Aboriginal people want to be part of this country and want to be recognized as being the First Nations and for the great contribution made by the citizens of this land in the development of this country.
—Elijah Harper, quoted in Pauline Comeau, Elijah: No Ordinary Hero (1989)
Every land claim, every barricade, every protest is less a harangue for rights and property than it is a beseeching for the promises offered in that flag, represented by it. Equality, shared vision, a shared responsibility. A wish, a held breath waiting to be exhaled.
—Richard Wagamese, One Native Life (2008)
As a survivor, I respectfully challenge you all to call for a national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women. And I ask everyone here remembers a few simple words: love, kindness, respect, and forgiveness.
—Rinelle Harper, statement to the Assembly of First Nations (2014)
Until this point, my biographical approach to Canadian history has been as sunny as Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s rhetoric, as I looked at people who helped cultivate its endless promise. And superficially, there was much to be upbeat about. Changes to immigration and refugee policies had made the total population (nearly twenty-eight million by 1990) increasingly diverse. In 1979 and 1980, over fifty thousand people who had fled from Vietnam were welcomed here as refugees—a dramatic contrast to the way that Sikhs, Chinese, and Jews had been treated in previous years. Along with newcomers from Indonesia, India, and Somalia, they were absorbed without too much resentment. Mosques and temples became familiar sights within Canadian cities. The Expo 67 anthem sung by Bobby Gimby—“Ca-na-da”—appeared in retrospect to launch a new confidence. The country that had championed the United Nations peacekeeping force now enjoyed its reputation for pluralism and non-violence. What could make Canadians prouder than our country’s constant position at or close to the top of any international index of human development?
But the exuberance and pride, not to mention all the benefits of Canadian citizenship, were not shared equally. There were other, darker aspects to Canada’s evolution: the widening cleavages between regions, Quebec’s demand for more autonomy, the alienation of and mistreatment of Indigenous peoples. By the late twentieth century, simmering discontents had turned into open conflicts. There were strong and contradictory visions for the country; in retrospect, the collective euphoria of Expo 67 seemed naive. Successive governments fought to accommodate several different groups with competing priorities. The national unity crisis triggered by Quebec was the most critical, and it occupied centre stage in the national news. Yet it was part of a much larger fragmentation that had been affecting Canadians as far back as Confederation.
Thursday, June 14, 1990. In Winnipeg, the prairie sun beat down mercilessly on noisy throngs of people as television crews set up their equipment outside the Manitoba legislature. Inside the imposing Tyndall-stone building, an uneasy hush gripped the legislative chamber. A stocky man hunched forward, clutching an eagle feather in his right hand. Elijah Harper’s brow and cheeks shone with nervous perspiration; sweat trickled down his neck under his dark ponytail; his bulky shoulders and arms strained against his suit jacket.
Then the former chief of the Red Sucker Lake First Nation rose to speak. His voice was so soft that many of those present strained to hear it. But his words were blunt. “Our relationship with Canada is a national disgrace,” he said. “What we are fighting for is democracy, democracy for ourselves and democracy for all Canadians. . . . Most of all we are fighting for our rightful place in Canadian society.”
Disgrace. A shocking word. Who was this unknown provincial politician, berating a country that prided itself on tolerance?
On that day, in that place, Elijah Harper was uniquely placed to make history. A small group of Indigenous strategists working alongside him had crafted his message and had begun the day together by burning sweetgrass.1 But the speech was delivered by this nervous, self-conscious chief. And the messenger himself embodied in his own story the whole painful history of relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians.
For three straight days, the New Democratic member of the Legislative Assembly—the first member of a First Nation elected to the Manitoba legislature—had snarled up parliamentary process simply by saying no each day. No, he would not agree to unanimous consent to rush a motion through the House. The motion under consideration would have allowed public hearings in the province on a new federal constitutional deal, the Meech Lake Accord. The hearings were essential to secure cross-Canada approval for the deal. Now, on this hot June day, Elijah Harper followed up his fourth no with remarks about why he wanted the motion—and therefore the accord—to die.
The accord was part of a broader, white-knuckle constitutional drama that convulsed Canada in the late twentieth century. At this moment in Winnipeg, the country seemed to be coming apart at the seams.
To understand how the fate of Canada came to be in the hands of a lone Manitoba MLA, we have to go back to the 1970s and 1980s, and the constitutional wrangles triggered by Quebec’s sovereigntist movement. Elijah Harper’s role in the constitutional drama did not emerge until the second act.
Act one, stage-managed by Prime Minister Trudeau, unfolded between 1980 and 1984, as the final ties between Britain and its former colony were cut. Canada got its own constitution, laid out in the 1982 Constitution Act. This new constitution incorporated and amended the 1867 British North America Act, for which George-Étienne Cartier had worked so hard. The Charter of Rights and Freedoms, on which Bertha Wilson would expend so much judicial effort, was embedded in the Constitution Act. So was a new amending formula that required unanimous consent by all ten provinces (an improbably high hurdle) for any further changes.
While act one of the drama had finally given Canada a constitution that was not a simple act of the British Parliament, the document smacked of an elitist compact that shunned the interests of women, new Canadians, and minorities. And although article 35 gave constitutional recognition for the first time to “existing aboriginal and treaty rights,” this fell far short of the various demands of Indigenous leaders. Moreover, Quebec premier René Lévesque had rejected Trudeau’s package, which meant that the new constitution lacked Quebec’s signature. Lévesque, leader of the sovereigntist Parti Québécois, had refused to sign in part because the new Constitution Act did not include a veto power for Quebec over future constitutional amendments.
The Meech Lake Accord was act two. In 1984 a Conservative government replaced the federal Liberals, and Prime Minister Brian Mulroney became the new constitutional choreographer. Mulroney promised to bring Quebec back into the Constitution “with honour and enthusiasm.” Three years later, he and the ten provincial premiers embarked on the Quebec Round of negotiations. Next to a small, shallow expanse of water in the Gatineau Hills called Meech Lake, the politicians hammered out an agreement that included recognition of Quebec as a “distinct society.” The prime minister, who had a dangerous penchant for hyperbole, announced that this deal was going to “save Canada” by ensuring Quebec’s place in the federation. Yes, yes, yes, Canada’s Indigenous peoples had concerns, first ministers acknowledged. But they must wait. Right now, the very existence of Canada was at stake.
However, the accord was an even greater disappointment to Indigenous peoples than the Constitution Act, since it had nothing to say about their rights and history. They were not alone in their opposition. Former prime minister Trudeau accused Mulroney of being a “weakling” who had sold out to the provinces.
