Let the People Speak: Opression in a Time of Reconciliation

By Sheilla Jones

Over the past fifty years, Canada’s Indigenous Affairs department (now two departments with more than 30 federal co-delivery partners) has mushroomed into a “super-province” delivering birth-to-death programs and services to First Nations, Inuit and Métis people. This vast entity has jurisdictional reach over 90 percent of Canada’s landscape, and an annual budget of some $20 billion. Yet Indigenous people have no means to hold this “super-province” accountable to them. Not a single person in this entity has been elected by Indigenous people to represent their interests. Not one. When it comes to federal Indigenous policy, ordinary Indigenous people in Canada are voiceless and powerless. In Let the People Speak: Oppression in a time of reconciliation, author and journalist Sheilla Jones raises an important question: are the well-documented social inequities in Indigenous communities—high levels of poverty, suicide, incarceration, children in care, family violence—the symptoms of this long-standing, institutionalized powerlessness? If so, the solution lies in empowerment. And the means of empowerment is already embedded in the historic treaties. Jones argues that there can be meaningful reconciliation only when ordinary Indigenous Canadians are finally empowered to make their voices heard, and ordinary non-Indigenous Canadians can join with them to advance a shared future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Signature Editions
• Release date: Nov 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9781773240725

Sheilla Jones

Sheilla Jones is a Senior Fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, leading the Treaty Annuity/Individual Empowerment Initiative. She has been researching Indigenous politics for more than 20 years, serving as a facilitator for the Treaty Annuity Working Group, a special committee of the Social Planning Council of Winnipeg, which focused on modernizing First Nations treaty annuities. Sheilla is an award-winning Canadian journalist and author of several books, including an examination of the troubled early years of the Manitoba Métis Federation, as well as books on cosmology and quantum physics. Sheilla has a deep settler history. Her European ancestors have been part of settling Canada since the 1600s. She lives in Winnipeg.

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FOREWORD

I was raised in Bunibonibee Cree Nation, an isolated community in northern Manitoba filled with mostly other Cree people, and it shaped who I am. It structured how I think. When I was growing up, I thought the rest of the world was just as nurturing and loving as my own community — a place where all people helped each other in times of need, a place where people respected each other and shared what they had with each other. Bad things sometimes happened, but somehow it always felt like there was more good than bad.

However, in some ways it was all a facade. My parents, one a residential school survivor and the other a day school survivor, made a choice to be the best parents they could be in spite of what they experienced as children who grew up in a world that was being colonized — in spite of their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents being told that everything they knew about themselves and their world was wrong and unclean.

There are many other Indigenous families who have been irreparably damaged by the intentional undermining and derogation of their culture and identity. There is ample evidence of that in urban areas, where many people are openly struggling to survive on the streets and in poorer neighbourhoods, as well as in too many First Nations reserves in Canada.

I am thankful for my resilient parents, who, like many other Indigenous parents, found a way to shield my siblings and me from the hardships of life, at least in our formative years. Because of parents like them, we are seeing many healthy Indigenous people who are thriving today, in spite of what happened to them and their families. It is important to remember that all families, including Indigenous families in this country, want what many Canadians already enjoy — a good life. A life that allows us to care for everyone in our families and communities in the most positive and healthy way.

But right now, in this bountiful country we now know as Canada, the original people of this land, with a few exceptions, are living in Third World conditions, treated with disdain and disrespect and forced to live in abject poverty. The questions we all need to ask ourselves are the four w’s and the h! What, When, Where, Why and How.

Let the People Speak: Oppression in a Time of Reconciliation will start you on a path to answering those questions for yourself — where you as a Canadian citizen fit into all of this, and how you may find a way to help change the course of history, starting from where you are. If you are hoping our country is truly that place where everyone is getting what they need to be healthy contributing members of society, you should be involved.

Let the People Speak sets out in plain English what a treaty is and what the sacred agreements signed generations ago have to do with what is happening today. The sacred agreements signed between the British Crown and the First Nations of this land — agreements that essentially formed what Canada is today — laid out how original inhabitants and newcomers should live peaceably with one another. You will clearly see how the acknowledgement of sharing the land and seeing the treaties fulfilled can help this country live sustainably and be the beacon of human rights protection it portrays itself to be.

