Young Activists Come Together
ONE OF THE IRONIES of the name “Idle No More” is that most of the key activists behind it have not been idle at all. Indian resistance has not stopped in Canada, but it had, for several decades, been cut off from the leadership. In fact, activists, many of whom would be more comfortable in describing themselves as sovereignists, were disowned by our leadership to the point where we recently learned that the Assembly of First Nations was secretly working with the RCMP to contain protests at the community level.
Journalists have turned up documents revealing that the AFN and the RCMP held biweekly meetings and synchronized their press releases during the 2007 Day of Protest, which the AFN was working behind the scenes to undermine. As Russell Diabo described it to the Toronto Star: “The Canadian government managed to get the AFN to work against its own people, using them to contain discontent of First Nations and to try to prevent it from spilling into a broad social movement.”56
Around the time of the Day of Action, I had been speaking to Russell about the need for some kind of cross-country group of activists to support each other on an ongoing basis. During the Skwelkwek’welt protest, in the informal network of contacts that my children were part of, I had met many young people dedicated to the cause. I often saw new faces at the protest camp, generally young people from as far away as the east coast who had come to show their solidarity (although some of the young men, I suspected, were hanging around because they had developed crushes on my daughters). But for the most part, young activists were scattered across North America working in isolated communities and often facing the same sort of police harassment and criminalization of their protest as our people faced at Skwelkwek’welt. They were obviously not getting help and support from the national organizations—which were, at times, actively working to undermine them.
Russell told me a group was trying to form just that sort of activist alliance, and he asked me to work with him to help them out. With the assistance of a phone account provided by my friend Judy Rebick, we organized a conference call with dozens of Indigenous activists from across the country. Many of them were young people who had gone off reserve to get an education and had returned with some idealism to work with their communities, only to find chiefs and councils who saw themselves basically as administrators of Department of Indian Affairs programs and services. At the same time, the young people saw resource companies moving onto their lands and leaving a swath of destruction in their wake, with no recognition of Aboriginal title and rights. It was these young activists, in isolated pockets across the country, who had risen up in the summer of 2007. Now they were seeking to link together to defend their people’s lands and Aboriginal rights.
What was most striking from that first call was how little respect these activists had for their chiefs and councils. In most cases, their attitude was that if you dealt with the chiefs, you might as well phone Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the RCMP directly. To our leaders who seemed so willing to negotiate away our rights, they suggested they should just move to town, become settlers themselves, but not destroy the last vestige of our sovereignty.
The majority of these activists were young, but they had also sought out some seasoned veterans to offer them counsel. Among those on the initial conference call were long-dedicated people like Milton Born With a Tooth, who had spent four years in jail after the 1990 battle over the Oldman River in Alberta; Sam McKay, who had been jailed during the KI (Big Trout Lake) mining protests; and Tom Goldtooth, president of the Indigenous Environmental Network. There were also many second- and third-generation activists like Norman Matchewan from Barriere Lake and Dustin Rivers, the great-grandson of Andrew Paull. More than half of the activists were women, including Judy DaSilva, Heather Milton Lightening, and Carol Martin and Cleo Desjarlais from Northern Alberta.
The important and often leading role of women in our struggle has been common since at least my father’s day; this includes women Elders like Irene Billy, who was one of the Secwepemc participants at the first meeting. At a follow-up meeting, she was joined by her daughter-in-law Janice Billy, and by Elder William Ignace, the famous Wolverine from Gustafsen Lake, who is better known locally these days as an excellent organic farmer who gives away fresh vegetables to the people in our communities.
Among the young activists, I noticed something that turned out to be typical of youth movements today: a true sense of solidarity. The group was firmly Indigenous and sovereignist but it also had a number of active non-Indigenous supporters, bright and multitalented young people like Shiri Pasternak, who was studying at the University of Toronto (and now has a doctorate in geography), Corvin Russell, a young and savvy activist, and researcher Emma Feltes. These young people understood that justice for Aboriginal people would not only make things better for us, but it would also make a much better Canada.
