A Business Interlude
OUR POWER COMES from our people and from their active struggle for their rights. This has been a hard lesson to learn for much of our leadership. The 1980s were largely a lost decade for Indigenous peoples in Canada. One of the main reasons was that, after the victory of the Constitution Express, we left it to our leaders to take care of things behind closed doors or in the staged federal-provincial conferences. We believed again that somehow we could quietly negotiate our way into new breakthroughs for justice for our people. In fact, we could not even get governments in this country to recognize and affirm the rights they had just included in their own Constitution.
Our leadership was lost in this maze. After boycotting the signing ceremony for the Constitution Act in 1982, the National Indian Brotherhood accepted $2.5 million from Ottawa to enter the post-constitutional discussions with the federal government and ten provinces. This was obviously a hopeless task and, at the last minute, before the first federal-provincial conference in 1983, dissension on the issue led to a fracturing of the NIB. The Western organizations pulled out to form the Coalition of First Nations, denouncing the NIB for abandoning the battle for First Nations sovereignty. The NIB’s timid position, said the Coalition, meant negotiating at a table with the people who had already indicated—publicly and privately—that they would not take any concrete measures to recognize and affirm our Aboriginal rights and title in legislation.
The great error on our side was to relax the grassroots mobilization within Canada and internationally. Especially when it quickly became apparent how wildly different our people’s vision of self-government was from what the provincial and federal governments were peddling. In both of the conferences held under the Trudeau government and, after 1984, those held under Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservative government, the Canadian state proposed “delegated” self-government, the same sort of municipal-style government that is on the table in today’s negotiating tables.
Among the jurisdictional powers the federal government offers are the following:
Other authorities include limited powers over agriculture, natural resources management, and hunting, fishing, and trapping on Aboriginal lands—all things that any municipality can do within the town limits. And the government made it very clear that when it spoke of “Aboriginal lands,” it was referring only to those lands the government recognizes: our Indian reserves, which make up 0.2 per cent of Canadian territory. Even those limited powers would not be granted to us as part of our inherent right to govern ourselves under Section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982, but would be delegated from federal and provincial powers as set out in Sections 91 and 92 of the BNA Act, as occurs with every hamlet and village in the country.
In effect, the governments were prepared to offer a colonial—or what Mohawk scholar Taiaiake Alfred calls “contemporary colonial”—package. It would freeze our people as virtually landless wards of the state for the foreseeable future, until that state decided we had reached a suitable level of weakness to be simply cut out entirely and reduced to ethnic groups within the Canadian mosaic. It was a continuation of the BNA Act that had left our people powerless and, with the usurpation of our lands, penniless. The Department of Indian Affairs had been created in 1876 to manage our poverty as wards of the state. This is how we were still viewed by Canada’s governors.
What the NIB (which reorganized into the Assembly of First Nations in 1985), as well as the non-Status Indian organization and the Métis and Inuit associations, were asking for during the constitutional negotiations amounted to the creation of a third order of government within Canada. An order that would have real constitutional powers and, like the provinces, constitutional protection over its jurisdiction. Our powers would be drawn from Section 35 of the Constitution, with entrenched powers over such matters as self-government, lands, resources, economic and fiscal arrangements, education, preservation and enhancement of language and culture, and equity of access.
Between these two positions—recognition of constitutionally protected self-governing peoples and the colonialist package from the federal and provincial governments—the differences were irreconcilable. The negotiations of the 1980s with the federal and provincial governments inevitably turned into a prolonged danse macabre toward a constitutional deadlock that would not be shaken until the Supreme Court intervened with the Delgamuukw decision a decade later.
By the end of the negotiations, both camps were infused with anger and bitterness. The government side began to show open contempt for our demands. The federal minister of justice and attorney general, Ray Hnatyshyn, finally rejected even the idea of “self-determination.” He said that it was the same as demanding sovereign rights, and sovereignty applied only to Canada as a whole. End of discussion.
On our side, there was a kind of shock that the decolonization process that Section 35 was supposed to begin had been blocked by the Canadian political class. This sense of betrayal was only increased when, after the negotiations collapsed in 1987, the federal government simply dropped the file and moved on to the Quebec issue, leaving our people demobilized and our leadership demoralized.
