THE SMALL POLITICS OF ’66
There was no mistaking who held all the power in First Nations communities well into the 1960s. Under the powers of the Indian Act of 1876,1 an Indian Agent could literally rule as a tyrant over the lives of the band (or bands) he managed, at a time when the majority of Status Indians (Registered Indians) lived on reserves. The Indian Agent had the power to punish and reward as he deemed fit. He could unilaterally change Indian names to European ones, prevent Indians from leaving the reserve by refusing to issue mandatory passes, ban traditional ceremonies, withhold rations as retribution, prevent reserve residents from forming political organizations, and much more.2
At that time, some three-quarters of Status Indians in Canada counted as Treaty Indians.3 The bands signing on to treaties ceded their traditional lands to the Crown in exchange for ongoing livelihood supports in the form of annuities and the freedom to continue hunting, fishing and trapping, along with other treaty provisions. Some of the land was specifically reserved for them, and thus began the formalized rule of the Indian Agent on reserves.
In 1869, the Indian Affairs Branch introduced an act authorizing the election of a chief and councillors for each band every three years,4 with only men over the age of twenty-three allowed to vote. The electoral system was a way for IA to displace traditional tribal governance that included women’s councils and consensus decision-making. It would, according to the act, “pave the way to the establishment of simple municipal institutions.”5
This was certainly not the model of traditional governance practised by First Nations prior to settlement, when individuals and families had considerable autonomy within the collective. The community members relied on each other to survive and to thrive, and carefully chose wise leaders. Noted Indian leader Big Bear, for instance, was groomed from the time he was a child to succeed his father as chief, and his leadership qualities were recognized early on. A leader’s success would be measured by the number of followers in his band, and should he abuse his position or fail his followers, they were free to vote with their feet and move to a community with better leadership.6 That freedom ended with the imposition of the Indian Act of 1876, and the regulation of reserves under the control of Indian Agents. Elections were an alien adversarial governance system that reserve residents had no choice but to accept, since IA or its agents simply appointed chiefs and councils if they didn’t.
People living under the rule of the Indian Agent had little recourse in the face of abuses of authority, not when Indian Affairs required that all complaints and inquiries by band members be directed to IA through the local agent. Later amendments to the Act gave strengthened control of government officials over elections by giving Indian Agents powers to call elections, oversee them, and to cast the deciding vote in band council elections in the event of a tie.7
The Indian Act was not a treaty or alliance between the Crown and Indians. It was legislation written by the federal government to clarify the powers of the Crown over Indians and reserve lands, and legal authority to enact the terms of the treaties and the policy priorities of the government of the day. The lines of authority flowed only in one direction — from the top down. There was no provision in the act through which individuals or collectives living under the Indian Act could demand their voices be heard. Indian Affairs was accountable to the government of the day; it was not accountable to the people living under the Act.
The chiefs and band councils were given very limited powers by Indian Affairs, such as keeping down the weeds on the reserve and preventing the trespass of cattle. If the chief and council got ideas about making changes on the reserve, even simple ones, they had to first be approved by the Superintendent of Indian Affairs (later by the Indian Affairs minister). The need to get written authorization from Ottawa tended to slow everything down long enough to drain away any enthusiasm or initiative, and give the Indian Agent time to deal with “troublemakers” in his own way.
One band in northern Alberta did not have to deal with an Indian Agent until 1957.8 Even though the Slavey people of Hay Lake, near the border with the Northwest Territories, signed onto Treaty 8 in 1899, they remained a nomadic people, following the moose and trapping for furs to trade with the Hudson’s Bay Company. Leading the Slavey people was Chief Harry Chonkolay, a hereditary leader who had been trained from youth for the role he finally assumed in 1938.9
The people of the Slavey community depended on each other for survival, as did all the bands before the settlers came. Everybody had a valued role to play, even the children.
