colonial mind in post-secondary education, The

The Indians have really no right to the lands they claim, nor are they of any actual value or utility to them, and I cannot see why they should either retain these lands to the prejudice of the general interests of the colony, or be allowed to make a market of them either to the Government or to Individuals. (p. 143)

Trutch's conclusion here, that First Nations people have `no right to the lands they claim, nor are they of any actual value or utility to them' was based upon the belief that First Nations people were of inferior, sub-human status in relation to Europeans, as amplified here in Robin Fisher's (1992) writings:

Some colonists, like the journalist Donald Fraser, may have found that they had `taken a fancy to these Indians'; but more would have agreed with John Coles, a rancher, who wrote that jailing an Indian for being a vagabond was absurd since they were `all vagabonds with a very very few exceptions.' For the prejudiced individual among the colonists every aspect of the Indians and their society seemed to confirm their inferiority. (p.89)

Paul Tennant (1990) also reveals the prejudice toward First Nations people:

By the late 1880's there was unanimity among provincial politicians concerning the Indian question. Regardless of their faction or federal party loyalties, they believed the white myth that Indians had been primitive peoples without land and ownership, and they accepted the white doctrine that extension of British sovereignty had transformed an empty land into unencumbered crown land. In the provincial view, the surviving Indians were mere remnants of an irrelevant past with neither the right nor the means to influence their own unhappy future. (p.52) (My italics)

Finally, Edward Said (1996), in his paper on decolonizing the mind, writes the following:

All writers, intellectuals, and citizens necessarily confront the question of how as people living and working in one culture they relate to other cultures. Never has this been more of a challenge than during the postimperial period when the rise of nationalism has stimulated a more acute sense of ethnic difference and particularity. So long as England ruled India, for instance, the native elites in Delhi and Calcutta who were educated in British schools were taught that the English language, European culture, and the white race were inherently superior to anything that the Orient might produce by way of languages, cultures, or human species. (p. 92)

These early authors clearly outline core attitudes and beliefs that still exist today in First Nations/non-First Nations relations in Canadian society. For example, Andrew Coyne writes the following in his Commentary in the National Post: "But when the whole [the entire First Nations land question argument] is based on a legal and historical fiction - that aboriginal people were and are sovereign nations - it is long since time for a rethink" (March 8/2000). Coyne's rejection of the existence of First Nations as a people with distinct social and political structures who maintained sovereignty over their hereditary lands is an example of colonialist thought, as outlined previously by Tennant (1990) and Berger (1991). In fact, the European demonstration of power, authority and control over First Nations culture based on the belief of inherent superiority was exerted through warfare, larger numbers, a new technology that increased the pace of social evolution, and eventually government policies and legislation over First Nations peoples and their hereditary lands.