Native Wage Labour and Independent Production during the 'Era of Irrelevance'

Abstract

THE DEBATE over the inherent right of native self-government has been largely confined the concept of political autonomy. As University of Lethbridge sociologist Menno Boldt reminds us in Surviving as Indians, meaningful political autonomy can only be realized once the economic dependence of native peoples on welfare has been addressed. The historical origins of this dependency have remained obscure because the study of Amerindian history is a relatively recent phenomenon in Canada. Pioneered by anthropologists, the study of native peoples' has been joined by many disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. Research has tended focus upon the early contact period, the central role of the Amerindian in the fur trade, and the evolution of relations between Amerindians and the state. Until recently, historians have assumed that the importance of natives in the New World economy did not survive the decline of the fur trade in the mid 19th Consequently, there has been little interest among historians in exploring the nature and extent of Amerindian participation in the emerging capitalist economy. As J.R. Miller so aptly observed in Skyscrapers Hide the Heavens, only in World War n did Amerindians begin to move out of an 'era of irrelevance' in which they had been cast by the majority population in the nineteenth century. Unfortunately, the perceived irrelevance of native peoples in the post fur-trade era has extended the historiography itself. As a result, the experience of Amerindians, during a

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