In British Columbia, we were also in contact with the young South Asian activists Harjap, who works with the Council of Canadians, and Harsha, who is a popular educator rooted in migrant justice. Both are strong supporters of Indigenous peoples. These young activists even crossed the English-French divide. At an Ontario meeting organized by a national trade union, I found the Quebec contingent, led by the charismatic student leader Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, to be among the strongest supporters of the Indigenous peoples and our rights, at a time when the union leadership was offering us only partial support. The active assistance of these youthful non-Indigenous supporters is yet another reason I have hope for our collective future.
That first conference call ended with a plan for the founding meeting of a new organization, the Defenders of the Land, to be held in Winnipeg in the fall of 2008. The group raised sixty thousand dollars in small amounts from Indigenous organizations and unions to pay for travel and hotel expenses, and worked on a draft charter over the Internet.
The Defenders of the Land described itself as a network of Indigenous communities and activists in struggle across Canada, including Elders and youth, women and men. It was, its website said, the only organization of its kind in Canada: Indigenous-led, free of government or corporate funding, and dedicated to building a fundamental movement for Indigenous rights.
The Defenders would be both nationalist and protectors of Mother Earth. As their charter put it:
We are sovereign nations. We have the inherent right to self-determination. We will determine our own destinies in accordance with our own customs, laws, and traditions—not in a way dictated to us by Canadian and provincial governments, and without interference by these governments….
No development can take place on our lands without our free, prior, and informed consent. “Self-government” that does not include control of our lands is not self government at all. A “duty to consult” that does not allow us to say no to development is meaningless.57
Today the Defenders of the Land includes several hundred activists from more than forty communities who are ready to take on the fight to protect our lands at the ground level. They continue to have a remarkable ability to build alliances with non-Indigenous youth, who can become official supporters of the Defenders by pledging: “when Indigenous peoples stand to defend their land and to protect Mother Earth, we will stand alongside them.”58
At the inaugural meeting in Winnipeg, the Defenders were given the opportunity to engage in their first national protest when we learned that Prime Minister Harper was in town for the Conservative party’s annual general meeting. We drafted a letter condemning his policies and marched through the cold November rain to the Winnipeg convention centre to give it to him. Of course, the prime minister did not come out to see us—but we did present it to his security detail. If nothing else, it served as a calling card for the new organization.
In the fall of 2012, when Stephen Harper’s legislative offensive against Indigenous peoples was in full swing, the Defenders were joined by a much more broadly based movement. It began, like so many important events in the world, with the women. Namely, four Prairie women: three Indigenous, Jessica Gordon, Sylvia McAdam, and Nina Wilson, and one non-Indigenous, Sheelah McLean. These four remarkable women launched the Idle No More movement, a movement that would “call on all people to join in a revolution which honours and fulfills Indigenous sovereignty which protects the land and water.”
Their alarm had been raised by the introduction in Parliament of the Conservative omnibus bill C-45 on October 18, 2012, which gutted Canadian environmental legislation. Among other changes, it cut the Navigable Waters Protection Act and replaced it with the Navigation Protection Act, which excluded more than 98 per cent of the country’s lakes and rivers from federal environmental oversight, thus unlocking them for abuse by resource extraction companies and opening them up for the passage of oil and gas pipelines.
The four women organized a teach-in in Saskatoon on C-45 and its implications for First Nations peoples. They called this session Idle No More and launched a Facebook event page to spread the word. The name struck a chord among a generation that felt Indigenous peoples had been left standing idly by as their leaders frittered away their sovereignty and allowed developers to despoil their lands. A week after the first Idle No More information session in Saskatoon, there were similar events in Regina, Prince Albert, and North Battleford, Saskatchewan, and in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Then that spectacular political fission took place, with Idle No More actions spontaneously springing up across the country and even across the world.
The sense that it was time to act seemed to infect some of the chiefs as well. In early December, a group of chiefs in Ottawa for an Assembly of First Nations meeting—led by Chief Wallace Fox from the Onion Lake Cree Nation in Saskatchewan and Grand Chief Derek Nepinak from the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs—tried to enter Parliament to demand that the government withdraw its legislation and consult with First Nations before taking any action that might affect us or our lands, as required by UNDRIP. The Idle No More organizers, seeing the rising enthusiasm, called for a Day of Action on December 10 that saw thousands of Indigenous people and non-Indigenous supporters rally in Vancouver, Whitehorse, Edmonton, Calgary, Saskatoon, North Battleford, Winnipeg, Thunder Bay, Toronto, Montreal, and Goose Bay–Labrador.