For the federal and provincial governments, the failure of the negotiations was the intended outcome, the prerequisite for their colonial business-as-usual approach. And in the Meech Lake accord later that year, the federal government was careful to open the Constitution only to Quebec’s demands. Our leadership expressed their profound but initially ineffective dissatisfaction. By putting their eggs in the government’s negotiating basket, and distancing themselves from the grassroots and international lobbying, they had left themselves without any recourse.
Finally, it was only the government’s own unwieldy amending formula and a courageous Cree in the Manitoba legislature that put us at least partly back in the game. The Meech Lake accord required the consent of all of the provincial legislatures. One by one the provinces—with a greater or lesser degree of reluctance—fell into line, until only Manitoba and Newfoundland were left. As the ratification date went down to the wire, the unanimous consent of the Manitoba legislature was necessary for the accord to pass within the deadline. For days on end, one lonely voice—Elijah Harper, a northern Manitoba Cree and NDP member of the legislature—sat clutching an eagle feather for strength. He withstood the pressure and impatience of the Mulroneyites, his own party, and the opinion of most Canadians by refusing the necessary unanimous consent for the accord. The clock ran out. Meech died in June 1990.
A month later, the Oka Crisis was sparked when a Sûreté du Québec force attacked a group of Mohawk Warriors who were dug in behind a barricade to defend a sacred burial place on disputed land on the Kanesatake Reserve. One police officer died in the raid, and a tense seventy-eight-day standoff, and Canada’s Indian summer, began.
During the period of the drawn-out constitutional negotiations, I returned to Neskonlith to raise my family and work in my own community. At a personal level, a kind of exhaustion had set in. I was in my thirties, I had been involved in the young radical wing of the movement, and now our leadership was telling us, Okay, we’ll talk to the government and take care of things.
I think that a similar sense of exhaustion among activists across the country allowed them to cede the terrain to those who believed they could negotiate our way into freedom. I realize that as I tell this story, I have been recounting some of the adventures of my earlier days. And it is easier, as you get older, to romanticize these youthful battles. But it is important to recall that we often lived without places of our own, sleeping with a blanket on the floor of someone’s flat. With not enough to eat. Walking long distances in the cold because there was no money for bus fare. Often facing harassment from the police and in some cases facing arrest for our attempt to protect our land and our rights as members of Indian nations.
I know it is the same for the activists today. I have seen this willingness to sacrifice in my children and their friends and in many young people across the country, and I know what it is like. Their commitment is essential to our struggle. As we have found so many times, when the grassroots are demobilized, for whatever reason, our cause does not move forward. It falls back. I understand their commitment, but I also understand their exhaustion and frustration. In my time, I have felt all of these things. And for a period in the 1980s and into the early 1990s, I took my own sabbatical from our movement.
When Beverly and I returned to Neskonlith in the early 1980s, we did have a plan. Our idea was to try to move our community forward by restarting the community farming that we had engaged in during my parents’ and grandparents’ time. Over the previous twenty years, the farmlands had gone into disuse and been replaced with wild grasses. What was needed to make them profitable, everyone knew, was a sprinkler irrigation system that could nurse the crops through our long, dry, hot summers. Our band had first water rights at Neskonlith Lake in the hills above the village, but at the time, a neighbouring rancher was using that water. We weren’t even exercising our option.
To launch the new community farming endeavour, I wrote up a detailed business plan and called a meeting of the Elders and Certificate of Possession holders. To my surprise, no one showed up. I was upset by this, so a few days later when I saw Clarence, one of the Elders, burning his garbage in a barrel outside his house, I went to see him. I told him about my business plan for the new irrigation system and said I was disappointed that no one came to the meeting.
“You Elders are always telling us to go and get educated, but when we do, you do not even listen to what we have to say.” I told him I had put a lot of effort into the plan and I would really appreciate it if he would show up at the meeting.
“Okay,” he said. “You call another meeting and I’ll be there.”
That week I met with all the other Elders and CP holders and told them that Clarence was going to come to the meeting. When I called it, they all came. It was before computers, so my business plan spreadsheets were done by a calculator and typed out and the main points were covered on a flip chart. The Elders and CP holders, I was pleased to see, listened intently. But when I finished my Neskonlith Irrigation System presentation, they were silent.
