13 Ethical Advocacy Versus Propaganda
Canada’s Indian Support Groups1
John A. Price
Technically, propaganda is any widespread promotion of particular ideas; but the common connotation is that advocacy of ideas carried to an extreme can become unethical and lead to distortions in the promotion of special views and images. Propaganda typically uses stereotyping for political or commercial ends (Price 1973). The presentations are too biased, too selective to tell the whole truth. Emotional appeals may be substituted for a fully reasoned, balanced analysis of issues. One result is that even honest, ethical, and reasoned political advocacy can become tainted and discredited by association with the propaganda of fanatic proponents of any cause.
Such problems occur when advocates abandon fundamental principles of serious research and responsible social action. Sometimes they fail to do complete research on the relevant issues, or they do not maintain a critical stance in judgments about the truth of rumors and hearsay until they have been substantiated. Sometimes overly dedicated champions do not assemble a full array of verified facts in an entirely honest and well rounded way. On the contrary, they present only that evidence and information which supports the position they are endorsing. Similarly, the more zealous advocates concentrate on a narrow range of confrontational styles of social action strategies for achieving their goals, excluding the possibility, for example, of quiet negotiations that might be more effective in the long run than attempting to force policy changes by embarrassing public officials.
Increasingly, we have witnessed these and other tactics used by Canada’s historically most important native support group, called The Indian-Eskimo Association of Canada (IEA) at its founding in 1960. This advocacy group later changed its name to The Canadian Association in Support of the Native Peoples (CASNP) in 1972, and then The Canadian Alliance in Solidarity with Native People (still CASNP) in the 1980s. This essay provides an overview of modern native politics in Canada, some general features of modern native political values and rhetoric, and a brief case history of the CASNP support group. The following table gives an overview of information about natives from the 1981 Census (Statistics Canada 1984). About 2.2 percent of Canada’s population were then enumerated as native people, a figure five and a half times greater than the 0.4 percent Indians that were counted in the 1980 U. S. Census.
Canada’s policies for the management of Indian communities were based mainly on stereotyped thinking about small band type organizations, the most frequent form of native social organization in this nation. Given this narrow conviction and emphasis, with the homogenized universalization of rules and regulations characteristic of state level bureaucracies, the administrative practices of Canada’s Indian Department were particularly destructive of the traditional political systems and operations of tribal and chiefdom level societies. In contrast, in the United States larger, multi-community tribal level societies as a general rule were the model for American policy. Therefore, in the United States native peoples historically have had much more experience with self-determination—in the sense of internal management of their political affairs—than Canadian natives, having since the early nineteenth century been encouraged to develop their own written constitutions, law codes, tribal courts, police forces, and the like. The “tribal” orientation in the U.S. Indian policy and management also meant that American Indians by-and-large were awarded much larger reservations than was the case in Canada. Hence, the Indians of the United States have some eight times more trust land per capita reserved for their use, under the protection of the federal government, than Canadian Indians.
Table 13.1 Native People in the 1981 Canadian Census
This historical acceptance of greater political self-determination for Indians in the U.S., combined with the slower rate of acculturation and urbanization of natives in Canada, has led Canada’s native policies to lag about twenty years behind those of the United States. For example, the following are the initial dates for several salient government events in the two countries.
The acculturation of Canada’s native peoples has been a selective process, as is also true in the United States (Price 1979, 1984, 1988). One dimension is that, generally, the more an Indian cultural trait conflicted with the practices of the dominant society, the more quickly and completely it disappeared, both in practice and from memory. Some examples of extreme conflict are traits such as cannibalism, infanticide, geronticide, scalping and the collection of other body-part trophies, inter-tribal warfare, plural marriage, sacrificial torture and killing of prisoners, and slavery. These traditional practices dropped out early in the history of relations between Indians and the Canadian and American nation-states; and modern native political and poetic rhetoric, when not avoiding any mention of them, vehemently denies their existence or attributes their origins to “the White man.” Thus when burned and broken human bones are found in the trash of archaeological sites of the Huron, Neutral, and Iroquois the policy is to treat them legally in the same category as animal bones. In contrast, several permits and reburial rites are required for regular burials, and Indian activists regularly protest the “desecration” of such sites by archaeologists.
