washington, D.C., and worked again for the federal government. In 1944, he left to become chairman of the Diebold Corporation, a security safe company based in Ohio. He ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Cleveland in 1947 and Ness had a few business failures and was forced from his job at Diebold in April 1951. He eventually came to work for North Ridge Industrial in Coudersport, Pennsylvania. His book, The Untouchables, was published in 1957 shortly after his death at the age of 54 years old following a heart attack.

He was married three times, divorced twice, and had only one child (by adoption). He was married to illustrator Evaline Ness from 1938 to 1946. His ashes were scattered in one of the small ponds on the grounds of Lakeview Cemetery in Cleveland.

Impact on America

A number of television series and feature films have been made (loosely) based on his life, inflating the image of Ness into the fearless incorruptible lawman of legend. Some of the most well-known of these include the 1950s/1960s TV series titled The Untouchables, which features Robert Stack as Ness, and Brian De Palma’s Oscar-winning film of the same title, The Untouchables, which stars Kevin Costner as Ness and also features Sean Connery and Robert De Niro. Tom Amandes portrayed Ness in the short-lived TV remake of The Untouchables, which ran from 1993 to 1994. Eliot Ness was also the protagonist of the graphic novel Torso by Brian Michael Bendis and Marc Andreyko and a film is reportedly in development with David Fincher attached to direct. Ness is the subject of a series of novels by Max Allan Collins and also appears as a minor character in Collins’s graphic novel Road to Perdition.

Great Lakes Brewing Company makes a beer in his honor, “The Eliot Ness,” because Ness allegedly “frequented the Brewpub’s bar during his tenure from 1935-1941 and, according to popular legend, was responsible for the bullet holes in the bar still evident today.”

There is a sandwich shop in Fort Collins, Colorado, just outside the campus of Colorado State University named “Eliot’s Mess” in his honor.

Ness also appeared in an episode of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, “Mystery of the Blues” as Indy’s roommate at the University of Chicago. They, along with a young Ernest Hemingway, attempt to solve a mystery surrounding the murder of Indy’s boss. Al Capone is found to be responsible, but he cannot be brought to justice, as police corruption has started to take hold. While this is theoretically written to be part of Eliot’s motivations later in life, all accounts of him, Hemingway, and Capone here are obviously fictional.

Kateri Tekakwitha

Kateri Tekakwitha , baptised as Catherine Tekakwitha and informally known as Lily of the Mohawks (1656 – April 17, 1680), was an Algonquin-Mohawk Catholic virgin and religious laywoman. Born in present-day New York, she survived smallpox and was orphaned as a child, then baptized as a Roman Catholic and settled for the last years of her life at the Jesuit mission village of Kahnawake, south of Montreal in New France.

Tekakwitha professed a vow of virginity until her death at the age of 24. Known for her virtue of chastity and corporal mortification of the flesh, as well as being shunned by her tribe for her religious conversion to Catholicism, she is the first Native American woman to be venerated in the Roman Catholic Church. She was beatified by Blessed Pope John Paul II in 1980. On February 18, 2012, Pope Benedict XVI announced at Saint Peter’s Basilica that Tekakwitha is scheduled to be formally canonized on October 21, 2012. Various miracles and supernatural events are attributed to her name after her death.

Early life and education

Kateri Tekakwitha (the name “Kateri” is derived from the French Catherine, her baptismal name) was born around 1656 in the Mohawk village of Ossernenon near present-day Auriesville, New York. She was the daughter of Kenneronkwa, a Mohawk chief, and Tagaskouita, a Roman Catholic Algonquin who had been adopted into the tribe after capture. Her mother Tagaskouita had been baptized and educated by French missionaries in Trois-Rivières, east of Montreal. Mohawk warriors captured her and took her to their homeland. She eventually married Kenneronkwa.

