76 Before Agriculture
out on the land. Send the kids to school or you will lose your family allowance.”
Parents were afraid. They made the children go to school. When a priest told us to
do something, we did it. We listened to him as if he was Jesus.’
In defiance of these intense pressures, Mary Adele Andrew and Elisabeth
Penashue, as well as some others, continued to spend as much time as they possibly
could on their lands with their families. They were teaching the young how to live
there, as Innu. It had been hard, and some had lost a great deal, but there was
hope – so long as they could keep going onto the land.
One day at a summer camp, where the women were baking bread in ovens
they had scooped out of sand heated with large fires of driftwood, Mary Adele said:
‘On the land we are ourselves. In the settlement we are lost. That was the way they
made our minds weak.’
4
European ‘discovery’ of the New World, those great adventures to the Americas as
well as to southern Africa and Australasia, led to a set of theories about the peoples
who lived in these lands. The theories, which disregarded hunter-gatherer eco-
nomic systems, languages and belief, were underpinned by the idea that hunter-
gatherers were not quite human beings at all.^1
Articulate colonists of southern Africa in the 16th century declared that the
Khoisan peoples they encountered at the Cape of Good Hope were ‘the very reverse
of humankind ... so that if there’s any medium between a rational animal and a
beast, the Hotantot [sic] lays the fairest claim to that species.’ In Australia, Abo-
rigines were classified as being at a midpoint on the evolutionary ladder, more a
species of animal than human. When William Lanney, the last Aborigine of Tas-
mania, died in 1869, a struggle to get possession of his bones was fuelled by the
belief that ‘he represented a last living link between man and ape’.
In 16th-century Spain, the question arose as to whether or not the original
inhabitants of the colonies in the Americas were ‘natural slaves’. The notion came
from Aristotle, whom the Spanish monk Juan Gines de Sepulveda relied on for
judging the rights of ‘the Indians’. A ‘natural slave’, according to Sepulveda’s
interpretation of Aristotle, was a person whose inferiority and ignorance were
such that only through servitude could the necessary human development be
achieved. In Aristotle, this idea arose as part of a justification of slavery in Greek
society; he sought to show that the slave’s opportunity to work in the master’s
household was a chance to experience and learn the arts of civilization. Applying
this to Spanish colonial rule, Sepulveda saw slavery as a necessary opportunity.
The enslavement of the Indians of the newly conquered territories in South
America, who lived far beyond Christian influence and teaching, was ‘natural’ –
and it would bring them into the ‘natural’ joys and benedictions of the Christian
Church. But slaves did not have the right to own property; those who did the