I asked them if they were willing to support it. No one answered; instead, they retreated into an Elders’ scrum at the back of the hall. When they came back, Susan August had been chosen their spokesperson. “We cannot support this plan,” she said.
I was stunned. I had been working on the plan for months, and I had expected that I would be rewarded with, if not outright applause, at least a measure of enthusiasm for what it could do for our community. “Why not?” I asked.
They looked at each other. Then they went into another scrum at the back of the room, more excited this time, speaking a rapid mix of the Secwepemc language and English. When they returned to their seats, Susan said, “Because you put so much work into this plan, we all agreed that we should explain why. But first, we noticed that the amount of money that you have put down for the revenues from irrigated land is too low.” She then listed how much per acre different crops would bring.
I explained that I put the revenues low to show that even if things went badly, we could still pay for the irrigation system. Susan said, “Okay, we just wanted to raise that with you, but that is not the reason we made our decision not to support the plan.
“We know how much farmland Neskonlith can support,” she continued, “because we worked the land with our parents and grandparents when the reserve was under full cultivation. So we know how hard the work is to farm this land. We would like to see it developed, but we do not have confidence in our children to be able to do this work, and they will lose the land if they get into this kind of arrangement.”
I did not try to explain how this could be prevented by the lease arrangement, because it was a basic confidence issue. They did not trust our generation to put the work into the land. I was enormously disappointed. I had worked for months on this project, and I had planned to work many months, even years, to get it up and running. But now, the rug had been pulled out from under me.
After the meeting, I went back to my mother’s old trailer across the road, where Beverly and I and the kids were living at the time. I didn’t know what to do. The trailer was on a hill overlooking the Trans-Canada Highway, and I sat out front watching the stream of cars and trucks passing by on their way east to Chase and the Rockies or west to Kamloops and the coast.
I was struck by the obvious. Why not build a gas station and store on the reserve lands to bring in money from the traffic streaming through our territory on the Trans-Canada? It would at least provide a few jobs and bring some revenue into the community.
I went in and told Beverly about the idea, and I said that I would build it in three to five years. Despite the fact that we didn’t have a cent in capital and I had zero experience in business. She was understandably sceptical.
I admit that part of the reason the gas station idea appealed to me was that I wouldn’t have to ask anyone’s permission to proceed. I was hurt by the rejection of the Elders. On a community level, it would allow me to create some jobs for young people, and on a personal level, it would give me a way to support my children in a way that my father, with his unrelenting commitment to the struggle, hadn’t been able to.
It did, finally, take just over three years to build the gas station and convenience store. The first act was a symbolic burning of the old. The best place for the gas station was on the site of the decrepit old family DIA house that we called the “brown house.” My father was quite ill by this point and living in a small house in Chase. The family house, like most of the old DIA houses in the community, was beyond repair. To clear the site for the gas station, we arranged for a team to burn it and bulldoze the remains. I called my father the evening before to let him know what we were doing. He came out the next morning to watch it burn but he stayed in his car. Bobby was with me. Neither of us felt any sentimental attachment to the house, but we were both reluctant to do the torching ourselves. One of the construction guys finally took the gas can and doused the house inside and out. A few minutes later, it was engulfed in flames.
It took only minutes to reduce our old home to ashes and a few charred beams. Then the bulldozers moved in to level the standing timbers and push them aside. Within hours it was as if the house had never existed. For me, the fire cleansed some of the unhappier memories of my youth. The next building that would stand on that spot would not be provided to “wards of the state” by Indian Affairs, but built by Secwepemc people for their own use.
I do not know what my father felt watching the old house burn from the car. He drove away when the bulldozers moved in. But it was not an easy period for him. He could barely walk by that time and his once crystal clear thinking was clouded. Evidence of this came most sharply when he became embroiled in a dispute with Bobby, who was still serving as band chief. It had something to do with band policy that was so insignificant that I cannot now recall the details.
My father, who was still revered by many, and who by this time had been three times nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his work with the National Indian Brotherhood and the World Council of Indigenous Peoples, was being intensely courted and, I believe, manipulated by the opposition. Finally they organized a takeover of the Neskonlith band office, and my father announced he was going to run against Bobby in the band election.