When native cultural practices were in only moderate conflict with those of the dominant society, and were institutions of central importance, they often did survive in some modified form. Here one thinks of such revitalized institutions as the Northwest Coast potlatch, the Salish Guardian Spirit Ceremonial, the Plains Sun Dance, and the Iroquois Longhouse Society. However, the most successful institutions of modern native life society are neither ancient nor traditional: they are practices recently invented that in a general way draw on some combination of native tradition and broader Canadian and American influence, interest, and demand.
The modern Powwow is a striking example of such a recently invented pan-Indian “tradition,” as are contemporary native political organizations (local, regional, national, and international). Some of these syncretisms are specific to particular cultures, such as the Inuits’ soapstone sculpture and print making and the Ojibwa-Cree school of painting. Moreover, the central themes and pronouncements of native political and poetic rhetoric emphasize mainly issues and forms that elites of the majority society most respect. Among these much stressed, broadly acceptable politicized cultural themes, certainly the most popular is that Indians are truly the first-comers, the Original People, the really native Americans. Other themes almost as frequently expressed are the ideas that the native peoples of North America practiced representative democracy long before immigrants from Europe enjoyed such liberties (see chapter 6), that they lived in peaceful cooperation in communities based on equitable sharing rather than competition and inequality (see chapter 8), that they practiced “geopiety” and lived in ecological harmony with “Mother Earth” (see chapter 7), and that they have fine traditions of oral literature and the visual arts and crafts.
The rhetoric of Indian support groups and of allied Indian leaders involve concerted efforts to present acceptable special interest group images. But even when politically sophisticated Canadians—recognizing the political motivations in such pronouncements—discount some of the hyperbole in such pronouncements, there have been serious difficulties in public acceptance of native political views. This is so because the demands made by activists on behalf of Indians often conflict with general Canadian values and cultural features. The fundamentals of democratic life, the separation of religion and politics, industrialization, urbanization, and policies universally applicable to the whole citizenry are among the particular points of friction.
The Canadian political left and related social activist political groups greatly value material, political, and social equality; they tend not to mix religion and politics; they are anti-sexist; they align themselves with international movements; they are anti-racist; they tend to be oriented to urban life, industrialism, and labor unions; they oppose the killing of seals, whales, and other wild animals; and they tend to be antimilitaristic. Thus while the political left might want to support Indian causes, they must deal with mixed signals. This is especially so in the peace and ecology movements because so many natives peoples are quietly proud of the their heritage in warfare and because hundreds of thousands of native Canadians still depend upon harvesting fish and game. Moreover, native people often include religious issues as legitimate aspects of their political activities. Native conferences, for instance, typically begin and end with prayers and religious references are commonly found in the speeches. Moreover, they are the most rural of Canada’s ethnic groups, the least industrial, the least unionized, and the most vocal in defense of special rights not available to other Canadians.
Native people have been particularly “undemocratic” in several substantial ways, adding further sources of friction with potential supporters. They have insisted on a constitutionally entrenched special status as the aboriginal people of Canada, a people entitled to numerous rights beyond those granted to the citizenry at large. Similarly, they make extensive special claims on Canada’s economic and political systems through modern interpretations of old treaties, demanding such privileges as special hunting and fishing rights, exemption from taxation, free medical services, freedom to cross and recross the international border with the United States (because of an article in the 1794 Jay Treaty between the United States and Great Britain), and a wide latitude as regards political self-determination.