The day following the Day of Action, Chief Theresa Spence of the Attawapiskat First Nation in Northern Ontario announced her support of the Idle No More movement, and began her hunger strike in Ottawa. She promised it wouldn’t end until Prime Minister Harper and Governor General David Johnston agreed to sit down and talk about the fundamental problems in Canada’s relationship with First Nations.
Chief Spence’s principled and dignified move further galvanized the Idle No More movement, and actions from round dances in shopping malls to information pickets erupted across the country. In a measure of the movement’s growing influence, dozens of members of Parliament and senators felt compelled to visit Chief Spence on Victoria Island on the Ottawa River, along with political celebrities like former prime minister Paul Martin, who described her as an inspiration. In fact, the only people who were having difficulty dealing with Chief Spence and this new high-energy grassroots movement were the Harper government, the chiefs who were closely tied to the government and, it seemed, the AFN leadership.
If nothing else, the Idle No More movement showed how alarmingly out of touch most of the leadership was with the people. This hit me most forcefully when, after the prime minister caved in to pressure from across the country to meet with the Indigenous leadership, I was invited, along with dozens of others, to take part in an AFN conference call. The purpose of the call, I was astounded to discover, was for a panicky AFN to decide what to put in front of the prime minister as our demands. The organization was almost forty-five years old, and it had apparently so badly lost its way that it didn’t even know what it stood for. Finally, it patched together an eight-point plan that had something for everyone but lacked, as we soon found out, the means to pressure the government to act on any one of them. It was presented like a half-hearted wish list that focused almost exclusively on process, with no thought to results. To give you an example of the tortured bureaucratic phrasing, item number one on the AFN list of demands was the following:
1. Commitment to an immediate high level working process with Treaty Nation leadership for establishing frameworks with necessary mandates for the implementation and enforcement of Treaties on a Treaty by Treaty basis, between the Treaty parties Nation-to-Nation.
Jesus, I thought when I read their tortured prose, they are asking for nothing at all—except more process.
The AFN leadership had their meeting with the prime minister on January 11, 2013. Ironically, that was the same week they had been scheduled to meet in their high-level Crown–First Nations Gathering to announce the utter failure of the previous year’s high-level process, which had begun in January 2012 and had already collapsed by April. The result of the January 2013 meeting with Harper was yet another hopeless high-level process, now called the Senior Officials Committee.
As it had been doing for decades, the AFN consolidated around the weakest position. In the run-up to the meeting with Prime Minister Harper, the stronger elements of the AFN had announced that they did not want to attend a meeting without assurances that it would lead to concrete actions by the government. But the weaker elements insisted that it was important to “engage.” The problem is, the government controls the outcomes of those discussions by refusing to change any of its policies. And why should it when our leadership is willing to spend year after year—and decade after decade—discussing these policies without ever demanding they be changed?
When criticized, our leadership came back to us, as they always do, to say that if we did not “engage” we would not have this “process.” But since it is the government process, which has absolutely nothing to do with our demands, participating has become, objectively, a form of acquiescence.
We should also be aware that for many Indigenous leaders, process has become its own reward. They negotiate to create processes because processes ensure them jobs and money, since government processes come with government funding pots. These kinds of opportunists are, unfortunately, more widespread in the movement than many of us like to admit. It was, after all, how the B.C. Treaty Process was created. B.C. leaders flocked to Ottawa in the fall of 1990 to get a “process” immediately after the Oka Crisis. And this twenty-plus-year process has resulted in millions of dollars paid to First Nation negotiators and the First Nations Summit and other consultants, but it has gone virtually nowhere. What makes it worse is that these millions—these hundreds of millions of dollars—have to be paid back by impoverished Indigenous communities. But the professional Indian negotiating class continue to have privileged, extremely well-paid careers at government negotiating tables.
I know there are some who will take offence at the frankness of these observations, but it is something that must be said. Many of our leaders have too long dodged responsibility for their actions by claiming that any criticism, no matter how mild, shows a lack of respect and is somehow therefore not Indigenous. It is a self-serving position that we should not accept. Those who put themselves in front and who accept millions of dollars in direct and indirect government pay to act on our behalf must be ready to answer to the people.