Kateri’s village was highly diverse, as the Mohawk were absorbing many captured natives of other tribes, particularly their competitors the Huron, to replace people who died from European diseases or warfare. She was most likely born into the Turtle Clan. (The Mohawk and other Iroquois had a matrilineal kinship system, in which children were born into the mother’s clan and took their status from her.) When she was young, her village moved to a different location. The Mohawk suffered from a smallpox epidemic from 1661 to 1663. Kateri’s brother and both her parents died, and she was left with scars and impaired eyesight. She was adopted by her maternal uncle, a chief of the Turtle Clan.

The Jesuits’ account of Kateri said that she was a modest girl who avoided social gatherings; she covered much of her head with a blanket because of the smallpox scars. They told that, as an orphan, she was under the care of uninterested relatives. However, this was probably not the case; the Jesuits wanted to present her as unique among the “pagan savages.” According to Mohawk practices, she was probably well taken care of by her clan, her mother and uncle’s extended family, with whom she lived in the longhouse. She became skilled at traditional women’s arts, which included making clothing and belts from animal skins; weaving mats, baskets and boxes from reeds and grasses;, and preparing food from game, crops and gathered produce. She took part in the women’s seasonal planting and intermittent weeding. She was pressured to consider marriage around age thirteen, but reportedly she refused.

Kateri grew up in a period of constant change as the Mohawk interacted with French and Dutch colonists. In the fur trade, the Mohawk originally traded with the Dutch, who had settled in Albany and Schenectady. The French traded with and were allied with the Huron. Trying to make inroads in Iroquois territory, the French attacked the Mohawk in present-day central New York in 1666, destroying several villages and their winter stores.

After the defeat by the French forces, the Mohawk were forced into a peace treaty that required them to accept Jesuit missionaries in their villages. While there, the Jesuits studied Mohawk and other native languages in order to reach the people. They spoke of Christianity in terms with which the Mohawk could identify. In his work on Tekakwitha, Darren Bonaparte (Mohawk) notes the parallels between some elements of Mohawk and Christian belief. For instance, the Jesuits used the word Karonhià:ke, the Mohawk name for Sky World, as the word for heaven in the Lord’s Prayer in Mohawk. “This was not just a linguistic shortcut, but a conceptual bridge from one cosmology to another.”

The Mohawk rebuilt on the south side of the Mohawk River at what they called Caughnawaga. In 1667, when Kateri was 11 years old, she met the Jesuits Jacques Fremin, Jacques Bruyas, and Jean Pierron, who had come to the village. Her uncle was against any contact with them because he did not want her to convert to Christianity. One of his older daughters had already left Caughnawaga to go to Kahnawake, the Catholic mission village near Montreal.

In the spring of 1675 at age eighteen, Kateri met the Jesuit Father Jacques de Lamberville and started studying the catechism with him.

Conversion and Kahnawake

Judging her ready for true conversion, Lamberville baptized Tekakwitha at the age of 20, on Easter Sunday, April 18, 1676. This is significant because, according to Jesuit policy, baptism was usually withheld for new converts until one was on his deathbed or until the missionaries could be certain that the convert would be committed.

After Catherine was baptized, she remained in Caughnawauga for only another 6 months. Some Mohawk opposed her conversion and accused her of sorcery and sexual promiscuity. Lamberville suggested that she go to the Jesuit mission of Kahnawake, located south of Montreal on the St. Lawrence River, where other native converts had gathered. Catherine joined them in 1677.

The historian Allan Greer notes that most of these early converts to Christianity were women. They lived in a way which they thought was integral to Christianity, dependent on charity. They devoted their bodies and souls to God and participated in mortification of the flesh. There were similar practices among Mohawk traditions, usually carried out by warriors. Despite opposition from the Jesuits, the women of the village continued to practice mortification, usually in groups, claiming it was needed to relieve their people of their past sins. The people of Kahnawake usually followed the directions of the Jesuits; at other times, they evaded their control. On the whole, they wanted to experience the sacred and spiritual life, and they were determined to do this with or without the Jesuits.

