The Aboriginal Truth and Reconciliation Commission recently presented its findings about the ghoulish legacy of the residential school system. Some people have reacted to the Commission’s findings by wondering why nothing seems to change. Why should they be made to feel guilty for something that they were not involved in? Why are the programs and the money currently allocated to support Aboriginals not enough? Why don’t Aboriginal people just “get over it”?

Part of the problem is that the abuse of the residential schools went on far longer than most people realized, the last one closing in 1996. Over all that time, the abuse and trauma many Aboriginals suffered led to alcoholism, violence, and other problems. Given how long the schools operated, and how many generations they affected, it’s not surprising that change is so slow. Would any of us have done any better if we were forcibly dragged away from our families, beaten for speaking English, told that our ancestral cultures were stupid and primitive, and repeatedly been forced to move our homes by the government?

The actions of the past are responsible for the problems of the present.

A larger reason why many things don’t seem to change, though, is the fact that we don’t fully understand the Aboriginal perspective on their Treaty rights. For many non-Natives, the Treaties were bills of sale, and the Aboriginals were expected to assimilate into the rest of society. For most Aboriginals, however, the Treaties are sacred agreements to share the land with non-Natives while still maintaining their own self-governing communities. The Treaties, and the rights associated with them, have an almost religious meaning for many Aboriginal people. As Harold Cardinal wrote, asking them to abandon their Treaty rights is like asking them to abandon their faiths and identities. Many of them don’t like the Indian Act any more than anyone else, but it’s still an implicit recognition of their distinct status. They’d rather continue to live under it than abandon their Treaty rights.

The big problem is that too many people still insist on adhering to the non-Native interpretation of the Treaties, the one that expects Aboriginal people to assimilate into mainstream society. The residential schools were meant to “civilize” Aboriginal youth for assimilation, which in practice led to beatings, assaults and attacks on their identities. Non-Native Canadians don’t understand where many Aboriginals are coming from, and resent being associated with the schools. Many Aboriginals, on the other hand, feel like they aren’t being listened to. Even if they aren’t being violently forced to assimilate, the underlying attitude that Aboriginal people are seen as “primitive” still remains.

A better way lies with the original spirit that the Treaties were signed under.
Recognizing Aboriginal self-government and Treaty rights would go a long way towards healing the wounds and frustrations many Aboriginal communities feel, enable them to contribute economically to Canada and allow Canada to get rid of the Indian Act. While many Aboriginal people insist that they are distinct, they wish to be distinct within Canada. Being Canadian would be the bond that continues to unite them with the rest of us.

We would be able to leave the past in the past, and look forward to a brighter future than we could ever imagine.

   

I'm sorry, I don't think it will work. We can't have a bunch of sovereign "nations" within Canada and still be one country. We can't make aboriginals special people with a special deal for eternity. And we can't sign treaties, as we do in BC, with aboriginals insisting they are not final deals, and they intend to keep pushing for more and more. I think aboriginals need to integrate into the greater society for them to be successful. We are a very tolerant society, with people being able to to keep all sorts of aspects of their heritage. But they are all governed by one law, and follow the same rules.

No doubt we fucked them over. No doubt we have to put in a lot of money to help them on the road to recovery. But that road has to be the same one we are walking down, so at one point there's no difference between saying aboriginal Canadian and Chinese Canadian, say.

   

Many of the most prominent Aboriginal leaders, including George Manuel, Harold Cardinal, Georges Erasmus, Ovide Mercredi and others have never advocated becoming separate and independent entities. Cardinal wrote in The Unjust Society that many Aboriginals are quite happy to contribute to Canada, and to consider themselves Canadians, but they also want to have their distinct status within Canada recognized by their fellow Canadians. Erasmus was quoted by Jeffrey Simpson in Faultlines: Struggling For A Canadian Vision about how the Dene in the Northwest Territories wanted to assert their distinctiveness within Canada. Guys like Manuel and Erasmus, and more recent authors like Jody Wilson-Raybould, have all spoken about the benefits that private investment and entrpreneurship can bring in reducing Aboriginal poverty-one critique Erasmus and Manuel made was how a lot of the money spent by the federal government goes to welfare, rather than economic development.

However, they're also very insistent that this distinctiveness needs to be recognized. Harold Cardinal wrote in The Rebirth of Canada's Indians that most Aboriginal peoples see their Treaty rights as being an important, fundamental part of who they are. Asking them to give up those rights and simply assimilate is like asking them to give up their religious faiths and their identities as people. Even if most of them don't like the Indian Act any more than the rest of us do, they would still prefer to live under it, because it's an implicit recognition of their Treaty rights, as long as they're stuck in the legal limbo of Canada no longer trying to assimilate them, but their rights not generally being recognized, either.

