THE BUFFALO JUMP POLICY OF ’85
Prime Minister Brian Mulroney was about to put a stop to the out-of-control spending on Indian programs and services. The day after his Conservative government was sworn into office in the fall of 1984,1 the PM ordered his deputy PM Erik Nielsen to begin a hush-hush task force review of “Indian and native programs.”2 The task force considered that “neither the deplorable social and economic circumstances for native people, nor the rapid escalation of costs associated with native programs, are acceptable.”3
The 1985 Task Force report bore remarkable similarities to the 1969 White Paper, as if the federal government had never really abandoned its termination policies. Maybe it hadn’t. According to a memo sent April 1, 1970 to Trudeau and Indian Affairs minister Jean Chrétien by one of IA’s assistant deputy ministers on preserving the principles of the White Paper, “We can still believe with just as much strength and sincerity that the policies we propose are the right ones….” However, he added that “we should adopt somewhat different tactics in relation to policy, but that we should not depart from its essential content.”4
Mulroney was not advancing a Trudeau policy so much as attempting to rein in the out-of-control spending the new Conservative government had inherited. One part of the deficit reduction plan was focussed on Indian Affairs. But once again, consultations with ordinary Indigenous people were nowhere in sight. Nielsen’s bureaucrats did, however, consult “program managers, economic development co-ordinators, deputy heads, and the Private Sector Advisory Committee to the Task Force,” along with “limited consultations with selected client groups” and with senior deputies from several provincial governments.5 The idea was to keep a lid on what the task force was doing as it prepared its report to Cabinet, and Nielsen’s team went to considerable lengths to ensure secrecy.
What the task force was most concerned about was the continuing upward spiral of costs for programs and services delivered by IA and its co-delivery partners, which had reached $2.42 billion in 1983–85. Those costs were projected to hit more than $5 billion in five years, and that did not include the estimated $500 million backlog in housing and potential for about $8 billion in land claims settlements over the next decade or so.6 The main problem was that “anything having to do with natives, especially Indians and Inuit,”7 was assumed to be a federal matter, and within the federal government, the responsibility of IA. Over time, IA had evolved into a hybrid of a federal department and a provincial government, but without the depth of capacity to meet such a wide range of needs.
The plan was to divest Ottawa of as much responsibility for Indians as possible, with the federal government legally obliged to cover only 25 percent of what IA was spending. Another 40 percent of programs and services were considered to properly be the responsibility of the provinces and municipalities, including responsibility for band governments. The remaining 35 percent was considered discretionary social spending. The objective was to offload as much as possible as quickly as possible, and then redistribute Indian Affairs’ remaining program responsibilities to other federal departments. The department would then be dismantled.8
The task force team anticipated that Indian organizations would vociferously oppose the task force plan. One tactic to quiet dissent was to have the Justice Minister review the practice of funding only select Aboriginal groups (AROs) to see if the practice contravened the Charter of Rights. Another was to take the consultation funding for the self-government negotiations going to AROs and give it directly to band governments. Both moves would weaken the clout of political organizations that were becoming more adept at using the media to move public opinion.9
In particular, the strategy for rolling out the new policy for IA relied on continuing to keep Indian leadership in the dark. With the federal budget scheduled to be released on May 20, 1985 and a First Ministers Conference with Aboriginal leaders slated for the following week, the task force advised “withholding news of specific native programming until June” as part of the budget discussions so that the conference could proceed “without the added complication of an adverse native reaction to the program changes.”10
Because of the demand for secrecy, it is highly unlikely that any bureaucrats ever intended that the informal name they had given to the 395-page termination plan — The Buffalo Jump of the 1980s — would ever be made public.11 They were mistaken.
“The entire review was conducted behind a dense wall of secrecy,” said Menno Boldt, author of a number of books on Indigenous issues, “thereby creating a good deal of curiosity and speculations about political intrigue. It was predictable that when a summary of one of these secret reviews, a sixty-one-page document entitled Memorandum to Cabinet: Report of the Ministerial Task Force on Native Programs, was leaked to the media, it would achieve instant ‘celebrity status’ and become the focus of intense (media, political, and academic) scrutiny.”12
Indeed, it triggered immediate howls of outrage in the Indigenous political community, just as the White Paper had done.
The informal Buffalo Jump title, whether intended as a joke or not, was a dead giveaway. A buffalo jump is a cliff over which bison would fall to their deaths after being herded into narrowing drive lanes and then spooked from behind so that the herd stampeded forward and pushed each other over the edge. Any injured animals that survived the fall could be easily dispatched at the bottom of the cliff.