Tekakwitha was said to have put thorns on her sleeping mat and lay on them while praying for the conversion and forgiveness of her kinsmen. Piercing the body to draw blood was a traditional practice of the Mohawk and other Iroquois nations. She lived at Kahnawake the remaining two years of her life. She learned more about Christianity under her mentor Anastasia, who taught her about the practice of repenting for one’s sins. When the women learned of nuns and female convents, they wanted to form their own and created an informal association of devout women.

Father Cholonec wrote that Tekakwitha said,

“I have deliberated enough. For a long time my decision on what I will do has been made. I have consecrated myself entirely to Jesus, son of Mary, I have chosen Him for husband and He alone will take me for wife”.

The Church considers that in 1679, with her decision on the Feast of the Annunciation, her conversion was truly completed and she became the “first virgin” among the Mohawk.

Mission du Sault St. Louis: Kahnawake

The Jesuits had founded Kahnawake for the religious conversion of the natives. When it began, the natives built longhouses for residences. They also built a longhouse to be used as a chapel by the Jesuits. As a missionary settlement, Kahnawake was at risk of being attacked by nations of the Iroquois Confederacy. (While it attracted other Iroquois, it was predominately Mohawk.)

After Catherine’s arrival, she shared the longhouse of her older sister and her husband. She would have known other people in the longhouse who had migrated from their former village of Gandaouagué (also spelled Caughnawaga). Her mother’s close friend, Anastasia Tegonhatsiongo, was clan matron of the longhouse. Anastasia and other Mohawk women introduced Tekakwitha to the regular practices of Christianity.

Chauchetière and Cholenec

Claude Chauchetière and Pierre Cholenec were Jesuit priests who played important roles in Tekakwitha’s life. Both were based in New France and in Kahnawake. Chauchetière was the first to write a biography of Tekakwitha’s life, followed by Cholenec, in 1695 and 1696, respectively. Cholenec arrived in New France in 1672, before Chauchetière. Father Cholenec introduced whips, hair shirts and iron girdles, traditional items of Catholic mortification, to the converts at Kahnawake so they would adopt these rather than use Mohawk practices.

Both Chauchetière and Tekakwitha arrived in Kahnawake the same year, in 1677. He later wrote about having been very impressed by her, as he had not expected a native to be so pious. Chauchetière came to believe that Catherine Tekakwitha was a saint. Jesuits generally thought that the natives needed Christian guidance to be set on the right path. Chauchetière acknowledged that close contact with and deeper knowledge of the natives in Kahnawake changed some of his set notions about the people and about differences among human cultures. In his biography of her, he stressed her “charity, industry, purity, and fortitude.” In contrast, Cholenec stressed her virginity, perhaps to counter stereotypes of promiscuous Indian women.

Corporal mortification

The Jesuits wanted to guide natives and share their Catholic religion, but at this time, they did not provide for natives to be trained or ordained as clergy or religious. The most devout of the natives wanted full access to the religion and believed that some secrets were being held from them. As most converts to Catholicism were women, they comprised the majority of the devout.

Tekakwitha met Marie-Thérèse Tegaiaguenta for the first time in the spring of 1678. Aspiring to devotion, they began to practice mutual flagellation in secret. Cholenec wrote that Catherine could flog herself between one thousand and twelve hundred blows in one session. Tekakwitha’s dedication to ritual mortification became more intense and consuming over the remainder of her life; she included prolonged fasting, flogging, cutting, sleeping on a bed of thorns, and burning herself with hot coals. Marie Skarichions told Catherine and Marie-Thérèse about nuns, female religious, and their role in the Catholic religion. Through their mutual quest, the two women had a strong “spiritual friendship,” as described by the Jesuits.

The two women influenced a circle of associates. When they asked the Jesuits for permission to form a group of native disciples, they were told they were too “young in faith” for such a group. The women continued to practice together, including mortification of the flesh. Marie-Thérèse eventually left the group, supposedly due to personal issues. Catherine tried to reintegrate her into the group until her death. She had often given her guidance. Examples recorded by the priests were the following:

• “Take courage, despite the words of those who have no faith.”
• “Be assured that you are pleasing in the sight of God and that I shall help you when I am with Him.”
• “Never give up mortification.”

