CALM AT THE EDGE OF THE STORM
The shores of Lac Ste. Anne in Alberta are shallow and reedy, but the area where pilgrims gather provides an easy slope for wading out into the healing water. The lake, about seventy-five kilometres west of Edmonton, has been the destination of Roman Catholic Indigenous pilgrims since 1889.
About 40,000 people gathered there over several days in late July 1999. The Lac Ste. Anne gathering is the largest Indigenous pilgrimage in North America, drawing families towing pop-up tent trailers, state-of-the-art Winnebagos, fifth-wheelers, battered pickup trucks with campers on the back, and those prepared to pitch tents in the large cattle pasture by the lake. Like the Mi’kmaq of the Maritimes, the pilgrims honoured the grandmother of Jesus, the mother of Mary, who was said to have been seen walking across the water.
Among the throng were Leona Freed, Jean Allard and Harold Cardinal. Allard and Cardinal were both raised as Catholics. Freed was there to talk to people about accountability. She knew that the chances of the First Nations Ombudsman Act becoming law were slim. Most private member’s bills got lost inside the legislative machinery, never to be seen again. But the bill was something real that offered hope for change, which was more than she and the other women in the First Nations Accountability Coalition had thought possible when they started out.
The Lac Ste. Anne gathering offered a window into a different Indigenous reality. Under the sea of blue plastic tarps serving as canopies over lawn chairs gathered around a Coleman stove or “porches” where people could sit and visit, were Indigenous people from all across the Prairies, from the North and from central United States. They were not the impoverished and hopeless Indigenous people portrayed in so many media stories. Nor were they the panhandlers seen on city street corners or the tragically broken men and women regularly rescued by social workers from freezing to death in the wintry back alleys of the cities. They were also not the people involved in Indigenous politics. They stayed well away from that toxic nonsense and got on with the same things everyone else does — raising their kids, enjoying their grandchildren, worrying about whether the teens were mature enough to start dating and whether Mom’s cancer would stay in remission, and looking for peace and solace.
The People of Always
The people gathered on the edge of the lake could be described as the modern face of the “People of Always.” The historic term was actually “Men of Always,” which seems to have originated in the rather fanciful writings of François-René Chateaubriand, a minor member of the French aristocracy who set sail for North America in 1791 to escape the French Revolution. He claims to have travelled from Albany to Niagara Falls, where he broke his arm and lived with the Iroquois for a month while it healed. The Iroquois, he said, called themselves the “Men of Always” or the Ongoueonoue.1
A professor of geology used the term in a speech before the Historical and Scientific Society of Manitoba in 1922, but there is not much evidence of its widespread use.2 It is, nonetheless, an apt term to describe a culture that has endured for a very long time — the “People of Always.”
Tribal communities, with their own particular territories and customs that suited their physical and cultural needs, have walked the landscape of what became Canada for many thousands of years. All of Canada, prior to 14,000 years ago, was covered by ice sheets up to three kilometres thick in some places. All the living things on the land either perished or were driven south ahead of the vast ice sheets that spread south and west from the Hudson Bay — crushing and grinding everything in their path under their own enormous weight — west to the Rocky Mountains and south to Wisconsin. The exceptions were the dry interior regions of Alaska and Yukon that remained relatively ice-free, where mammoths, horses, camels and giant short-faced bears flourished in vibrant communities. With so much water lying frozen on the land, the global sea level had dropped an incredible 120 metres (400 feet), which laid bare a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska across which animals and people migrated from west to east, although some animals went in the opposite direction. As the ice masses began melting back about 12,000 years ago, the land opened up and animals like bison, horses and bears began reclaiming parts of their former range. With them, from the north, came the ancestors of the tribes that established themselves across the landscape.3
Of course, this is the story of modern archeology. For people whose memories were passed on through stories from generation to generation, the oral stories of those from ten generations back might well have seemed like deep history. Yet if the people had lived on the landscape for, say, 6,000 years, it would count as about 250 generations. Would stories passed down through such a long time not have seemed like “always”?
The people gathered on the shore of Lac Ste. Anne in 1999 could well have been the “People of Always.” It was a serene gathering. There was occasional gridlock in the parking area, mainly because no one appeared to be organizing anything, and drivers just figured it out among themselves. It had the feel of a familiar traditional event where many people knew each other and how it was more or less organized. Even the higgledy-piggledy arrangement of the campers, trailers and tents seemed to work, somehow.
Jean Allard had spent some years brooding about the plight of Indigenous people, and he had come to Lac Ste. Anne to talk to the people there about an idea he was mulling over. He had had lots of time to think on the long nights in the summer of 1994 when he chained himself to the statue representing the tortured and troubled Louis Riel on the grounds of the Manitoba Legislature. Other Métis leaders wanted a proper buttoned-up suit-and-bow-tie statue of Riel. Allard disagreed, in part because he was a prime mover in getting the original Riel statue there in the first place, and more than one person had remarked on how much the stylized Riel looked like Allard. But it was also about duking it out via statues to see which Métis group would dominate in Manitoba — between Allard, the past president of the Union nationale métisse Saint-Joseph du Manitoba (founded in 1887) and Yvon Dumont, the president of the Manitoba Métis Federation (founded in 1969). After twelve days chained to the statue, Allard gave in when the work crew showed up to move the statue from the Legislature to the grounds of St. Boniface College, where Allard and Riel had both once been students of the Jesuits. The MMF had won.