A lot of the proposals for Aboriginal governance I've seen aren't so much separation into their own entirely separate countries so much as they are similar to recognizing Aboriginal communities as similar to provinces, with their own distinct governing powers in the Constitution. Things like civil law, education and so forth would be handled by the Aboriginal governments, but they would also continue to participate in the larger country, kind of like how the residents of Saskatchewan, PEI or Ontario all have their own internal issues and debates, but they also participate in the larger country, too. Kathy Brock noted in one of the Centre for Research and Information on Canada's early research papers on the subject that many Aboriginal people who live in the cities often go back and forth between their reserve communities as needed.

As I told freakinoldguy in another thread, "nation to nation" relationships does not automatically mean total separation. For some people it does, but as an old professor of mine pointed out-and this guy was himself part of the Blood nation in southern Alberta, they're not exactly sovereign if they rely on Canada for things like monetary policy, embassy services, and so on. Who do you think they'll ask for help if they try traveling to a country that doesn't recognize any passport issued by their community? It's the same problem you'd arguably run into with the sovereignty-association proposed by some Quebec separatists.

For other Aboriginal people, though, when they talk about nation-to-nation relationships they aren't talking about "nations" in the sense non-Native Canadians most typically use it in English. It's similar in many ways to what a lot of Franco-Quebecois talk about when they consider themselves a "nation"-a distinct cultural community with its own roots in a particular part of the country, with its own particular legal codes, institutions, etc., but that can also be part of a larger country. It's possible to have multiple nations existing in one country, particularly a federal one-we see it in Spain with Catalonia and the Basque country, and we even see it in the United Kingdom with the Scottish and Welsh Parliaments. The Catalan, Basque, Scottish and Welsh nations are all recognized in one way or another, and their peoples still participate in the larger Spanish and UK countries. Hell, even the United States recognizes various "domestic dependent nations" among its First Nations peoples.

The recognition of Aboriginal governance and Treaty rights in Canada is not an exact parallel to any of these examples, nor would it necessarily be the same kind of arrangement. But it does tie into what many Aboriginal voices have been saying for a century and more about their unique place in Canada, and would be a critical step forward in resolving the legal limbo that Aboriginal rights are in, strengthening the economic contributions Aboriginal people can make to Canada and avoiding assimilation, without precluding their participating in Canadian society in general. Elijah Harper helped kill the Meech Lake Accord because it did not contain any recognition for Aboriginal rights, but that did not prevent him from spending 10 years as a Manitoba MLA and four years as a federal MP and representing all his constituents, whatever their skin colour, as needed.

It'd be a hell of a lot better than the situation we're in right now...

   

There's a lot of frustration on both sides, but also, I believe, a genuine good will by both sides to continue to try to improve the relationship. For the First Nations, there's been a lot of frustration getting their issues off the political back burner. Absent any political impetus, the courts have had to step in. Now that aboriginals may effectively veto projects on their traditional territories, and they are receiving royalites from some projects.

If the natives are given de facto governance or jurisdiction over federal traditional land, it's going to open up some tough questions. What are the rights of non-natives on traditional territories--can they be taxed by First Nations, can they vote in Band elecitons? What is the Canadian response to bands that forbid inter-racial marriage?

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Excellent points one and all. I have the edition of The Unjust Society that was published a few years before Harold Cardinal's death. He wrote a new introduction that talked about how many things hadn't changed from when he originally wrote the book, but others very much have, including the effort by many non-Natives, including churches who participated in the residential school system, to try and understand where Aboriginal leaders like him were coming from and build a better future. The anger and violence of confrontations like the Oka crisis are still in many people's memories, but there have been efforts at reconciliation like those transcribed in Andrea P. Morrison's Justice For Natives: Searching For Common Ground, which transcribed many of the community meetings that took place to try and rebuild bridges after Oka.

And that's a question I would prefer to have answered in any discussions about Aboriginal governance-how does it tie into non-Native peoples who live in Aboriginal communities, including taxes and civil law, as noted above? It's the same thing with enshrining Quebec's distinctiveness in the Constitution, and formally recognizing asymmetrical federalism-which areas will Quebec continue to continue be treated the same as other parts of Canada?

Back when he was a political scientist and before he went into politics, Pierre Trudeau wrote that if Anglophone Canadians had spent half as much time and effort in accommodating Francophones as they did in trying to assimilate them and stamp out their rights, a separatist movement would have never arisen in Quebec. It's the same thing with the Aboriginal peoples-had there been more of an effort to accommodate them and what they were hoping for when the Treaties and initial contact were happening, instead of pigheadedly assuming that they were too stupid to know their own interests, forcibly trying to assimilate them and then holding them solely responsible for all the dysfunction it caused, we wouldn't be having nearly as much trouble as we are today.

   

Sure we can - think of the division between Provinces and the Feds. It wouldn't be that difficult in practise.


