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On Nov. 7, 1885, Donald Smith drove the last spike into the Canadian Pacific Railway, completing the transcontinental route.
“A week later, Métis leader Louis Riel, who had once successfully negotiated with Ottawa for Métis land rights, was hanged for treason,” Joe Bongiorno writes. “The railway transported Canada’s first army to crush Métis uprisings.”
Tracing the history of Canada’s railways across the country, Bongiorno makes a case for how these routes became “vehicles for expropriation” in the eyes of First Nations people.
“Nov. 7 marked the realization of John A. Macdonald’s ‘national dream,’” he writes. “… But to those who feel excluded from the grand designs of Macdonald’s dream, railways, pipelines and future infrastructure projects may erode what remains of their nations within Canada, rather than bind them all together.”
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