I learned a lot by reading this article summarizing Macdonald's handling of the "Indian Question":
https://nationalpost-com.cdn.ampproj...ebb938ff8/amp/
Quote:
This was clearly an Ottawa that had no time for the rights and culture of what they would have called “savage” nations. Even in that context, over his career Macdonald would pursue an Indigenous policy so draconian that even his contemporaries would come to accuse him of going beyond the pale.
“Macdonald basically had Indigenous people locked down so tightly that they became irrelevant after 1885,” said James Daschuk, the author of the bestseller Clearing the Plains, from which many of the primary sources quoted in this article were obtained.
When Macdonald took office for the second and last time in 1878, the plains were in the grip of what is still one of the worst human disasters in Canadian history.
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