UNLEASHING THE FURY OF MOTHERS
It used to be Indian Agents who came to the reserves and took the children away, and in doing so, removed the heart of the community. The grandmothers remembered when the agents took them away from their mothers when they were small and took them to residential schools. And when they grew up, their children were taken away to schools, too. But now it was their own people who were seizing the children. Not to take them to residential schools, but as a means to exact revenge against mothers and fathers who challenged the power and authority of the chief and council on reserves. It was, at last, too much.
Leona Freed was no shrinking violet in the face of abuse of power by band employees. She was the daughter of Rufus Prince, who became chief of the Ojibway Long Plain reserve in southern Manitoba after returning from army service in Italy in the Second World War. He was a founding director of the Manitoba Indian Brotherhood,1 and fought a 1964 hunting-rights case to the Supreme Court of Canada.2
Freed had avoided the residential school system because her Saulteaux mother moved Freed and her little sisters off the reserve to prevent that from happening. But Freed, along with her husband and children, were unable to escape becoming a target when she became a thorn in the side of the band chief on the reserve near Portage la Prairie where she lived with her family.
Some of Manitoba’s sixty-two reserves had created their own version of the “Kennedys,” and Freed was concerned about what she saw as systemic financial abuse.
“The elite clan is the chief and council and their families. They own property off-reserve that is their own personal property, take exotic vacations and get new vehicles regularly. Everything has to go through chief and council, so they only fund themselves and their friends.”3
That might sound like resentment from a woman bagging onions for a living, except that the chief and council did have control over the funding, and anybody who dared question what seemed like lavish spending could face retribution. Even when welfare cheques from the band officer were bouncing, people like Freed couldn’t get answers. The chief and council controlled who got houses, who got welfare and who had their electricity cut off. The Indian Agents who used to have dictatorial control over every aspect of life on reserves had been replaced, in some communities, by dictatorial chiefs and councils. When Freed tried to find out where the band’s money was going, she faced a backlash.
“It wasn’t just me,” she said. “It happened to other families, too. They would have their dogs killed, car tires slashed and be labelled as Satanists.”4
Freed further angered the band council when she wrote a letter to the federal Minister of Health in 1998 to demand immediate action on the health hazard caused by a broken sewage pipe on the reserve. The Health department forwarded her letter to the chief and councillors, who promptly threatened to sue her.
The issue of the confidential letter from Freed being provided to the band chief was raised in the House of Commons.5 It wasn’t the first time that complaints about band issues made to government authorities had been referred directly back to the people who were the focus of the complaint. Indian Affairs minister Jane Stewart was on the hot seat in Parliament in 1997 after a confidential letter sent to her by Tsuu T’ina band member Bruce Starlight, outlining concerns members in his community had about financial mismanagement on the reserve near Calgary, ended up in the hands of the band chief. The chief then launched legal action against Starlight for defamation of character.
Stewart confirmed that the letter had the minister’s stamp on it, indicating it had reached her office, but she couldn’t explain how it had ended up in the chief’s hands.
“I can confirm that it didn’t come from me and it didn’t come through official channels in my department, but there will be an internal investigation to, if we can, identify how indeed and if indeed, this letter came from our department.”6
A year later, an internal investigation by a different government department concluded that it could not disclose who sent the letter to the chief and no further action would be taken. IA did, however, say it would cover Starlight’s legal costs. That seemed fair, since it was IA funds being used by the band chief to sue Starlight.7
The leaking of the confidential letter to the IA minister and the failure to hold anyone accountable was a signal to ordinary Indigenous people that the insiders were taking care of each other, and the chief’s lawsuit against Starlight was an intimidation tactic meant to muzzle any opposition. It was also a tactic that would go unchallenged by Indian Affairs.
In response, the Indigenous publication Windspeaker announced that it would break with the standard journalism practice of requiring people to reveal their names in published letters to the editor and that it would now print some anonymous letters. The lesson learned from the Starlight affair, said the publication staff, was that “you’ve got to protect yourself, because no one else will.”8
The publication also accused Indian Affairs of losing all credibility by denying protection to Starlight, a whistleblower, saying, “By not protecting its source, Indian Affairs stripped the average Joe of the only leverage average Joes have to effect change in Aboriginal communities… Efforts to strengthen Aboriginal governance and develop a ‘stable, predictable and accountable’ fiscal relationship with Aboriginal governments and organizations had been dealt a levelling blow.”9
The “outing” of whistleblowers appeared to be less an orchestrated campaign to silence troublemakers than an effort to paper over the obvious problems created when large amounts of money were dispersed with little accountability required from those who had control over it.
