"Clearing the Plains" by James Daschuk

I already knew the broad strokes here from other sources: Canada starved Indigenous people, broke promises, used disease and hunger as tools of policy, and then acted like this was all unfortunate but somehow natural.

But seeing it laid out this broadly and this clinically hits differently. Daschuk does not make the argument by yelling. He just stacks the evidence until the “oops, history was complicated” version becomes impossible to take seriously.

The core point is brutal: the collapse of Indigenous health on the Plains was not just caused by disease, climate, or the disappearance of the buffalo. Those things mattered, obviously. But Canadian policy made them catastrophic. Food was withheld. Rations were used as control. People were forced onto reserves in conditions that made sickness worse. Starvation became a governance strategy.

What stuck with me most was the scale. This was not one bad official, one tragic winter, one broken treaty. It was a whole system: expansion, settlement, the railway, agricultural dreams, and Indigenous removal all tied together. Canada did not simply “clear” the plains after Indigenous populations declined. It helped create the conditions for that decline.

Is it pleasant to read? No. Is it useful? Very. Especially because it turns the story from vague national shame into something much more concrete: names, policies, timelines, decisions.

I knew most of what happened already, but the depth and accumulation here gave it a different weight. Less “Canada also has a dark history” and more “this country was built through administrative violence, and the paperwork was part of the weapon.”