The Moonspeaker:
Where Some Ideas Are Stranger Than Others...

Quite A Coincidence

These days most people in what is currently called canada are quietly aware that until very recently all Indigenous spiritual practices were treated as illegal by the colonial government. There were various levels of rationalization claimed for this right into the late twentieth century. I encountered more than one person who, no longer able to claim christianity should be the only religion allowed at all, and with Indigenous poverty too visible to allow sniping at supposed waste of goods and money, resorted to claims that Indigenous ceremonies mostly involved torture and mutilation. For many who have lived on the Plains, such people love to trot out what they think the Sundance entails. I have encountered individuals who strive for consistency, and so decry any practice for spiritual or other reasons than medical that require breaking the skin. This strikes me as a more reasoned position, although it does not actually get at the fundamental reasons colonizing governments ban Indigenous spiritual practices. Those governments are well aware that such bans enable colonial authorities and colonists more generally to undertake mass cultural warfare against Indigenous peoples via missionisation, creation of reserves cum concentration camps, pervasive kidnapping and abuse of Indigenous children, and arrest and incarceration of spiritual leaders in prisons and/or insane asylums. At one point Indigenous peoples living on reserves were not allowed to have curtains so that the so-called "Indian agents" and other wardens, including priests and farm instructors, could look inside. There is no need to take my word for this. Feel free to have a look at the freely available reports from the canadian commissions on Aboriginal peoples, residential schools, and missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.

Now, "very recently" in fact refers to 1951, when the canadian federal government stopped printing the section of the "Indian Act" that declared Indigenous ceremonies illegal. The last version of the section before its quiet deletion dates to 1884, and said:

Every Indian or other person who engages in or assists in celebrating the Indian festival known as the "Potlatch" or in the Indian dance known as the "Tamanawas" is guilty of a misdemeanour, and shall be liable to imprisonment for a term of not more than six nor less than two months in any gaol or other place of confinement; and any Indian or other person who encourages, either directly or indirectly, an Indian or Indians to get up such a festival or dance, or to celebrate the same, or who shall assist in the celebration of the same is guilty of a like offence, and shall be liable to the same punishment.

There is a great deal of interesting material here. As it happens, it was only recently that I learned the term "Tamanawas" refers to the Sundance, and that originally this was the main focus of the colonial ban on Indigenous ceremonies. The timing is also telltale, because the 1880s was precisely when the canadian federal government was funding a more and more violent invasion of the northern plains, and striving by every means possible to break the strength of the Cree, Blackfoot, Nakota, Lakota, Dakota, Saulteaux, and Northwest Métis. Disrupting their ceremonies and encouraging social division by sending in missionaries and priests deemed to have the right attitude were as important if not more than setting up the paramilitary organization first known as the northwest mounted police. Reference to the "Potlatch" was added in later to help provide retrospective license for missionary and police harassment of Northwest Coast First Nations. Note also the reference to "or other place of confinement," which allowed for all manner of less than savoury options. Yet perhaps most striking is what isn't there, considering how common it used to be to hear settlers claim Indigenous ceremonies, especially the Sundance, involve mutilation or torture. If this were so, the legislators would have been all over it, and a person charged under this section would certainly not be facing the prospect of a misdemeanour charge. Instead, there would probably be at least another subsection clearly setting out what activities in ceremony involved bodily harm, and these would be defined as felonies. But that would have been awkward, and liable to provoke questions about residential schools and perhaps even the typical work conditions on large construction projects of the day.

Snapshot of the header of the uk act passed in 1951 to repeal their 1735 witchcraft act, called the 'fraudulent medium act.' Yes, these are the real names of the acts, which are as ever, extremely poliical. The pdf version of the 1951 act was accessed at the uk's legislation website 15 december 2024.

These are some of the things I learned while putting together a collection of the various acts used to create and then change the "Indian Act" until the 2010s, when the canadian federal government of the day began the present pattern of abuse of the "omnibus act." While omnibus acts are often presented as a means to get "more done faster" they introduce the same egregious issues as the slabs of legislation proposed in the united states. The omnibus bills are large, with many pieces all presented together in three hundred pages or more of text, and these must be parsed carefully to find relevant changes that someties amount to only a sentence or two or a clause. This is of course far less transparent than such formerly standard items as "An Act to Further Amend the Indian Act" of the relevant year. For 1951, besides silently dropping the ban on Indigenous ceremonies, amendments explicitly allowed status Indians to do the following:

• slaughter and sell their livestock without getting permission from an Indian agent first;
• women to vote in band elections; and
• pursue land claims and hire lawyers for same.

It also imposed compulsory enfranchisement, meaning removal of status under the "Indian Act" for any First Nation woman who married a non-status man, and denial of status to any of their children. So a lot was happening to make this year stand out for Indigenous people affected by the "Indian Act" in 1951. It is a matter of great pride among First Nations and Northwest Métis that they resisted the ceremony ban so thoroughly the canadian federal government finally had to give up on enforcing it, even if they couldn't have the grace to overtly repeal it. There seemed nothing else to add when writing up a summary of this material for the class I was teaching. That is, until the most recent efforts in scotland to at least pardon women executed as witches there, and a news article noting in passing that the united kingdom's witchcraft act was repealed and replaced with a new act in 1951.

Now there is quite the coincidence, and it seemed far too good to be true. While there are unmistakable parallels between how the upper and industrializing classes used land enclosure and interference with ceremonies and spirituality of the labouring classes at home and Indigenous peoples abroad, it seemed like this change in legislation must have been earlier, or the reference was to a later amendment to the original repeal of the Witchcraft Act. So I tracked them both down, first the original 1735 Witchcraft Act, which the english government does not provide a copy or transcription of online. In fact, for almost anything pre-1988, it is necessary to check The Statutes Project for anyone who has no ready access to the british library or the british parliamentary library. With the 1735 act identified, this provided enough information to accurately identify the act passed later to repeal it. This turned out to be the 15 Geo. 6 Fraudulent Mediums Act, which was indeed passed in 1951. So the coincidence of timing is real, although things are otherwise quite different, because the british members of parliament apparently felt unable to simply drop the notion of witchcraft as such. After all, in their context, they remained insistent that even if witchcraft was not a rival spiritual practice or an outright attack on their church, then there must still be fraudsters claiming to be spirit mediums to charge and punish.

To be sure it is not so coincidental that the ceremony ban section of the "Indian Act" was not replaced with something like the british attempt to save face by declaring against fraudulent mediums instead. Besides Indigenous ceremony being part of ongoing, land-based Indigenous cultures, Indigenous communities did not go in for the table turning and séance craze that affected much of the british and colonial british middle and upper classes through the late eighteenth and early twentieth century. When it comes to fraud, potential charges are more likely to come via general canadian federal or provincial law rather than a specific act created in hopes of getting out of Treaty obligations by pretending to define Indigenous people out of existence.