The provinces had three years to ratify the deal. Despite the disagreements, most provincial legislatures voted their consent. By early June 1990, only Manitoba and New Brunswick were not on board. The prime minister persuaded New Brunswick to sign on, which left only Manitoba—although Newfoundland was wobbling in its commitment.
And now this rumpled Oji-Cree MLA was sabotaging the whole thing. Suddenly people across Canada were asking, “Who is Elijah Harper?”
Harper had never made much of a political splash outside his province. When reporters looked for comments from Indigenous leaders, they gravitated toward Phil Fontaine, the brainy silver-haired leader of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, or Ovide Mercredi, vice-chief of the Assembly of First Nations and master of the acerbic retort. Elijah Harper? He mumbled, and he took too long thinking about what he would say. His hesitancy led some players in the 1990 Meech Lake crisis to write him off as a bit slow, and perhaps manipulated by his colleagues. Now his face was on national television every night, and his tone of quiet reason served as a contrast to the belligerence of some of the other Meech Lake actors. As his widow, Anita Olsen Harper, remembers, “He didn’t ask for this role, but it was the only path he could take because otherwise he would have been betraying his people.”2
There was something both noble and discomforting about press photographs of the forty-one-year-old man. With his long hair and bolo tie, a thunderbird on its beaded clasp, he looked and behaved like no other elected politician in Canada. Most of the time he seemed reluctant to speak. It was as though a Roman senator were sitting there, clad in his toga amid besuited businessmen and lawyers, or (given the sporadic drumbeats beyond the building’s walls) as though a Game of Thrones hero had come to life.
Within hours of his first no, Elijah Harper had become a champion to anybody who felt unsettled or betrayed by the Meech Lake Accord, and a menace to politicians and provincial leaders determined to see it pass. As the deadline approached, the pressure was intense. The chiefs had presented Harper with the eagle feather, symbol of the bravery of a warrior, to help him withstand it. It rarely left his hand. As his biographer, Pauline Comeau, points out, “Elijah was so authentic. He knew he was just one piece of a larger struggle.” The following day, Harper would drive a final nail into the accord with a last no: he refused to give unanimous consent to forgo the required public hearing and thus allow ratification by Manitoba.
This was a watershed moment in Canadian history. The Meech Lake Accord was dead. In Ottawa, as I well remember, there was shock, anger, and a deep dread that the centre could not hold. When Newfoundland realized that Manitoba had effectively killed the deal, it aborted its own vote on the accord. The Mulroney government went into fibrillations when several Quebec MPs defected to join a new sovereignty movement, the Bloc Québécois, headed by Mulroney’s former friend and cabinet minister Lucien Bouchard.
In Winnipeg, by contrast, thousands of Indigenous people from all across the province (where more than 17 percent of the population is Indigenous) converged on the lawns outside the legislature to dance, drum, and dream of a better future. A few non-Indigenous people joined in the exuberance, while others offered support from the sidelines. All the fights over the Constitution, culminating in the arm-twisting of the final dramatic week, had upset many Canadians. Outside Quebec, there had been a wave of sympathy for the First Nations’ rejection of the Meech Lake Accord. As Elijah Harper had said earlier in the week, “What we have accomplished . . . is that we have made the general public aware of Aboriginal issues.” Many Canadians realized for the first time how little attention we had paid to the story of Indigenous peoples.
Elijah Harper had quietly implored Canadians: “Look at the relationship with Canada in terms of when the Europeans came here. We shared our land and resources with strangers, the people who came to our homeland. . . . The Canadian constitution doesn’t even mention this, not even as a founding nation of this country. There are only the French and the English.”3 It was the first time that many of us started learning in any detail about the disgraceful actions perpetrated in our lifetimes, as well as in the distant past.
That awareness had been a long time coming. The standoff in the Manitoba legislature reflected far more than frustration with Brian Mulroney’s constitutional deal, which had put Quebec’s agenda ahead of all other issues. Since 1867 Canada’s Indigenous groups had been pushed to the margins of Canadian society. But by 1990 a generation of forceful Indigenous leaders had emerged who argued that legal promises made to them had been broken: their rights had been ignored, their health impaired, their children taken away, their place in Canadian history suppressed, and much of their land stolen. Mulroney’s threat that the accord’s collapse would trigger a crisis of national unity did not intimidate them. They had little left to lose.
“Everything came together at that moment,” recalls Phil Fontaine, then an intense radical who went on to serve three terms as national chief of the Assembly of First Nations. “It was a no to denial and to the exclusion of all First Peoples. It was a no to Ottawa’s standard way of dealing with important issues. We weren’t opposed to Quebec, but we weren’t prepared to be an afterthought.” Elijah Harper, eagle feather in hand, immediately became a powerful symbol. Harper, Fontaine, and the other Indigenous leaders did not want to break up the country, and they sympathized with Quebec’s concerns. But they knew this was a pivotal moment in relations between the federal government and Canada’s Indigenous peoples, and they had to grab it. “Every night,” Fontaine remembers, “Canadians could watch Elijah—decent, respectful, and extending his hand to the whole country.
“Since Elijah spoke up for us,” adds Fontaine, “we have had a far larger public presence. Sometimes the stories are less than positive, and improvements have been less than we hoped for, but Aboriginal issues are in the media every day. Elijah forced people to pay attention.”
Today there are about 1.4 million Indigenous people in Canada, including 850,000 First Nations people (still legally known as Indians), 450,000 Métis, and 60,000 Inuit.4 They speak more than thirty languages and constitute 4.3 percent of the total population, and their share of the population is increasing rapidly because their birth rate is much higher than that of other Canadians.
Their stories begin several millennia before the birth of the Dominion of Canada in 1867, my opening point for this book. In past accounts of this country, this meant that Indigenous peoples were often covered in the early chapters of history textbooks, dealing with explorers, the fur trade, and the contest between England and France. In the sixteenth century, when Europeans first arrived here, there were as many as two million people living in what is now Canada, in diverse and complex societies. But almost invariably textbooks described early contacts from the European point of view, and Indigenous people were mentioned only because they were useful to the newcomers as fur trade partners and military allies. Their usefulness to Europeans had faded by the nineteenth century. The newcomers first divided the land, assisted by their theodolites and section markers; next, assisted by their racial categories, they divided up the people. Indigenous history slipped out of sight as the colonial narrative gathered speed and Indigenous-held land became more important than the Indigenous people themselves. By 1871, after three centuries of epidemics and conflict, the census reported only 100,000 Indigenous people in Canada.