Looking back, it was obviously a confusion in his thoughts, but the whole family and community were affected by this turn of events. In my own mind, and I know for Bobby as well, it reminded us again of the harsh and deeply unpleasant side of politics. Building the gas station became more than a family project, it became a refuge.
My father won the election against my brother, but it was a contest he never should have entered. He would barely serve the two-year term before succumbing to his illness in 1989, the year after my mother died.
Today, despite my father’s sad end, I see both my parents as heroic figures. They found strength from some hidden reservoir deep within to withstand and overcome the hardships and adversity that they faced, and went on to build full and rich lives that helped many in their community, in their nation and—in a very real sense in my father’s case—the world.
Although I was far from the centre of the political battles, even in this period I was not completely cut off from the fringes. I still did the odd contract for the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs; one of them was writing speeches for the president, Saul Terry. One in particular put me in touch with the national scene in the late 1980s. It was a speech condemning the Sechelt Agreement, a product of the newly elected Mulroney government, which had begun its own White Paper–style offensive.
The leaked report of Mulroney’s policy was offensive to the point that even within the government it was nicknamed the Buffalo Jump for Indigenous peoples. It contained deep cuts in services and the shifting of costs to the provinces. At the same time, it proposed “negotiating municipal community self-government agreements with First Nations which would result in the First Nation government giving up their Constitutional status as a sovereign people and becoming a municipality subject to provincial or territorial laws.”25
Only the Sechelt had been conned into signing an agreement under these terms. The legislation transferred fee simple title of Sechelt lands to the band and conferred municipal status on the community, placing it under provincial jurisdiction. This was chapter and verse of the White Paper policy of 1969, and many of us were deeply disturbed that the Sechelt leadership would accept it. The speech I wrote hammered the Sechelt municipal government approach, and Saul Terry—the Union president at the time—presented it to the Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs in Ottawa.
I gained a renewed respect for Saul when we met some of the Sechelt guys back at the Holiday Inn after the session, and one of them was so angry with our brief he threatened to beat the hell out of Saul. Saul didn’t back down. And thankfully, since the guy towered above both of us, Saul didn’t turn around and point me out as the speech writer. A small incident, but again a reminder of the passions of our politics.
For most of this period, I was consumed by the business project. It would provide me with an essential education on what the private sector was about, on its strengths and its limitations for Aboriginal people in the reserve setting.
In my family’s case, we had jointly inherited both my mother’s and father’s Certificates of Possession to the land. With the help of a lawyer friend, Wayne Haimila, I set up the Ska-Hiish Holdings company and leased the CP land to it with a twenty-year lease at a dollar a year, basically leasing it to myself.
This was a more or less accepted practice for on-reserve development, but it still required approval from the Department of Indian Affairs. Like almost everything to do with the DIA, it was a demeaning process. My brothers, Bobby and Richard, and I drove down to the Department office in Vancouver to meet with the regional director and a group of a half-dozen officials to ask for DIA approval of our lease. It promised to be a difficult and likely drawn-out affair, except for the fact that my brother Bobby had long since lost patience with these things. As soon as we sat down, he looked the regional director in the eye and said, “I know you have the power to approve or disapprove this lease. Can you let us know right now if you are going to approve it or not?”
There was a moment of silence and sidelong glances, and probably a little disappointment that Bobby was depriving them of the sport of pushing Indians around a bit. The regional director finally answered that he would approve it if all three of us got a legal opinion stating that the Department wasn’t responsible for the difference in the real value of the land and the dollar-a-year payment that the lease called for. We agreed and were out on the street minutes later. I mentioned to Bobby that I didn’t have money for a lawyer to write up the opinion and Bobby said, “Forget that. We will all just write them saying we won’t hold them responsible and that’s that.”
He was right. Our lease was accepted.