What exactly did the Mulroney government have in mind? It seemed that the task force agreed that the past twenty-five years of IA devolution policy had left an unfortunate legacy on many reserves: “participation rates in employment are low and unemployment remains consistently high. Suicide, particularly for younger people, is six times the comparable national rate…. Incarceration rates are high — seven times the national rate.”13 However, the task force was advising dumping the whole mess onto reserve residents to fix themselves, and with less money.14 “Experience has shown,” it noted, “that these problems cannot be solved by the application of more money.”15
Under this new policy, Canada’s 579 band governments,16 squeezed for money by funding caps and a ban on deficit financing — while still facing all the same social and economic problems — could be pushed towards self-governance agreements and maybe not notice the danger ahead. If band governments took the jump, they would be required to give up their Aboriginal rights in exchange for multi-year block funding, and turned into ethnic municipalities at the bottom of the governance hierarchy. As more bands took on “self-governance,” it would be easier to start stampeding the others over the cliff.
It’s no wonder the Mulroney government wanted to keep a lid on its new policy. The Indian Affairs minister of the day was David Crombie, formerly Toronto’s “tiny perfect mayor,” and he was poorly equipped to handle the blowback from a report for which he had no responsibility. The leaked details of the Nielsen report were damning, and Crombie and the Prime Minister quickly scrambled to assure everyone that the report was just a report and not government policy.17
Crombie, in the House of Commons, dismissed the report as “the entrails of policies which have been found in the wastebaskets of the bureaucracy.”18 However, it seemed that Mulroney was still intending to advance the Buffalo Jump policy, but do it quietly. Mulroney promised to maintain government spending, but the government continued its efforts to downsize Indian Affairs, and continued the devolution efforts begun during the Trudeau years.
Behind the “self-government” drive was the goal of extinguishing federal responsibilities for Indians — a policy of termination. Unlike the Trudeau era prior to the repatriation of the Constitution, the federal government could no longer unilaterally nullify treaties or eliminate Aboriginal rights. Those rights were now enshrined in the Constitution. Since it was the chiefs who had the legal authority to sign agreements with IA, it would be necessary to “persuade” band chiefs to voluntarily sign away their peoples’ rights.
The means for doing so was two-fold: squeeze bands financially until the suffering of the people compelled chiefs to sign away their peoples’ rights, while extending the promise of five-year block funding and relief from the controls of the Indian Act.
However, much of the Mulroney agenda on Indigenous issues was sidelined by a hostile relationship with Indigenous people (excepting the Métis political organizations, which were secretly pursuing their own Métis Nation agenda). In the summer of 1990, the animosity between the federal government and First Nations came to a head in a violent, armed stand-off on Mohawk land near Oka, Quebec that lasted nearly eighty days. That confrontation led to Mulroney shifting gears and setting up the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples in 1991.
And then Mulroney was out and the new government of Jean Chrétien was in. Chrétien decided he would take a different tack on Indigenous issues.
The Manitoba self-government experiment
In 1994, the newest Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development minister Ron Irwin signed the ambitious Manitoba Framework Agreement with Phil Fontaine, who had returned to Manitoba to head the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs (AMC), formerly the Manitoba Indian Brotherhood. The Framework Agreement set out the process to “dismantle DIAND operations, develop Manitoba First Nations government institutions, and restore to Manitoba First Nations governments the jurisdictions currently held by DIAND and other federal departments.”19 The Framework had two goals: to establish First Nations governance in accordance with the inherent right to self-governance, and to develop band governments legally empowered to exercise their authority.20 As Manitoba’s First Nations took over governance authority, the Indian Affairs regional departmental structures in Manitoba would be dismantled. It was the most ambitious self-government initiative undertaken in Canada.21
If it looked like it might be just another White Paper/Buffalo Jump gambit, that’s not how the AMC saw the $60 million agreement. It was determined to base the new governance method on a consensus around what the people wanted. Success depended on the individual communities buying into the results. The AMC hired dozens of staff, set up a variety of committees, and got right to work. How hard could it be to take over IA administration jobs? There was surely nothing difficult about dismantling the IA regional office, and then moving in and taking over what was there.22
Community consultations were more of challenge, but they were crucial to the Framework’s success.