Death and appearances

Around the period of Holy Week 1679, friends noted that Tekakwitha was failing. When people knew she had but a few hours left, villagers gathered together, accompanied by the priests Chauchetière and Cholenec. Cholenec provided the last rites. Catherine Tekakwitha died on April 17, 1680 at the age of 24, in the arms of her friend Marie-Therèse. Chauchetière reports her final words were, “I will love you in heaven.”

After her death, the people noticed a physical change. Cholenec later wrote, “This face, so marked and swarthy, suddenly changed about a quarter of an hour after her death, and became in a moment so beautiful and so white that I observed it immediately.”Tekakwitha is said to have appeared before three individuals in the weeks after her death; Anastasia Tegonhatsiongo (her mentor), Marie-Therèse Tegaiaguenta (her companion) and Father Chauchetière. Anastasia said that, while crying over the death of her daughter, she looked up to see Catherine “kneeling at the foot” of her mattress, “holding a wooden cross that shone like the sun”. Marie-Thérèse reported that she was awakened at night by a knocking on her wall, and a voice asked if she were awake, adding, “I’ve come to say good-bye; I’m on my way to heaven.” Marie-Thérèse went outside but saw no one; she heard a voice murmur, “Adieu, Adieu, go tell the father that I’m going to heaven.” Chauchetière reported seeing Catherine at her grave; he said she appeared in “baroque splendour; for 2 hours he gazed upon her” and “her face lifted toward heaven as if in ecstasy.”

Chauchetière had a chapel built near her gravesite. By 1684, pilgrimages had begun to honour her there. The Jesuits turned her bones to dust and set the ashes within the “newly rebuilt mission chapel.” This symbolized her presence on earth. Her physical remains were sometimes used as relics for healing. Chauchetière and Cholenec wrote accounts of her life.

Epitaph

Tekakwitha’s grave stone reads:

“

Kateri Tekakwitha Ownkeonweke Katsitsiio Teonsitsianekaron The fairest flower that ever bloomed among red men.

”

Because of Tekakwitha’s notable path to chastity, she is often referred to as a lily, a traditional symbol of purity among Roman Catholics and one often used for the Virgin Mary. Religious images of Tekakwitha are often decorated with a lily and cross, with feathers or turtle as cultural accessories. Colloquial terms for Tekakwitha are The Lily of the Mohawks (most notable), the Mohawk Maiden, the Pure and Tender Lily, the Flower among True Men, the Lily of Purity and The New Star of the New World. Her tribal neighbors referred to her as “the fairest flower that ever bloomed among the redmen.”‘Her virtues are considered an ecumenical bridge between Mohawk and European cultures.

Religious veneration

For some time after her death, Tekakwitha was considered an honorary yet unofficial patroness of Montreal, Canada, and Indigenous peoples of the Americas. Fifty years after her death, a convent for Native American nuns opened in Mexico. They have prayed for her and support her canonization.

The process for Tekakwitha’s canonization was initiated by United States Catholics in 1884, followed by Canadian Catholics. In January 3, 1943, Pope Pius XII declared her venerable. She was beatified as Catherine Tekakwitha on June 22, 1980 by Pope John Paul II.

On December 19, 2011, the Congregation for the Causes of Saints certified a second miracle through her intercession, signed by Pope Benedict XVI, which paved the way for pending canonization. On February 18, 2012, Pope Benedict XVI decreed that Tekakwitha be canonized. Speaking in Latin, he used the form “Catharina Tekakwitha”; the official booklet of the ceremony referred to her in English and Italian, as “Kateri Tekakwitha”. She is the first Native American/First Nations woman to qualify for Sainthood by the Roman Catholic Church. She is scheduled for canonization in October 2012.