The next challenge was putting together a business plan for the gas station. Though I was nearly broke, I bought a Tandy computer and Lotus 1–2–3—something of a novelty in those days, but a tool I felt was a bit of an equalizer for someone who did not have formal business education. It was well worth the investment. The government business loan I was seeking required 20 per cent private equity, so I went to the bank, showed them my painstakingly assembled and professional-looking Lotus business plan, and asked for the loan. After a couple of their filing cabinets were filled up with plans and background information, both the government and bank loans were approved. From then on, the computer became an essential tool in our house, and I’m sure it contributed to my oldest son becoming a physicist and my youngest an electrical engineer. For Indigenous peoples, the computer has helped break the information monopoly of the dominant society.
With my wife and children and a business to keep me busy, I was enjoying the break from the frustrations of day-to-day politics. I thought at the time that this was it. I would simply do my part in the community. Perhaps I’d use some of my experience to do a few jobs for Indian organizations and raise my children, as all parents strive to, so that they would have pride in their heritage and the skills they would need to find their way in the world.
The gas station and store were opened in 1988. But there was an unexpected hurdle. Soon after we opened, the Progressive Conservative government in Ottawa brought in its goods and services tax, with a provision that the tax had to be prepaid on wholesale purchases. This played havoc with our cash flow, since the government demanded we pay the tax up front, though we sold a large percentage of our gas to on-reserve customers who were tax exempt. As a result, we were put in the untenable position of selling our gas for less than we were paying for it, with the government reimbursement coming only sixty days later.
We were living with an impossibly negative cash flow. It actually took us some time to identify this, and when I showed our financial position to friends and colleagues, the only thing they could think of was that I sell my truck. At the same time, the bank was getting increasingly impatient as we fell behind on our loan payments, to the point where we were beginning to receive threats to shut us down less than a year after opening. Clearly, I needed better business advice. And the most successful person I knew was Ron Derrickson in Westbank.
Already by the beginning of the 1990s, there was something legendary about Ron Derrickson. His success in business and as chief was well known. At the same time, he had also suffered more than his share of slings and arrows, which included—to the shock of all Interior peoples—an assassination attempt.
This had occurred in 1982, when as band chief he was embroiled in a bitter dispute with local white trailer park owners over his aggressive move into business on unused Westbank lands. They felt they were being pushed out of the market and responded by hiring a former police officer to beat him to death.
It was a hot August afternoon when Chief Derrickson heard the knock on his door. When he opened it, he was confronted by a man he’d never seen before who, instead of saying hello, pulled a sharpened crowbar out of his jacket and landed a crushing blow on the side of the chief’s head. Half-blinded by the blood pouring out of the gash, Derrickson stumbled backwards. More blows landed on him as he raised his arm to try to defend himself. An artery on that wrist was slashed and it, too, gushed blood. He kept backing up with his arms raised trying to protect his head until he reached his gun cabinet. While blows rained down on him, he pulled out a revolver. The attacker froze, then turned and fled. Derrickson shot him in his front yard through the open window, hitting him in both shoulders. The attacker went down. Derrickson, a bleeding mess by this time, with slash wounds that would require almost 250 stitches to close, still managed to call the police before collapsing in his living room.
When the police came, both Derrickson and the attacker were rushed to the hospital. Both survived their ordeals, and it was soon revealed that the attacker was not a robber acting independently but an ex–police officer hired by local businessmen who couldn’t stand the idea that Westbank First Nation, under Derrickson’s leadership, had moved into direct competition with them. The attacker and one of the businessmen were jailed for attempted murder. With the escape from the assassination attempt, Chief Derrickson became even more of a local legend.
But while he was still packing a semi-automatic pistol to deter further attempts on his life, Chief Derrickson found himself under attack from within. Just as the band’s economic success had drawn the fury of the local white businessmen, Derrickson’s activism had brought the attention of the Department of Indian Affairs. With the help of political opponents within his own Westbank community, they began to spread rumours that he was mixing his personal and business affairs. These rumours grew and, after complaints were made to the government, an inquiry was launched. The government undertook an extensive review, with forensic audits of both his personal books and the band’s books, and concluded there was no substance to the charges. But by this time, for him, too, political life had lost its lustre. When I drove down to meet him at his trailer office on the reserve with Bobby and Wayne Haimila, he had been out of politics for four years and was happy to have it behind him.