“We lived happily,” Chonkolay said in the 1970s,10 speaking through an interpreter, recalling that band members lived in Alberta in the summer and moved into British Columbia for the winter. As a traditional headman, he was not paid for his leadership. He hunted, trapped, fished, ranched and logged, along with the other men in the band.11
But life changed for Chonkolay and his people when they got reserve land and the Oblate missionaries built a large residential school there in 1952. Indian Affairs wanted the Slavey children in school, which meant families had to stay put in the community. IA built 100 one-room log cabins and an Indian Agent moved in. He took over administering the rations, pensions, family allowance payments and other tasks that had been performed by the Hudson’s Bay Company on behalf of Indian Affairs since the 1920s.12
By 1963, the entire remote community was living on monthly welfare of about twenty dollars per family. They had switched from a subsistence-based, nomadic lifestyle of living on the land to a subsistence-based, fixed lifestyle on the reserve that was completely dependent on government handouts. The entire process of conversion from independence to total dependency had taken only ten years.13
The band’s medicine man Willie Denechoan lamented at the time, “We are different than we used to be. The government has us in a little box, with a lid on it. Every now and then they open the lid and do something to us and close it again.”14
Fed up with being invisible, trapped on the reserve and living in the abject poverty of welfare dependency, every able-bodied Slavey man from Hay Lake made the long trip south to Edmonton in early February 1965. There was no road to the reserve, so more than 100 men boarded school buses and rode the sixty miles of winter ice roads out to a gravel road, and then south 600 miles to the city. Few of the men spoke English, including the chief, and most had never been in a city before. But once there, they followed Chief Chonkolay in a silent, frozen march, down the middle of the street in downtown Edmonton to the Alberta legislature to confront Premier Ernest Manning. The men marched because they wanted jobs, they said, not welfare.15
The roughly dressed men in their oil-stained coats marching four abreast were, no doubt, a strange sight in the city’s main thoroughfare, but it is unlikely many people knew what to make of the parade. Indians were largely invisible to most of Canadian society.
Manning met Chonkolay and a couple of the younger men who could speak English and act as interpreters. The premier politely reminded them that the band was the responsibility of the federal government, not the province, but Manning did agree to send a telegram to Prime Minister Lester Pearson demanding action from the federal government.16
Indian Affairs investigators flew into Hay Lake a week later and, according to author Heather Robertson, what they found was infinitely worse than what the Slavey men had described to the premier:
“Houses had no furniture but metal tubs on wood stoves for melting snow for drinking water, a few squalid, sagging beds covered with coats and dirty blankets, plywood and cardboard peeling off the floors, leaky roofs. Children, ragged and dirty, often half-naked at below-zero temperatures, pulled sleds loaded with firewood. A smell of rot, filth, smoke, wet clothes, permeated the fetid air in the log homes, large one-room buildings housing ten to fifteen people… From the rafters, inside, hung strips of smoked moose meat and dried fish — the staple diet of the people.” 17
The attention drawn by the march in Edmonton, said Robertson, was intended to shout out to the rest of the country to look at the conditions in which they lived. They wanted to be seen and acknowledged.
“This was the second phase of the march — an explanation, at least in part, of why the Indians went to Edmonton. Their main purpose was not jobs, not training, not angry demands but just to say: ‘Look at me.’”18
A few things had stayed the same after the Slavey people were anchored to a single piece of land because of the Oblate missionary school. Chonkolay continued as hereditary chief, and he still fit into his treaty suit,19 given to him by Indian Affairs in 1939 to honour the treaty term that the chief of each band receive a new suit.
“The way of life had changed only in one respect,” wrote Robertson, “Work was missing now. The people were forced to live in an idleness they’d never experienced before. Their only apparent value or use was to produce children to fill the school. The value of the children changed. Out on the trap line, children had been valuable and useful, but now they were a liability, increasing the rations required without being able to contribute to the productivity of the family. This was the little box the Slaveys found themselves in in 1963. There was no prospect that this way of life would ever change.”20
The Indian Affairs investigators took a good look at the Hay Lake reserve over three days, fired the Indian Agent and left. They had looked inside the box, but quickly closed the lid. They had no solution for men who no longer had a role as providers to their families, and no role as warriors to protect their families and fellow band members. Those roles were now covered by Indian Affairs. In many cases, the only new role available for men that preserved their dignity was working for the Indian Agent or serving on the band council. Challenging the system seemed impossible.