Indians have been successful in acquiring freedom from most Canadian taxes (Bartlett 1985). Indian bands have a taxation status like municipalities, being generally immune from external taxation, while entitled to raise their own real estate and business license taxes—charged against both Indians and non-Indians living or operating on Indian lands. Indian corporations based on Indian reserves do pay taxes on goods purchased off their reserves, although Indian bands per se are generally exempt from taxes. Such exemptions do not apply to all those counted as natives, for Inuit, Métis, and non-status (not federally registered) Indians do pay taxes in the same way as all other citizens. But status Indians are exempt from federal and provincial taxation on reserve land, personal property on reserve land, and income received while working on reserve land. Similarly, scholarships paid by the Department of Indian Affairs to Indians for attending universities are deemed to be paid on a reserve and are thus not taxable. All these special categorical aids and exemptions represent points of controversy between Indian and non-Indian Canadians.
Indian exemptions from provincial sales taxes are somewhat variable from province to province. Historically, British Columbia has had the most repressive policies of any province in Canada and taxes everything it can, except sales to an Indian purchaser at a store located on a reserve. On the other hand, Saskatchewan has an official tradition of positive policies toward Indians, although it also has by far the highest arrest rates of Indians and the lowest favorable public sympathy in national opinion surveys. Saskatchewan exempts almost all purchases by Indians from sales taxes, on or off reserves and irrespective of place of delivery. Between these two extremes of British Columbia and Saskatchewan, most provinces exempt Indian purchases from sales taxes for consumption or use on a reserve, particularly when they are delivered right to the reserve. But liquor, tobacco, gasoline, electricity, and telephone services tend to be taxed.
The federal government now spends $2.9 billion a year on its programs for Canada’s status Indians and Inuit. In addition, there are hundreds of millions available in provincial programs benefiting Indians, and more benefits resulting from provincial, excise, sales, and income tax exclusions for natives. Moreover, there are now over 750 successful Indian businesses in Canada, many started with loans from the Indian Economic Development Fund or the newer (1983) native managed Native Economic Development Program. Given these facts, their unique land and treaty rights, their special place in the new Canadian Constitution, and national programs to promote Indian businesses and to employ native people, we can say that they have certainly achieved the “citizen plus” status that native advocates have fought for over the past generation.
After Canadian native peoples were granted citizenship in 1960, with a new Bill of Rights, the rhetoric of advocates was quite modest, calling for economic and political equality, simple legal justice, adequate medical and educational programs, and so forth. Nonetheless, as native political organizations acquired genuine political power and these calls for equality began to be realized in the 1970s, the rhetoric of advocates increasingly shifted to newer goals and in some instances took on a new stridency.
More and more these aims included specialized issues: the plight of Indians in prisons; and issues that involved a combination of social protests—such as the women’s movement and the native movement’s effort to eliminate discrimination in the Indian Act of Canada. In significant ways, the aims and interests of Indian activists coincide with those of other special interest groups, as when the ecology, peace, and native movements joined forces to eliminate the use of Labrador as a training ground for NATO pilots. Other specialized aims of Indian activism include defending cases of alleged injustice against individuals. One such has been the the case of the American Sioux political leader Leonard Peltier’s sentence in an American prison; another the sentencing of Sergeant Clayton Lonetree to thirty years incarceration for espionage, larceny, and conspiracy while guarding United States embassies in Moscow and Vienna; and a third the case of Donald Marshall, a Micmac who served eleven years in prison for a murder, of which he turned out to be innocent when the actual murderer at last confessed. Native support groups, similarly, are always willing to beat the publicity drums for any such particular claim of injustice against native groups and individuals, whether land claims, hunting and fishing rights, hydroelectric development projects, or what have you.
In these increasingly specialized, multiplying ways, native advocacy over the past decade has moved from the general to the specific. In the same period, organizations staffed and conducted exclusively by native peoples have taken control of most of their own advocacy. Those which are managed by non-Indians, or which include non-Indians in their membership and in leadership roles, commensurately, have been supplanted and forced to become minor voices in the whole native advocacy industry. It is among those displaced from their earlier positions of prominence where we can see the more flagrant abuses of advocacy rhetoric: frank, unmitigated propaganda which bypasses the intellect and strikes directly at the the public’s emotions. The new non-Indian Indian activists, in open competition for an influential voice in the direction of native affairs, are involved in direct competition for positions of power. In this developing political contest it is difficult for serious scholars, such as applied anthropologists, who hew to professional standards of evidence, research, and pragmatic advice, to find a place for themselves with others interested in the future of native Canadians, and to have an influence on social policies.