Freed collected what documentation she could on suspicious band spending on her home reserve and took it to the RCMP. The band authorities hit back hard. The local tribal council Family Services seized her teenage daughter, claiming that Freed had been beating the girl, and removed her to a reserve rumoured to have a problem with pedophiles. Freed was terrified for her daughter’s safety, and knew there was no one she could go to who would have the authority (or willingness) to intervene, not even the RCMP.10
The Manitoba government had been devolving responsibility for child welfare services to the reserves through regional tribal agencies since the 1980s. The Indigenous Child and Family Services agencies, managed by directors appointed by band councils, worked well in some communities, but not so well in others. There was an accountability gap because the chiefs’ political organizations insisted that they had an inherent right to run their own agencies, while provincial officials were taking the hands-off approach to oversight lest they be accused of paternalism.
The only tool Freed had left was the threat of public shaming of officials. She went directly to the media-savvy CEO of the Winnipeg Child and Family Services and to the provincial minister of Family Services. Freed’s daughter was quickly and quietly returned to her when it became clear there was no abuse. The girl confessed that she had been pressured by a Family Services staffer from Freed’s reserve to make a false statement claiming her mother was beating her.11
Freed had every reason to be furious, but she knew she and her daughter had been lucky. What about all the other women who were raising the alarm about similar abuses by band councils on their reserves? How many of them would have the guts to press a provincial cabinet minister for help if their children were taken from them as retribution?
When control of band membership was handed off by IA to band councils in 1985, it gave councils exclusive authority over who could live on reserves. The threat to band members of being struck from the band list and evicted from the reserve was yet another weapon that could be used to keep them from speaking out. But First Nations women on reserves saw a new threat in the federal government’s push for self-governance as proposed in the “Gathering Strength” policy, which was a response to the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) initiated by Brian Mulroney and completed in 1996.
The Chrétien government had been under criticism for its silence on RCAP, the most expensive inquiry in Canadian history at that time. The action plan announced by Indian Affairs minister-of-the-day Jane Stewart in 1998 was intended to answer that criticism. The plan offered an apology for the abuse of children in the Indian Residential Schools system and $325 million for a healing fund. It was also about rebuilding the relationship between the government and Aboriginal leaders, and the IA minister had consulted about this directly with the heads of the five designated Aboriginal Representative Organizations (AROs): the Assembly of First Nations, the Métis National Council, the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples, the Inuit Tapirisat of Canada, and the Native Women’s Association of Canada.12
“We want to achieve measureable results,” said Stewart, “by supporting self-reliance at the individual and community level. We will work with Aboriginal people to support healthy, sustainable communities by improving health and public safety, investing in people and strengthening economic development.”13
Those were fine words, but they were rendered meaningless by what seemed to be the deliberate blindness of IA and the AROs to complaints of corruption and abuse of power on reserves. There was no specific incident that triggered the uprising of First Nations women in 1998, but rather a growing fury at the mistreatment of people on reserves and the seemingly unchecked powers of the “village tyrants.” They found a voice through a handful of women like Freed and Rita Galloway from Saskatchewan who were publicly challenging band authorities. The women were inundated with calls and letters from band members from reserves across the country — both men and women — who were outraged by what they saw as the blatant and criminal misuse of money intended for reserve programs and services.
Freed, Galloway and other women who would not be silenced any longer channelled their outrage into creating the First Nations Accountability Coalition. They had no money to organize, so they emptied their wallets and let it be known that they would hold meetings across the country in the name of protecting the futures of their children.
Gail Sparrow, the former chief of the Musqueam band in BC, supported the women. “Like the phoenix rising from the ashes, we’re spreading our wings and the men are all flapping around and they don’t know what to do to us.”14
The Coalition found help from an unexpected source. For the first time in Canadian political history, the upstart Reform Party of Canada held official opposition status in the House of Commons. MP Myron Thompson, “the barrel-chested giant in a huge Stetson”15 from the Wild Rose riding in central Alberta, was appointed Indian Affairs critic. He had lots to criticize.
