the plain Indians pitched their tents. Scattered around them we found a few vestiges of the people who once owned our land -a number of arrow heads and some stone hammers.

                Growing up in the same fashion as all our neighbours' children, we never dreamed that the land we lived on had been taken away from its millennia-old inhabitants, then given free to others brought in from the four corners of the world.  Our digging of what we thought was an Indian grave and our endless search for arrow heads were to us games in the world of fantasy.  In our minds, the people who left these remains were not humans like ourselves.  They were like the factitious characters in the stories from the Arabian Nights which our mother often related during the cold winter evenings.

                We must have picked up this outlook from our few playmates - no doubt, influenced by their parents' thinking.  As poor Syrian immigrants with deep inferiority complexes, we mimicked those we thought were real Canadians.  The history of the conquest of the West with its broken treaties and betrayals were never known or talked about in our family circle.  Yet, we had inherited the bounty of these unfulfilled promises.  No one questioned the fact that like almost all the western pioneers, we were living on stolen land.  Parroting others, we mouthed the phrases, 'the only good Indian is a dead Indian', 'Drunken Indian  and  'Indian giver', never dreaming we were insulting our fellow men.

                Yet, for hundreds of years, in a corner of the vast expanse of the windswept and treeless prairies - a land which some say God could have given to Cain - the Plain Indians pitched their tents.  Following the migrating herds of buffalo from whom they derived almost all the necessities of life, they lived in a relatively secure world with their own laws, languages and religions.  The cultures in which they were emersed satisfied all their earthly and afterlife needs.  However, since they left no records, by the time my parents and other newcomers had inherited their lands, it was as if they had never existed.

                The plain Crees and Assiniboine, like most of the Western Hemisphere's Indians, were exceptionally friendly and hospitable to the first white men who entered their lands -  that is - until the strangers brought their gifts of guns, rum, smallpox and syphilis.  In the ensuing years, these lords of the prairies came to detest the Europeans, but by the time this feeling of hatred had become widespread, it was too late.  There was scarcely any of them left. The few who remained have lingered, until our times, on the fringes of the white man's civilization.   Unlike their American brethren who killed their Indians systematically, the Canadian settlers were much more humane, they destroyed them unwittingly.

                After the defeat of the Riel Rebellion at Batoche in 1885, the spirit of the proud western Indian was broken.  Demoralization and accelerated disintegration of native culture rapidly followed.  At the same time, the herds of buffalo, from 50 to 100 thousand each, which once darkened the prairies had disappeared.  White hunters had virtually exterminated this prairie beast on which the Plain Indians depended. 

                In summer, they ate the meat fresh and made pemmican with the remainder for the harsh winter months. Hides, sinews, bones and hair - everything was used in their daily life. After the bison was gone, ordeals of starvation became common and this, added to the diseases introduced by the Europeans, almost wiped out the original inhabitants of the western plains.

                Weakened by lack of nourishment and almost continual sickness, the old and young often died in the cold winter months.  Finding no way out of their dilemma, women often sold themselves to sex-starved railway workers, settlers or mounties.  Only in liquor could Indians find solace and forget their harsh life.  Hence, the phrase 'drunken Indian' came into being.

                The few that remained were put into reservations - a type of 19th century concentration camps.  Those who left the reservations to try and better their lives were not, like my parents, given land or livestock or trained for jobs in the newly established towns.  They lingered in the never never land of make believe.

                On the other hand, the settlers who had been given their lands prospered or moved away and melted into mainstream Canadian society.  But many of the Indians, ensnared by the white mens laws have never been allowed to climb out of the abyss in which they have fallen.  As late as a few years ago when a proposed Canadian constitution, belatedly gave back to the Indians a few of their stolen rights, the Canadians rejected it.  It is apparent a great many have not advanced in their thinking from the days when we immigrant children searched for days around the circles of stone for traces of a people who had been dehumanized.

                                                                                                                                  Habeeb Salloum