At this time, I didn’t know Ron that well. His father and mine had been friends, and Ron and Bobby had been chiefs at the same time and had developed a friendship as well as a good working relationship. So, while we didn’t really have a personal history, we knew each other through family connections and by reputation.
Bobby and I arrived at his office with a copy of the business lease. I told him about the bank’s threats to close me down before I had time to straighten the issues out with Revenue Canada. Our backs were against the wall, I told him. Ron listened, nodded his understanding, then began studying my lease. After a few minutes he said, “This is a very badly written lease! But I don’t think you have anything to worry about. They are just blowing smoke. They can’t shut you down.”
Just to be sure, he told me to take the lease to his lawyer, and he called him up. “I’m sending three Indians over who have a lease I want you to look at.”
The lawyer read it and came to the same conclusion. The lease would make any bank move against us very difficult indeed. We could forget about the bank while we fought our battle with Revenue Canada over the revenues they were withholding from our business cash flow for sixty-day periods.
With the threat of foreclosure lifted, we worked on getting Revenue Canada to reduce its withholding period to a manageable sixteen days. This allowed us to turn over our product and revenues twice a month, which was doable. My cash flow righted itself, and I was thankful that I didn’t have to sell my truck. I was also thankful to Ron for helping me buy the time I needed to solve the problem.
His message, essentially, was: Don’t let them bully you. It is a message that Indigenous businesspeople should have inscribed on the wall where they can see it when they open their eyes in the morning. It is a message that only a few of our people, and even fewer of our leaders, have taken to heart so far. But it is essential if we are going to begin the process of truly decolonizing ourselves.
The business began to run more or less smoothly. Beverly and I still worked long days, but the uphill struggle of the previous four years was over. I had reached the point when I could reduce my focus on the business. And when I looked around, I found a growing crisis in the only issue that could have brought me back to the political struggle: the land issue.
In October 1990, only a month after chaotic fistfights and mass arrests ended the Oka standoff in Quebec, a group of B.C. Indian leaders were in Ottawa for private meetings with the prime minister and apparently looking to pick the fruit of the summer’s turmoil. Among the leading figures was Ed John, an Indian lawyer and briefly chief of the Tl’azt’en Nation band, who had been part of the failed constitutional negotiations throughout the 1980s. Ed John is a man of considerable talent—he even served as an appointed cabinet minister in the B.C. provincial government—and he and those who met with Prime Minister Mulroney in the fall of 1990 were determined to settle the B.C. land question at the negotiating table. The immediate result of that meeting was the creation of a tripartite B.C. Claims Task Force made up of First Nations and federal and provincial representatives, which within two years would morph into the B.C. Treaty Commission (BCTC) and the First Nations Summit (FNS) to oversee the negotiation process.
The terms of the negotiations, however, would not be under Section 35 of the Constitution, under which Aboriginal rights would be recognized and affirmed at the beginning of the negotiations. Instead, they would be carried out under the revised Comprehensive Claims policy, which the Mulroney government brought out in 1986. It stated that negotiations would take place under Section 91(24) of the BNA Act, where the federal government had sole jurisdiction over “Indians, and Lands reserved for the Indians.”
This policy was not contained in some secret government negotiating strategy, it was explicitly given in the definition section of the negotiating guidelines. The Aboriginal lands under negotiation were defined as lands “held by, or on behalf of, an Aboriginal group under conditions where they would constitute ‘lands reserved for the Indians’ under section 91(24) of the Constitution Act, 1867.”
For us in the Interior and for many Indian nations across the country, it was an astounding retreat by these B.C. leaders. The First Nations Summit was agreeing to begin negotiations by surrendering their Aboriginal title and rights contained in Section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982, before they even sat at the table. In fact, the government itself referred to this as the “surrender and grant back” policy, with First Nations first surrendering their Aboriginal title and rights while the government decides what to grant them back during the negotiations.
The stated goal of these skewed negotiations was clearly the old ceding and releasing of our rights, to be replaced by what amounted to, in the best case, slightly expanded reserves and the menu of municipal and nonprofit organization powers that were defined in the policy.
