The Unjust Society

Harold Cardinal, an incredibly influential and prominent Cree political leader, author, lawyer, and negotiator wrote The Unjust Society. It was in part a critical response to Pierre Trudeau and Jean Chretien's "White Paper" which was widely regarded as the Canadian Government's attempt to abolish all legal protections and statutes which, although problematic themselves, enshrined certain rights for First Nations including treaties, Aboriginal or Treaty rights, and land/resources.

Cardinal writes, Page 2-3:

"The history of Canada’s Indians is a shameful chronicle of the white man’s disinterest, his deliberate trampling of Indian rights and his repeated betrayal of our trust. Generations of Indians have grown up behind a buckskin curtain of indifference, ignorance, and all too often, plain bigotry. Now, at a time when our fellow Canadians consider the promise of the Just Society, once more the Indians of Canada are betrayed by a programme which offers nothing better than cultural genocide.

The new Indian policy promulgated by Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s government, under the auspices of Honourable Jean Chrétien, minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, and Deputy Minister John A. MacDonald, and presented in June 1969 is a thinly disguised programme of extermination trough assimilation. For the Indian to survive, says the government in effect, he must become a good little brown white man. The Americans to the south of us used to have a saying “The only good Indian is a dead Indian.” The MacDonald-Chrétien doctrine would amend this but slightly to, “The only good Indian is a non-Indian

…As an Indian writing about a situation I am living and experiencing in common with thousands of our people it is my hope that this book will open the eyes of the Canadian public to its shame. In these pages I hope to cut through bureaucratic doubletalk to show what it means to be an Indian in Canada. I intend to document the betrayals of our trust to show step by step how a dictatorial bureaucracy has eroded our right, atrophied our culture and robbed us of simple human dignity. I will expose the ignorance and bigotry that has impeded our progress, the eighty years of educational neglect that have hobbled our young people for generations, the gutless politicians who have knowingly watched us sink in the quicksands of apathy and despair and have failed to extend a hand.” (2-3). 

Provided is an excerpt from The Unjust Society: The Buckskin Curtain and When the Curtain Comes Down.

A digital edition of The Unjust Society is accessible on Open Library