Cree activist Harold Cardinal was just a teenager in the 1950s when he first got involved in Indian politics in Alberta. His father had long been involved in the Indian Association of Alberta, and Cardinal knew the kind of grief faced by early Indian leaders.
“The Indian agent,” said Cardinal in 1969, “dead set against any successful Indian organization, actively worked against the leaders of the day. He had many weapons and never hesitated to use them. Sometimes he openly threatened to punish people who persisted in organizational efforts. More often he used subtle weapons such as delaying relief payments or rations to show the Indians which way the wind was blowing.”21
Still, said Cardinal, they persisted.
“The first leaders were genuine heroes. They had guts and needed them. They had no money; they had no access to skilled and trained advisors; they were harassed by white government officials and the police and they were doubted by their own people. Yet they fought on.”22
Indians tried to organize politically in the 1920s. In response, the federal government added a new section to the Indian Act in 1929 prohibiting Indians from hiring lawyers or raising funds to make claims against the government without a licence from the IA superintendent.23 The government did not outright ban political organizing, but instead criminalized seeking legal help. And it clearly signalled that the government did not want Indians gathering for political purposes or organizing in opposition of its decisions.24 Given that travelling any distance at that time was difficult, that there was no money to pay people to attend meetings, and that people might be punished by the Agent for attending meetings, it was a struggle to get organized.
From the time the Indian Association of Alberta (IAA) was founded in 1939, the organization “was concerned, on an every-day level with treaty rights.”25 The people placed great faith in the chiefs and headmen who had negotiated the treaty terms, and held a similar faith in the power of the treaties for their security. The association also faced the challenge of moving past long-standing tribal enmities in efforts to organize, such as the bloody history of wars between the Blackfoot and Plains Cree. Not enough time had yet passed in the 1930s for people to forgive and forget.26
The Alberta association developed strong connections with the League of Indians of Western Canada, an offshoot of the League of Indians of Canada, which had been founded in Six Nations territory in Ontario in 1918. It also allied itself with political reform movements such as the United Farmers of Alberta and the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (the forerunner of the New Democratic Party).27 The IAA made its mark on the national political stage in the 1940s and 1950s. It was recognized as a leader in Indian politics, especially under the leadership of Jim Gladstone, a Cree adopted by the Blackfoot in 1887 when he was a baby. He finally succeeded in bringing both tribes together into one organization. In 1958, Prime Minister John Diefenbaker made Gladstone the first Status Indian appointed to the Senate, where he fought to get Indians the right to vote in federal elections. That right was granted in 1960, but it changed little of what was happening on the ground. At the reserve level, the chief and council still had only token powers that were routinely overridden by the Indian Agent or Indian Affairs. But it was better than nothing.
James Burke, a former staffer with the Manitoba Indian Brotherhood (MIB), also described the subsistence life on reserves in the 1960s as “better than nothing.”28 Although there was some migration to urban centres, encouraged by Indian Affairs as part of its assimilation policies, most people stayed on the reserves and held onto their faith that their protection flowed from the treaties their long-gone leaders had signed.
The promises in the treaties — livestock, farm tools, fishing nets, bullets and other tools, along with education, protection against famine and pestilence, and a medicine chest provision — were, in effect, gradually “modernized” over the years to become the many programs and services being delivered by Indian Affairs. In the mid-1960s, as the Indian Affairs branch of Citizenship and Immigration became a stand-alone department, it was spending over $130 million on supports for Indians on reserves across the county, but it was hard to tell from the shabby housing and hardscrabble living conditions.