Indigenous history is finally being taught in many schools in Canada and even shared at dinner tables and book club meetings. But not everyone has had the chance to learn about the remarkable history of the First Peoples and how things came to be the way they are today. Sheilla Jones does an incredible job summarizing federal Indigenous political history in Canada over the past 150 years, with a particular focus on the past fifty years. Reading the results of her in-depth research on the subject, including how treaties come into play, will help get you up to speed on what you need to understand if you are interested in being part of a country that cares for all of its people. Others have written extensively on historical Indigenous issues. The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples contributed five volumes; the Truth and Reconciliation Commission illuminated a sorry chapter in Canada’s treatment of Indigenous children, and the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls Inquiry Report has added more. The question still to be answered: what do we do to keep old patterns from repeating themselves?

The place I came from is what Canada can and should be for all of us — a country that cares for all of its citizens, willingly helps others in times of need, and knows the value of sharing. But more than that, the country I would like to see for my children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren is most likely the same country you want to see, too. A country where all children receive the best education that allows them to compete for opportunities and become the self-sustaining citizens we all want to be, while understanding the importance of helping others who struggle.

The discussion about raising treaty annuities explored in this book can lead to a real path of reconciliation, one that does not oppress anyone. While First Nations citizens are resilient and have the ability to overcome great tragedies, their voices in their own homelands are not being heard. We hear some of the leaders and advocates who know how to get media attention, but the average citizen who is the most impacted by Canada’s colonial policies is largely ignored. To me, I see the strength and winds of change contained in these voices.

As natural stewards of the land, ordinary Indigenous citizens have this country’s best interests at heart, and have an outstanding capacity to welcome others. The time to include the original people of this land in decision-making on all aspects of this country, especially in how it affects their daily lives, is now. What is the alternative? To keep living in denial that Indigenous people deserve better? To keep spending money on problems that seem unsolvable?

Let the People Speak: Oppression in a Time of Reconciliation will challenge you as you see the repeated patterns of how the Government of Canada has intentionally tried to do away with the Treaties through assimilation and termination policies — even to this day with Canada’s Rights Recognition Framework — in order to keep denying the original people of this land their fair share of resources as intended in the treaties. To live in ignorance is bliss, but at what cost? If you would like to see everyone in Canada contributing to enriching our society, in whatever unique way people might choose, then this book is for you.

Sheila North

Former Grand Chief of Manitoba Keewatinowi Okimakanak (MKO)

We realize the importance of our voices only when we are silenced.

– Malala Yousafzai

1

THE VOICES OF THE PEOPLE

For too long, the voices of Aboriginal people have not been heard in the councils of government or in the management of their own economic, social and cultural affairs. Too many still live in grinding poverty and lack the tools necessary to improve their quality of life. To overcome these challenges we must enter into a true dialogue and a true partnership with the goal of building a better future.

Although this quotation might sound like it’s been pulled directly from a news story today, it is actually from a speech made by Prime Minister Chrétien nearly two decades ago in 2001.¹ Frankly, the exact same statement could have been made fifty years before by a much younger Chrétien in 1968, which strikes directly at the heart of a conundrum that has long caused frustration, confusion and anger among ordinary Canadians. Why are we still talking about grinding poverty? Or the need for a true dialogue and a true partnership? Why have these not been resolved yet?

Since Indian Affairs (IA) became a stand-alone government department in 1966,² a great many men and women of goodwill and enthusiasm — Indigenous and non-Indigenous — have expended considerable time and energy attempting to fix the seemingly intractable issues of poverty and despair facing so many Indigenous people and their communities. The Indigenous Affairs (IA) department is still struggling with the same issues.³

IA is a unique department in Canada’s federal government. Other departments, such as Justice, Transportation or Public Safety, provide specific government services for the benefit of all Canadians. IA does the opposite. It provides nearly all government services to a specific group of Canadians. However, that specific group of Canadians has no meaningful influence over what services the department decides to provide. Ordinary Indigenous people are uniquely powerless when it comes to federal Indigenous policy. They are left with the options of protest, civil disobedience or the courts to influence the government department that has control over almost all aspects of their lives, especially those living in First Nations communities. It is not a battle of equals.

The Indigenous Affairs department has long been viewed by those who have fallen away, bloodied and bruised, in their battles against the institution and its policies as an immutable monolith that is impervious to change. There is an old saying in Indigenous politics: You don’t change Indian Affairs; Indian Affairs changes you.

