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Infographic / Treaties, Rights and Title

A Brief History of Centralization

This comic graphically illustrates a painful experiment the Department of Indian Affairs enacted on the Mik’maq and Maliseet nations. For the purpose of economic efficiency and to remove the First Nations from white sight, in the 1940s these Indigenous communities were uprooted from their villages and placed on four central reserves in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. The results were disastrous and genocidal and the experiment was quietly ended by the end of the 1950s.

This resource was created as part of the Yellowhead Institute Cash Back Red Paper. Picking up from Land Back, the first Red Paper by Yellowhead about the project of land reclamation, Cash Back looks at how the dispossession of Indigenous lands created a dependency on the state due to the loss of economic livelihood. Cash Back is about restitution from the perspective of stolen wealth.

Learn more at cashback.yellowheadinstitute.org

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