Drawing the Battle Lines
IT COULD HAVE BEEN a scene from a movie. More than two hundred chiefs from across Canada packed the parliamentary visitors’ gallery to hear the announcement of the government’s long-awaited new Indian policy. It had been preceded by years of consultations with Indian leaders throughout Canada, including with National Indian Advisory Board that my father co-chaired. When the Indian Affairs minister of the day, Jean Chrétien, stood to deliver his White Paper in the House of Commons, the leaders waited with great anticipation that, finally, a government was preparing to move on their demands.
In the movie version, the young Québécois Indian Affairs minister would have announced a new era in Canadian-Indigenous relations based on historic rights and international justice for all nations. That is what the leaders in the gallery were hoping to hear. But instead, they received the shock of their lives.
After beginning with oddly empty phrases like “to be an Indian is to be a man, with all a man’s needs and abilities,” the 1969 White Paper proposed abolishing the Indian Act and at the same time sweeping aside Indian status and Indian lands and turning First Nations people into ethnic groups—like Italian-Canadians or Irish-Canadians—to be gradually absorbed into the melting pot. Any further services to Indigenous peoples would be turned over to the provinces, and existing treaties would be wound down. This policy would, in the cheerful words of the White Paper, “enable the Indian people to be free—free to develop Indian cultures in an environment of legal, social and economic equality with other Canadians.”7
To understand the full depth of the anger and sense of betrayal felt by my people, you only have to imagine what would have followed if the federal government announced in Parliament that it was stripping Quebecers of all of their constitutional protections, including their political institutions like the National Assembly and all control over the territory of Quebec, under the noble goal of ensuring they were completely absorbed into the English-Canadian mainstream. Outrage is not a strong enough word to describe the reaction of the Québécois in that situation, and outrage is not strong enough to describe the reaction of my people.
The White Paper’s attack on our lands and on our very essence as Indigenous peoples galvanized the newly formed National Indian Brotherhood. For my father, it became the battle of the decade. He and his fellow leaders organized mass meetings across the country to send Ottawa the message that the White Paper would never be accepted. Its mission, after all, was the same as Duncan Campbell Scott’s stated goal in the 1920s: solving the Indian problem by ensuring that every individual in that “weird and waning race” would disappear into the Canadian body politic. Unfortunately, these goals and most of the specific policies of the White Paper have remained constant in Canadian Indian policy ever since.
Concerning our constitutional rights, the White Paper pointed out that “under the authority of Head 24, Section 91 of the British North America [BNA] Act, the Parliament of Canada has enacted the Indian Act. Various federal-provincial agreements and some other statutes also affect Indian policies.” To address this fact, the White Paper argued, “the removal of the reference in the constitution would be necessary to end the legal distinction between Indians and other Canadians.” In other words, we were to be ejected from the Constitution and not recognized at all in Canada.
To drive this point home, the White Paper went after our lands. Again, it began with the banal. “The result of Crown ownership and the Indian Act has been to tie the Indian people to a land system that lacks flexibility and inhibits development. Indian people do not have control of their lands except as the Government allows and this is no longer acceptable to them.”
They proposed that our land, after some “intermediate states,” be reduced to “fee simple” ownership. That is to say, to turn our homelands into real estate that is bought and sold on the open market with property taxes collected by the provinces, as with all other mortgage lots. Aboriginal title lands would be struck out of existence and reserve lands would cease to exist under the fee simple arrangement. As the White Paper put it:
The Government believes that full ownership implies many things. It carries with it the free choice of use, of retention or of disposition. In our society it also carries with it an obligation to pay for certain services. The Government recognizes that it may not be acceptable to put all lands into the provincial systems immediately and make them subject to taxes. When the Indian people see that the only way they can own and fully control land is to accept taxation the way other Canadians do, they will make that decision.
This last point is crucial in our struggle today. A small number of Indian people are working with the government and conservative think tanks like the Fraser Institute in support of the fee simple trap, which is still very much part of the government strategy for getting rid of our collective land base. We will look at the return of this idea, which has risen from the grave like the undead in a zombie tale, in more detail in chapter 15.
The fact that these measures would not only contravene but also render inoperative the treaties was immediately recognized by the chiefs. Their protests were met with an astounding response by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.