The only people who have clearly shown that they have the power to drive change at Indigenous Affairs are prime ministers. Justin Trudeau did exactly that in 2017 when he announced the first significant restructuring of IA since it became a stand-alone department.⁴ That change involved hiving off some 80 percent of the existing IA department dealing with programs and services to create the new Indigenous Services (IS) department, with a new minister. The previous IA minister was left with a reduced portfolio covering mainly governance issues in the renamed Crown-Indigenous Relations (CIR) department. But splitting the department wasn’t the only change. The Northern Affairs part of the portfolio was severed from Indigenous Affairs altogether and transferred to the Internal Trade department. And then Health Canada’s programs and services for Indigenous people were rolled into the new Indigenous Services department, shrinking the Health Canada portfolio by about 80 percent.

Time and again over the past half-century, we’ve seen prime ministers who use the weight of their office to shift Indigenous policy, with mixed results.

Liberal prime minister Pierre Trudeau, for instance, used the clout of his office in 1969 when he ordered IA minister Jean Chrétien to scrap the Indian Act, terminate all special Aboriginal rights, turn over responsibility for services on reserves to the provinces, and eliminate the Indian Affairs department.⁵ The PM’s termination policy was developed in secret, with input from selected IA bureaucrats but without any input from Indian band chiefs or the handful of regional Indian political leaders who did not yet have a national voice. The dramatic policy change publicly backfired on Trudeau, and in the face of public opposition led by Indian leaders, he had to withdraw it.

Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney tried the same tactic fifteen years later in 1984 when he ordered his deputy PM Erik Nielsen to conduct a hush-hush review of IA.⁶ The review resulted in a plan to devolve most of IA’s responsibility for services and programs to the provinces, allocate the remaining federal responsibilities to other government departments and eliminate the Indian Affairs department altogether. However, the policy that was jokingly named Buffalo Jump of the 1980s by Nielsen’s team had a darker agenda. The plan was to squeeze band governments financially until they accepted the status of ethnic municipal governments. To sweeten the pot, band governments were to be offered the financial relief of five-year block funding, but only in exchange for voluntarily surrendering their peoples’ now constitutionally protected Aboriginal rights. An explosive leaked memo detailing this new variation of a devolution-and-then-termination policy triggered a public backlash. The IA department once again survived. However, unlike the Trudeau back-down, the Mulroney cabinet quietly set in motion the devolution and termination priorities of the Buffalo Jump policy.

In 2004, Liberal prime minister Paul Martin took a different path. He oversaw closed-door, by-invitation-only meetings to develop a multi-billion-dollar accord that he hoped would set the stage for a new relationship between the federal government and Indigenous people.⁷ By this time, the federal government was funding three Aboriginal Representative Organizations (AROs) that it had sanctioned as the official and sole voices of First Nations, Inuit and Métis people at the federal table. There were two smaller AROs specifically for Indigenous women and girls and for Indigenous people not represented by the three main organizations. In the Martin negotiations, the five AROs all got to sit at the table with senior IA bureaucrats, some Members of Parliament and a few other selected people.

The process was a success, insofar as it resulted in an accord that provided a framework for devolution of more powers and responsibilities from IA to band governments. However, it’s not clear what effect the new devolution policy would have had since it was never enacted by Stephen Harper, the Conservative prime minister who followed Martin.

Liberal prime minister Justin Trudeau adopted Martin’s successful methodology in 2017 in negotiating the newest, new relationship between Indigenous people and the Crown, but this time it was a much tighter circle of people sitting at the table in the secretive, closed-door meetings. It was almost entirely bureaucrats from IA and a range of other departments delivering Indigenous programs, and representatives from only one ARO, the Assembly of First Nations, which represents First Nations chiefs. Some regional chiefs’ groups were also consulted, while others boycotted the process. The new plan that slowly emerged in 2018 called for the gradual elimination of the Indian Act and Indigenous Services, after the devolution of most of the Indigenous Services responsibilities to provincial governments and to band governments. The band governments would then take the form of municipal-style entities, complete with a ten-year block funding plan. At the time of this writing, the requirement that chiefs sign away their people’s rights in exchange for gaining block funding and freedom from the Indian Act was still government policy.

There is a certain irony in Justin Trudeau’s promising the elimination of Indian Affairs and the Indian Act; his father promised the same thing nearly fifty years earlier, but Pierre Trudeau’s 1969 termination policy triggered a national outrage, not a national move to reconciliation. And yes, the current Trudeau plan gives off more than a whiff of the Mulroney Buffalo Jump policy. However, it is not what is in the policy plan that is cause for immediate concern. It’s what is missing — the voices of ordinary Indigenous people.

Why are the voices of Indigenous people still not heard in the councils of government or in their own affairs? The simple answer is that ordinary Indigenous people have no political power, and hence, no political voice. They don’t have a seat at the table when their futures are being negotiated by others. They didn’t have a voice when the Indian Act was established in 1876; they do not have a voice today. And since ordinary Indigenous people are voiceless and powerless, they are shut out of the very policy decisions and governance issues that could provide the means to empower them.

