In
the late 1960s I was assigned by the newspaper I worked for, The Montreal Star, to investigate the
terrible conditions of housing being suffered by a group of Ojibwa Indians who,
years before, during the war, had left
their poverty-stricken reserve on the shores of a northern Ontario lake, and wound
up living in hovels in Armstrong, a small, isolated town which was the site of a Mid-Canada
Corridor station charged with warning of the approach of Soviet missiles,
planes or other forms of attack.
Under the guidance of a stalwart
chief called Willie John, who doubled as an agent of the Company of Young
Canadians, my assignment immediately plunged me into the miasma of Canada’s
dealings with “Indians and lands reserved for Indians”, to quote the British
North America Act under which Canada was established in 1867.
As I described it in the articles I
wrote, I recognized that the Indians in question were living lives similar to
those described by Maxim Gorki in his play The
Lower Depths which presented, as described in the online encyclopedia.com “a pessimistic, unredemptive portrait of
a destitute lower-class segment of
society.
On the way back home from that
assignment I called into the nearest Indian Affairs department office, and
asked them for information about the provenance of this group of stranded
people. They steadfastly refused to give me anything, would scarcely even talk to me. So, right out of the gate, as it
were, I discovered the strangled, incoherent, self-satisfied bureaucracy that the Department
of Indian Affairs and Northern Development as it was then called, had grown into in the almost 100 years since
it was established in 1876 as the father, mother, grandparent and the ruthless
boss of Canada’s long-suffering indigenous people.
I tell this because I quickly
discovered the full scandal of this
relationship as I plunged into the subject. The federal government is the
trustee for the interests of “the Indians”, even to the extent of managing
their money, and yet it was not fulfilling in any way the legal definition of
trusteeship. Within months of the
passing of the Act, the Deputy
Superintendent-General of Indian Affairs
declared that “the legal status of the Indians of Canada is that of
minors, with the government of Canada as their guardian.”
For generations this control was virtually
never questioned by European Canadians, most of whom knew nothing about it, but
it did come under persistent, determined, but always rejected criticism from
the indigenous people themselves. The Act at first had 100 sections, but within
30 years these had been expanded by its
guardian-government to 195 sections of draconian controls, designed to strip
from the charges everything that meant anything to them, and to replace their
beliefs, stories, morals, and rules for living, and the economy on which they
were based, with an equivalent
cornucopia of European values. In other words, the objective has always been to
get rid of “the Indians” by making them into white men (and women).
Over all these years, the government
has become expert in doing the opposite of what it says it is doing; or to put
it around the other way, they have attained an absolute mastery at the art of
lying about their objectives, pretending always to be acting in the interest of
their charges, while actually trying to bamboozle them with indirection, false
hints, and a relentless determination to dictate the agenda.
HOW
STRAIGHT IS RECONCILIATION?
And so we come to the present moment,
where a government has been elected on promises of seeking reconciliation, of
accepting the new rules laid down in the United
Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and of faithfully adhering to the promises of Section 35 of the
repatriated Canadian constitution of 1982, which says that
“(1) The existing aboriginal
and treaty rights of the aboriginal people in Canada are hereby recognized and affirmed. (2) In this Act, Aboriginal
Peoples of Canada includes
the Indian, Inuit, and Métis Peoples of Canada”.
The
half century that has passed since then have been employed in unsuccessful
efforts to decide on an agreed meaning of “the aboriginal and treaty rights”
guaranteed in the Constitution. Throughout all these years, the government, has
always insisted on one paramount clause
in any agreement with indigenous peoples, and that has come to be known as
“extinguishment”, which means they have insisted that the rights guaranteed in the Constitution
must be regarded as extinguished and replaced by the decision laid down in any
new agreements. One can imagine the ho-ha that would occur if other Canadians,
let’s imagine people of Scottish or Japanese or Ukrainian heritage, were
required to abandon their legal rights in order to qualify for assistance from
the government. In other words, the indigenous people have been literally
forced to let go of rights that have been guaranteed to them by the nation’s
Constitution, because if they don’t do that there will be no pot of gold
sitting at the end of their rainbow. What kind of guarantee is that, that can
be set aside and replaced by something that usually lies outside the parameters
of Aboriginal Title? (I remember that during his brief reign as Indian minister from 1984-86, David Crombie, previously the
Mayor of Toronto, asked a panel of experts if this extinguishment was still necessary and
they recommended extinguishment should be abandoned, but ….Crombie’s civil servants
got rid of him before anything could be done.)
