1) Hepathos wins.

2) Eugenics was the brainchild of Sir Francis Gordon, of the English Upper crust, and he was inspired by Darwin and Malthus (England and England). He was mainly wanting to go after the poor if I remember.

Back in one of my local history classes, I did a big project on the Alberta Eugenics board (that being where I lived at the time)(Alberta, not the actual Board), which ran from 1928 – 1972). It was supposedly based on intelligence and poverty, but it was quite clearly a bias test meant to eliminate the Native, French and Chinese population. Funny thing is, most Albertans have never heard of it. All very well documented and organized too. I don’t know many internal memoes and such I sorted through.

We’re talking about the 1930s here. And completely non-standarized tests. Many of the early ones were really bad, for example: What can you tell me about the Tudor Dynasty? How about Anglican doctrine, the Glorious Revolution, etc? Stuff white Canadians would have known at the time. Like I said, by the fifties it was more like standardized intelligence tests, but not in the 30s.

Ah, but Magnus, you didn’t read close enough. Keep in mind that I had to defend this to one of the world experts in Alberta’s History.
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1) AEB’s activities can be divided into phases. The original series of tests didn’t resemble IQ tests in any reasonable ways (with exceptions – all candidates for sterilization had to be send from a hospital or some other similar institution, so it varied, but in terms of rural population, it’s doubtful weather any of these people had received an IQ test). Like I hinted at, they read more like a combination of Protestant indoctrination and maoist purgings. The idea wasn’t to eliminate the non-whites, but all who didn’t fit a very narrow ideological view involving the age-old Anglican/Protestant feud. The natives got caught up in it, yes: You’ll notice I mentioned that in the early phase, the natives sterilized were largely those who didn’t attend residential schools. Not a coincidence. Also, those who attended Catholic residential schools were amongst the few residential students to have been sterilized in this early phase. And of course, the virtual dissapearance of the French here, and Eastern Europeans were targeted disproportionately as well. Skin colour was never the issue, the very cultural assumtions that form the foundations of our lives were targeted. More devious in my opinion. Were I around back then, I would be a potential target: Though I’m Latin American, I could pass as white, but having been raised Catholic and knowing virtually nothing about Anglicanism, xenophobic rural institutions would have no doubt reccomended me to the board, and because the AEB considered English Culture as a measuring stick for intelligence, no doubt I would have failed.

Interestingly, one of these guys, MacEachran, who considered himself a philosopher before a psychologist, had lived in Germany, spoke German and studied under some prominent future Nazis. He was suspiciously quiet about that by the late 30s and mostly wronte long volumes on Plato. Furthermore, friends and associates say that he didn’t pay close attention to the cases he was approving when dealing with minorities: How could he, only four people had the final say on thousands of patients. Some years in the thirties, they would have been approving 2-3 cases a day. Do you think you can assess a person’s complete mental, physical state, the heridible effects and so on in a few hours? And the council of four were psychologists, their understanding of genetics was minimal even by the standards of the day. It’s thought that very few of these conditions are even inheritable, strickly speaking.

3) Again mentioned above, the process became more regular. In the late thirties, a series of amendments were passed which regularized the process. The patient’s own approval was now required (which complicated things, as in Canadian law, one must have one’s faculties to agree to a contract), and standardized IQ testing became the norm. By the 1950s, virtually no one accepted genetics, but the AEB had become less maleficient and generally sterilized cases of serious mental health. Nota bene: It is unanimously accepted both by the court system and the Professors specializing in Alberta’s history at UoC and, I’m told, UoA, that there was a lot of bullying, poor sanitation, etc, which brings me to my next point.

3) You state that theory beautifully, Magnus, about breeding out native addiction, but I never saw a reference to it. No, most of the stuff in the thirties was about eleminating crime deviancy, and, hilariously, the fear that smart people might be bread out of existance. The idea was that smart people represented a fixed percentage of the population, and each time a smart person married a less smart person, the children would be half-stupid and eventually smart people would vanish. Here’s where we start getting into the real crazy stuff, but that’s beyond the scope of this comment. I’ll just say that there was the clear and frequently stated assumtion that Intelligence was a feature found only amonsgst the rich and protestants, and pre-Ottoman Greeks. There was nothing resembling scientific method. You were dealing exculsively in the realm of the ancient biases of the old world.

4) Ethical issues. Again, you stated your theory about native addictions beautifully, but few people understood or cared, and those that did were mainly anthropologists. Psychologists in Alberta were busy trying to cure the world of ‘sexual deviancy’, which included, amongst other things, irregular menstration (ask a doctor or a few females how common that is) or masturbation (you’re a guy, right?), which they were experimenting to find a suitable cure for. Many unagreed to castrations were performed for medical testing, many lady parts were gutted, for lack of a scientific term. Of the reccomended WASP patients and non-WASP patients, guess which ones were approved more often, and then guess which group was more frequently passed along for medical testing. Basically, if they caught you squeezing one off, and they didn’t want a fucking catholic in their neighbourhood, they could send you off to AEB, and then the lab.