During the first century after Confederation, “Indians” barely surfaced in the construction of Canadian identity, except as an exotic flourish. Those of European descent were almost oblivious to the First Peoples, the vast majority of whom lived on reserves or on the outer edges of the country. Government policy was overtly paternalistic and mean-spirited. “Indians” registered under the 1876 Indian Act (“status Indians”) were treated not as fellow citizens or adults but as dependants of the federal Crown. They did not have the right to vote or buy liquor unless they gave up their Indian status. The federal government’s goal was assimilation of Canada’s Indigenous people into the settler mainstream. The fact that this would blot out their unique systems of governance, cultures, and languages was not a concern. Canada avoided the worst excesses of violence and exploitation that characterized treatment of Indians to the south, but the Americans had set the bar low. Ottawa remained largely blind or indifferent to Indigenous people’s poverty, unemployment, and ill health.
Indian bands that had signed land treaties with the federal government in the first half century after Confederation found that the land allocated to them for reserves was marginal and food rations were inadequate. One glimpse of the resulting hardship is noted in an 1880 report by the North West Mounted Police surgeon John Kittson, which mentions that the Cree around Fort Macleod were receiving less than half the provisions provided to state prisoners in Siberia.5 NWMP officers like Sam Steele realized that the Indigenous people were starving and reported this back to Ottawa, but the protests were ignored. According to the historian James Daschuk, author of a devastating analysis of federal policies in the West in the late nineteenth century, “Once regarded as the saviours of the indigenous population of the west, the police became the ambivalent agents of their subjugation.”6
Under the 1876 Indian Act, most First Nations were entitled to a wide range of government services because they were “status Indians.” However, many others did not have status, and the provisions did not cover any Métis people. By the mid-twentieth century, there were all kinds of problems. A large proportion of status Indians now lived in cities, far from their traditional communities but still poorly integrated into the larger society.
Indigenous activism mushroomed in North America in the 1960s and 1970s, alongside (but less loudly than) black activism and the women’s movement. After the Second World War, Canadian Indigenous peoples had finally been granted the federal vote without the requirement to surrender Indian status. The National Indian Brotherhood was established and rapidly became the voice of First Nations people on reserves, where poverty was rife and infant mortality high. And then the activists were given a target. In 1969 the government of Pierre Trudeau published a White Paper that argued that the Indian Act was discriminatory and should be abolished, and that First Nations should be given the same rights as all other Canadians.
Along with powerful provincial Indigenous organizations in Alberta and Manitoba, the brotherhood whipped up a high-profile campaign against the White Paper. Despite its stated intention of enabling First Nations citizens to be “free to develop Indian cultures in an environment of legal, social and economic equality with other Canadians,” it was seen as another strategy to achieve the goal set long ago: assimilation. First Nations wanted no part of it. Harold Cardinal, a Cree from Alberta and the most articulate Indigenous leader of his generation, insisted that the proposals would lead to “cultural genocide.” Such a move would rob Indians of their land, their treaties, and their unique traditions. Cardinal and other leaders wanted Indian status to be preserved but based on a different model: they would have preferred to become what Cardinal called “citizens plus.” But giving one group of Canadians special privileges did not sit well with most non-Indigenous people. The White Paper proposals died.
The federal government continued to look for solutions. It committed itself to negotiating new treaties in parts of the country that had none, and to addressing claims for violations of existing treaties. It promoted “self-government” on reserves (although there were extensive restrictions). However, the standard of living for most Indigenous people was far below that of other Canadians, and First Nations leaders remained deeply discontented about slow progress on rights and inadequate controls of their own affairs. By 1990, when Elijah Harper played his historic role, the old model of relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians had clearly broken.
The shifting relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities brought sensitive issues to the fore. There were so many minefields: growing disparity in the standards of living of Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities, disagreement over Canadians’ clashing versions of events, the difficulty of dealing with ugly aspects of our shared past.
Even language can become a barrier. As a historian, I recognize that Indigenous people are not homogeneous, but as I wrote this book I was aware that appropriate terminology was constantly evolving. “Indigenous” is now the collective adjective that covers all the different peoples, from Mi’kmaq in the Maritimes to Haida on the West Coast, from Métis on the prairies to Inuit in the North. (“First Peoples” is sometimes used as a similar umbrella term, but the term “Aboriginal” has fallen out of favour. “First Nations” covers only “Indians,” the legal term that some still use themselves. “Natives” seems acceptable in some circumstances, and cool urban Indigenous people sometimes call themselves NDNs.)
And what should I call non-Indigenous Canadians like myself? The author Thomas King (of Greek, German, and Cherokee descent) suggests that if we call First Nations people “Indians,” we might refer to ourselves as “Cowboys.” Perhaps not. Euro-Canadians? Yet many of the ancestors of those who were once called “Whites” left Europe generations ago. And anyway, non-Indigenous Canadians come from all over the globe: the majority of today’s immigrants are non-white.
How much easier it sometimes seems for non-Indigenous Canadians to look away from this troubled history, with a mumbled apology for the cruelty of our forebears. Or to be hyper-rational about it and focus on words like “healing” and “going forward,” as if the historical slate can ever be wiped clean. Or to rant about the hideous attitudes of the past, as though every action of non-Indigenous people was motivated by conscious racism. There is no issue in Canadian history more complicated and painful than relations between this land’s original inhabitants and the larger community of Canadians.
Difficult questions persist—questions about why some Indigenous groups have flourished and others seem helpless, mired in poverty and trauma. Or how to make Canadian voters and governments attach greater priority to acknowledging and correcting historic wrongs. Or how to accommodate the demands of fewer than 5 percent of Canadians in a way that most of the other 95 percent of the population will accept. Or even . . . is such accommodation possible in the twenty-first century, given both the diversity of Indigenous peoples and the extraordinarily heterogeneous nature of the Canadian population overall?
What an unlikely hero! As I consider the way that Elijah Harper was shaped by his upbringing and went on to grab our attention, I’m struck by how he personified First Nations history. He’d seen it all. Even without the eagle feather, he symbolized the dreadful consequences of colonization and the extraordinary resilience of its victims. Yet he also expressed his culture’s struggle to find solutions that were not rooted in revenge.
There are more than six hundred First Nations bands and 3,100 reserves across Canada, including dozens of small ones scattered across the watery northern reaches of Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta. Few reserves are as remote or as poor as the Red Sucker Lake First Nations reserve in northeast Manitoba, where Harper was born in March 1949. Named after the fish that spawn locally, Red Sucker Lake perches on the inhospitable Canadian Shield and is surrounded by spruce and Jack pine. In winter it is a full day’s drive on an ice road from Winnipeg; in summer, it is accessible only by small bush planes. It is a small speck on the district map covered by Treaty 5, signed in 1875.