“Outcomes cannot be imposed,” stated the Memorandum of Understanding for the Framework Agreement. “Moreover, consultation and communications throughout the Project must be focused on, and delivered primarily by, individual First Nations communities and tribal councils in order to ensure the widest possible support and maximum absorption of information and decision-making.”23
It turned out that there weren’t very many people AMC could hire who could go out to the province’s sixty-two reserves to talk about self-governance and what it might mean to communities. AMC had to start by educating and training community co-ordinators on such topics as the Constitution, citizenship, judicial systems, accountability and governance structures. They would then be able to talk with ordinary people on reserves about different ideas they might have for governance. The coordinators would then bring the results of their discussions back to Framework officials, who would attempt to make sense of all the information coming in to develop a governance model.
In rural areas, coordinators ran into problems with outdated band lists and the fact that many band members were transient. Reaching out to urban Status Indians was enough of a complication that they were dropped from the consultations.
It was a slow process, in part because many ordinary FN people were so used to governance being decided in government offices somewhere else and then imposed on them that they hadn’t given much thought to the issues. Nonetheless, it soon became apparent in interviews with community Elders that there was a strong leaning towards governance based on traditional culture and values. But how many people even knew what that meant anymore? Traditional governance had ended a century before with the signing of the treaties.
The coordinators themselves had to be brought up to speed first before they could go back out into the field to share what they’d learned about traditional ways with ordinary people on reserves.24 It was a learning opportunity for everyone, but the seeds of traditional self-governance were taking hold. Governance through humility, honesty and balance held great appeal. What the people were considering, whether they realized it or not, was governance based on self-determination, which is loosely defined as “the right and ability of a people or a group of people to choose their own destiny without external compulsion.”25
The AMC team was confident that all was going according to plan and that the possibility of developing a traditional governance model that could function in the modern world was beginning to take form. True, according to the initiative’s work plan, they were running behind schedule because of all the training and education needed just to get started, and because some communities were taking their time with their deliberations. Not all chiefs were on board, either. Some saw a return to traditional governance as a direct threat to the power they wielded under the Indian Affairs system.26
Due to the substantial amount of money involved in the Framework initiative, the agreement called for regular reviews by IA. By 1999, the AMC had already spent $27 million on research and consultations over five years, and suddenly, IA froze their funding.
When IA wouldn’t bend, the AMC authorized three chiefs to head directly to Ottawa to appeal to the Standing Senate Committee on Aboriginal Peoples.
“The federal government,” explained one of the chiefs to the senate committee, “has been under a lot of pressure to make sense of this $27 million which was spent but, to my mind, there is no better way to spend $27 million than on building the foundation of a new government. When this process is done, in all honesty, we will be able to say we have a government by the people for the people.”27
And further, consultations were making progress and funding should be reinstated.
“We consult with our home communities and ask how we can look after ourselves so that we can go forward. Our people back home have been waiting for this for a long time. When we go to meetings and talk to the elders, we talk about this new self-government initiative. They shake their heads and say, ‘What took you so long?’ They have always known that this was the way.”28
Unfortunately, the presentation to the Senate proved fruitless; so three Grand Chiefs were dispatched to Ottawa to negotiate directly with Indian Affairs. Part of the problem was the changeover in leaders. The principals who signed the agreement were no longer involved. Phil Fontaine had departed the AMC to run for national chief of the Assembly of First Nations (he won), and of course there was yet another new IA minister, Jane Stewart.
The Grand Chiefs did get the funding for the Framework Initiative reinstated, but at a cost that compromised the entire effort. The minister would allow the initiative to continue only if the AMC immediately ceased community consultations. They weren’t necessary because Indian Affairs had already decided that “self-government” would be modelled on municipal-style governance. The initiative continued, as there was still work to be done in the area of devolution of responsibilities for education, child and family services, and fiscal relations.29 But the heart and soul of the project — genuine self-determination — had been cut out.
Perhaps the AMC had been naïve to believe they were truly going to be allowed traditional self-governance on First Nations terms. It seemed clear in retrospect that IA was only going to countenance modern governance models of its choosing. While the people did get an education on governance, both traditional and modern, that they hadn’t had before, the effort ultimately exhausted their good will and interest.30 The project sagged under the great weight of people’s frustration and disappointment, and finally ended in 2007.31
The Framework Initiative ended ignominiously, without any reports to detail the work that was accomplished, and with an internal IA audit into what happened to the $55 million or so that was spent with so little to show for it. The audit led to “two senior department officials being marched out of their offices.”32
The people were not going to decide their own governance after all. It was far from the first time First Nations people had been teased with the promise of finally being heard, only to be ignored. And every time it happened, the futility of even bothering to try to take control of their lives anymore resulted in more apathy, despair and hopelessness.