Mi'kmaw Teaching and Learning Resources

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33 1/2
The Comm appointed to inquire into & to report on the condition of the Indians in this province, report. That owing to the failure of the resourses of hunting & fishing on which this distressed people depended for their existence their condition has become miserable in the extreme & calls loudly for the humane consideration & interference of the legislature of this province - and when it is remembered that the distress of these the aboriginal proprietors of this country, are chiefly occasioned by the settlements of those people whom this legislature represents & their occupancy of of those situations from which the former chiefly drew their [substinance?] their claims in the opinion of your committee become irresistable

Such however is the natural [insolence?] of these people & such the unhappy propensity of great numbers of them to the vice of drunkeness that most exertions of charity towards their relief have only the effect of increasing these dispositions, & your committee are formily of opinion that the supplies here to fore so liberally granted to them by our mother country instead of proving ultimately beneficial to them have generally tended to divest them from those pursuits on which their subsistance depended & to increase those habits of precarious dependance which form so striking