There is an old saying attributed to Lord Acton that power tends to corrupt. A corollary to that saying, played out in Indigenous politics, is that powerlessness tends to destroy. Is it possible that the well-documented social inequities in Indigenous communities — high levels of poverty, suicide, incarceration, children in care, family violence — are, in fact, the symptoms of institutionalized powerlessness?

If that is the case, then all the public inquiries, royal commissions, compensation awards for government-sanctioned historical abuses and prime ministerial apologies will ultimately be futile if the root cause of hopelessness, powerlessness and despair are not addressed.

Ordinary Indigenous people have no political power, and no political voice.

At first blush, this statement may seem absurd. In the mainstream media, it may appear as if Indigenous voices are omnipresent, whether it is commentary about murdered and missing Indigenous women, pipeline protests, announcements of federal/provincial funding to address boil-water orders, housing, child care services or another controversial court case on Indigenous rights.

Ordinary Indigenous people certainly have plenty of organizations to speak for them. There are the five national Aboriginal Representative Organizations, with nearly seventy regional and territorial counterparts.⁸ There are also some eighty tribal councils across Canada to advocate for Indigenous interests.⁹ And there are more than 4,000 Indigenous groups and organizations across the country funded by IA and Canadian Heritage,¹⁰ mainly in culture, arts, women’s issues and support for Indigenous media. And then there are all the Indigenous musicians, artists, actors and writers who are giving voice to the pain, beauty and drama of their lives and cultures.

In the face of such significant media, political and cultural coverage, it may seem ridiculous to suggest that ordinary Indigenous people are voiceless and powerless. Yet when it comes to being heard at the federal political level, they are exactly that.

Power from the top down

In its simplest terms, power in Indigenous politics — and the money that goes with it — flows entirely from the top down, with IA at the top and ordinary Indigenous people firmly entrenched at the bottom of the power hierarchy. There is no mechanism for power to flow from the bottom upwards, and no means for ordinary Indigenous people to hold the department that controls almost all aspects of their lives accountable to them.

The Indian Act was passed by Parliament in 1876 to give the Indian Affairs branch rules and regulations by which bureaucrats could administer the provisions of the historic treaties signed between Indian bands and the Crown. For roughly the first 100 years of the Act, Indian Agents employed by IA had dictatorial control over what happened on the reserves they were assigned to manage. The Act did allow for chiefs and councils to be elected, but this colonial governance system had little meaning for ordinary Indians, other than it provided a chief with an extra $25 a year and a new suit of clothes every three years, and an extra $15 for councillors. Chiefs had no real power and neither did ordinary band members. The power was all held by the Indian Affairs branch.

That changed in the 1960s when the new, stand-alone IA department recognized that its century-old assimilation policy had not worked, as evidenced by the fact that nearly 80 percent of Status Indians still lived on reserves.¹¹ IA shifted to a policy of devolution of power and responsibility to band councils, with an eye to turning bands into provincial responsibilities. The chiefs were granted new powers to deliver IA programs in their communities and, for the first time, they received core funding for band operations so that the positions of chiefs, councillors and administrators came with actual paycheques. It turned those positions into highly coveted jobs. However, the band governments were not accountable to band members; they were beholden to IA, the source of their power and money.

The Aboriginal Representative Organizations established by the federal government in the 1970s were in the same position. They were totally reliant on federal funding to run their offices, pay for telephones and Gestetner machines, and to pay their directors and staff. If the AROs stepped out of line, IA was prepared to reassert its control by slashing their funding and returning it only when assured of the ARO’s willingness to comply with IA’s agenda.

The reality for both AROs and band governments on reserves was a simple, immutable truth. What Indian Affairs had the power to dispense, it had the power to take back. What Indian Affairs had the power to bestow, it had the power to withhold. That same power dynamic continues to this day, with the exception of a handful of First Nations communities that have developed enough of their own economic resources to free themselves from IA dependency.

Indigenous political/representative groups like the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) and its provincial/territorial counterparts deserve a great deal of credit for what they have been able to achieve for Indigenous people, despite being deeply compromised by their own dependency on IA. Protection of Indigenous rights and the historic treaties, for instance, would never have been enshrined in the Constitution in 1982 were it not for their determined efforts.