To an outsider, this community of seven hundred Oji-Cree looks scruffy and depressing. It takes only twenty minutes to drive along the rutted, garbage-strewn clay road from one end of the reserve to the other. Rusty skeletons of abandoned pickup trucks litter the yards, their dead batteries bleeding acid into the surrounding land. The houses are mainly one-storey, shabby clapboard; the school is often closed; there is no cellphone service, and few residents enjoy running water or indoor toilets. Contamination of nearby waterways triggers regular water alerts. The community’s only regular source of income is transfer payments from Ottawa.
But that’s the perspective of a middle-class urban outsider. To an insider, like members of the extended Harper clan, this has been home for generations—a place of much-loved landmarks, great blueberry crops, and good hunting. Abject poverty cannot extinguish the sense of belonging. Most children grow up here as young Elijah did, confident that they are welcome in every house and cherished by relatives; visitors always mention the quiet laughter and gentle teasing that characterize social events. Residents don’t particularly enjoy the conditions: food and travel are expensive, and who wants to face the challenges of personal hygiene, laundry, child raising, and cooking with such inadequate facilities? Yet this is their land, with which they enjoy a deep spiritual connection. Its residents feel whole and accepted here. Nobody is judging or crowding them.
Red Sucker Lake was Elijah Harper’s world from the moment of his birth, on March 3, 1949. The eldest son in a family of thirteen children, he was taken by dogsled to his father’s trapline in the bush when he was only two weeks old, and he was rapidly absorbed into the seasonal rhythms of reserve life. His father’s father taught him how to fish and trap; his mother’s father passed on Indigenous creation stories and memories of ceremonies that were no longer permitted. The annual fall moose hunt would become a fixture on Harper’s calendar for the rest of his life. Not only was it a way to feed his family; it was his chance to shrug off political stress. Anita Olsen Harper recalls, “He was happiest there. He loved to put on his gumboots and go tramping around.”
Those rhythms constituted the upside of traditional Oji-Cree culture. The twentieth-century downside came when Elijah was five years old. He found himself wrenched away from his warm, loving family and heading five hours west, alone on a plane, to Norway House Hospital. His parents knew only that there was something wrong with his neck; they were never told that Elijah had contracted tuberculosis. (He learned the truth only decades later when his biographer, Pauline Comeau, looked at the hospital records.) The child spent the next six months in a TB sanatorium on Clear Lake in The Pas, on the other side of the province. He was cured of tuberculosis, but his links to his own people had been damaged. When the little boy stepped off the plane and ran into his mother’s arms, she could barely understand him at first. He was speaking Swampy Cree rather than the Cree dialect spoken on his home reserve.
Three years later, Elijah and his younger brother Fred were packed off to the United Church’s residential school in Norway House. The boys were reluctant, but their father wanted his sons to be able to function in the larger world. “He told me that although he would miss us and everything, he knew that we had to get an education,” Harper told Comeau.7 But it felt like exile to the eight-year-old, who protected himself by keeping a psychological distance from what was happening. Suggests Comeau, “Such detachment would become a constant in Harper’s life, eventually becoming a self-defence skill to be called upon when a situation was too stressful or painful.”8
Harper would spend most of the next decade in residential schools in Norway House, Brandon, and Birtle, Manitoba. He suffered the humiliations and miseries of institutionalization. His hair was clipped short; his freedom to roam curtailed. He was punished when he spoke his own language. “You feel like you don’t have any say, no rights, nothing,” he later recalled.9 He saw classmates being humiliated. Two teenage boys who ran away from the Birtle residential school were made to bend over a table and pull down their pants and shorts; then they were strapped repeatedly. “We just stood around the room, stood at attention and watched. It was to let you know not to break the rules.” He was taught that his culture and language were inferior and that the Oji-Cree way of life on the land was dying. He was deliberately devalued and his sense of self-worth damaged.
He was also subjected to sexual abuse. This was something he never told his biographer, and even now Anita Olsen Harper, his widow, prefers simply to mention that it happened but not to elaborate. Elijah Harper’s reticence on this painful subject was the standard reaction within his generation and previous ones: the abuse was so taboo that victims rarely discussed the experience even among themselves. Instead they suppressed the anguish and internalized the shame. Only when First Nations issues began to boil in 1990 did the bitter silence crack and survivors begin to talk about it. That’s when Phil Fontaine, then head of the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, revealed on CBC Television that he had been sexually abused in a church-run residential school. But the trauma and collective denial still linger, as the 2009–15 Truth and Reconciliation Commission discovered when it held hearings about the impact of residential schools.
Despite the brutal residential-school experience, Elijah Harper—now fluent in English—was seen to have potential. In 1967 the taciturn student arrived in Winnipeg to stay with a foster family and attend high school. He got involved with one of the earliest First Nations political organizations of this period: the Manitoba Association of Native Youth. Most Indigenous youngsters in his generation failed to graduate from high school, but Harper had larger ambitions. After getting the necessary credits in night school, he enrolled at the University of Manitoba in the fall of 1971. He was one of the first Indigenous students to gain access to higher education.
At the University of Manitoba, twenty-two-year-old Harper was one of a handful of Indigenous students within a sea of younger, non-Indigenous faces. Lonely and insecure, he felt his heart lift when he noticed a poster about a proposed student association. The organizer was Ovide Mercredi, an articulate Cree activist. Harper became one of the first members of the newly launched Manitoba Indian and Eskimo Association, where he met representatives from other communities and forged alliances that would last a lifetime. The association was soon organizing demonstrations, helping students elsewhere set up similar organizations, and drawing attention to the blatant racism that was pervasive in the student body.
These were the years that followed the Trudeau government’s 1969 White Paper. After the failure of that first major attempt to reform the 1876 Indian Act, Indigenous concerns disappeared from the headlines. Canadians fired up about human rights abuses joined freedom marches in Alabama rather than noticing what was happening in their own backyard. However, educated and politically astute Indigenous leaders were now emerging both on reserves, where self-government provided employment and salaries for band chiefs and councillors, and within cities like Winnipeg with large Indigenous populations.
Harper spent the summer after his first year of university with the Manitoba Department of Education, researching and writing on various Indigenous projects. On evenings and weekends he frequented the Manitoba Indian Brotherhood offices. There he met Phil Fontaine, then chief of the Fort Alexander Reserve, and the two young men reviewed together the latest federal proposals to reform administration of reserves. The Department of Indian Affairs had abandoned the idea of assimilation: now it wanted First Nations organizations to run the reserves while Ottawa controlled the spending. This proposal was a long way from the type of self-government that the new Indigenous associations had begun to demand, and they were uncompromising. As Harper told his biographer, “What I saw was that they would establish a brown bureaucracy for Indian Affairs to administer all that misery. Over four or five years, the money . . . would be reduced and eventually the bands would be supporting their tribal council.”10
Harper dropped out of university in his second year and retreated to Red Sucker Lake, overwhelmed by the demands of family, school, and activism. Within six years, he and his wife, Elizabeth, would have four children: Marcel (from Elizabeth’s first marriage), Bruce, Tanya, and Holly. Next Harper started working for the Manitoba Indian Brotherhood as a community development officer; eventually he was hired by the Manitoba Department of Northern Affairs. He learned his way around bureaucracy, quietly observing why and how decisions were made in the system.