The basic negotiating model has remained over the years, though there has been some monkeying with the terminology. Instead of speaking of “extinguishment,” the government now speaks of “certainty” as the goal of its negotiations. This sleight of hand has fooled no one. Even from afar, it is obvious what has been going on. As the Department of Indian Affairs itself admitted, UN bodies saw that replacing “extinguishment” by “certainty” was meaningless:
… the UN Human Rights Committee called on Canada to ensure that alternatives to extinguishment in modern treaties do not, in practice, extinguish Aboriginal rights. Similarly, the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights expressed concern that the new approaches “do not differ much from the extinguishment and surrender approach,” and urged a re-examination of governmental policies and practices ensure they do not result in extinguishment.26
The government waited five years to reply to the UN:
Under the modified rights model, aboriginal rights are not released, but are modified into the rights articulated and defined in the treaty. Under the non-assertion model, Aboriginal rights are not released, and the Aboriginal group agrees to exercise only those rights articulated and defined in the treaty and to assert no other Aboriginal rights.27
Once you unscramble the bureaucratese, it is impossible to conclude other than that “certainty” means “extinguishment.” If an Aboriginal group agrees “to exercise only those rights articulated and defined in the treaty and to assert no other Aboriginal rights,” all of those “other” Aboriginal rights are effectively extinguished.
More than twenty years after it was set up, B.C.’s First Nations Summit, which is made up mainly of coastal bands, continues to promote these extinguishment negotiating tables. It is important to note that the Summit itself does not actually carry out these negotiations. The FNS is highly funded by the federal and provincial government as a kind of procurer and public relations cheerleader for the bands involved in the process.
These bands negotiate in secret, on their own, with the negotiations funded by government loans. The negotiations are expensive, requiring costly legal advice and professional negotiators with full-time staff. The bands must pay back this loan money when the negotiation is complete—either through a breakdown or a successful deal. Today, the amount the bands collectively owe on these loans has topped $500 million, with very few deals signed. In a bizarre twist, bands are now negotiating for settlements that might be less than they already owe in negotiation costs. As the international business magazine The Economist pointed out in 2012, many “Native leaders fear that the mounting loans will take a big bite out of, or even exceed, any final cash payment.”28 We will look more closely at the disastrous consequences of the B.C. Treaty Process in chapter 15.
As these land and treaty issues arose in the early 1990s, it was already clear that they touched the core of my people’s interests and long-term survival. It was becoming increasingly difficult to turn away and tend to my own business, as others promoted our surrender at the negotiating table. But finally, it was the gentle Elder Mary Thomas knocking at my door with a purely local issue that pushed me back into the fray. Mary was for many years a kind of spiritual mother to the whole community. To get me to do what she wanted, she used that unique mix of sweetness and guilt that mothers of all nations have perfected.
She came to see me about a problem with a house for one of her children. She wanted me to run for chief, she said, so I could solve it. I told her that I really wasn’t interested in running, that I was busy with my business.
That was all the opening she needed. “Ah, yes,” she said. “You have an education and a business.” The she paused, smiling sweetly. “You know, you have benefited from the community. Don’t you think you need to pay back sometime?”
While I was still telling her that I did not want to run, she assured me that I would not even need to campaign. She had already been talking to some of the other Elders. She would talk to them all and she would take care of it …
In fact, the idea of one of us running had already come up between me and Bobby. The B.C. Treaty Process had established roots among the coastal peoples and, to the north, Yukon Indians were already coming to agreement on land surrender deals. The pressure was growing on the B.C. Interior peoples to join in, and we both feared there would be a rush to the extinguishment of our Aboriginal title.
We would probably not have much influence on the coastal peoples, but the Interior peoples at least had to stand together against this threat. We needed to denounce the termination of our rights, and the chief would have entry to the rooms where the decisions were being made. Neither of us had much confidence in the current chief. I had suggested to Bobby that he run again, but he said he had taken some soundings and, after the painful divisions created by my father’s coup, he didn’t think he would be elected. But, he told me, “I think you would have support.”
Mary was also convinced of this. A few days later, when I told Bobby that I had agreed to let Mary put my name forward and line up support among the Elders, we both knew what this meant. A few words would be spoken at the sewing circles, at the berry patches, in the kitchens where community suppers were prepared, and in small, dark living rooms where tea was served. And the local political wheels would start turning, whether the designated driver was behind the wheel or not.