“Given all this,” said Burke, “one would think that the Indian’s special status is more of a millstone than a crutch. Not from the Indian standpoint, though, for poor housing is better than no housing, inadequate education is better than no education, and inferior medical care is better than no medical care.”29
Indian Affairs was finding it harder in the 1960s to ignore growing public awareness that people on most reserves — 80 percent of Canada’s Indian population — were deeply impoverished. The civil rights movement in the United States had awakened the Canadian consciousness, at least a bit, to racial oppression in their own country. People like the Slaveys were no longer quite as invisible as they used to be. To demonstrate that Indians were being consulted on policy, Indian Affairs set up provincial and national advisory councils, and paid the travel costs for band council members to attend meetings. They were, according to Harold Cardinal, pointless exercises in which IA told Indians what the branch had already decided to do, and then cranked out propaganda to Parliament and the public about how they were consulting with Indians about everything. The councils were terminated in 1968.
“The Indian people themselves insisted they be dropped,” said Cardinal. “All they accomplished, for all their government doubletalk, was the embarrassment of many sincere but deceived Indian workers.”30
Harold Cardinal was only twenty-four years old when he was elected president of the Indian Association of Alberta (IAA) in 1968, which meant dropping out of university in Quebec where he was studying sociology. The young man with a big grin, usually seen wearing a buckskin jacket, grew up on the Sucker Creek reserve near High Prairie in northwestern Alberta. He had been trained by his father and the elders about the importance of the treaties and traditional laws.
Cardinal and other Indian leaders knew that if they wanted to make themselves heard in Ottawa, they were going to need real money to do it. The old days were over. No more attempting to organize by hitching rides to neighbouring reserves, sleeping on people’s sofas, and picking up a few dollars here and there for memberships. No more hiding from the Indian Agent and risking arrest for being off the reserve without a pass.
“We first approached the Department of Indian Affairs for help,” Cardinal admitted. “Of course, we were promptly refused. It seems that they didn’t have any money in their budget allocated for the purposes of Indian organizations.”31
The influence of the IAA had waned since the 1950s, but the small provincial Indian organizations in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and BC saw themselves as voices for the bands. It would have made sense for the bands to provide financial support for political organizing, but that wasn’t possible. According to Cardinal, Indian Affairs had instituted a policy that limited funding for Indian organizations to twenty-five cents per person in each band.32 Even if a few bands could scrape together the allowed amount to donate to their own organizations, it still wouldn’t have amounted to a hill of beans.
Nonetheless, the provincial Indian organizations each managed to tap into funds in a roundabout way through a federal farming program set up in 1961 under the Agriculture and Rural Development Act (ARDA). Walter Deiter, leader of the Federation of Saskatchewan Indians, was able to access ARDA funding in 1966, the first time in Canadian history that an “unsupervised Indian organization” had been awarded such funding.33 Two years later, Harold Cardinal and the Indian Association of Alberta had $180,000 in ARDA funding in hand. So did Dave Courchene, president of the newly formed Manitoba Indian Brotherhood. They had enough money to make themselves heard, and they weren’t dependent on Indian Affairs for it.
“We were quite happy with the arrangement,” said Cardinal. “We knew that if we had been forced to rely on direct funding from Indian Affairs, we would always have been very vulnerable to pressures from that department. This way we felt we had slipped some buffers between us and Indian Affairs.”34
Cardinal and the Alberta association’s people could finally breathe a sigh of relief. They had the financial resources to invest in ideas they wanted to pursue, like rewriting the Indian Act to reflect the needs and views of the people. This they did in preparation for the first-ever national consultations called by the Indian Affairs minister. But new players were moving onto the stage.
Jean Chrétien was appointed the minister for Indian Affairs by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in July 1968. It was not a prestige posting. Indian Affairs was a portfolio where ambitious, first-time ministers could cut their teeth before moving quickly to a better posting as soon as one presented itself. Chrétien was an ambitious thirty-four-year-old MP from Quebec with a mangled syntax and a reputation as a tough guy, first elected to office in 1963. He had no experience with Indian issues and, until the previous year, had never even been to the Prairies. Except for a few months as a junior minister in National Revenue, Indian Affairs would be his first significant cabinet position.