But Red Sucker Lake kept pulling him back. When he heard that the position of band chief was coming vacant in 1978, he decided to run. He promised that, if elected, he would create jobs. It was a big promise, but it brought victory. Aged twenty-nine, Elijah Harper was elected chief.
Harper did not manage to solve his reserve’s fundamental problems of poverty and isolation. How could he? For those not involved with the band council, there was no meaningful employment available, beyond winter trapping or perhaps some government contract work, and there was no prospect of establishing any. But thanks to his bureaucratic experience, the new chief did secure two key improvements: satellite television and a better winter road. Both involved adroit manoeuvring with government officials. He purchased a television satellite dish and arranged for it to be flown to Red Sucker Lake, without asking permission from the Department of Indian Affairs in Ottawa. The dish broke all Ottawa’s broadcasting regulations because it allowed the reserve to capture American programming. However, by the time Ottawa realized what the chief had done, it was a fait accompli. In order to secure grants for the winter road, Harper played a three-way game of chess with various government departments, allowing each to think that one of the others had already approved the financing. His success in gaming the system encouraged him to develop bigger political ambitions. And then the provincial New Democratic Party came knocking, looking for an Indigenous candidate.
NDP leader Howard Pawley flew to the remote reserve for Harper’s nomination meeting. He was appalled to discover that he and Harper were the only people in the community hall when the meeting was scheduled to begin. But the nominee just chuckled. “Don’t worry,” he reassured Pawley. The new satellite dish was broadcasting from Detroit a John Wayne cowboys-and-Indians western, “and everyone in the community is watching.” A couple of hours later, when the program was over, the community hall filled up. Harper received enough votes to become the NDP candidate for the sprawling northern riding of Rupertsland, where 90 percent of the thirteen thousand voters spoke either Cree or Ojibwa. In 1981 he was elected to the provincial legislature. The same election brought the NDP to power, with Howard Pawley as premier of Manitoba.
As I explore Harper’s career, I realize how often he felt immobilized, strung between two poles. It wasn’t just the clash of loyalties between his own people and his New Democratic colleagues in the Pawley government. It was also the tension between two different styles of government. As a chief, he had followed the traditional practice of slowly working toward consensus through long discussions and respectful consultations with elders. This process suited both his temperament and the politics of a community of fewer than a thousand people. But it doesn’t work in our parliamentary system, which answers to millions of people and requires deals and decisiveness. It also makes negotiations between Indigenous organizations and federal politicians time-consuming and difficult, as a handful of First Nations can always block a deal by simply refusing to compromise.
In the Manitoba legislature, Harper was a fish out of water. A colleague saw him ambling down a hallway “and my heart went out to him.” She described her reaction to Pauline Comeau: “I could relate to how he was feeling, how he must be trying to adjust to it—this big brick-and-cement building and all the rules and regulations that go along with the position he had just been elected to.”11 An imposing institution, racist barbs from some members of the Conservative opposition, and the corrosive sense of being an outsider awakened unhappy memories of residential school.
Elijah Harper began as a backbench MLA. He gave part of his maiden speech in his native tongue, the first time Cree entered the legislature’s official record. He spoke about the pressing issues facing First Nations: poor housing and health, extremely high unemployment rates, the damage done by residential schools. But Harper could do little for his constituents other than draw attention to the problems. First Nations education, fishing policy, health care, the need for economic development policies on reserves—these were all Ottawa’s responsibility, not Winnipeg’s. He insisted, “We as Indian people must take steps to control our destiny.” But it was not clear how they could do that.
However, Manitoba now had a critical mass of Indigenous leaders. Paradoxically, most, like Elijah Harper, were products of residential schools. They had first crossed paths in the offices of Ovide Mercredi’s native student association or in the Manitoba Indian Brotherhood. Harper had a sturdy network that included Phil Fontaine, Moses Okimaw (a lawyer who headed the Manitoba Indian Brotherhood), Murray Sinclair (then vice-president of the Manitoba Métis Federation, who would go on to head the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and now sits in the Senate), and Mercredi, as well as chiefs throughout the province. They would congregate out of sight of legislators at the St. Regis, a downtown Winnipeg hotel that was soon dubbed the “Indian Embassy.” There they honed their demands for a larger role in the conferences of first ministers that were held in Ottawa, and for a significant say in constitutional discussions. Determined, as Harper had said in his maiden speech, to “take control” of their destiny, they intensified their campaign for self-government—the very opposite of nineteenth-century Ottawa’s goal of assimilation.
But what did self-government mean? When Harper raised the issue often in his own NDP caucus, he met hostility and incomprehension from some members. He would explain, “What it is all about is to take control of your lives, manage your own affairs, and determine your own future.” He would insist: “We have never relinquished that right, even by signing the treaties.” None of this made much sense to Harper’s colleagues in the Manitoba legislature, or to Canadians watching the same demands made at four First Ministers’ Conferences that met in Ottawa in the 1980s to define Indigenous rights. Which Indigenous organization or leader would speak for all the different peoples, would negotiate resource rights, would handle the substantial budgets that the federal Department of Indian and Northern Affairs administered? By now, the appalling social conditions on many reserves were widely acknowledged. But was there enough capacity in the hundreds of small bands to take on responsibility for housing, child care, education, roads, and water systems? Handing these services over, as Harper, Mercredi, and Fontaine now seemed to be demanding, might open the door to further deterioration and corruption. And all politicians balked at the price tag that such reforms would carry.
In the Manitoba legislature, Elijah Harper watched and listened. It was hard to have much impact when so many issues belonged to the federal government. “Elijah’s strength was that he was not interested in grandstanding,” Howard Pawley said later. “He was interested in gradually working his way up.” But Harper didn’t develop even such basic political skills as networking or public speaking. And he was unpredictable. As his former deputy minister told Comeau, “He can be tremendously effective or a complete bomb. If there is an Indian in the audience, the man is unbelievable. An all-white audience and he gets uncomfortable and he tries to deliver a message he thinks the white audience wants to hear—and he fumbles.”12
Harper was never a cabinet star. After four years as a provincial legislator, he was finally made a junior cabinet minister in 1986. The following year he was promoted to minister of northern affairs and, with the help of a seasoned bureaucrat, scored a minor success. He asked cabinet for $2 million for an Aboriginal Development Fund that would centralize information on Indigenous program activities within the Manitoba government. Many of Pawley’s fractious and unsympathetic ministers erupted with protests. Harper listened and watched. Then he quietly interrupted: “I am getting pretty tired of being the token Indian.” He won the vote.