Tekakwitha is featured in three national shrines in the United States: the National Shrine of Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha in Fonda, New York; the National Shrine of the North American Martyrs in Auriesville, New York; and the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, D.C.

A statue of Tekakwitha is installed outside the Basilica of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré in Quebec, Canada. Another is installed at the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Tekakwitha has been featured in recently created religious works. In 2007, the Grand Retablo, a 40-foot high work by Spanish artisans, was installed behind the main altar of the Mission Basilica San Juan Capistrano in Orange County, California. It features Catherine Tekakwitha , Junipero Serra, St. Joseph, and Francis of Assisi.

A bronze statue of Blessed Kateri kneeling in prayer was installed in 2008, created by artist Cynthia Hitschler, along the devotional walkway leading to the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe, La Crosse, Wisconsin. Another life-size statue of Blessed Kateri is located at the National Shrine Basilica of Our Lady of Fatima in Lewiston, New York. A bronze figure of Kateri is included on the bronze front doors of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City.

Reputed miracles

Joseph Kellogg was a Protestant child captured by Natives in the eighteenth century and eventually returned to his home. Twelve months later, he caught smallpox. The Jesuits helped treat him, but he was not recovering. They had relics from Tekakwitha’s grave, but did not want to use them on a non-Catholic. One Jesuit told Kellogg that, if he would confess and embody a Roman Catholic, help would come to him. Joseph did so. The Jesuit gave him a piece of decayed wood from Catherine’s coffin, which is said to have made him heal. The historian Greer takes this account to mean that Tekakwitha was known in 18th-century New France, and she was already perceived to have healing abilities.

Other alleged miracles were attributed to Catherine: Father Rémy recovered his hearing and a nun in Montreal was cured by using items formerly belonging to Catherine. In those times, such incidents were evidence that Catherine was possibly a saint. Sainthood is symbolized by events following the death of a person that show the rejection of death. It is also represented by a duality of pain and a neutralisation of the other’s pain (all shown by her reputed miracles in New France). Father Chauchetière told settlers in La Prairie to pray to Catherine for intercession with illnesses. His words and Catherine’s fame were said to reach even Jesuits in China and their converts.

As people believed in her healing powers, some collected earth from her gravesite and wore it in bags as a relic. One woman said she was saved from pneumonia (“grande maladie du rhume”), and gave the pendant to her husband, who was healed from his disease.

Tradition holds that Tekakwitha’s smallpox scars vanished at the time of her death in 1680. Pope Pius XII in 1943 declared this an authentic miracle. Pilgrims to her funeral reported healings.

On December 19, 2011, Pope Benedict XVI approved the second miracle needed for Blessed Kateri’s canonization. The authorized miracle dates from 2006, when a young boy in Washington state survived a severe flesh-eating bacterium. Doctors had been unable to stop the progress of the disease by surgery and advised his parents he was likely to die. As the boy is half Lummi Indian, the parents said they prayed through Tekakwitha for divine intercession, as did their family and friends, and an extended network contacted through their son’s classmates. The boy had received his Last Rites from a Roman Catholic priest before the miracle of the disease stopping its progression took place.

Cultural references

The historian K. I. Koppedrayer has suggested that the Catholic Church fathers’ hagiography of Tekakwitha reflected “some of the trials and rewards of the European presence in the New World.” Based on accounts from two Jesuit priests who knew her, at least 300 books have been published in more than 20 languages on the life of Kateri Tekakwitha.

In addition, Tekakwitha has been featured in novels:

• Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers (1966)
• William Vollman, Fathers and Crows (1992), second novel of the Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes series, includes her as a character, together with French colonists and priests.

 

Home Children

Home Children is a common term used to refer to the child migration scheme founded by Annie MacPherson in 1869, under which more than 100,000 children were sent to Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa from the United Kingdom.

Australia has apologised for its involvement in the scheme, while in February 2010 UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown made a formal apology to the families of children who suffered. On 16 November 2009, Canadian Immigration Minister Jason Kenney issued a statement that Canada will not apologise to child migrants.