Chrétien recalled that Trudeau had told him that his inexperience would be an asset, and also told him, “In fact, you represent a similar background. You’re from a minority group, you don’t speak much English, you’ve known poverty. You might be the minister who understands the Indians.”35
Chrétien was the seventh minister in just seven years to take on the Indian Affairs portfolio.36 It really wasn’t a prestige position.
The department Chrétien took over might have been a small one, but it had a lot on its plate. Indian Affairs was looking to divest itself of some of those responsibilities. As a pilot project, IA selected about 100 bands and provided them with grants to employ band staff, with the objective of gradually turning over the “authority, the responsibility and the financial resources which enable them to do for themselves the many things the Branch is doing for them now.”37
IA was also looking at ways to push the provinces to take over services like education and health care, which were normally the purview of provincial governments. This generated considerable alarm within the Indian organizations. They worried IA was gradually divesting itself of responsibility for Indians, and such moves would undermine the treaties with the Crown that represented their security.
This was at a time when treaties, reserves and Indian rights were not constitutionally protected. The Indian Act and the Indian Affairs department could be eliminated with the stroke of pen. Of course, it would have been shameful for the Crown to simply tear up the treaties it had signed, but there was no constitutional impediment preventing the federal government from doing so.
Still, Indian leaders had cause for optimism in 1968 when Jean Chrétien was appointed. He chose to immediately proceed with the first national consultations with Indian chiefs that had been announced the previous year by his predecessor Arthur Laing. The new minister would be crossing the country and consulting with elected Indian chiefs and other political leaders on how to amend the Indian Act.
At the Winnipeg hearing in December 1968, the president of the Manitoba Indian Brotherhood (MIB), Dave Courchene, paused before he began his presentation. He invited Chrétien to sit with them on their side of the table, rather than be on the other side. The Indians, he said, were asking the government to be their partner.38
Courchene was a burly man known for his powerful and fiery speeches, and that is what he delivered.
“The status of a Canadian Indian compares unfavourably with the status of the Negro in the United States. Surely Canadian cities need not be burned and looted to evidence discontent and neglect.” The first step, he said, “is the restoration of trust, crumbled by years of neglect and actual abrogation of treaty agreements. The treaty rights of the Indians in all of Canada must be restored.”39
Courchene also called for recognition for Indian dignity with a program of guaranteed income so that people, especially the elderly lacking education or skills, should not be made to “suffer the continued indignity of living on welfare.”40 He finished his presentation with a wish that Indians would become equal citizens, both politically and economically, and hoped that at the next consultations with the Minister, they would be able to do away with the Indian Act.
“You say,” responded Chrétien, “perhaps next time there will be no more Indian Act. I hope this will be possible one day, because it is the only way that you, who are really the first citizens of this land, will be part of the country.”41
It was a satisfying meeting for the Manitoba Indian Brotherhood, with new opportunities already opening up. Indian Affairs had chosen the Brotherhood as a partner in the trial program “to invest Indians at the band level with sufficient expertise to administer their own programs,” where “Indian people of Manitoba were to be involved in the decision-making process” and where they would play a significant role in creating the decentralization process that would lead to “the granting of full autonomy to the province’s registered Indians.”42 Through the new Manitoba Project, IA was scaling up its plans to turn Manitoba band councils into program administrators who would be more aligned with the provincial government, with the ultimate goal of offloading program responsibilities onto the provinces.
The Manitoba Project agreement was confirmed in February 1969, and it included the Brotherhood taking over the Community Development file for Manitoba from Indian Affairs. It came with half a million dollars in funding.43 It also provided the MIB with some tasty carrots with which to persuade band chiefs that the Brotherhood, with its growing budget, was the one and only real voice of Indians in Manitoba. It wasn’t long before Courchene was being accused of living a luxurious city lifestyle while people on reserves were going hungry. Of course, “luxurious” in this context might not have been all that grand, but people were not blind to the growing gap between how their leaders lived on the salaries funded by IA and their own circumstances.