Perhaps, but first we would need to agree on what is the definition of "successful"? Making sure they have clean drinking water comes first before you train them to to put the new cover sheets on the TPS reports for this guy:

   

Provinces aren't based on racial identity - all citizens have the same rights. Would that hold true for aboriginal "provinces". One person, one vote? Free movement between "provinces"? Laws and regulations that are color blind?

By the complaints we hear from FN's, they measure success the same way we do - a good material standard of living. If they want that, they are going to, or should have to, work for it, same as everybody else. Non-aboriginals pay for clean water with their municipal taxes or build and maintain their own wells for their drinking water. Let these nations do the same.

   

Provinces are not racially-based any more than the country as a whole is, but we do make exceptions and exemptions in the Constitution to reflect the particular circumstances of particular parts of the country, as I believe you've mentioned you support.

As for "race based" government, first off we should note that ethnicity does not automatically entail Aboriginal status...



Intermarriage, and the government's ability to strip Aboriginal peoples' legal status as such away (as was part of the Indian Act's original goals of assimilation-Aboriginals lost their status once the Indian Agents decided they were "civilized" enough) have made the issue a lot more complicated than it seems.

As for things like the current controversies over the "marry out, get out" policy in Kahnawake, here's what Waneek Horn-Miller has to say:



And Horn-Miller was one of the frontline protesters during the Oka crisis, to the extent that she actually got stabbed by a Canadian soldier during the confrontation, so you can't say she isn't a passionate supporter of her community and Aboriginal rights.



Easier said than done when so many decisions are still made by the government under the Indian Act, and Aboriginal people on reserves aren't necessarily equipped with the legal tools to ensure that development actually benefits the community, instead of all of the profits benefiting third parties and land speculators.

Here's an excerpt from an essay I submitted to CKA's sister site Vive Le Canada a couple of years ago describing the issue:



Part One describes how we got into this mess in the first place. Part Two describes the current situation and possible changes for the better. It contains a lot more of what I was talking about in the original post, along with references in case anyone's wondering where I got all this info from.

   

As for Quebec, it's about language. If First Nations want a different primary language in their nation fine. But Quebec doesn't get to kick out everybody who's not pure laine, anybody in Canada can move to quebec and vote in their elections. The charter of rights also applies to everyone in Quebec. You want to create a huge number of provinces where the language isn't English, have at er - except most FN's also don't speak "Indian." But you're talking about creating bantustans where you have to be of a certain race to live and vote. Crrrrazy.

   

Um, no.

For one thing, as the links I cited above note, the exact definition of who exactly is Aboriginal and has the status of such is already contested. Aboriginal groups who promote a "get out, move out" policy see that policy heavily contested, in some cases by their own people, like Waneek Horn-Miller. Given that interracial marriage is occurring in Aboriginal communities as in all others, this is something any Aboriginal society is going to have to figure out how it will accommodate, just as non-Native societies have had to.

And while Quebec cannot kick out everybody who isn't a "pur laine", and anybody can move there and vote in their elections, la belle province has established some basic social expectations with its language laws, namely that French is the primary language of education, commerce and work, albeit with various exceptions and exemptions made for the Anglo-Quebecois minority. That was borne in part out of concern that new arrivals in Quebec were not making a lot of effort to integrate with the larger Francophone society, and that they all simply expected to continue speaking English, which in turn raised the risk of assimilation.

Similar concerns arise not only from the current debates in Kahnawake to the larger concerns expressed by leaders like George Manuel and Jody Wilson-Raybould, as I've cited above when they talk about Aboriginal communities needing to develop on their own terms. Will new arrivals to the community actually make an effort to integrate, or will they simply expect to have everything done their way all the time, which would in turn lead to assimilation? Similar concerns exist not only in Francophone Quebec but among Anglophone Canadians too, not to mention in the U.S. and Europe over how far an existing society should go to accommodate the differences of new arrivals, and how much the new arrivals should be expected to integrate. I don't agree with the policy that Kahnawake is taking to address the issue, but I think they have a powerful and understandable basis for their concerns, which aren't as different from concerns many of the rest of us have as you might think.

Aboriginal communities are wrestling with these issues, just like Francophones and Anglophones. Unlike the latter two groups, though, they don't exactly have a lot of the constitutional and legal tools that would help them address a lot of these things the way the other founding communities of Canada do. Ensuring that Aboriginal people have access to these tools does not automatically mean that they'll use them to institute "Bantustan" policies. Even if they try to, they'll likely be heavily contested by their own people, as is already happening.

If anything, it's far more likely that they'll be able to make good use of such tools in building a stronger basis for their cultures and everyone who live among them, and how they interact with other Canadians. And it's possible that, like Quebec, they'll make various exceptions for non-Natives as needed, but that's for them to decide.

The past has been ugly and dark, but there is a potential for a brighter future, one that would obviously benefit Aboriginal people, but would also benefit Canada as a whole.