September 30th marks 50 years since the Native People’s Caravan arrived at Parliament Hill.
The anniversary may not be widely recognized, but the memory is important to keep alive.
For over two weeks, the Caravan travelled from Vancouver across Canada, picking up more people along the way, and with others coming to Ottawa from the other direction(s) too.
And it culminated in a severe instance of police brutality and repression, as RCMP attacked the Caravan people on Parliament Hill, while in the background the opening ceremonies for the Fall session of Parliament went on uninterrupted.
This space is to introduce some of the documentation of the Caravan, so more people can know about it.
I don’t think it is much known about, and I don’t think there are many commemorative events planned, but at least this way it can be more recognized as part of the trajectory of history that has brought us to where we are now.
This is a bare-bones version of an archive, with more to come later.
The items listed below are the most substantive ones I’m aware of, though I have a number of other links I want to include in a spreadsheet type of format.
To start with:
- The prime resource I know of for learning about the Caravan, is Vern Harper’s book, published in 1979:
“Following The Red Path: The Native People’s Caravan, 1974“.It can be viewed and/or downloaded for free at The Internet Archive: at link 1, or link 2.
Vern Harper was one of the leaders of the Caravan.
- In June 2023 for Indigenous History Month, there was a webinar,
“Honouring Elder Vern Harper and the Native People’s Caravan” hosted by the Toronto Workers History Project.They have since posted the full recording (1 hour, 40 minutes).
Maria Campbell was one of the speakers, and starting at around the 1hr 06min mark, she gets into the description of the events in Ottawa on September 30th. At 1hr 23min 30 sec, she talks about the desire to build a collection of all the stories from the Caravan, to help people know what happened.
The other two speakers featured in the webinar were Clayton Shirt, now recognized as an Elder who at the age of seven – as Vern Harper’s son – was also part of the Caravan, and Jonathin Rudin, of Aboriginal Legal Services in Toronto, who worked with Harper in later decades.
- Louis Cameron was another of the leaders of the Caravan, and there is an in-depth interview with him republished* in the Oh-Toh-Kin newspaper (1992 – v1,n1).
This link goes direct to the interview on pages 14-15 (introduced on page 13).
The interview covers both the Native People’s Caravan, and the Occupation of Anicinabe Park in Kenora that occurred earlier that year and provided momentum and inspiration to the Caravan. The interview was originally conducted in 1974 by James Burke and published in his book, Paper Tomahawks: From Red Tape to Red Power (1976) - Canada’s Other Red Scare: Indigenous Protest and Colonial Encounters during the Global Sixties is a book by Scott Rutherford, published in 2020, that has one chapter devoted to the Native People’s Caravan. The previous chapter is about the Anicinabe Park Occupation, and the following (and concluding chapter) is a letter by the author to the late Louis Cameron.
The book’s main page is at the publisher McGill University Press’s site; it is also available online via JSTOR subscription; there is a 35-page preview at Google Books; and the author’s full academic thesis upon which the book is based, is available for free download from Collections Canada.
- (ADDED) There was a very in-depth article published in the January 1975 issue of Canadian Dimension magazine. Fortunately, they very recently have made all their archives available online via the University of Manitoba Library: the full January 1975 issue is here – but it is 121 MB file size download.
The article was entitled “Welcome to Ottawa! The Native People’s Caravan,” by David Ticoll and Stan Persky. It spans pages 14 – 31. I’ve made a custom PDF of it (a 31 MB file size) for anyone who wants a smaller download.
*This post was most recently updated on May 03, 2025.
As mentioned, this post is currently ‘bare-bones’, but there are a significant amount of additional sources I will be adding.
Also, please reach out (preferably by email) with any further suggestions of content or feedback.
For now, below is an example of the further content I will be adding – this is the cover page from The Native People weekly newspaper, October 4, 1974 issue front page.
Interdependent media & in-person learning opportunities for those who are inspired to be part of movements for social justice.