Media stories about brazen misspending by chiefs and councils and tribal organizations were in the public spotlight, and they were garnering international attention. According to the New York Times, “the message of tribal corruption has been most vividly illustrated by reports of junkets to sunny climes. In Toronto, government support for an Indian addiction center, Pedahbun Lodge, was cut after it was disclosed that $110,000 in treatment money was used last year to send employees to California. In Alberta, unfavorable publicity forced the Samson Cree tribal government to cancel a 12-day trip to Hawaii for 55 members. But, according to auditors, $200-a-day stipends paid to each trip participant were never returned.”16
Such stories were hard to ignore when the reserves that were home to the big spenders on luxury cruises and world travel were also home to some of the worst living conditions in the country. One such reserve was in Myron Thompson’s riding. The oil-rich Stoney First Nation had been a hotbed of allegations of financial mismanagement, with enough evidence of criminal activity that more than forty allegations of wrongdoing were turned over to the RCMP.17
For her part, IA minister Stewart was quick to assure critics that band chiefs and councils were making progress toward self-governance, and that it would be paternalistic to interfere in band matters.
Meanwhile, Thompson decided he needed to do something about all the complaints he was receiving:
“Immediately after word got out that I was responsible for accountability on the reserves I was literally bombarded by grassroots natives from all across Canada. The files I received number in the hundreds, while well over 200 cases of mismanagement had been reported by the media.”18
Since the First Nations Accountability Coalition women were already organizing meetings across the West in 1998, the Reform Party decided to lend a hand, which Leona Freed greatly appreciated.
“We were all volunteers,” she said. “I paid for my own office expenses out of my pocket. The Reform Party provided a little money to pay for halls and food for meetings. And the party covered my travel costs using their MPs’ Air Miles.”19
The coalition held thirteen meetings in seven provinces, drawing people from about 200 reserves. Freed sat, she said, with hundreds of women and listened to their anger, their pain and the hopelessness generated by futile efforts to make themselves heard. As she comforted them when they cried, Freed grew more and more angry. Ordinary Indians had absolutely no one to go to for help, and that had to change. The women marched, demonstrated, and held sit-ins at government and band offices. Indian Affairs and the Assembly of First Nations dismissed the women as troublemakers, and explained away the growing litany of high-profile abuses as “growing pains” that would be ironed out as chiefs and councils grew into the responsibilities of self-governance. Critics, on the other hand, called it blatant whitewashing to prevent a backlash against the self-government policies being pushed by Indian Affairs.20
The conditions on reserves were not some “Lord of the Flies” scenario where the colonial “adult” supervision of Indian Affairs bureaucrats had been withdrawn, leaving reserve residents to fight it out among themselves to see who would be in control. This was a deep entanglement that grew out of the White Paper of 1969, resulting in a triad of Indian Affairs, the Aboriginal Representative Organizations (AROs), and chiefs and councils as the power brokers. The three factions pushed and pulled against each other for political and financial control. Ordinary Indians had no role to play. They were relevant only insofar as their continued suffering provided the justification for programs that kept the money flowing for the benefit of IA and its agents.
Some First Nations leaders were unapologetic participants in oppressing their own people. A chief testified before a judge investigating multiple youth suicides on the ostensibly wealthy Stoney First Nation in Alberta in 1998 that he opposed economic development on the reserve as a matter of policy. Stoney people were much easier to control, he said, when they were kept poor and dependent.21
But didn’t band members have the power of the vote to get rid of chiefs that wanted to keep them under their boot? Sure, there were elections every two years, but reserve communities had never institutionalized elections in a way that made them a legitimate part of the community. According to the Institute on Governance, governing institutions must have legitimacy for them to be successful; and there must be a good cultural match for the way that particular society is being governed. Traditional consensus governance had no corollary to adversarial elections. The result of the externally imposed election system was that “many Indigenous citizens have no authentic connection to the systems and structures they live under.”22
In a democratic society like Canada, it is assumed that mechanisms will be in place to ensure that elections will be free and fair, but elections on reserves have no such requirement. The incumbent chief and council are in charge of the election process, which gives them a considerable advantage in elections that can be hard-fought and vicious battles where the winner takes all. It is not about who represents the will of the people; it is too often about who gets the big prize.
As one chief from a New Brunswick reserve put it, “With elections every two years, there is a constant division of families, and emotions tend to run deep. When you are talking about people’s livelihoods, matters of the election are of the highest importance. This is why we have such high voter turnouts on the reserve at about 95 per cent. There is a tendency for people to strike out at each other and do things to hurt one another for the most celebrated positions of power — chief and council. After an election, a community might begin to heal, but that healing is never complete because before you know it, there is another election.”23
Despite media stories across the country about claims of vote-buying, voter intimidation, chiefs who had declared themselves chief-for-life, and other election irregularities on reserves, Indian Affairs took the same stance as on allegations of band corruption. After years of dictating band affairs, IA decided to defer to chiefs and councils. Noted a former IA senior manager, “Even though the Indian Act allowed the minister to intervene, most incumbents rubber-stamped whatever system of ‘election’ a band wanted, under the pretense that these were traditional band customs.”24 IA ministers took the position that it would be “totally inappropriate” to interfere with band elections.