This refusal to answer shows a profound lack of respect toward our people, in whose name the leaders are supposed to be acting. I have been at meetings where someone begins to speak against the Treaty Process, and those who are involved in it, instead of defending their position, leave the meeting claiming the person raising the criticism is showing a lack of respect. At other meetings, I found that when someone spoke in very general terms about the government policy, everyone unanimously rejected it. But soon as they suggested that the negotiators pull out of these talks, the negotiators took great offence and said they are being shown a lack of respect. In the worse cases, I have seen speakers literally drummed out of meetings where someone complaining about the leadership’s participation in government negotiations was suddenly surrounded by drummers, who misused our sacred drum to silence the discontented and prevent open discussion in the meeting.
It is time for those in leadership to explain to the people exactly who, other than they themselves, is profiting from their decades of failed negotiations on the Comprehensive Claims policies and engage the people in a discussion of where, at last, we should be going from here.
Today, the people themselves are demanding this. In January 2012, the AFN had embarked on a meaningless process. But in January 2013, the AFN was no longer the lone player in the field. The AFN leadership was denounced by some of their own chiefs for heading down the same old garden path with the government, while Idle No More ridiculed this new and pointless process and continued to demand fundamental change in the way Canada addresses Indigenous issues. This was manifest in another Day of Action on January 28, 2013. Parliament came back into session after its Christmas break as Idle No More rallies took place across Canada, in the United States, and even in Europe. Idle No More also received endorsements from student groups, unions, and the movement’s old friends, including Judy Rebick, Naomi Klein, and Maude Barlow.
More importantly, Idle No More received the support of key chiefs who themselves began to call the AFN national chief and his executive to account for continually caving in to the government’s demands. A number of these chiefs, who stood with Idle No More protesters and insisted that the national chief seek more than “process” from Canada, would later force Shawn Atleo from office over his support of the government’s First Nations Education bill.
Another sign of the new grassroots spirit of activism was the joining of forces of Idle No More and the Defenders of the Land after the January 2013 Day of Action. As a symbol of their joint struggle, the Defenders and Idle No More named a joint spokesperson and put forward a common position. In mid-March, the Defenders and Idle No More demanded the following of Canada:
1. Repeal provisions of Bill C-45 (including changes to the Indian Act and Navigable Waters Act, which infringe on environmental protections, Aboriginal and Treaty rights) and abandon all pending legislation which does the same.
2. Deepen democracy in Canada through practices such as proportional representation and consultation on all legislation concerning collective rights and environmental protections, and include legislation which restricts corporate interests.
3. In accordance with the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples’ principle of free, prior, and informed consent, respect the right of Indigenous peoples to say no to development on their territory.
4. Cease its policy of extinguishment of Aboriginal Title and recognize and affirm Aboriginal title and rights, as set out in section 35 of Canada’s constitution, and recommended by the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples.
5. Honour the spirit and intent of the historic Treaties. Officially repudiate the racist doctrine of discovery and the Doctrine of terra nullius, and abandon their use to justify the seizure of Indigenous Nations lands and wealth.
6. Actively resist violence against women and hold a national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, and involve Indigenous women in the design, decision-making, process and implementation of this inquiry, as a step toward initiating a comprehensive and coordinated national action plan.59
These are the type of demands that the AFN should have been making in its January meeting with Stephen Harper instead of their process-dominated demands. For our leaders today, the first step is to recognize the utter failure of Plan A and to move, finally, to Plan B.
It is time now to do what our leaders refused to do then: withdraw from all negotiations with the government that do not begin with government recognition of our Aboriginal title and rights under Section 35 of the Constitution. By simply pulling out of the negotiations, we will send a powerful message not only to the government and the Canadian people, but also, equally importantly, to the bond rating agencies and the investors, that things are definitely not under control in Canada. It will no longer be business as usual until the government is prepared to sit with us for nation-to-nation discussions that begin and end with respect for our fundamental constitutional rights.