Multiple voices were trying to make themselves heard in Indian politics, but IA was picking winners, which meant it was also picking losers. One of the rivals for Indian power, Saskatchewan Cree William Wuttunee, might well have been bitter when he saw his voice diminished as IA anointed its chosen winners with big dollars and ignored groups like his. He was harshly critical of leaders like Courchene and Cardinal, and speculated publicly about whether the IA-sanctioned Indian organizations were potent instruments for change or “government-backed refuges for self-serving despots.”44
“They are very anxious,” said Wuttunee, “to maintain their executive power over the Indian people, and they resort to attacking their own people from big offices in the cities, and because most Indians are still humble, the leaders can, without much objection from their own people, step upon them as they wish.” 45
Dave Courchene was quickly making a name for himself politically. In the spring of 1969, he was approached by Ed Schreyer, the leader of the New Democratic Party in Manitoba, to run in the province’s vast northern riding of Rupertsland. It was the largest riding in the province, sparsely populated, and mostly by Indians. Courchene had bigger and more lucrative fish to fry with the Manitoba Project, so he turned to Métis activist Jean Allard.
The tall, handsome Allard had the makings of a persuasive politician, motivated by a desire to make a difference. He’d grown up in the French-speaking farming community of St. François Xavier west of Winnipeg, which had once been part of the Selkirk-Peguis land grant. He’d had no trouble finding work in a lumber camp in Manitoba or on a fishing boat in Vancouver. But by the age of twenty-four, he was a widower with a small child.
“I grew up quicker than I expected,” he said. “I remember vividly that beautiful May morning when I left the hospital in Vancouver. My wife had just died of leukemia. When I closed her eyes before I left, I felt like I would never be afraid of anything again.”46
With a child to raise, he also knew he could no longer rely on a lifestyle based on brawn and not brain, so he decided to put his Jesuit education at St. Boniface College boarding school to good use.
“I went to university and got a law degree. I didn’t intend to practise law. What I wanted was the small measure of respect that would come with the letters behind my name. I headed back to Manitoba, and instead of working in a lumber camp, I was running pulpwood operations for Indian Affairs.”47
And what he discovered working for Indian Affairs infuriated him.
“I’d spent time overseeing projects for Indians, clearing hydro-line right-of-ways in the bush, running pulpwood operations. I thought these projects were intended to help Indians, but a successful project attracted the wrong kind of attention. As soon as it started being successful, some [Indian Affairs] bureaucrat changed the rules and a promising project floundered and failed.”48
Allard had gotten his first hard lessons about the frustration and futility of going up against the IA bureaucracy, but he was not about to be bested by intransigent civil servants ensconced in their comfortable offices in Ottawa or Winnipeg.
“When I realized I could do little to change the bureaucracy that ran economic and employment programs for Indians, I thought I might make a difference if I became a politician. I figured that the bureaucrats would have to listen to me then. I thought I could make some meaningful and substantive changes to the lives of the impoverished Indians on northern reserves if I sat on the provincial government benches.”49
Allard was prepared to use the powerful pulpit of public office to make sure Indian voices were heard in the legislature. He went up to the Fort Alexander Reserve (now the Sagkeeng First Nation) about 120 km northeast of Winnipeg, to see Dave Courchene at his home. Allard told him he was willing to run for the Rupertsland seat.
“I’d need someone to run my election campaign for me,” Allard said, “and Dave told me to go see the young fellow next door and he would be able to help me. That young fellow was Phil Fontaine, and between the two of them I was elected in 1969 to the Manitoba Legislature with Schreyer as premier.”50
To be precise, Allard was elected to office in a tight race on June 25, 1969, helping the NDP form a socialist government in Manitoba for the first time.
That same day, the world of Indian politics changed forever.