The Senate Standing Committee on Aboriginal Peoples was set to resume its hearings on self-governance in March 1999. Freed hadn’t even considered an appearance at the hearing until she got a phone call from Jean Allard. He’d heard Freed give a radio interview, and encouraged her to take her message directly to the Senate. She had no idea how to go about doing that. People can’t just show up at hearings; they have to be invited. Freed got on the phone and talked about the issues at stake until the Senate issued her an invitation.25
Leona Freed and Myron Thompson had a plan. Freed would make a presentation before the Senate committee, detailing band administration and election corruption, advocating for a modernized treaty annuity, and calling for the creation of an Aboriginal ombudsman. Thompson would put forward a private member’s bill, the First Nations Ombudsman Act.
Freed was not a sophisticated political activist. She was the mother of six and grandmother of seven, was married to a tow-truck driver, and bagged onions at a market garden company for a living. The Accountability Coalition had no money to pay for political advisers or professional writers to help them produce a polished presentation. What they had were women fuelled by the fierce passion of mothers protecting their children, and they would be silent no longer.
“At the outset, honourable senators,” Freed began her presentation to the senators, “I want to apologize if I offend anyone because the choice of words in our brief is quite strong. However, it comes from the heart and I am speaking on behalf of many band members.”26
Rita Galloway was speaking for Saskatchewan; Freed was speaking on behalf of band members in Manitoba, Ontario, British Columbia, New Brunswick and Alberta.
“Our aboriginal people in these five provinces are not ready for self-government,” said Freed. “In order for a First Nation to be self-sufficient, successful and self-governing, there must be accountability, democracy and equality. These three factors are non-existent.
“What does exist in the majority of our First Nations is that the chiefs and their families, relatives and friends benefit from nepotism, employment opportunities, education, housing off and on the reserve, properties being purchased off the reserve including some outside of the province, exotic vacations and trips as well as gambling sprees to the United States. We also have self-appointed chiefs, silent chiefs, illiterate chiefs, bought-and-paid-for chiefs and band hereditary/custom chiefs which means ‘chief for life.’ In the latter instance, they are not elected. We cannot vote for our leader. The chief and his family make all the rules and there is no democracy.”27
Freed turned her sights on the Indian Affairs department, with the accusation that it “condones the criminal activities of chiefs and councils of Canada’s First Nations. There has been absolutely no punishment administered to these people.”28
First Nations political organizations fared no better.
“The accountability coalition members in the provinces I represent here today do not recognize the Assembly of First Nations as our aboriginal leaders. We did not vote them in, nor did we have a say in the elections or the voting. They call themselves ‘aboriginal leaders’ but true aboriginal leaders would not ignore the cries and pleas of their people. A true aboriginal leader would come to the aid of the people in their time of need, and put an end to all the needless suffering.”29
Freed called for the end of all band funding flowing through the hands of chiefs and councils, with funds flowing directly to individuals to empower them to take charge of their lives. And finally, she called for a native ombudsman “who would activate accountability of band funds on the First Nations; guide and aid band members to self-sufficiency and eventually towards self-government; act as dispute mediator.”30 More than anything, the coalition members wanted somebody to listen and to act on their concerns.
What caught most of the media attention, however, was Freed’s declaration that too many bands were not ready for self-governance.
The Indian Affairs minister responded by saying that the last thing the government wanted to do was impose self-government on bands that weren’t ready, and suggested that there could be improvements to accountability.
“Maybe it is an ombudsman,” said Stewart. “Maybe it is an auditor-general. Those kinds of institutions are very much the focus.”31
The next day in the House of Commons, Thompson stood to introduce Bill C-222, the First Nations Ombudsman Act: “an Act to establish the office of First Nations Ombudsman to investigate complaints relating to administrative and communication problems between members of First Nations communities and their First Nation and between First Nations, allegations of improper financial administration and allegations of electoral irregularities.”32
Freed and Galloway were watching from the Visitors’ Gallery in the House of Commons. Ordinary Indigenous people were once again getting their concerns heard on Parliament Hill, but it was fully thirty years after the Cardinal/Trudeau showdown in 1969.