Well, I have gone into his
background with my sketchy and incomplete outline and set it against the
federal government’s customary negotiating methods, because the current Trudeau
government is embarking on a “reconciliation” initiative designed to overcome
the traditional blockages against honest
negotiations. Or so they say. They have done so by issuing what they call a “Recognition
and Implementation of Indigenous Rights Framework”, within which a totally
new arrangement governing the relationships can negotiated. Although the
government claims to have consulted indigenous peoples widely, activists claim
that the Framework was simply sprung on them without consultation, except
possibly with the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) which the activists claim has
simply been co-opted by the government that finances their operation.
RECONCILIATION THE SAME AS WHITE PAPER 1969?
Some of these activists
have hearkened back to the infamous White Paper of 1969, proposed by Trudeau
the father, which, although arrived at after a similar round of consultations,
was something that not one Indian in the
consultations had suggested, namely abolishing the Indian Affairs department
and transferring management of Indian questions to the provincial governments
which at that time --- and one might say the same today in most cases --- had
never shown any sympathy with the indigenous people living within their
borders.
These activists revolve around
the Idle No More and Defenders of the Land movements. Here is
the burden of the case, as presented by the widely respected policy analyst,
Russell Diabo, a Mohawk from the Kahnawake
reserve near Montreal. (In the interest of full disclosure, I have known Diabo
for at least 40 years).
In a vigorous campaign he has been conducting
all over the country, Diabo has taken to calling the Framework agreement the White Paper 2.0 “which involves co-opting the Assembly of First Nations….to
manufacture consent through various co-development tables…. giving the illusion
that First Nations want these Bills, policies and changes. The Federal
Government is imposing an overwhelming ‘shock and awe’ strategy of massive
changes to legislation, policies and new funding agreements that are designed
by the Prime Ministers’ Office and the federal bureaucracy to complete the
assimilation-Termination objectives of the 50-year-old 1969 White Paper on Indian Policy.” He says that some 400 of Canada’s 600 Indian
bands are already working on so-called tables with federal negotiators.
He says the Framework was announced
on Feb14 2018 and its first aim has been “to remove bands from the Indian Act
and turn them into federally recognized ‘Indigenous Governments’ or ‘Nations’
that will have authority delegated to
them by the Government of Canada. They will be subject to the Canadian Constitution as
a 4th order of government—below not only the federal and provincial governments
but also with less power than municipal governments.”
He accuses the government of “taking
advantage of our poverty to change administrative agreements and funding that
forces us to accept policies that impact our sacred Treaties & Inherent
Title & Rights, while directly attacking our sovereign jurisdiction. This
is genocide through law and policy.” In addition Daibo says that issues of
central importance to the indigenous people have been rushed into Parliament as
add-ons to other bigger bills in order to get them through the legislative
process without adequate, and in some cases without any debate.
IMPORTANT DECISIONS HIDDEN IN OMNIBUS BILLS
The bills he has in mind are three:
Bill C-97 – dissolving the Department of Indian
Affairs & Northern Development, a policy announced in August 2017, but
crammed into a 400-page Budget bill in April this year, creating two new
federal departments: one for Indigenous Services and one
for Crown-Indigenous Relations.
Bill C-86 – a 900-page Omnibus Bill that became
law in December 2018, making substantive amendments to the: First Nations
Land Management Act, First Nation Fiscal Management Act, Additions
to Reserve and First Nation Matrimonial Property Act – (to)
facilitate eliminating reserves by transitioning communally-held reserve lands
into a new land regime that eventually leads to individually held private property
(fee simple) that would come under provincial laws and lands registry. (My
note: a policy tried in the US in the 1930s which literally opened the way to
stripping Indians of their traditional lands.)
Bills C-91/92 – language and child welfare legislation, intended to take existing Inherent Rights and
convert them into federally-defined section 35 rights, which are subsumed under
Crown Sovereignty (to be dictated by the limitations stemming from section 35
federal doctrine/court decisions).
Diabo has a remarkable mastery of the minutiae of
indigenous-government policy, but it is a tough policy to explain simply. His
overall message rings loud and clear: the government appears to be up to its
traditional age-old tricks of bamboozlement and indirection. “It’s the worst it’s ever been in my
lifetime,” he says. This perhaps
explains the unreasonable haste the government is imposing on these changes,
which after all, are responding to conditions that have been entrenched for
more than 150 years. There seems no imperative, except perhaps the imperative
for the Liberal government of the impending general election, that all this
legislation has to be in place by June 21, a mere six weeks away, with much of
the legislation currently stuck in committee in the Senate.
Anyone who would like more
information on this crisis for the indigenous people can contact
Tori Cress at E-Mail:
info@IdleNoMore.ca
Sylvia McAdam, Idle No
More Organizer, Cell: (306) 281-8158
Rachel Snow, Spokesperson,
Cell: (403) 703-8464
Russ Diabo, Spokesperson,
Cell: (613) 296-0110
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