Selections from John A. Price’s Additional Work Notes for “Ethical Advocacy Versus Propaganda”
Michael Price, Complier
A mixed Native and non-Native organization political organization I have been associated with over the years has evolved from a research and political lobbying [group] to unresearched advocacy and uncritical propaganda on behalf of what is seen as any pro-Native cause. In the early 1960s, the Indian-Eskimo Association of Canada (IEA) did research on many problems of native peoples and acted as a national political lobby for Native interests. In the later 1960s it helped stimulate the development of Indian centers and the formation of Native political organizations. By 1970, the Eskimos had formed Inuit Tapirisat [Eskimo Brotherhood] of Canada (ITC) and there was a working alliance of Native organizations, particularly through the National Indian Brotherhood (NIB), for [a legitimate voice] on behalf of federally registered Indians, and through the Native Council of Canada for non-status Indians and Métis. The Native associations required that the IE A change its name, because it appeared to denote an official Native organization. In 1972 the name was changed to the Canadian Association in Support of the Native Peoples (CASNP), and the head office was moved from Toronto to Ottawa, to more effectively pursue a political lobbying function.
With greatly expanded federal support, the all-Native associations had an explosive growth in personnel and programs. And they recommended that the government stop funding CASNP. The government agreed and CASNP was forced to close down most of its research operations . . .
The IE A, later called CASNP, has had a long history as a Native support group. Always based primarily in Toronto, it had branch offices and chapters in Ottawa, Winnipeg, and Edmonton. Though it always had some Native members, who were encouraged to run for positions on the Board of Directors, most members and officers were non-Natives. These came mainly from Native Studies specialties in academia, church groups, and social service agencies, together with some individuals just interested in Native affairs.
The IEA was created in 1959 by a committee of the Canadian Association for Adult Education, and was supposed to educate the public about Native issues, to encourage Natives to form national political associations, and to advocate and lobby for Native associations. The IEA held conferences and workshops where Native people could speak to largely non-Native audiences on the issues of the day (Ponting and Gibbins 1980:chapter 10).
The IEA’s early lobbying efforts were concerned with such issues as: (1) establishment of the Indian Claims Commission, (2) removal of Indian Affairs from the Department of Citizenship and Immigration, (3) improvement of Native housing, (4) Native hunting rights, (5) a nation-wide survey of contemporary Indian life (that resulted in the influential Hawthorne-Tremblay report), and (6) federal funding of a network of urban Indian social services and recreational centers.
Early issues of the IEA’s Bulletin describe such things as: (1) activities of Native associations, (2) scholarships and job openings for Natives, (3) educational kits, (4) the activities of the IEA’s northern field agents, such as Wally Firth, a Native who piloted an IEA airplane on various research, political, and economic development missions in the Northern Territories in the 1970s, and who later became a politician in his own right, (5) government projects that would affect Native areas, and (6) the association’s library services and publications.
Articles in these early issues of the Bulletin were well researched and conveyed the complexity of the issues discussed. For example, Jeannette Fauell’s (sp?) court battles starting in 1979 to recover the Indian status she automatically lost when she married a non-status Indian, were shown in terms of their historical, legal, and political complexity, not just as an issue of right and wrong. It took fifteen years of conferences and court cases to resolve the issue raised by her case, and now with Bill C-31 of 1985 some 76,000 women and their children who lost their Indian status through marriage [to non-Indian status men] can be reinstated.