There were additional stresses: his marriage was unravelling, his finances were a mess, and there was a drunk-driving charge. Elected representatives at every level of government face similar crises, but in a culture saturated with negative stereotypes, Harper was branded. When it all got too much, he would disappear. He needed the silence of the northern bush, the rich swampy smell of the land where his family had their trapline. A week or two later he would re-emerge after a therapeutic retreat on Red Sucker Lake Reserve. His behaviour drove his officials nuts.
These were the years when Brian Mulroney’s Meech Lake Accord was making its way through provincial legislatures. Each month saw new uncertainties, especially because other issues were souring the political environment. The 1988 free trade deal, the federal election the same year, budgetary cutbacks, distrust of Prime Minister Mulroney, blistering criticism from former prime minister Pierre Trudeau (the accord, he raged, “should be put in the dustbin”13)—all contributed to a cross-country hardening of attitudes. While Quebec insisted that not a word in the accord could be changed, demands for amendments piled up from women’s groups, trade unions, anti-poverty groups, and the premiers of New Brunswick and Newfoundland. And in Manitoba, the ratification process was delayed, first by deteriorating relations between Winnipeg and Ottawa, and then by a provincial election that saw the defeat of Pawley’s NDP.
In June 1989, Elijah Harper attended an Assembly of First Nations conference in Quebec City. It wasn’t a particularly newsworthy event, and most media outlets ignored it. Pierre Cadieux, the newly appointed federal minister of Indian and northern affairs, had reluctantly agreed to address the chiefs. Cadieux watched impatiently as a thickset man in a buckskin jacket whom he did not recognize made his way over to the microphone. “I am a member of the Red Sucker Lake First Nation,” Harper announced softly, “and . . . I am also a member of the Manitoba legislature. Are you prepared to include in the Meech Lake Accord protection for Aboriginal treaty rights and recognition of native self-government?” The minister waffled. Harper told the minister he would not support the accord when it came through the Manitoba legislature. His remark had no impact. “They didn’t take me seriously.”14
A year later, people took Elijah Harper very seriously indeed as he stood, eagle feather in hand, and killed the Meech Lake Accord. It might have foundered even without Harper’s no if the Newfoundland legislature had decided to withdraw its support at the last minute. Many of the accord’s opponents were relieved that its demise was triggered by Indigenous concerns rather than hostility to Quebec.
However, Harper had permanently marked the country. He not only put the spotlight on Indigenous claims but also ensured that first ministers alone would never again conduct constitutional negotiations behind closed doors. He had defied the political elite, and he made us acknowledge that the way that Canada treated its Indigenous people was “a national disgrace.” The Canadian Press voted him newsmaker of the year, and (more meaningful to him) Red Sucker First Nation named him honourary chief for life.15
Despite Prime Minister Mulroney’s dire warnings, Canada did not fall apart when the accord died. Most of us got on with our lives, went to the lake, and lit the barbecue, eager to shrug off constitutional fatigue. The dollar rose and foreign investors increased their holdings of government bonds. In the words of the political journalist Andrew Cohen, “After all the shouting, wailing, crying and bawling, after all the recriminations and lamentations, it was as if the radio had suddenly died. . . . Finally, there was silence.”16
Yet for Elijah Harper, the moment when he helped to defeat the Meech Lake Accord was a personal triumph. The humiliations and setbacks of his own life had been forgotten in the sense of empowerment he enjoyed as he spoke for Canada’s Indigenous people. It was a “feeling of unity, togetherness and solidarity.”17 He determined to share it. A few weeks after the death of Meech Lake, a land dispute erupted in Quebec, between the Mohawk community of Kanesatake and the town of Oka over the expansion of a golf course onto land claimed by the Mohawks. The dispute quickly turned ugly; a police officer was killed and the Canadian Armed Forces deployed. One morning Elijah Harper emerged like an apparition from the Oka pine forest to offer support to the Mohawk warriors. He now saw himself as an Indigenous ambassador at large.
Prime Minister Mulroney made one final attempt to reconcile Quebec and the other provinces by convening a marathon session of the premiers, representatives from First Nations, Inuit, and Métis organizations, and various interest groups. The 1992 Charlottetown Accord included concessions to everybody in the room. Its provisions dealing with Indigenous peoples were the most generous and detailed ever to appear in a constitutional proposal; the accord included a recognition of their right to self-government. But this new deal was defeated in a national referendum. Many Canadians from different backgrounds voted against it because (among other reasons) they thought it gave Indigenous peoples too much. Senior Indigenous leaders supported the deal, yet about 60 percent of First Nations people on reserves voted no—and so did Harper—because they said it didn’t give them enough. While another wave of sovereigntist sentiment built in Quebec, the Indigenous fight for self-government seemed permanently stalled.
Elijah Harper, perhaps the only politician to emerge from the Meech Lake fracas with his reputation enhanced, now found his own career was stalled too. He resigned from the Manitoba legislature and switched parties. In the 1993 federal election won by Jean Chrétien’s Liberals, he became the Liberal MP for the northern Manitoba riding of Churchill.
Ottawa provided an even greater culture shock than the Manitoba legislature for this soft-spoken man. Once again he was an outsider. And once again, First Nations were falling below the radar. The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples had been appointed in 1991 in the hope of recasting the relationship between Indigenous people and government; Bertha Wilson, now retired from the Supreme Court, was one of the seven commissioners. But “RCAP,” as it soon became in Ottawa jargon, went way over budget and took six years to produce its five-volume report. Most of its recommendations would be ignored.
All 295 MPs, along with every chief in Canada, were given copies of the 1996 report. Harper’s office on Parliament Hill quickly became a dumping ground for the five volumes. “He was so disappointed,” Anita Olsen Harper recalls. “Some of his colleagues would drop their copies on his desk and say, ‘I have no use for this. There are no Indians in my riding. Here, you take it. Give it to a friend.’ They didn’t even read it. They felt no obligation to the issues.” Indigenous matters were still not mainstream political concerns.
Defeated after one term, Harper continued to be in demand as a public speaker, but his health slowly deteriorated. In May 2013 he died in Ottawa, of heart failure due to complications from diabetes. Hundreds of supporters filed past his open casket as he lay in state in the Winnipeg legislature. Then his body was loaded into a small plane and flown to Red Sucker Lake First Nation for burial.
