Finances, the People, and the Land
YOU QUICKLY LEARN that, despite the government’s attempts to make it so, being chief is not at all like being a small-town mayor. As chief, you are expected to be present in the lives of band members from cradle to grave. This includes celebrations like graduations and weddings, and sad events like funerals. The chief is called when a band member is arrested and when a band member succumbs to despair and commits suicide. You are responsible for housing your people and for difficult issues involving child welfare, and for dealing with racial attacks on your children in white schools. And for so many other issues that it is impossible to list them—everything from protecting archaeological sites to hosting visitors.
As chief, you are part of all public functions and you find yourself, even with a salary of six hundred dollars a month, as was my case in Neskonlith, reaching into your pocket to pay for community parties, coffee for council meetings, and the gas you put in your car when you go to off-reserve meetings. But the hardest part of being chief is confronting the real destitution among community members. I was most shaken by those people who were asking for mercy from a really uncaring and unfeeling society. And there was nothing you could do. You can blame them for not doing enough to help themselves, but you know deep down that they are not going to get anywhere unless there is a major change in our society. Without outside help, they will never have the footing to climb out of the situation life has placed them in.
But when you arrive at the band office for your first day on the job, as I did in January 1995, it is the band finances that consume you. As soon as you are elected, you are sent into budget negotiations with Indian Affairs, and they leave you only the smallest room to manoeuvre. Your overall budget is already broken down into line items that the Department controls. And these items often have no relation to the real needs of your community. You are further hamstrung by the fact that you have to compensate for any overruns from the previous year.
This amount of control is not so different from in my father’s time, when the Indian agent would come down from his Kamloops office and tell our chiefs to sign a sheaf of documents without even looking at them and take them back to Indian Affairs. My father would tell his chief to stop doing that. “You can’t just sign away our decisions. You have to refuse.”
This was the situation all over Canada. In fact, very few chiefs in those days could write in English if they even owned a typewriter. So the Indian agent simply took over. My father’s first job was to get the chiefs, not the Indian agent, recognized as the leaders of the Indian bands. He wanted the chiefs to lead the way to self-government, though toward the end of his life, he realized that that might not happen.
Today it is often the band manager who plays the controlling role. The manager is in constant contact with the Department of Indian Affairs, and shoves reams of Indian Affairs papers in front of the elected chief for signing. The band manager becomes the de facto Indian agent working in our offices. Often they don’t live in the community, and many of them are not even Indian. It was one of our Elders, Irene Billy, who made this link directly. Whenever she needed papers signed by the band manager or had an issue to discuss with him, she would say, “I have to go see Indian Affairs.” The band manager, for her, was indistinguishable from the Indian agent of old.
I learned a lot about how the Elders saw the world from listening to Irene. When we went to Ottawa together once on a lobbying trip, I pointed out the giant Indian Affairs skyscraper across the river in Hull. She asked me what floor Indian Affairs was on, and I told her it was the whole building. She could not believe the Department was so enormous, and later admitted to me that she thought when I pointed to the building, it was where the whole government was housed. Knowing how little use they were in the world, she could not imagine that the Indian agents would have such a grand headquarters all to themselves.
When something goes wrong, of course, the Department and its political masters inevitably shake their heads and blame the chief and council for incompetence, or worse, hint ominously at “irregularities.” In fact, bands face budgetary surveillance throughout the fiscal year and they are rigorously audited at year-end. Budget problems are invariably caused by the system itself, which forces First Nations to try to satisfy the basic human needs of their people with a budget that simply cannot cover them. There is a reason that while Canada as a whole was sitting in the first rank of world nations when I became chief, Indigenous peoples were living at the seventy-eighth rank—in Third World conditions. It had nothing to do with the administrative skills of chiefs and councils, and everything to do with the fact that our land has been confiscated. In return, we are given what amounts to starvation wages to care for our people. The parentage of our poverty is very clear.
Along with band finances, the chief’s own agenda is also largely out of his or her own control. One issue came out of the blue that would later take on an overriding importance in my community—Sun Peaks. When I was elected, Manny Jules, then chief of the Kamloops band, and Nathan Matthew, head of the Shuswap Nation Tribal Council, were working on a protocol agreement with Nippon Cable, which was investing in the expansion of a ski resort on our Aboriginal title land. Along with the rest of the chiefs in the Tribal Council, I signed it without a great deal of thought. It was something I would soon come to regret.