History

The practice of sending poor or orphaned children to British settler colonies, to help alleviate the shortage of labour, began in 1618, with the rounding-up and transportation of 100 vagrant children to the Virginia Colony. Labour shortages in the British colonies also encouraged the kidnapping of children for work in the Americas, and large numbers of children were forcibly emigrated, mostly from Scotland. This practice continued until it was exposed in 1757, following a civil action against Aberdeen businessmen and magistrates for their involvement in the trade.

The Children’s Friend Society was founded in London in 1830, as “The Society for the Suppression of Juvenile Vagrancy through the reformation and emigration of children”. The first group of children was sent to the Cape Colony in South Africa and the Swan River Colony in Australia in 1832 and in August 1833, 230 children were shipped to Toronto and New Brunswick, Canada.

The main pioneers of child migration in the nineteenth century were the Scottish Evangelical Christian, Annie MacPherson, her sister Louisa Birt, and Londoner, Maria Rye. Whilst working with poor children in London in the late 1860s MacPherson was appalled by the child slavery of the matchbox industry and resolved to devote her life to these children. In 1870 she bought a large workshop and turned it into the “Home of Industry”, where poor children could work and be fed and educated. She later became convinced that the real solution for these children lay in emigration to a country of opportunity and started an emigration fund. In the first year of the fund’s operation, 500 children, trained in the London homes, were shipped to Canada. McPherson opened distribution homes in Canada in the towns of Belleville and Galt in Ontario and persuaded her sister, Louisa, to open a third home in the village of Knowlton, seventy miles from Montreal. This was the beginning of a massive operation which sought to find homes and careers for 14,000 of Britain’s needy children.

 

“CHILD EMIGRATION TO CANADA The attention of the Dominion Government has been drawn to the fact that the children sent to Canada from England are street waifs and workhouse paupers, and that the professional philanthropists engaged in the work are largely prompted by mercenary and not charitable motives. A demand will be made that parliament should investigate the matter before voting any money to promote this kind of immigration.”

 

The Star, 18 April 1891

Maria Rye also worked amongst the poor in London and had arrived in Ontario with 68 children (50 of whom were from Liverpool) some months earlier than McPherson, with the blessing of the Archbishop of Canterbury and The Times newspaper. Rye, who had been placing women emigrants in Canada since 1867, opened her home at Niagara-on-the-Lake in 1869, and by the turn of the century had settled some 5,000 children, mostly girls, in Ontario.

The emigration schemes were not without their critics and there were many rumours of ill-treatment of the children by their employers and of profiteering by the organisers of the schemes, particularly Maria Rye. In 1874 The London Board of Governors decided to send a representative, named Andrew Doyle, to Canada to visit the homes and the children to see how they were faring. Doyle’s report praised the women and their staff, especially MacPherson, saying that they were inspired by the highest motives, but condemned almost everything else about the enterprise. He said that the attitude of the women in grouping together children from the workhouses, who he said were mostly of good reputation, with street children, who he considered mostly thieves, was naive and had caused nothing but trouble in Canada. He was also critical of the checks made on the children after they were placed with settlers, which in Rye’s case were mostly non-existent, and said that:

Because of Miss Rye’s carelessness and Miss MacPherson’s limited resources, thousands of British children, already in painful circumstances, were cast adrift to be overworked or mistreated by the settlers of early Canada who were generally honest but often hard taskmasters.

The Canadian House of Commons subsequently set up a select committee to examine Doyle’s findings and there was much controversy generated by his report in Britain, but the schemes continued with some changes and were copied in other countries of the British Empire.

