Canada's Nigger: The True Story of the Indian in Canada

This book presents a comprehensive indictment of Canada's treatment of Indigenous peoples as an ongoing, state-organized campaign of cultural genocide spanning over two centuries. Author Doug Doucette argues that from the earliest British colonial rule through Confederation to the present day, systematic oppression has created outcomes for Indigenous peoples that are—on measurable indicators like incarceration, tuberculosis, suicide, and child apprehension—worse than those of African Americans in the United States.

The book traces this machinery chronologically: the Indian Act of 1876 establishing permanent wardship; the potlatch ban criminalizing ceremony; Duncan Campbell Scott's expansion of residential schools and his 1914 admission that fifty percent of pupils "did not live to benefit"; the 1907 Bryce Report documenting tuberculosis deaths in infected dormitories; biological warfare through smallpox blankets; scalp bounty proclamations; the betrayal at the Treaty of Ghent; Indigenous enslavement (the panis); the Sixties Scoop; and contemporary crises in housing, water, healthcare, and missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls.

Doucette carefully distinguishes documented history from myths—refusing to use the unverified "final solution" letter attributed to Scott—while demonstrating that the authenticated record is damning enough. He examines recent Federal Court rulings in St. Theresa Point and Shamattawa finding Canada owes fiduciary duties to provide adequate housing and safe drinking water on reserves.

The title uses a racial slur deliberately to force recognition that Canadian racism is not a milder cousin of American racism. Yet the book also documents Indigenous resilience, language revitalization, and successful self-governance initiatives. The central question: will Canada dismantle the colonial structure or merely fund it more generously?