In my initial weeks on the job, plans had to be constantly set aside for the unforeseen. Things like the ramping up of racial tensions between Indian and white teenagers at the local high school in Chase, which occurred while I was still engaged in the budget gymnastics. The council held an emergency debate on the race issue and a long discussion about what we could do. After talking it over for a while, we had to face the fact that nothing had changed since we went to school. We all went through this same kind of trouble when we were younger. I don’t know why we initially reacted with surprise, when we knew nothing had changed in Chase over the previous thirty years.
Shuswap Nation Tribal Council, Kamloops, November 2000. Left to right: Chief Ron Ignace (Skeetchestn Indian Band), Chief Nathan Matthew (North Thompson Indian Band), Chief Manny Jules (Kamloops Indian Band), Chief Arthur Manuel (Neskonlith Indian Band), Chief Ronnie Jules (Adams Lake Indian Band), Chief Cherlyn Billy (Bonaparte Indian Band), Chief Rick LaBorde (Whispering Pines Indian Band)
The impoverishment of our people and the racism of the whites had not changed. Even though our people spent several million dollars every year in Chase buying their essentials, and the neighbouring peoples from the Adams Lake and other Shuswap bands spent millions more, there was not even work for us in the service industries in Chase. In the whole village, no Indian youth were given jobs in the shops. No Indian workers were employed in the local assembly plants. We were preparing to take this issue to the town in a co-ordinated way, when, in the late spring of 1995, we suddenly found ourselves facing a much more intense battle on Secwepemc territory, a shooting war.
It began in mid-June when a group of Secwepemc spiritualists and a few non-Indigenous supporters were beginning a Sundance ceremony on our Secwepemc territory near Gustafsen Lake, known as Ts’peten in our language, about three hundred kilometres north of Neskonlith on the Cariboo Highway. The sacred site was located on lands that were fenced by a local rancher, Lyle James, whose claim to the territory was questionable even by the white man’s standards. This was Crown land, in fact part of our Aboriginal title land, and James had simply rented grazing rights from the province over a 900-hectare section for $1,300 a year.
The Sundancers were led by Percy Rosette, a Secwepemc faithkeeper. Several years earlier, he had had a vision of the sacredness of that site, and he notified the rancher that he would be holding summer ceremonies there.
This area also has a legendary status with our people. The story goes that Ts’peten was the place where the land commissioner in the nineteenth century had initially arrived with a box of money to purchase our territory. For days, the people politely put him off, saying they were looking for a sign from the Creator as to whether they had permission to sell the land. Finally, after days of waiting, the land commissioner became impatient and insisted the people make a decision. So they said, okay, they would see if the money came from the Creator. But first they had to purify it. They took the box of cash and emptied it onto the fire. The land commissioner watched in horror as the money was consumed by the flames. The Secwepemc then told him that the money obviously didn’t come from the Creator, because it had burned in the fire; therefore, the land was not for sale.
This was where Percy was holding his Sundances. They were held at that spot every summer for four years without incident. But the fifth year, after the Sundancers erected a makeshift fence to keep the wandering cattle from trampling their site, the rancher showed up with a dozen ranch hands, several carrying rifles, and ordered the Sundancers to pull down the fence and vacate the land. An argument ensued, and the Sundancers said that one of the hands warned them during the shouting match that “it was a good day to string up some red niggers.”
The ranchers returned later and stuck a homemade eviction notice on a ceremonial staff. They returned again when the Sundancers were away from the camp, ripped the door off the ceremonial hut, and walked off with the cooking stove. It was clear to the Sundancers that they were under threat, so they made a call to others to help them as the Defenders of Ts’peten.
The so-called Gustafsen Lake Standoff had begun. Over the next thirty-one days, the RCMP would amass four hundred Emergency Response Team officers complete with armoured personnel carriers. They would fire more than seven thousand rounds at the Defenders, blow up one of their pickups with a land mine, and engage in vile propaganda that even one of their PR officers later described as a “smear campaign.” Over the next month, the Sundancers were variously described as being members of a cult, as common criminals, and, finally, as terrorists.
From Neskonlith, these charges seemed bizarre. We knew many of the people at the camp, and they were far from cultists or terrorists. They included, rather, Secwepemc sovereignists like the Elder William Jones Ignace, who was known as Wolverine during the standoff. A member of the Adams Lake Band, he was a long-time supporter of my father and someone I respected for his deep conviction of our people’s sovereign rights to our land. He had not initially been with the Sundancers, but after the visit from the armed ranchers, he received a call from Percy Rosette, who told him about the threat. Wolverine headed up to Ts’peten that night and became one of the leading Defenders.