Elijah Harper is in many ways a tragic figure. Although he overcame tuberculosis, residential school abuse, political setbacks, and money and marital problems, he never achieved enough for Red Sucker Lake Reserve, from which he derived his sense of identity. The reserve continues to be one of the poorest in Canada. And the First Nations leadership were unable to resolve their own internal differences and take advantage of the opportunity that his courage created for them in 1990.
Yet Harper’s impact on Canada lives on. His eagle feather gesture and soft-spoken no marked an indictment of all those attempts, over a century and a quarter, by governments, churches, and the population at large “to change Indians, Métis and Inuit into just another ethnic group in the multicultural mosaic,” in the words of the historian J. R. Miller.18 Elijah Harper had demonstrated the will of Indigenous peoples to live on their own cultural terms, whatever the challenges.
Has anything changed since that snapshot moment, more than a quarter of a century ago? Yes and no.
On the negative side of the scales is the catalogue of bleeding sores. Red Sucker Lake Reserve is not alone in its problems. The number of reserves where there is insufficient housing, no school, or a school requiring repairs never seems to budge. One in five First Nations communities are under drinking water advisories. Nearly half of reserve communities need a new school; nearly thirty thousand First Nations children are in care. Schools on reserves receive proportionately far less funding than schools elsewhere: between $3,000 and $4,000 per child.19
Off reserve, it often seems, the story is equally bleak. The catalogue here includes the glacial pace of land claim negotiations, the disproportionate number of Indigenous people living in urban poverty, high suicide rates among Indigenous young men, the generational damage caused by residential schools, the corruption of a handful of band leaders.
Since Elijah Harper’s death, particularly grim issues have emerged. Harper’s old friend Murray Sinclair became chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which was set up as part of the 2007 Indian Residential Schools Agreement that also secured compensation for residential school survivors. Sinclair and his two fellow commissioners heard from 7,000 former students, and much of the testimony was profoundly shocking. Since the 1880s, more than 150,000 Indigenous children had been removed from their families, and the commission revealed that at least 6,000 had died. Witnesses spoke of a degree of physical, psychological, and sexual cruelty that few non-Indigenous people had ever imagined occurring behind the schools’ grim brick walls.
At the same time, nearly 1,200 Indigenous women were killed or went missing between 1980 and 2012, according to the RCMP. A great-niece of Elijah Harper very nearly joined that macabre statistic. In late 2014 sixteen-year-old Rinelle Harper was attacked and left for dead on the banks of the freezing Assiniboine River in Winnipeg.
The ugly stories breed pessimism, and some cynicism—a sense that nothing changes, that Indigenous people are trapped in their own self-perpetuating pathologies. Frances Abele, professor of public policy and administration at Carleton University, suggests, “Articles about tragedy, dysfunction, failure—they fit into a narrative in the news of how bad things are for Indigenous people that drives out the rest of the story.” Indigenous communities are viewed as tax burdens rather than being seen as fellow Canadians or potential partners in resource wealth production. As Phil Fontaine says, “That kind of racism accepts Indigenous poverty.”
There have been no significant political deals: for most Indigenous people living south of the sixtieth parallel, the goal of self-government appears an increasingly unreachable objective. Only in the three northern territories do Indigenous peoples, who form a substantial percentage of the population, have more control over political decisions. Elsewhere, the ideal of following a traditional way of life while enjoying a twenty-first-century standard of living appears unrealistic.
Indigenous frustration welled up once again in late 2012 with the Idle No More movement, the largest Canada-wide social action movement since the protest marches of the 1960s. Organized by four women lawyers (three of them from First Nations), the grassroots movement had many targets. A key complaint was the Conservative government’s disregard for treaty rights and environmental protection laws as it sought development of resources and construction of petrochemical pipelines. As Elijah Harper did in 1990, participants found a lot of support from non-Indigenous groups. What did Idle No More achieve? Nothing specific, although Phil Fontaine suggests, “It was another key moment—like the 1990 moment with Elijah—which embodied hope of change.”
So was Elijah Harper’s brave gesture futile? Did his refusal (backed up by most chiefs) to assent to the Meech Lake Accord process achieve nothing for Canada’s Indigenous population?
It is always hard to link cause and effect. However, there has been significant change since 1990.
Far more Indigenous students receive some post-secondary education. Elijah Harper was one of only a handful of such university students across Canada in 1970. Today, close to thirty thousand Indigenous students, in academic gowns and with big smiles, file across university and college stages and collect certificates on graduation day each year. (The jump in numbers is huge, but as a percentage of the demographic group, it is still much lower than the figure for the whole Canadian population. Fewer than one in ten Indigenous people go to post-secondary institutions, compared with one in four of other Canadians.) Elijah Harper’s widow, Anita Olsen Harper, has a doctorate in education from the University of Ottawa; a couple of his grandchildren are heading toward college.
Indigenous history is now one of the hottest humanities disciplines on our campuses. Ethnohistory, post-colonial scholarship, economic and demographic analysis, Indigenous studies—according to the Carleton University historian Michel Hogue, “Aboriginal history has moved into the academic mainstream. There’s a critical mass of scholars writing it from the point of view of the peoples themselves.”
Law schools have been particularly attractive to Indigenous students: Canada now boasts over two thousand Indigenous lawyers. Why law? Because it has been our judicial system rather than our political system that has started to take Indigenous rights and demands seriously. This trend has created a demand for lawyers from these communities. Although there were protests in 1982 that the protections granted to Indigenous peoples in the 1982 Constitution Act and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms were completely inadequate, those clauses have proved powerful weapons. They have opened up new avenues of political participation. Since 1982 more than forty Indigenous rights cases have gone to the Supreme Court of Canada.20 Indigenous oral histories have been given the same weight as the written histories of colonizers.
Some of these cases have breathed life into the wording of the eleven treaties signed between First Nations in Canada and the Crown between 1871 and 1921, treaties that covered most of present-day Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, Ontario, Saskatchewan, and the Northwest Territories. These agreements provided the Dominion government large tracts of land and access to resources in exchange for promises (often ignored) to the original inhabitants. Indigenous communities now have far more muscle when negotiating any developments not only on their reserves, but also on any lands that have been their traditional hunting or fishing grounds. If a corporation wants to exploit the resources (logs, rocks, minerals, oil) on those lands, it cannot go ahead without extensive consultation.