Grand Chief Ron Derrickson will look at the possible content of these negotiations in more detail in the Afterword, but they must include substantial change in our political, economic, and environmental relationship with Canada. Before we begin, both sides have preparatory work to do. In Canada’s case, this work was largely completed in its 1996 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples report, which is still waiting for implementation. It is as simple as that. All the government has to do to begin real and substantive negotiations with Indigenous peoples is to follow the recommendations of its own Royal Commission, which repudiated the racist and internationally discredited doctrine of discovery and recognized our right to self-determination.
It is important to recall that the title of the Royal Commission report was People to People, Nation to Nation. As RCAP pointed out, our right of self-determination is based on international law, and under this right, Indigenous peoples “are entitled to negotiate freely the terms of their relationship with Canada and to establish governmental structures that they consider appropriate for their needs.”
Respecting its own Royal Commission, its own Constitution, and its own Supreme Court rulings is all that the Canadian government has to do to set up nation-to-nation negotiations that can begin the historic and too-long-delayed process of decolonization for both Indigenous peoples and Canadians. It would be an enormously important first step for Canada in its rendezvous with its own past and with an honourable future.
It is unlikely, however, that Indigenous communities simply withdrawing from the current one-sided negotiations will be enough to bring Canada to the table. We will need a more active strategy that includes public education, direct action/assertion of rights, and a strong international campaign.
Ongoing public education is essential. It is not an accident that what launched the Idle No More movement was that first public education meeting in Saskatoon held by the activist women. Similar events, often described as Idle Know More, have been just as important as protests in building support for our cause. Before you can have community participation, you must have community education. This is especially the case in the struggle for recognition of Aboriginal title, which, after all, resides collectively with the community.
At the same time, we have to educate Canadians on our rights and our demands and seek allies there. This is also essential. As we saw during the Constitution Express, when Canadians are made aware of the issues—and of the injustices that are being committed in their name—they can demand that their political representatives find honourable solutions. Already today, we can count on friends and allies in the environmental movement and increasingly among Canadian popular organizations, churches, trade unions, and community activists to stand alongside us and to help us to get the message of justice for Indigenous peoples to the Canadian people.
There is no question in my mind that direct action—that is, asserting our Aboriginal title and rights on the ground—will also be necessary before the government finally agrees to sit down and negotiate with us. Public education is important, but I am not so optimistic as to think that it alone will be enough to turn the massive ship of state from its course. For 150 years, the government has been trying to rid itself of the “Indian problem” by ridding itself of Indigenous peoples through assimilation.
To send a clear message that the days of surrendering our fundamental rights are over and that we are ready once again to take charge of our land and our lives, we will have to show our seriousness with our deeds. I know that asserting our rights on the ground is a contentious issue because, as we saw at Skwelkwek’welt, some people get extremely nervous about the tensions direct action can create. And I know that direct action requires the ultimate and personal commitment of those of our people who take a stand in the face of blatant racism and the threat of criminal prosecution. But as a people, we have a just cause and we cannot simply surrender because demanding justice will create tensions in society.
After decades of waiting, of engaging in process, of losing rather than gaining ground, it is clear that to kick-start true negotiations, we will have to signal our seriousness. This signal of peacefully exercising our rights, of refusing to sit at the back of the economic bus, of ceasing to stand by while our Aboriginal title lands are wantonly destroyed by unsustainable development will send a powerful message to the Crown, to the people of Canada, and to international investors.
Just to be sure that there is no doubt on this issue, I am speaking without exception of non-violent protests. But this does not mean I do not support our warrior movements, which are rooted in our nations. Our Warriors, properly trained in non-violent resistance and connected to the local Indigenous peoples’ decision-making structure, are essential for protecting our Aboriginal title and rights. The strength of the Warrior is her or his understanding of the anti-colonial struggle for the restoration of the world of the Two Row Wampum. The Two Row Wampum recognizes our national rights as equal to those of all other nations, with no other nation having the right to hold sway over us.
The Warriors are there to stand against the RCMP and provincial police officers who are committed to the old colonial model of decision-making in Canada. This model treats Indigenous peoples like inanimate baggage to be bulldozed aside with injunctions and aggressive police tactics. We saw this most recently at Elsipogtog in New Brunswick when Mi’kmaq Warriors, joined by Warriors from other nations, stood their ground against the RCMP, who were armed with sniper rifles, tear gas, pepper spray, and riot guns firing rubber bullets. They stood against this massive police violence to block a Houston-based gas fracking company from drilling test holes in their watershed. In an important sign of the times, the people of Elsipogtog First Nation and their Warrior protectors had the support of many in the non-Indigenous community.