During the standoff, there were several shooting incidents and a few pitched gun battles. It seems a miracle that no one was killed and only a few on each side were lightly wounded. But the barrage of racist attacks in the press and from the police and government officials continued before and after the firefights.
It must also be noted that the Defenders’ cause was not helped by the antics of their white lawyer, Bruce Clark; his mental stability was questioned by one judge, who accused him of “delusional paranoia” and charged him with criminal contempt. Clark was eventually disbarred by the law society of Ontario as being “unfit and ungovernable.” But it turned out even his delusions were not entirely delusional. The RCMP superintendent in charge of the Gustafsen Lake Standoff, Len Olfert, was quoted by a number of sources within the RCMP as telling Sergeant Denis Ryan to “kill this Clark and smear the prick and everyone with him.”
At one point, then national chief Ovide Mercredi travelled to the camp to try to defuse the situation. While he condemned violence from either side, he also dismissed the police and government’s attempts to characterize the Sundancers as “terrorists.” “These individuals are not terrorists,” Mercredi said. “They are people with strong convictions … they are not criminals.”
The standoff ended with a surrender of the camp on September 11, 1995, after visits from spiritual leaders. Almost all who remained in the camp were arrested and charged. William Ignace, who, as Wolverine, had been given a high media profile during the standoff, was given an eight-year sentence. From his prison cell in Surrey, British Columbia, he had no trouble explaining what the incident had been about. It was clearly and squarely about our right to our land:
All we want is the respect that we deserve, because we made room in our nations for the non-Indigenous people. And yet where is the respect that we should have? Meanwhile it is the RCMP who is the goon squad for the province of British Columbia to carry on the theft of the resources here in our homeland.
Everyday they are stealing billions of dollars from the Indian people and look where they put our people to where we can only collect welfare and people start squawking about this. But First People have to realize where the tax base starts from, it starts from the Indian land and all the resources. People say we’re living off their backs but we’re not—they are living off ours.29
As is so often the case, the truth of Canada’s treatment of Indigenous peoples is more apparent from outside the country. When James Pitawanakwat, one of the Defenders, fled Canada for the United States, his extradition back to Canada was refused by an Oregon U.S. District Court judge, Janice Stewart. After hearing all of the evidence, she said: “The Gustafsen Lake incident involved an organized group of native people rising up in their homeland against an occupation by the government of Canada of their sacred and unceded tribal land.” She added, “the Canadian government engaged in a smear and disinformation campaign to prevent the media from learning and publicizing the true extent and political nature of these events.”30
That, unfortunately, was not news to us. We have been the target of a disinformation campaign since the moment the Europeans arrived on our shores and insisted first that there were no humans here and then, for a time, that the humans who were here were not in fact human. Again, with Gustafsen Lake, we were reminded about how little has changed. Today, James Pitawanakwat remains in the United States in political asylum from Canada. William Ignace recently put me in touch with him. James would like to come home, and I am looking for a legal route to safely bring him back.
One preoccupation of mine that was sidetracked in that tumultuous first year as chief was to counter the centuries of disinformation that began with the doctrine of discovery. Our people had to gain control of their own history. The opportunity to do this in an important way came when British Columbia made available funds for First Nations to do Traditional Use Studies (TUS) of their territories. It was a tool we could use not only to prove our Aboriginal title but also to draw up an Indigenous resource management plan. The goal of the research was not to put together a four-inch-thick book that would collect dust on a shelf, it was to create something we could also apply on the ground when we were exercising our Aboriginal title and rights.
Some of my community members were sceptical about this. “Why do we have to prove that we were here?” they asked. “We know we were here. It is the white guys who should be spending the money to do the research.”
I told them that we had to face reality. The federal and provincial governments are in effective possession of our property and our assets. We have to show them in concrete terms that the land we inhabit is ours. And if we hope to manage it, we have to know how, exactly, we are using it today. So our study involved amassing the information from archival, oral tradition, and historical sources through to visiting all of the sites our people use today.
It was important to stress that “traditional use” of our territory did not end after Simon Fraser took his guided tour along what was then known as the Secwepemc River, or after British Columbia became a province in Canada, or after the American loggers arrived to build the Adams River Lumber Company mill in Chase. Traditional use covers a wide range of activities we do today—fishing, hunting, berry picking, and gathering edible and medicinal plants. Many of these activities are still essential for our people, particularly those who must rely on the $175 a month that is given out in Indian social assistance. We know that people cannot get enough day-to-day protein and vitamins on that monthly income; they survive by supplementing it with the traditional economy. So when we speak about traditional use activities, we are speaking not only about something that is ancient, but also about something that is essential today. At the same time, we needed to look at our historical research to connect our activities with the past and provide ourselves with a detailed history of our Aboriginal title lands.