“It is inconceivable,” he said, “that in a given society, one section of the society have a treaty with the other section of the society. We must be all equal under the laws and we must not sign treaties amongst ourselves.” Furthermore, “we can’t recognize aboriginal rights because no society can be built on historical might have beens.”8
To finalize the evisceration of Indian status in Canada, and for the federal government to wash its hands of its obligation to Indigenous nations, all federal programs for Indians would be terminated and our people’s welfare turned over to the provinces. This is clearly stated in the White Paper.
The Government further proposes that federal disbursements for Indian programs in each province be transferred to that province. Subject to negotiations with the provinces, such provisions would as a matter of principle eventually decline, the provinces ultimately assuming the same responsibility for services to Indian residents as they do for services to others.
The destruction of our nations and the final theft of our lands was to occur over a very short period. As the White Paper blandly described the timetable:
The Government hopes to have the bulk of the policy in effect within five years and believes that the necessary financial and other arrangements can be concluded so that Indians will have full access to provincial services within that time.
Among the Indian leaders in Ottawa for the White Paper announcement was Walter Dieter, the provisional president of the newly formed National Indian Brotherhood. He issued a press release describing the White Paper as “the destruction of a nation of people by legislation and cultural genocide.” The popular resistance that followed caught the government by surprise; it caught many Indian leaders by surprise as well, as people at the community level rose against the government’s termination policy. The government, true to form, found a small number of leaders willing to work against their own people and sent them and Indian Affairs across the country to try to convince them to drink Chrétien’s Kool-Aid. One of the few who accepted the contract to sell the White Paper in the communities was William Wuttunee, an Indian lawyer who at the time had close ties to the Liberal government. Time and again he found himself ejected from or refused entry to reserves.
As Harold Cardinal saw it: “In spite of all government attempts to convince Indians to accept the White Paper, their efforts will fail, because Indians understand that the path outlined by the Department of Indian Affairs through its mouthpiece, the Honourable Mr. Chrétien, leads directly to cultural genocide. We will not walk this path.” In Alberta, Harold asked his people “forcibly if necessary to eject federal officials from Indian lands.”9
In the House of Commons, the government tried to use the affable and well-respected Len Marchand, an Okanagan Indian who had been elected as a Liberal in the Interior of British Columbia in the 1968 election, as a shield. Marchand stood up in the House several times to try to defend the White Paper, but after catching heat from his own community, he dampened his praise considerably. He was finally reduced in the House to pleading with his own minister to “look at this matter very carefully and clarify it so it will be clearly understood.”10
In British Columbia, and elsewhere, the mass movements against the White Paper continued to grow. In the fall of 1969, Philip Paul and my father organized a meeting in Kamloops to formally launch the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs with a specific mandate to fight the White Paper by any means. Philip Paul, from the Tsartlip band on Vancouver Island, had been a young protege of Andrew Paull; he had roomed in Paull’s house in Vancouver when he was in town for Buckskin Gloves tournaments. A talented boxer in his youth, he went on to become a respected educator and director of Camosun College, a Victoria, British Columbia, college that supports Indigenous students. My father had been working with him in the National Indian Advisory Board since the early 1960s and Philip Paul, a fighter in and out of the ring, quickly became one of the driving forces in the development of the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs.
It was around this time that Harold Cardinal engineered my father’s election as leader of the National Indian Brotherhood. In the serious situation following the White Paper, Harold once again urged him to take over the leadership of the organization. My father, Harold later said, reluctantly agreed to have his name put forward, but not to campaign for the job. Harold told him, “Don’t worry, I’ll do the campaigning. You go take a vacation and I’ll do the campaigning.”11
My father withdrew for a tactical break and Harold kept his promise. By the time he returned, Walter Dieter had been manoeuvred out of the leadership at a special executive meeting in Winnipeg, and my father was offered the presidency of the NIB. He was also given the daunting mandate of battling the White Paper at the same time as he needed to set up and staff an office in Ottawa.
In discussions within the NIB, it was decided that it wasn’t enough to merely block the White Paper; they had to counter it with an Indian agenda. Several agendas were produced by different provincial associations. Among them were the Brown Paper in British Columbia and the Red Paper in Alberta. The Red Paper demanded, first, the obvious: that no changes be made to Indian status without the consent of the Indian people. It stated that “only Aboriginals and Aboriginal organizations should be given the resources and responsibility to determine their own priorities and future development.”12
It then addressed the title and treaty rights threatened under the Chrétien proposal and summed up the overall effect: “We would be left with no land and consequently the future generation would be condemned to the despair and ugly spectre of urban poverty in ghettos.”
