Memorial to Sir Wilfred Laurier, Premier of the Dominion of Canada from the Chiefs of the Shuswap,
Okanagan and Couteau Tribes of British Columbia presented at Kamloops, BC,
August 25, 1910
Dear Sir and Father,
We take this opportunity of your visiting Kamloops to speak a few words to you. We welcome you here, and we are glad we have met you in our country. We want you to be interested in us, and to understand more fully the conditions under which we live.
We expect much of you as the head of this great Canadian Nation, and feel confident you will see that we receive fair and honorable treatment. Our confidence in you has increased since we noted of late the attitude of your government towards the Indian rights movement of this country and we hope with your help our wrongs may at last be righted.
We speak to you more freely because you are a member of the white race with whom we first became acquainted, and which we call in our tongue "real whites" to the latter (viz., the fur-traders of the Northwest and Hudson's Bay companies. As the great majority of the companies' employees were French speaking, the term latterly became applied by us as a designation for the whole French race.)
The "real whites" we found were good people. We could depend on their word, and we trusted and respected them. They did not interfere with us nor attempt to break up our tribal organizations, laws, and customs. They did not try to force their ideas of things to us to our harm. Nor did they stop us from catching fish, hunting and so on. They never tried to steal or appropriate our country and treated our chiefs as men. They were the first to find us in this country. We never asked them to come here, nevertheless we treated them kindly and hospitably and helped them all we could.
Download the full PDF of the Memorial to Sir Wilfred Laurier 1910 from various Interior Chiefs
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