Gathering this information is not encouraged within the current land claims negotiating structure; in fact, it is actively discouraged. While the government spends millions of dollars a year doing research, for example through the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and the Ministry of Forests’ Land Resource Management Plan, we are expected to deal with our land—our title—without any research whatsoever.
When it comes to the land claims process, the government says quite plainly, “You don’t need to do research.” This is especially the case with the B.C. Treaty Process. It does not even take notice of research, because it does not deal with the rights that flow from possession. If you put rights on the table, they will immediately get thrown off. To enter the negotiation process, all you need to do is take a piece of paper or a B.C. map, draw your territory on it, and have your band council write a letter of intention and mail it in to the B.C. Treaty Commission. Presto—you are in negotiation. The BCTC wants us to avoid research and especially to avoid providing a foundation for future resource management.
The government likes this amateurish approach to mapping our territories in another way. Today it is not uncommon for communities to make unresearched maps of their territory that greatly overlap neighbouring Indigenous territories. One of the government’s arguments against recognizing title is that it would create economic chaos because of the overlapping claims. This is a challenge that requires serious thought by our peoples. We can at least agree that the land is ours and undertake joint research to address conflicts—something we know that the government has no interest in supporting.
In Neskonlith, we started an ambitious project on our own, but we quickly discovered that we needed outside technical help. A professional job would require professionals. Fortunately, I knew someone who could put together a study combining historical research with traditional use that could serve both as the basis of a resource management plan and as legal proof of occupation of our Aboriginal title lands. That person was Russell Diabo.
Russell is a Berkeley-educated Mohawk from Kahnawake whom I first met when I was living in Montreal. I had gotten to know him when he was a political adviser at the Assembly of First Nations. As with so many things, Russell was ahead of the curve when it came to Indigenous land use issues. When the United Nations released the report of the World Commission on Environment and Development, the so-called Brundtland Report, in 1987, Russell was working with the Algonquins of Barriere Lake in northwestern Quebec in their battle to stop the logging, mining, and hydroelectric developments on their Aboriginal title lands.
The Brundtland Report was the UN’s first serious attempt to address the increasing damage to the world’s natural environment with a broad focus on population, food security, the loss of species and genetic resources, energy, industry, and human settlements. It recognized that all of these elements were intimately connected in our ecosystem, and demanded that the world turn away from its unsustainable environmental practices. If fact, it was this report that defined sustainable development as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
Among the Brundtland Report recommendations that caught Russell’s eye was that Indigenous peoples should have a decisive voice in resource management decisions that affect them, and that their knowledge should be used in managing in complex ecosystems. He took the Brundtland sustainable development model and applied it to the Algonquin land use battle. Over the next several years, he used it as the basis of tripartite negotiations on co-management of Algonquin title lands with the federal and provincial governments.
Russell and his team managed to draft what he called an “ecosystem-based Integrated Resource Management Plan (IRMP)” with a commitment to the principles of sustainable development, conservation, protection of the traditional way of life of the Algonquins, as well as multiple other uses of the territory, from logging to sports hunting and fishing and other recreational uses. They began with Indigenous knowledge to map the hunting and fishing sites, food gathering sites, sacred sites, burial sites, and other culturally significant areas on the Algonquins’ Aboriginal title lands, and then worked out a detailed plan to harmonize the forestry and other activities on the land with the needs of the Algonquins.
In the end, the forestry companies were given a map of areas where they had to leave swaths of varying sizes of the territory intact to protect important ecological and cultural sites. Often, it was only a small corridor that was needed, for example, to leave untouched sixty metres of forest on either side of a portage so the people could find their way when heading to their fishing or hunting camps. Or a similar sixty-metre protected area around bear habitat between November and May when the bear cubs were in the den.
These protections of the living forests called on the Algonquins to be employed as protectors of the land, working closely with the forestry companies and other land users to ensure that their activities did not damage the fragile ecosystem. The Algonquins developed quite a good relationship with the forestry companies based on mutual respect and the reasonable approach that was taken on all sides. The Province of Quebec was also a willing partner. Typically, it was the federal government that finally pulled out of the arrangement, for reasons that were never fully explained. But their withdrawal was consistent with the federal government’s slash-and-burn approach to Aboriginal rights over the past fifty years.