However, AROs are fundamentally flawed organizations that are politically weakened by their dependency on IA and undermined by the internal friction among their leaders about whether the organization is too cozy with IA officials or too confrontational. But it is the claim that AROs are the legitimate political voices of their people that is their greatest weakness.

It has long been an open secret in Indigenous politics that the AFN does not speak for all ordinary First Nations (FN) people. It is an organization of reserve chiefs. However, more than half of FN people today no longer live on reserves and the chiefs do not represent their concerns in the AFN. The AFN sought to address this political vulnerability in 2005 by deciding to allow all eligible First Nations members across the country to vote for the AFN’s national chief from a selection of candidates chosen by the chiefs. It would, finally, be a mechanism for ordinary First Nations people to make their voices heard within the AFN, albeit in a very limited fashion. By 2008, however, the AFN had dropped the idea as too expensive and too complicated to deliver.

But, you might ask, are not chiefs empowered through elections by band members who still live on reserves to represent their interests? For the first 100 years under the Indian Act, band elections were largely irrelevant. The Indian Agent had the power to appoint a chief and councillors if communities didn’t bother with elections. That changed with the IA devolution policy in the 1960s. Elections suddenly became very important because whoever was elected had complete control of the power and money dispensed to the band by IA. It quickly became apparent that there was a big problem with elections. The Indian Act had no requirement that elections on reserves be free and fair. The Act did, however, give IA the authority to unilaterally nullify election results and simply replace troublesome chiefs and councillors with people of IA’s choosing who were valued for their compliance.

IA never bothered itself about how the lack of free and fair elections affected ordinary band members because ordinary Indians were of no political value to the department, other than as a continuously suffering client base for IA’s ever-expanding programs and services. Chiefs, on the other hand, had the legal authority to sign self-government agreements and sign away their people’s rights. Whether chiefs were legitimately elected by their people was generally irrelevant to IA in advancing the Buffalo Jump policy objectives of squeezing bands financially to force them into signing termination papers.

Because elections have so long been considered irrelevant, or served as snake pits for feuding factions to fight it out over which one controls the band’s power and money, First Nations communities have not institutionalized accountability through elections in place of the traditional, consensus-based form of governance. Band governments answer to IA, not to the community. However, the willingness of the federal government, the IA department, the AROs and the chiefs and councillors (who may or may not be fairly elected) to sustain the pretense that ordinary Indigenous people have a voice in Indigenous politics at the federal level has served to institutionalize their powerlessness. As a result, it has been, to all intents and purposes, a government policy of oppression that renders ordinary Indigenous people voiceless.

It is worth repeating. Ordinary Indigenous people have no political power, and no political voice.

There is another segment of the Canadian population that is shut out of Indigenous politics. Ordinary non-Indigenous people also have no say in policy decisions made by Indigenous Affairs or its AROs that affect them and their communities. The difference is that, for most of the past 150 years, ordinary non-Indigenous Canadians have demonstrated a casually callous lack of interest in the concerns of Indigenous people. The exception was a brief spurt of attention during the civil rights era in the 1960s and 1970s, and again now, as talk turns to reconciliation.

Let’s pause for a moment and be clear about who we mean when we talk about ordinary Indigenous people and ordinary non-Indigenous people. Indigenous people in Canada are defined constitutionally as First Nations (Indian), Métis and Inuit. Canadians, whatever their ancestry or ethnicity who are not First Nations, Métis or Inuit are, by definition, non-Indigenous. That’s the easy part. The word ordinary as used here could well be describing people who, in their everyday lives, are extraordinary, one-of-a-kind, remarkable, tragically broken, genius, outrageous, or any other adjective that conveys anything-but-ordinary. However, if they are not the power brokers, political players and decision-makers in the power hierarchy of Indigenous politics, they are ordinary people. Even many of the people employed by Indigenous Affairs, the Indigenous political organizations, or who work for band councils could be considered ordinary in the sense that they have no power to affect the laws, policies and rules that impact the lives of Indigenous people. They have jobs; they do not have power. There is a difference.

How do ordinary Indigenous people feel about this state of affairs? The obvious thing to do is ask. Many of the people I interviewed from First Nations across North America who had made a pilgrimage to the shore of Lac Ste. Anne near Edmonton in the summer

Reviews for Let the People Speak

[Valerie Cardinal · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Great facts and interesting scenarios to support them. Ordinary Indigenous People have no voice...as long as the governmentt supported ARO"s exist. Inidgenous and Colonial relations are and always have been complicated but necessary to understand. All the recent efforts for 'reconciliation" are still from the colonial perspective..after all it's all about the land.