Big Changes In Indian Affairs?

Or more of the same?



There's no doubt about it. Earlier this month Stephen Harper broke an old pattern and reached across the great divide offering a serious effort to change the current, chronic, deplorable situation, and there's something to be said about the willingness of Shawn Atleo to cooperate with the Feds. Not only is that refreshing, it's also nearly unheard of in the history of the Assembly of First Nations.  But then again, Shawn Atleo has been less than totally successful in bridging the chasm between factions within the Assembly itself. (The prairie Treaty Indian bloc being the largest, but certainly not the only, bugaboo.)

But there's something about this initiative that puts it in the same league as the major rewrite of the Indian Act in 1951. (For those who don't know, the Indian Act was amended in 1951 after an extensive consultation process with Indians, the transcript of which was published in 1948. It was among the first times that the Feds actually consulted with First Nations, but certainly not the last, despite what you may have heard from the loudmouth prairie Indian leaders over the past forty years.)

The consulting process invited both personal appearances and written submissions by Indian chiefs and private individuals. It is interesting to note that the recommendations made in some of those submissions were actually implemented as policies in the years that followed, a prime one being the closure of day schools on reserves and the busing of Indian children to nearby town schools.  In other words, integration, not Indian control (the call for which came much later) was what the Indians themselves had endorsed.

The 1951 rewrite of the Indian Act removed the most egregious clauses such as the ones that forbad ceremonies like the Sundance and Potlatch, although to listen to the Indian Industry's barking (especially the academic wing) over the last forty years you'd think these things were still in the Act - and that some things, like the pass system, were actually in the act, although it never was and had been abandoned as a policy before the 1951 rewrite.

The original Indian Act was passed in 1876. It was a consolidation of several previous pieces of legislation.  Even though Treaties 6,  7 and 8 (all of which are prairie treaties) hadn't yet been negotiated, when the Act received Royal Assent in 1876, it was made to apply to those regions which subsequently came under the terms of those three treaties. In other words, both Britain and Canada did not view those territories as sovereign Indian territory.

The history of Indian/Government relations over the subsequent 106 years since the original Indian Act was passed, on the prairies in any case, passes through four  phases.  The first phase, characterized by the negotiation of treaties on the prairies and vigorous attempts by the federal government to assimilate the Indians, lasted until the first or second or so decade of the 20th century.  Following that, until the end of WWII, was a period maintenance of the status quo coupled with indifference and neglect. Nothing new happened. The missionary zeal which had characterized the earlier phase had succumbed to disillusionment. The Feds had basically given up on the active openly stated and generally agreed upon assimilationist goal, and ceased boasting about fictitious progress toward that goal.

Following WWII, initiatives such as the rewrite of the Indian Act and the consultative process that preceded it mark the beginning of the third phase, and in the 1960s, with the comprehensive study and report known as the Hawthorn-Tremblay Report, in which the dire straits and impoverished conditions that existed on reserves was noted and documented, was probably its high-water mark. This lasted until the infamous White Paper on 1969, which advocated the complete abolition of reserves and the Indian Act, but which was thoroughly rejected by First Nations themselves.  One of the final initiatives of the Parliament of Canada during the third stage was the establishment of a Standing Committee on Indian Affairs.  Standing Committees dealing with Indian Affairs have existed ever since. First Nations people regularly appear before the committee and/or submit briefs. First Nations people sit on the Committee.  It is simply not true that governments in the past forty plus years are failed to consult, Indian Industry rhetoric, notwithstanding.

The most recent phase was marked by:

• a transfer of power and authority to First Nations band councils and provincial and national Indian organizations; 
• the growth of funding made available for the advancement of various causes; 
• the growth of massive corruption and mismanagement, with an industry of lawyers, academics, consultants and politicians at the trough spinning never-ending tales of blame, providing lists of excuses designed to encourage the rest of us to turn a blind eye and intimidate us into submission.  

Principle among these tales was the assertion that an Indian's word is to be taken at face value, no questions asked, but written documents, documents that clearly show the land was ceded, documents like the Indian Act, that applied to territory that had yet to be ceded under treaty, aren't worth the paper they are printed on.


Does this Harper initiative have a snowball's chance of actually putting an end to that, the most recent era?  Will the initiative be different from so many of the past ones?  Will remote reserves, those in the north and far away from the cities, actually start to see economic growth? I doubt it. There's much more to the problem than just the Indian Act, although it certainly is an obstacle. But unless some of the really hard problems, such as local corruption and lack of accountability to rank and file reserve members, the poor quality of education at the reserve level, which is now run principally by First Nations themselves, etc., are acknowledged and met head on, nothing will change.

As long as weasels like Perry Belgarde can claim that the Treaties did not deal with mineral rights, and therefore Indians still own them, or that the obligation to provide housing* derives from Treaty negotiations, AND POLITICIANS BELIEVE THEM, the future doesn't look any brighter than the past. There are far too many entrenched interests making a good living, Perry Belgarde being one, to allow that to happen.

Hopefully, I'll be proven wrong.

*The federal government began to provide housing on reserves in the late 1940s. It was part of the general tenor of the times, when ideas which are today considered "socialist" in nature (and in the generations preceding that era, would have been considered completely untenable) had gained acceptance and had found their way into government policy. (Delano Roosevelt's New Deal is an early example.)  According to accounts of the treaty negotiators, Indians in the Treaty 6 area were promised that they would never lack for a place to call home. But this was clearly a reference to the reserve lands that had yet to be set up, not to individual private dwellings for families to live in, although the Indian Industry has promoted the later as the correct and only interpretation.