Many of these legal decisions have made politicians, public officials, and business leaders grind their teeth in frustration. But Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin made it plain in May 2015 that the Supreme Court had no intention of backing off (and in the process, she proved that she shared with Bertha Wilson that great Canadian characteristic: empathy with the underdog). In a public speech, she said, “The most glaring blemish on the Canadian historic record relates to our treatment of the First Nations that lived here at the time of colonization.” Echoing Harold Cardinal, nearly half a century earlier, she went on to describe assimilation policies as “cultural genocide against Aboriginal peoples.”
Off and on reserves, there are economic success stories. At least one-third of reserves have pulled themselves out of the cycle of dependency, and another third are on their way.21 The Cree in northern Quebec, the Osoyoos in British Columbia’s Okanagan, the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation in northern Alberta, the Dene in Saskatchewan—with good leadership, these reserves have taken control of their own resources and developed thriving wage economies. There are now forty thousand businesses in Canada owned and operated by Indigenous entrepreneurs. In 2009 Phil Fontaine, now a white-haired businessman, founded his own company, Ishkonigan, a consultancy and mediation company that actively supports collaboration between Indigenous communities and corporate Canada. Explains Fontaine, “The challenge is to balance economic development and environmental protection. There is great resistance to the extractive industries because they have been so destructive, and that does not sit well with our people.”
There are hopeful political initiatives too. The Idle No More protests prompted the birth of Canadians for a New Partnership. Headed by the Dene leader Stephen Kakfwi, former premier of the Northwest Territories, its partners include two former prime ministers, Progressive Conservative Joe Clark and Liberal Paul Martin. Its goal is to build trust through a true commitment to Indigenous treaties and rights. The number of Indigenous MPs is slowly rising: ten were elected in 2015. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau gave Canada its first Indigenous justice minister, Jody Wilson-Raybould, a lawyer with Kwakwaka’wakw roots who had been a British Columbia regional chief for the Assembly of First Nations. The 2016 federal budget included $8.4 billion to improve the lives of Indigenous Canadians.
In the past decade, perhaps the biggest change is a quiet acknowledgement of First Peoples’ presence in our national life. At cultural or political events, recognition of First Nations land claims is routine in the opening remarks. In November 2015, when Justin Trudeau’s cabinet was sworn in, the ceremony began with First Nations drums, Inuit throat singers, and a message of thanks to the Algonquin people on whose territory it took place. Meegwetch!
I am particularly struck at the way that artists have now made Indigenous themes, stories, and visions part of the artistic mainstream in Canada. Indigenous writers have been winning major awards for several years now. The novelist Joseph Boyden (Irish, Scottish, and Anishinaabe heritage) has taken readers deep into First Nations communities and history, most recently in The Orenda. In fiction and poetry, Lee Maracle (of Métis and Salish heritage) has explored what it means to be an Indigenous woman living in two cultures. One of the most successful non-fiction books of recent years is Thomas King’s The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America, which is a First Nations history that manages the extraordinary achievement of being both devastating and hilarious.
A whole catalogue of other artists from every Indigenous group in Canada is achieving international success by challenging stereotypes. The work of Indigenous visual artists is now in collections of contemporary art, rather than hived off into Indigenous art ghettos. High prices are paid for work by Kent Monkman (Cree and Irish ancestry), Jane Ash Poitras (Cree), Brian Jungen (Swiss and Dane-zaa), Carl Beam (Ojibwa), and Gerald McMaster (Plains Cree and Blackfoot).
In 1991 the Kwakwaka’wakw artist David Neel silkscreened a portrait of Elijah Harper holding his eagle feather, entitled Just Say No.22 Neel went on to represent Canada at the prestigious Venice Biennale in 1999 with an installation of contemporary carved masks and a twenty-six-foot dugout canoe in the Grand Canal. He was followed at the Biennale in 2005 by Rebecca Belmore (Anishinaabe), an artist who in performance, installations, and photographs has taken apart several Canadian clichés. One of her earliest pieces was Twelve Angry Crinolines, in which she satirized the 1987 visit to Thunder Bay of the Duke and Duchess of York. The royals had visited a pioneer fort and paddled in a canoe for the press’s benefit.
Musicians? It’s a long list, which includes Tanya Tagaq, the Inuit throat singer who has collaborated with the Icelandic singer-songwriter Björk and whose eerie, passionate sounds won the 2014 Polaris Music Prize. And then there’s A Tribe Called Red, three Ottawa musicians who mesh the pounding beats and chants of First Nations music with hip-hop and electronic music. Their “electric powwow” events have made them the face of an urban Indigenous youth renaissance as they champion their heritage. Commenting on the visionary trio’s appearance at the massive South by Southwest music festival in Texas in 2013, the Washington Post wrote, “There wasn’t anything like it at SXSW. There probably isn’t anything like it on earth.”
Video, printmaking, film, poetry, children’s books—the list of successful works by Indigenous artists exploring their own cultures for diverse audiences lengthens every year.
Sometimes the message these artists deliver is combative or reproachful. Often it has a dark humour. And at other times it suggests a new route to reconciliation. At the Lakefield Literary Festival in 2014, I heard a presentation by the Ojibwa writer Richard Buffalo Cloud Wagamese. Wagamese’s novels Indian Horse and Medicine Walk feature First Nations men traumatized by their childhoods. A tall, good-looking man in his late fifties, the author spoke about the pain of children who grew up without fathers, of families torn apart by residential schools, of the lack of real communication between Canada’s Indigenous residents and settlers from elsewhere. His tone was warm as he implored us to engage Indigenous Canadians on a spiritual level rather than through laws and logic. He talked of the power he draws from contact with the land, and he explained the need of Indigenous peoples to stay deeply connected with it. His message was inclusive rather than polarizing. “People ask me what they should call me—Aboriginal, native, Indian? But anybody born in this country is native to it, and therefore when I talk about natives, I am talking about all of us.”
Wagamese’s audience was mesmerized. The author is without doubt a great performer, but there was a deeper magic than that. His listeners were ready to hear Wagamese’s stories and perspective. There was a feel-good revivalist-meeting quality to the whole event that made me uncomfortable. Yet I was impressed at the way he brought us into his world without making us squirm in our seats with guilt.
Elijah Harper played a fleeting role in our history, but his image—the bolo tie, the eagle feather—pops up in any national accounting of Canada’s political evolution. How that image is interpreted depends on the viewer. For the cynical, it is a romantic but naive gesture: a colourful counterpoint to conventional power politics, and a reminder that Indigenous people can be exasperatingly uncompromising. But for an increasing number of Canadians, both from Indigenous communities and at venues like the Lakefield festival, Harper is the symbol of Indigenous peoples’ 150-year-long battle to shed the role of victims and become part of the national dialogue. Although many of the issues remain unresolved, Canadians can no longer avoid or ignore them. Elijah Harper enlarged our field of vision.