The [IEA’s] research base in Toronto was aided by its rapidly expanding library on Native peoples, particularly its holdings of 140 Native periodicals, [collections of] government reports, [files of] newspaper clippings, and a variety of peripheral documents that were unavailable in any other library. A clipping service was started in which microfilm copies of [newspaper] clippings were organized by topic and annually distributed to other libraries throughout the country.
By 1971 this IEA resource was being described as “the best library of its kind anywhere.” It had 130 publications for sale, including the influential Native Rights in Canada (IEA 1970), and kits for schools and public libraries. The IEA was holding workshops for teachers and social workers, operating a Native speakers bank, presented a joint brief with the National Indian Brotherhood to the Canadian Senate’s Committee on Poverty, and was helping the Canadian Eskimos to form and incorporate Inuit Tapirisat [Eskimo Brotherhood] of Canada.
In this period federal funding for, and the political influence of, Native organizations was rapidly expanding. But then the IEA went into a decline, with something of a push from George Manual, the head of the National Indian Brotherhood. The IEA had encouraged several Native organizations to appoint one of their members to the IEA’s Board of Directors. It has often been assumed that the IEA’s financial crisis was caused by Manual’s recommendations to federal agencies to stop funding the IEA; that may have helped, but in 1971 only 14 percent of IEA funding came from government grants. It was primarily the decline in donations from business, and from IEA’s 200 private and 227 organizational members, and the expense of employing Native field workers and maintaining an office in Ottawa that led to years of financial decline.
[Years later] in 1978-1979, when IEA had reorganized as CASNP, the successor organization got 57 percent of its annual budget of $450,000 from government grants. Then, when the government reduced its grants to CASNP, its programs had to be cut back again.
[Meanwhile], in 1968 the Board of Directors of IEA met with the boards of the National Indian Brotherhood and the Canadian Métis Society in order to coordinate IEA’s activities with these two national associations. [Then] some Métis complained that the IEA was competing for members with these organizations. There was [also] a general objection to the IEA name, because of the implication it was a fully Native organization. There were [additional] complaints. One was that the IEA was not always obtaining the approval of local Native associations when it went into their areas and did research. The IEA was accused of using Native people in token ways, to serve on its Board of Directors as “Indian dressing” [so as] to get grants and to provide legitimacy to a basically non-Native association. The Native organizations were concerned that they had no power and that individuals who presented themselves as Natives [should] in fact be authentic representatives of the Native people.
The IEA agreed to reserve a certain number of positions on their Board for the Native organizations. The IEA [then also] changed its name to the Canadian Association in Support of Native Peoples, to answer the criticism of presenting itself as a group of primarily native people. Soon after this change in name was made, however, the National Indian Brotherhood boycotted making any appointments to CASNP’s board and continued this boycott for several years. The IEA/CASNP, under criticism from the NIB for competing with it for funds, adopted a policy of never applying for funds from Canada’s Indian Affairs department or from the Native Secretariat of the Secretary of State, withdrawing forever from competition with native organizations for funds. [For a time, IEA/CASNP maintained] very good relations with the Inuit Tapirisat of Canada, fairly good relations with the National Association of Friendship Centers, and fairly poor relations with the largest and most powerful Native group, the National Indian Brotherhood.
Ponting and Gibbins (1980) discuss the politics of the early history of IEA and CASNP. They give a fourfold analysis, following the style of Talcott Parsons’ “Four Needs”: support to Native organizations in cultural matters, helping in White-Native relations, political lobbying, and providing resources. CASNP’s support of Native organizations was aimed toward: (1) preservation of culture, as by teacher training workshops for curriculum development and workshops for the operation of urban Indian centers; (2) enhancing the integration of local communities through publications and speakers sent to Native groups; (3) political support of Native defined goals, often with submissions to government policy commissions in which there was a Native interest. Until the 1980s, CASNP remained oriented toward research and education and left politics to Native organizations. So it also, (4), provided resources such as Native scholarships and publications and workshops for Native organizations in such matters as fund raising, media relations, and operating a speaker’s bank. Ponting and Gibbins end by describing the demise of CASNP, due to its displacement by fully Native organizations and by church groups, philanthropical foundations, and educational institutions.