The White Paper was not only frighteningly bad policy, the Red Paper continued, it was a profound insult to all of the Indian people who took part in the consultations that preceded it. “Even if we just talked about the weather the Minister would turn around and tell Parliament and the Canadian public that we accepted the White Paper.”
On the land question, the Red Paper flatly rejected the fee simple arrangement.
The government wrongly thinks that the Crown owns reserve lands. The Crown merely “holds” such lands, they belong to Aboriginals. The government also thinks that Aboriginals only can own land in the Old World, European sense of land ownership. Aboriginal peoples should be allowed to control land in a way that respects both their historical and legal rights.
The Red Paper is now best known for the way it was delivered to the prime minister and the full cabinet in 1970, at the same time that the White Paper was formally rejected and returned to its author, Jean Chrétien. The ceremony was accompanied by Indian drumming and singing, something new in Ottawa in those days, and it apparently had an impact on the prime minister.
“You say that the government doesn’t understand, that it is dumb, that it is stupid or arrogant,” Trudeau said. “Perhaps all of these things are true, at least in part, but don’t say we’re dishonest and that we’re trying to mislead you because we’re not. We’re trying to find a solution to a very difficult problem that has been created for one or two hundred years.”13
It was an interesting response, but the real problem hadn’t been that the government was being dishonest. It was that they were moving ahead, quite openly in fact, to rob our peoples of our homelands and our heritage.
The dishonesty came later. While the government officially buried the White Paper, Chrétien told my father unofficially, in private, that they “were withdrawing the White Paper but they would hold it aside for the generation of leaders who will accept it.”
In fact, it has continued to be the federal policy under many different shapes and sizes, in pieces and fragments that successive Canadian governments have unrelentingly tried to get my people to accept. The White Paper lives on in the termination treaty process of the past twenty years. It is in the push for taxing reserves. It is in Tom Flanagan and Manny Jules’s recent policy book Beyond the Indian Act: Restoring Aboriginal Property Rights that the Fraser Institute is promoting to turn our national lands into fee simple real estate, and in Stephen Harper’s “results based” negotiation strategy announced at the end of 2012. All contain essential ingredients of the White Paper: extinguishing our title to our lands, rendering our treaties obsolete, and ending our existence as sovereign peoples.
It is up to our generation to not only continue to refuse to accept our own termination but to also move forward beyond this battle. Fortunately, we increasingly have the means to do so. The effective blocking action against immediate White Paper implementation that our fathers and mothers’ generation undertook at the beginning of the 1970s kept the wolf from the door. Over the following ten years, they would win a crucial court battle on Aboriginal title and rights and launch a massive campaign to ensure our rights were enshrined in the Canadian Constitution. This battle would provide us with a constitutional tool for our nation-building efforts.
But part of the strength of the NIB during the 1970s—and in another sense its greatest weakness—was the government core funding that it was awarded. The government funding was necessary to give our people the chance to reply to the White Paper with their own vision. But to continue accepting core funding from the government for our political organizations for decades on end has been a mistake. Slowly but surely, our leadership was drawn into quasi-governmental organizations that reflected the old adage that whoever pays the piper calls the tune. We began seeing the results of this approach in the 1990s, and it is clear to almost all of today’s activists—except those who are getting paid, often handsomely, to do those jobs—that these neo-colonial structures have seriously weakened our movement.
This did not happen by accident. Walter Rudnicki, the Department of Indian Affairs insider who switched sides and worked closely (without pay) with my father, charted the DIA plan to create these Indian bureaucracies in ways that made them completely dependent on the non-Indigenous bureaucracy of the Department of Indian Affairs. In band council offices today, you find the same lethargy that you find at DIA headquarters, as the Indian bureaucrats administer the same programs by the same DIA guidelines as the non-Indigenous officials once did. And at 5 p.m., the offices empty. Our band council offices have become perfect little Department of Indian Affairs branch offices and our leadership, too often, serve as junior government officials.