Friendship Centres in Canada, 1959–1977

Abstract

Friendship Centres in Canada, 1959–1977 Will Langford (bio) Friendship Centres were, and are, social service providers and social and cultural institutions directed toward Aboriginal peoples in Canadian cities and towns.1 They were the product of ameliorist Indigenous and non-Indigenous community social action and government intervention in response to the postwar migration of Aboriginal peoples to urban areas. Discussions of post–World War II Aboriginal activism have tended to foreground the emergence of Indigenous political organizations and the rise of red power militancy in the mid-1960s, resistance movements that were piqued in Canada in the early 1970s in response to the federal government’s proposal in 1969 to unilaterally abrogate treaty rights.2 Friendship Centres both related to and in some cases preceded these forms of activism and constituted an important aspect of postwar Indigenous organizing and mobilization. They were also, in many respects, analogous to the Indian Centers organized in the United States as early as the mid-1950s but especially from the 1970s.3 [End Page 1] Historians have begun to explore the connections of Friendship Centres to urban Aboriginal activism and to government policy in the 1950s and 1960s.4 In broadening the historical lens beyond individual centers and beyond the rhetorical confines of government policy, this political history essay puts in focus the experiences, possibilities, and contradictions of Friendship Centres in Canada between 1959 and 1977.5 It relies largely on the archival records of the Citizenship Branch, which collected center reports and materials and produced its own in the course of administering center grants. Combining empirical and textual analysis, this article examines the ideological and political bases of centers, contestation over their practices, the shifting character of public policy, and the often-implicit theme of friendship. The early history of Friendship Centres was marked by struggle over their control and, to an extent, over their practices and meaning. Informed by social scientific thinking and envisioned by government and community social service establishments as places of social assistance and cultural change, Friendship Centres were increasingly turned by Aboriginal activists into emergent places of Indigenous resistance and urban community. There were also important contradictions. On the one hand, Friendship Centres confounded social scientific expectation over the role of culture and the provision of social services. In the delivery of useful services and the elaboration of social and cultural activities, centers were generally supportive of broader claims to socioeconomic equality, cultural autonomy, and recognition of Aboriginal rights. Moreover, as I will suggest in closing, the affective bonds of friendship had the potential to generate solidarity-based ties among Aboriginal peoples and with non-Indigenous allies. On the other hand, the political meaning of Friendship Centres was indeterminate. Were centers status quo institutions that brushed over more fundamental questions about structural inequality? The relationship of Friendship Centre reformism relative to antiracist and anti-imperialist action remained uncertain and went largely uninterrogated. migration, integration, and the origins of friendship centres, 1958–1964 Aboriginal peoples moved to Canadian cities in increasing numbers in the decades following World War II. In the 1941 census, 4,469 “Indians,” or 3.6 percent of the total “Indian” population, were enumerated in urban areas. These counts rose to 11,015 and 6.7 percent in 1951; 28,382 and 12.9 percent in 1961; and, significantly, 90,705 and 30.7 percent in 1971.6 Evelyn Peters has demonstrated, though, that the total Aboriginal population in major Canadian cities remained quite low until the mid-1970s.7 A concurrent process of urbanization took place in the United States.8 Rising populations and chronic lack of economic prospects in rural areas prompted a growing, mobile group of young Aboriginal people to move to cities for employment and education and to escape reserves and residential schools. Indian Affairs placed some Aboriginal youth in urban secondary schools to continue their education or in sanatoriums to recover from tuberculosis. It also encouraged urbanization [End Page 2] through vocational training efforts and an Indian Placement and Relocation Program begun in 1957.9 Yet many more migrants moved of their own accord. Women outnumbered men, as cities offered an escape from the surveillance and assimilation policies of reserves...