In the 1974-1975 Annual report, CASNP’s Education Director wrote “more people are looking for a factual and easily accessible source of information to counterbalance the mere reporting of events in the media. This role is one which we and Native leaders across the country see, with CASNP making major contributions and consolidating its efforts ... In the upcoming year we will place an increased emphasis on the development and provision of accurate, unbiased information to the media and the general public in the hope of alleviating misunderstanding and fears based in ignorance.”
Ponting and Gibbins conclude that CASNP achieved its original paternalistic goal of contributing to the development of Native organizations and [that] it finally was no longer needed by Native people and died of success. But CASNP did not really die; [instead] it went into a long term decline and then emerged again as a smaller, more radical and more political organization.
Changing its name to Canadian Alliance in Solidarity with Native People, and taking a more militant stance, the reborn organization kept its old acronym, CASNP. It continued to address legitimate Native complaints, but its pronouncements were not based on much research, they lacked a balanced consideration of issues, and did not suggest a well developed strategy of social action to correct injustices. The result was that CASNP took on a kind of frustrated, propagandists cast, expressing a feeling of alienation from the majority society.
As a case study of this change in CASNP’s style, I will use one issue of the organization’s quarterly Bulletin, for Summer/Fall 1987. This will give readers a sense of the variety of issues addressed by this non-Native, Native lobby.
In this issue of the Bulletin one story involved the Oneida Council of Chiefs. Based in Canada, but claiming to represent Oneidas in Wisconsin, Ontario, and New York, they had a claim before the U.S. Federal courts in New York to regain six million acres of land in twelve counties in the state of New York. They said they would consider occupying state parks and unused state land if New York did not help to resolve the clam in their favor (see chapter 15).
Another report involved the Lac la Croix Indian Band at Forêt Francis, Ontario, which wanted to operate motor boats in Quetico Provincial Park, and in the American waters of Lac la Croix in Superior National Forest, in order to fish and earn a living. Their current, temporary right was set to expire in 1988, when motors were to be banned so as to preserve the “wilderness experience” of visitors to these parks.
One report concerned the United Church of Canada, which issued a formal apology to the Native peoples of Canada for failing to “recognize, learn from, and share in native spirituality, and for the resulting destruction of dignity, cultures, and spirituality.”
Another involved an Indian warning:
Canadians [that they] are always searching for roots, since the culture they brought with them when they immigrated here did not grow well in our soil. So they did their best to eradicate what was already flourishing here when they arrived . . . and the killing of our culture continues . . . you Canadians are now crying about the threat to your cultural sovereignty. What has already been done to us is about to be done to you [by the Americans]. Canada is like South Africa in some ways. Before the Europeans came Indians had no unemployment, welfare, alcoholism, children’s aid societies, prisons, or mental hospitals . . . Indians were herded into ‘Reservations’ and had to have a pass to leave the reserve. South African officials actually studied the Canadian reservation and “status” systems when they set up apartheid. Indian children were snatched and incarcerated in church boarding schools in attempts to “Christianize” them. Potlatches and powwows were outlawed ... in South Africa the Europeans are outnumbered by non-Europeans by more than 5-1. Who knows whether . . . the Canadian people would have extended the vote to all Indians in the 1960s if they had been outnumbered [as in South Africa].
One story told how the Ontario government was examining a fishing agreement with the Treaty Indians in the Northwest part of the province, around Kenora and Dry den. These fishing rights were opposed by the local tourist resort owners. “The tourist operators, a majority of whom are Americans, organized public meetings and stirred up a lot of white-sheeted, cross burning images among the gentle townfolk of Dryden. During a January 22 meeting, speakers demanded abolishment of Aboriginal treaty rights and armed resistance to the enforcement of these rights.” A native woman from Grassy Narrows [reserve] responded by a letter to the editor of the local newspaper, The Daily Times and News, [writing]:
only the bad side of Indians is portrayed in the local paper .... We are always labeled as drunks, thieves, or irresponsible people .... Wages from our people are almost all spent with local merchants in Kenora .... Kenora receives close to $20,000,000 each year from the lands .... We own nothing. We don’t even own our houses on the reserves or the land, or any business that exists on the reserve . . . nor do we have access to mortgages to attain improved housing! I have seen American operators in the past here . . . our resources are continually [taken] across the border, leaving nothing here except our lakes, which are being fished out ....
