EDITOR'S COMMENT: For non-Canadians: Charlie Angus is a Member of our House of Parliament, based in northern Ontario, since 2004. He is a member of the New Democratic Party (which thinks of itself, naively, as socialist) and a long-time advocate for social justice. -prh, Editor Canadians like to think that the expansion into the West was more civilized here than in the United States -- this song will change that. In "Four Horses", NDP MP Charlie Angus sings the agonizing story of John A. MacDonald's policy to starve First Nations peoples in order to make way for the Canadian Pacific Railway in the 1880s. Angus was inspired by the book Clearing The Plains by James Daschuk, which details how food promised in Treaty No. 6 was withheld by Canadian officials in order to force aboriginals to move to appointed reserves. At the time, MacDonald even boasted that First Nations peoples were being kept on the "verge of actual starvation" in an attempt to silence critics of the mounting cost of the railway, according to Daschuk. MacDonald's policies were recently cited in an open letter urging the United Nations to declare Canada's treatment of its aboriginal peoples "genocide." Angus told The Globe and Mail that MacDonald did many good things for Canada, but that we can no longer ignore "the policies that tried to destroy a people." "Mr. Macdonald has been able to escape all that because we write our history as boring, that all our people were well-meaning and boring," Angus said to the Globe. "So that’s the whole line of the song: Forget what you were taught about the Medicine Line." Angus, who is also a professional musician, has been an outspoken critic of the Conservative government's approach to First Nations peoples. In 2011, he was among the first to shine light on the deplorable situation on the Attawapiskat reserve in his Northern Ontario riding. The emergency on the reserve captured the attention of the nation and is seen by many as the opening act of the Idle No More movement. "Four Horses" is the first song off Angus' new record "Great Divide." Read all the lyrics below the video. To Fort Qu'appelle came a Dapple Grey Source URL |