Harold Cardinal - The "White Paper" and The Unjust Society

The "White Paper" and The Unjust Society

Cardinal rose to national prominence in the late 1960s. In 1968, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau proclaimed Canada to be a "just society." However, after a promising round of consultations between the government of Canada and aboriginal leaders in which issues of Aboriginal and Treaty rights and the right of self-government were prominently discussed, Aboriginal people were outraged when Trudeau’s Minister of Indian Affairs, the Hon. Jean Chrétien (later Prime Minister of Canada) introduced a "White Paper" which advocated the elimination of separate legal status for native people in Canada. The white paper amounted to an assimilation program which, if implemented, would have repealed the Indian Act, transferred responsibility for Indian Affairs to the provinces and terminated the rights of Indians under the various treaties they had made with the Crown.

In 1969, Cardinal swept open what he called, in his first book The Unjust Society, (cf. Just Society) the "buckskin curtain" between aboriginal people and mainstream society with force that was backed up with knowledge, understanding, dignity, anger and pride. The result, as expressed in the title of his second book, published in 1977, was The Rebirth of Canada's Indians as a political force in Canada.

The Unjust Society was Cardinal's personal response to the Chrétien/Trudeau White Paper. It became an immediate Canadian best-seller and was reprinted in 2000 with a new introduction by Cardinal. The Unjust Society was instrumental in causing the Canadian government to abandon the assimilationist policy of the White Paper. Cardinal was also the principal author of the Indian Association of Alberta's response to the White Paper, entitled Citizen's Plus' or known as 'The Red Paper. Cardinal's words galvanized the First Nations of Canada into action. The result was a complete about-face by the federal government on the policies of the White Paper and the establishment of joint meetings between First Nations and the federal cabinet in the early 1970s.

Cardinal’s gift for satire was displayed in his early writings, turning Trudeau's promise of a “just society” into an “unjust society” and a “white paper” into “red paper”, and then equating the brutal slaughter of American Indians by the U.S. Cavalry with bayonet and Hotchkiss guns with the cultural genocide which the Canadian government was perpetrating on aboriginal people with paper.

Cardinal’s lifelong demand for radical changes in policy on aboriginal rights, education, social programs and economic development was a beacon of hope for Canada’s First Nations people.