Another told of uranium mining in Saskatchewan. In the Cree language, uranium is called dada thay, meaning “death rock.” In June 1985, the Cree, Chipewayan, and Métis who live near Wollaston blockaded a road as an anti-Death Rock demonstration, after it was found out that areas in Wollaston were contaminated with a radioactive isotope up to 237 times the legal limit. Most of the energy development projects in Canada are in northern areas where Indian and Métis communities are concentrated .... The U.S. now accounts for 24 percent of the province’s $600 million [per year] uranium industry. Saskatchewan ships 400,000 pounds of uranium [per year] by truck to the Kerr McGee Sequoyah uranium processing plant at Gore, Oklahoma, home of the Cherokee nation.
Also noted was a petition to the Prime Minister and the Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern development:
There are 53 Native languages spoken in Canada. At the present rate of acculturation, it is estimated that within ten years only three languages will survive: Ojibwa, Cree, Inuktitut .... We will insist that Ottawa immediately improve the quality and number of first language programs available to Native people on and off the reserves .... The newcomer society has forced the denial of First Peoples’ language.
This issue of CASNP’S Bulletin reported that the Windy Boy [reserve] on Lyell Island in the Queen Charlotte Islands, home of the Haida Indians, [was a place with] a rich and beautiful ecology that is threatened by clear-cutting logging operations. The Haida had been blocking the logging roads and there were seventy-eight arrests:
The logging of Lyell Island continues without reduction or modification. Reflecting its biased pro-industry make-up, the appointed Wilderness Advisory Committee recommended sacrificing Lyell Island, including up to 80-90 percent of the Windy Boy watershed, and to preserve the rest as a National Park.
In 1983, a mine on Gauning Island on the west side of Monesby Island was closed down. In August 1987 the federal and provincial governments and the Falconbridge Mining Company signed an agreement with the Haida giving them the thirty-nine hectare island, including housing for about 350 people, a hospital, a hotel, and a recreational complex.
Another report concerned an airfield at Green Bay, Fairbanks, that was being used as a NATO training base, particularly for the high-speed, low-level flying that is necessary to fly under the level of radar detection systems. This creates massive sonic booms as the planes sweep above the ground faster than the speed of sound. The government claims that “The only humans present are occasional Inuit families who hunt and fish out of small camps on a seasonal basis. When occupied, these camps are carefully avoided by the low-flying aircraft. However, the Inuit have asked for solidarity from, among others, the Canadian and European peace movements, other native peoples, and native support groups, ecologists, and the churches.”
The Inuit were also the focus of another report. In March 1987 eight Inuit were arrested for illegal hunting and possession of caribou. This is part of the statement they gave on the day of the arrest. “To judge our hunting of caribou as illegal is to judge our whole way of life as illegal. As a people we have been made to feel as foreigners in our own land. We believe deeply that the foreign law is not our law and the right claimed by others to govern us and to dispose of our lands and our resources is not legitimate. We recognize no authority on our land but God and the wishes and direction of the Ishemit [elders].”