We also know that the RCMP and the national security forces work tirelessly to infiltrate our organizations with agents provocateurs who try to incite violence to justify the most brutal oppression of our people. This violence isolates our people as “terrorists” and gives the RCMP or armed forces the opportunity to occupy our territory, undermine our right to self-determination, and oppress us. Even if we were not by nature non-violent, there would be no sane case to be made for our people, with our small populations, to advance violence as a solution to our struggle for self-determination.
Our strength today is that the world, as never before, is watching and that we can control the access to our lands and resources and otherwise cause economic uncertainty. And the world is increasingly ready to support the final wave of decolonization—the liberation of Indigenous peoples trapped within the Fourth World in countries like Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. The world is less and less impressed with the Canadian government’s excuses and the untruths and half-truths that it reports to international bodies about its dealings with Indigenous peoples. In the fall of 2013, the UN sent its special rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous peoples, James Anaya, to Canada to review the status of Indigenous peoples within the country’s borders. As he was leaving the country, Anaya observed that the gap in well-being between Indigenous peoples and Canadians was not narrowing, and that Canada was heading toward a crisis with its Indigenous peoples. The world sees the coming train wreck if the government does not begin to take our title and rights to our lands seriously.
To avoid the worst, we need our Canadian allies—including church, union, community, and environmental groups—to help us to educate the Canadian population about our rights as they are recognized internationally and about Canada’s colonial position toward us.
At the same time, we know any nation-to-nation negotiations, once begun, will not be easy. The first obstacle in defining our new economic relationship with Canada will be the very heavy debt from the seizure and economic exploitation of our lands for almost 150 years since Confederation. This debt is enormous. I sometimes suspect that one of the main reasons the Canadian government refuses to acknowledge our Section 35 rights is that it would leave it open to paying us a percentage of the astronomical amount of wealth that has been taken out of our lands. In the Delgamuukw decision, the Supreme Court said that payment for past transgressions of our Aboriginal title was owed to us. But this debt—which has been accrued through generations of crushing poverty, illness, and despair—can strengthen our negotiating position.
We cannot continue to remain poor in our own territories while governments make all the decisions and corporations get rich off our land. We have to be recognized as decision makers regarding our territories and to be remunerated fairly for access to our lands and resources. Any fair arrangement has to recognize our Aboriginal title ownership of our territories today and into the future, and we have to be paid for access to our land and resources. As Grand Chief Ron Derrickson describes in his Afterword, we will need to speak about stumpage fees, payment for timber, mining, and oil and gas revenues, and portions of property tax schemes on our Aboriginal title lands, with the goal of finding common ground that both sides can live with. We will also need to set up new structures to protect our fragile ecosystems. Implementing Indigenous territorial authority and using Indigenous knowledge to ensure economically, culturally, and environmentally sustainable development will benefit all future generations. In light of the federal government’s abdication of its responsibilities to the environment, Indigenous peoples can occupy this space. This will provide opportunities for our people and especially our youth to work in stewardship positions and to do work in line with Indigenous values. And there is an existing model in Russell Diabo’s tripartite system that was put into effect in Barriere Lake by the community, the forestry companies, and the government stakeholders.
That will be the starting point. The negotiations will have to begin with the land itself and its needs before we impose new developments on it. This can best be done by giving the leading protection role to Indigenous peoples who have been taking care of these lands for thousands of years and who have the knowledge and commitment to them that outsiders lack. At a time when international institutions support Indigenous peoples serving as stewards of the land, our nations’ role as protectors of the land should be immediately respected while we engage in the larger and more detailed negotiations over its shared economic and cultural uses. This could involve new regional environmental bodies that would see Indigenous peoples as decision makers engaging with recreational and industrial users of the land. With this structure in place, we can begin to define together our political and economic futures.
The real surprise for other Canadians, I suspect, will be that the path that we want to embark on is one that not only brings justice to Indigenous peoples but also builds a better, much more sustainable Canada.