In 1909, South African born Kingsley Fairbridge founded the “Society for the Furtherance of Child Emigration to the Colonies” which was later incorporated as the Child Emigration Society. The purpose of the society, which later became the Fairbridge Foundation, was to educate orphaned and neglected children and train them in farming practices at farm schools located throughout the British Empire. Fairbridge emigrated to Australia in 1912, where his ideas received support and encouragement. According to the British House of Commons Child Migrant’s Trust Report, “it is estimated that some 150,000 children were dispatched over a period of 350 years—the earliest recorded child migrants left Britain for the Virginia Colony in 1618, and the process did not finally end until the late 1960s.” It was widely believed by contemporaries that all of these children were orphans, but it is now known that most had living parents some of whom had no idea of the fate of their children after they were left in care homes, and some led to believe that their children had been adopted somewhere in Britain.

Child emigration was suspended for economic reasons during the Great Depression of the 1930s but was not completely terminated until the 1970s.

As they were compulsorily shipped out of Britain, many of the children were deceived into believing their parents were dead, and that a more abundant life awaited them. Many children were welcomed into loving homes, but others were exploited as cheap agricultural labour, or denied proper shelter and education and not allowed to socialise with native children. It was common for Home Children to run away, sometimes finding a caring family or better working conditions.

Exposure and apologies

In 1987 British social worker Margaret Humphreys carried out an investigation leading to the exposure of the child migration scheme and the establishment of the Child Migrants Trust, with the aim of reuniting parents and children. Full details of the scheme only emerged as late as 1998 during a parliamentary inquiry in Britain, which found that many migrant children were subjected to systematic abuse in religious schools in Australia, New Zealand and other countries.

In 1994 Humphreys published a book concerning her research entitled Empty Cradles. In 2010, this book detailing Humphreys’ work, political obstacles, and threats on her life along with the crimes and abuse done to thousands of children by government and religious officials was depicted in the film: Oranges and Sunshine.

Australia

In Australia, such “Child Migrant” children are part of a larger group known as the “Forgotten Australians”. “Forgotten Australians” is a term the Australian Senate has used to describe the estimated 500,000 children who were brought up in orphanages, children’s homes, institutions or foster care in Australia up until the early 1990s. “Child Migrants” refers specifically to the 7000 children who migrated to Australia under assisted child migration schemes. Child migrants were adopted or brought up in children’s homes, institutions, orphanages or foster care. Many of these children experienced neglect and abuse while in institutional care.

At the urging of the “Care Leavers Australia Network”, in August 2001, the Senate Community Affairs References Committee published “Lost Innocents: Righting the Record – Report on child migration,” and followed this in August 2004 with the “Forgotten Australians” report. Both reports concluded with a number of recommendations, one of which was a call for a national apology. Prime Minister of Australia, Kevin Rudd apologised on behalf of the government of Australia on 16 November 2009. As of 2009, there were an estimated 7,000 “Child Migrants” currently residing in Australia. The Australian government had contacted about 400 British child migrants for advice on how the apology should be delivered. Australia’s Roman Catholic Church had publicly apologised in 2001 to British and Maltese child migrants who suffered abuse including rape, whippings and slave labour in religious institutions. A £1 million travel fund was set up by the British Government for former child migrants to visit their families in the UK. The Australian Government later supplemented this fund.

Canada

After the apology by the Australian government, the Canadian Immigration Minister, Jason Kenney, said

There’s no need for Canada to apologise for abuse and exploitation suffered by thousands of poor children shipped here from Britain starting in the nineteenth century … the issue has not been on the radar screen here, unlike Australia where there’s been a long-standing interest. The reality is that, here in Canada, we are taking measures to recognise that sad period, but there is, I think, limited public interest in official government apologies for everything that’s ever been unfortunate or [a] tragic event in our history.

Canada did proclaim 2010 the “Year of the British Home Child” and on 1 September 2010, Canada Post released a commemorative stamp to honour those who were sent to Canada. In the province of Ontario, the British Home Child Day Act, 2011 makes September 28 in each year ‘British Home Child Day’ to “…recognize and honour the contributions of the British home children who established roots in Ontario”.

United Kingdom

On Wednesday, 23 February 2010, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Gordon Brown issued an official apology for the “shameful” child resettlement programme and announced a £6 million fund designed to compensate the families affected by the “misguided” programme.