Leonard Peltier, an [American Lakota] political leader, was in his house on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota in 1975, when rifle fire from outside the house killed two FBI agents, who were coming to issue an arrest warrant on a person they believed to be in the house. Peltier fled to western Alberta, but was arrested in 1976 and returned to the U.S. where he was convicted of aiding and abetting in the deaths of the FBI agents. Today there is a large international movement that defines Peltier as a political prisoner and is moving to have him freed . . . claiming (1) he should have been given political asylum in Canada, (2) the charges were FBI “frame ups,” (3) the extradition hearing was based on circumstantial evidence, (4) the U.S. government falsified documents and withheld crucial evidence, (5) he spent three years in solitary confinement in an institution notorious for using shock therapy and behavior modification on inmates, (6) a human rights commission in Spain honored him for “defending the historical and cultural rights of his people against the genocide of his race,” and (7) he is not getting adequate treatment for an eye problem in prison.
CASNP, allied with the International Conference on Penal Abolition, [argued that] Native people make up an inordinately high proportion of Canada’s prison population. In one highly publicized case, Donald Marshall, a Micmac wrongly served eleven years in prison for murder before the White man, Roy Ehsanz, who committed the crime, confessed, and Marshall was released. “In contrast to Marshall’s life sentence for second degree murder, Ehsanz got one year for manslaughter.”
These reports in CASNP’S Bulletin reveal an implicit political strategy, which is propagandistic in design and execution. [Some of] the specifics of this strategy are as follows:
Present issues in terms of the nature and concerns of the majority society (Canadian identity concerns, competition with the United States).
Stress Native ecological or environmental wholesomeness and relatedness (appealing to environmental activists).
Maintain a high moral and religious position (appeals to church groups).
Do not discuss negative features of Native societies, such as political factionalism (do not offend Natives).
Claim a large mandate and a large constituency (one example of propagandistic exaggeration).
Use extreme cases, drawn in stark blacks and whites, and personalize as a way of dramatizing.
Omit any facts that might complicate the simplified image intended.
Accept Native statements as unfettered truths.
Play the victimization theme often.
Note
1In late November, 1987, John A. Price agreed to write an essay for this book. A few weeks later, in December, he sat down and finished a thick abstract of the essay he planned to submit, a draft containing the core of his ideas and interpretations. In addition, he wrote many pages of working notes, intended as the basis for fleshing out his first draft. At that moment, neither he nor anyone else suspected he was fatally ill. Within a few agonizing weeks he was gone, a shocking loss to his family, friends, and profession. Later, while sorting through John’s papers, his son Michael Price found the abstract and sent it to this book’s editor. With some minor copy-editing and correcting, published with the permission of his family, this essay is the draft John was trying to finish in the last days of his life. Always the consummate professional scholar, it is not the revised and triple-checked final draft he would have submitted. In particular, it does not include the closer look at the Canadian Alliance in Solidarity with Native Peoples he planned. But it does contain the core of information, ideas, and conclusions John A. Price wanted published in this book. A selection of his work notes is appended.
References
Bartlett, Richard H. 1985. “Taxation.” In Aboriginal Peoples and the Law. B. W. Morse, ed. Ottawa: Carleton University Press.
Canadian Alliance in Solidarity with the Native Peoples. 1985-1987. The Phoenix. Toronto.
Canadian Association in Support of the Native Peoples. 1972-1977. Bulletin. Toronto.
Indian-Eskimo Association of Canada. 1971-1972. Bulletin. Toronto.
Ponting, J. Rick, and Rodger Gibbins. 1980. Out of Irrelevance: A Socio-Political Introduction to Indian Affairs in Canada. Toronto: Butterworth.
Price, John A. 1973. “The Stereotyping of Indians in Motion Pictures.” Eth-nohistory 20:153-171.
Price, John A. 1979. Native Studies: American and Canadian Indians. Toronto: McGraw-Hill Tyerson.
Price, John A. 1984. “Government Policies and Programs Relating to Urban Indians.” In The Dynamics of Government Programs for Urban Indians in the Prairie Provinces. R. Breton and G. Grant, eds. Montreal: Institute for Research on Public Policy.
Price, John A. 1988. Indians of Canada: Cultural Dynamics. Salem, WI: Sheffield Publishing Co.
Statistics Canada. 1984. Canada’s Native People: 1981 Census. Ottawa: Supply and Services Canada.