In 1996 I called Russell, who was living in Ottawa at the time, and told him that I needed his help with our Traditional Use Study. “When do you need me there?” he asked. “As soon as you can make it,” I said.
The next day, he and his wife packed their car and drove across the country. He worked with us for three years with a technical team that included Terry Tobias, a land use and occupancy research consultant, Peter Doug Elias, a university researcher, and David Carruthers, as well as several Neskonlith and Adams Lake band members. Russell and his team produced a study and a series of overlay geomaps that identified more than 7,400 significant sites on our territory and gave a detailed sense of how our people had traditionally organized their economic as well as their social lives. They brought together from all sources a textured portrait of our people and their life on the land from ancient times to the modern day.
The geomaps show more than a thousand cultural sites, 424 traditional camps and base camps, and more than two thousand large and small game hunting sites, fishing sites, trapping sites, and plant gathering sites that our people continue to use today. Together, the overlay maps show a living history of our nation and provide the information we need to successfully manage—in partnership with Canada—the sustainable development of our territory. All that is missing now is that partnership. But the Traditional Use Study remains key to our own plans to build—and more importantly, manage—a truly Indigenous economy with a full range of activities, but carried out in a way that does not do irreparable damage to ecosystems that have sustained us for thousands of years.
While Russell and his team were putting together the study, I was struggling to keep up with the day-to-day needs of my community, and with what turned out to be an expanding role in our nation. I was elected to head the Shuswap Nation Tribal Council, which brings together nine Secwepemc bands in an organization that tries to co-ordinate the political and economic positions of the Secwepemc people. This can be a difficult task. As head of the Tribal Council, you always have to know where your chiefs are on any issue. The government works to undermine your unity by trying to lure individual communities away from your consensus positions. Individual deals are sweetened with that seemingly endless supply of Canadian taxpayer money the Department has at its disposal when it wants to break Indian unity.
I also worked with other Interior chiefs to reconstitute an old organization of the Interior peoples. This Interior Alliance brought together forty-five bands from five Indigenous nations: the Southern Carrier, the St’at’imc, the Nlaka’pamux, the Secwepemc, and the Okanagan. It had its roots in the Allied Tribes organization that had been put together for the Laurier Memorial before the First World War and that Andrew Paull had kept alive in a semi-clandestine form during the dark years from 1927 to 1951. Then as now, it was meant to be a fighting organization. And our main concern as the 1990s came to a close was protecting our lands from the forces of extinguishment.
From the Interior, we watched with alarm as the First Nations Summit communities, made up mainly of coastal peoples, continued to negotiate their title and rights at the B.C. Treaty Process tables. This division between us and the coastal peoples remains one of the greatest blocks to First Nations moving forward in British Columbia. It began in the late 1970s when certain forces, some of them created and supported by the government, began to pull the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs apart. In recent times, we are most seriously divided over land issues.
The Interior peoples, who have traditionally fought hard against any move to extinguish our rights, are concerned at some coastal peoples’ apparent openness to signing what seem to us to be very bad deals with the government. But I recall once being brought up short in a public discussion by the Nuu-chah-nulth leader George Watts saying, “Manuel can speak from a high moral stance because he’s got land.”
I was reminded that the coastal peoples were not even given basic reserve lands, only tiny parcels pushed against the sea. The colonial authorities decided that instead of land, they could live off the sea. These seashore communities were backed with only a few dozen acres and, as in so much of our history, desperation drives us.
While the divisions on the land issue between the Interior peoples and the coastal peoples are significant, we should not forget that there is also much that should unite us. Many of us, in fact, belong to the same Salish family. Interior people like the Secwepemc share the basic Salish language with many of the coastal people, and at crucial times in our history, as during the time of the Andrew Paull, we have managed to successfully work together. This alliance continued through the friendship between my father and Philip Paul and through most of the 1970s. The hope on both sides is that we will find a way to work more closely together again, to the great benefit of all of our communities.
In the mid-1990s, however, our differences were underlined by our dramatically different positions on Aboriginal title. The emerging symbol at the time was the Nisga’a agreement, a land claim drafted under Mulroney’s 1986 “surrender and grant back” policy.
In 1996, however, the broader movement was given hope of coming together by the publication of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) report, which called for fundamental change between the Crown and First Nations. Then, a year later, by a sweeping Supreme Court decision that had the same effect in moving the struggle forward for my generation as the Calder decision had had for my father’s. In Delgamuukw, the Canadian courts reminded the executive branch once again that Indigenous peoples in Canada have far more rights than the government was prepared to admit.