I’m gonna have a smoke and finnish this later. You raise some interesting points that deserve a fair response.

First of, I used the word WASP up there, which is unfair: Scottish protestants were also genetically acceptable.
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The History of Protestant Hegemony In Alberta
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On the dawn of Dominion, southern Alberta was virtually untouched by the Whites, save a few trading posts near Edmonton, and Whiskey Traders on the border. Canada’s first substatial contact with the Natives involved an influential band chief by the name of Crowfoot. Crowfoot was a quick learner when it came to white culture, and probably a genius: If you can ever find his Biography, it’s one of the best Canadian history books you’ll ever read. He’d been dealing with the fur traders for a while, and he understood from the beginning that the mounties made better allies than enemies: He enlisted them on the condition that they fight the Whiskey Traders, and because the Canadians were looking to prevent American incursions, they were more than happy to comply.
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Crowfoot was only ever Cheif of his own band. There were tribes, but they involved mutual decisions by band chiefs, who could easily change tribes, as the people could easily change bands. They didn’t have big chiefs in those parts, but Crowfoot understood that there were a whole lot of whites, and that a railroad was quickly approaching, something none of the other cheifs could concieve of. He also knew that the whites were planning to move in, and had been forcing treaties on the easterly tribes. Crowfoot spent years negotiating both amongst the other chiefs and the whites in order to obtain a good deal for the southern nations as a whole.
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This wasn’t an easy process. The only translators spoke only Cree, not a word of Blackfoot, or the local Lakota languages (except one guy, who was crazy). Crowfoot was one of the few Cheifs who could understand any Cree at all, and even then a different dialect. Plus he’d had little contact with the non-Blackfoot speaking chiefs. But he was a genius. He not only organized a loose aliance, but he knew how to play the whites off against each other: He dealt almost exclusively with the French Catholics, who were largely unsympathetic to the Anglos, and were religious enough to be persuaded towards fighting for the underdog. Here’s a good example:
www.biographi.ca/EN/ShowBio.asp?BioId=41654&query=
Another was Father Lacombe, another brilliant man, and more or less the founder of Calgary. The two of them also, importantly, negotiated a peace with the Cree.
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Why were the Treaty Seven Tribes so important? Years of trade with American Outlaws had provided them with more guns and horses than all the other Canadian Prairie Tribes combined. Had they joined the North West Rebellion, it would have been as brutal and bloody as the recent Battle of Little Bighorn (amongst others). In exchange for a good treaty (which only Crowfoot, amongst the cheifs, could even understand the language it was translated into) , ensured the building of the railroad and, eventually, a quick and easy Canadian victory in the NW Rebellion:
www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/obj/h32/f1/xx004701-v6.jpg
^One of the most important documents in Canadian history.
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Read Treaty 7:
www.treaty7.org/Article.aspx?ArticleID=38
Quite fair compared to virtually every other treaty, no? In fact, it should have been one of the prouder moments for both the First Nations and White Canadians. Also, very cheap for the whites. All it meant was big reservations nd cattle, really.
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The first wave of settlers were almost uniformly French. What became Alberta was, for about a decade, mainly French Speaking. However, once the railroad was complete, the government made great efforts to populate the land with as many protestants as possible. French settlers were evicted often, and land – even some treaty land – was handed off to protestants for pennies. Secretarian tensions were running high back east, and there was a time when Canada was close to becoming an Ireland.
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Not one article of Treaty 7 was fufilled till about the 1960s, and it’s yet to be entirely fufilled to this day. The Laurier government in particular thought the treaties inconvenient and instituted draconian restrictions on every aspect of native life. The Blackfoot were not only forbidden from taking part in any kind of traditional religious ritual but their movement was tracked: Should they leave the reservation, it would have to be with hard to obtain permissions. That’s just scratching the surface. By this time, Crowfoot had died of old age, reservation children were dying of malnutrition (no cattle + no buffalo + no farm tools + no money). The government did provide occasional ‘temporary’ food until the cattle could be arranged, but that was intermittent at best. Plus, reservation land was annexed, decimating some reservations (famously Siksika, but also Kainai, Stoney and I think Sarcee/Tsuu Ts’ina).
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To summarize: The treaty was broken, the horses and ammunition were mainly confiscated, the reservations were shrunk, the natives – including babies – were starved to death but not allowed to leave the reservations to look for work. The French were similarly evicted from their farms, except in the far north, and few would employ them, or even let them in stores. For the record, there are still towns in rural Alberta with “No Indians, No Irish, No French” painted on the doors. You know, tradition. Good enough for you Magnus?