It was this ideological battle with the MMF about what it meant to be Métis that got Allard thinking. He figured government funding of the MMF had turned the leaders into beggars, constantly seeking more and more money to deliver what he considered to be “apartheid” programs. He knew that the MMF had been started by the Manitoba government with the sole purpose of delivering services to poor, rural Métis.
In 1959, the Manitoba Department of Agriculture and Immigration commissioned a study to identify Aboriginal people, the better to target government aid to the impoverished. The terms of the study made it clear that only the Métis “living like Indians” were to be included. The government was only interested in the Métis, “living in shanties on the edge of reserves, or in small remote communities where they eked out a living trapping, fishing, or selling wood. They were interested only in the Métis who were illiterate and living in poverty.”4 That accounted for about 20 percent of the Métis in the province.
The majority of modern-day Métis, who counted themselves as descendants of the Scottish and French families of the Red River Settlement, were generally urban, middle-class or living comfortably without the need for government assistance. Many of the country-born children of Protestant Hudson’s Bay Company men and their Cree, Saulteaux or Assiniboine wives were sent to the Orkney Islands or to Scotland for their education, which meant the Anglo-Métis tended to be more prosperous than the families of the Catholic French fur traders and bison hunters and their country wives. When the province of Manitoba was created in 1870, the population was about evenly split, with about 4,500 “half-breeds,” as the Scottish Métis were called at the time, and about 5,500 French Métis.5 (There were also more than 500 “settled Indians” and about 400 British and Canadian people in the Red River Settlement.6) Many of the Métis moved to rural communities or joined other Métis communities on the edge of reserves in a substantial diaspora. Others stayed in Winnipeg, where Métis names such as Isbister, Norquay, Grant, Riel, McKay and many more grace streets, schools and public buildings.
But in 1969, the Manitoba government was looking for an organization to run programs for the poor Métis identified in the 1959 report. Allard, newly elected to government that year, was also a past president of L’Union nationale. He said his organization was insulted when asked to run the programs; they would not demean their brothers and sisters by treating them like second-class citizens who were too incompetent to manage for themselves. He saw it as a trap. The Métis would get some money. The bureaucrats would have lots of work to do overseeing the Métis-run programs. Of course, said Allard, it meant that the programs couldn’t be too successful. If poor Métis no longer needed help, the programs would no longer be needed, and neither would the bureaucrats.7
The Manitoba Métis Federation in 1969 represented just the twenty people who had created the organization, but to be considered legitimate, it needed to have some semblance of representing the Métis people. With $20,000 from the Schreyer government and another $45,000 from the federal Secretary of State, the MMF set up a Winnipeg office and five regional offices in rural Métis communities, with elections in each regional centre.
The MMF leaders went to Ottawa in 1971 to meet with Robert Stanbury, the man doling out core funding on behalf of the Secretary of State. They could accept taking government money for running programs, but figured relying on the largesse of government to run their basic operations was dangerous. Nonetheless, they left Ottawa with $125,000 in core funding. Stanbury had insisted. It was, said one of the leaders, “the worst thing that could happen to Métis people. All it’s going to do is lead to fighting.”8
Allard considered the dependency on government funding of the Métis political organizations, especially after the Métis were officially designated as Aboriginal in the Constitution Act of 1982, as no different from the Indian organizations. It struck him, as he sat chained to Riel’s statue, that the issue was ever and always about the money and who controlled it. The people who had no control were the ordinary Indigenous people. So, what if they did control the money? What would happen then?
Allard thought about an expanded family allowance to put more money into the hands of ordinary Indigenous people, but that seemed complicated and unwieldy. He had been going through documents about his grandparents’ farm in St. François Xavier on the Assiniboine River that showed they had paid one dollar per acre in the 1870s for their land. Five acres of land would have cost five dollars, which was exactly the amount of the annuity being paid to every man, woman and child in bands that signed on to Treaty One. He figured that the same land, in 1999, would be worth $1,000 an acre. If the annuity were increased to $5,000 per person, it would put money directly into the hands of families, and with that money, they could gain some measure of personal power to balance the power of the band government.9 The annuity was the single provision in the treaties from the1850s onward that provided some measure of individual empowerment within the collective of the band. By government policy, it was paid directly to people — IA officials were literally handing five-dollar bills to eligible recipients — and it never went through the hands of the band council.
The treaty annuity would apply only to Treaty Indians, of course, but the more Allard played the idea around in his mind, the more logical and simple it seemed.
Allard had been shopping the idea of what he called a “modernized treaty annuity” in political circles in 1998, including at a gathering of federal Liberals in Winnipeg. Bill Balan, regional executive director of Canadian Heritage for the Prairies and Northwest Territories, listened to his pitch and suggested Allard write a book about it. He would, said Allard, but he needed funding. Balan just happened to have funding available under Heritage’s Aboriginal programs, and in short order, Allard had $24,000 and a book to write.
He was working on the first draft of “Big Bear’s Treaty: The Road to Freedom,” which is what took him to Lac Ste. Anne in the summer of 1999. He wanted to meet with ordinary Indians and talk to them about what a modernized annuity would mean to them.
When asked about the $5 annuity they were getting, people laughed and rolled their eyes.
“The cost of buying food in the North is very high,” said Violet Camsell-Blondin, a Dene from the Dogrib Rae band north of Great Slave Lake in the Northwest Territories. “The value of five dollars doesn’t go far. Just one loaf of bread costs four or five dollars.”10
Blondin said her family got $35 in annuities, which they put into a savings account as a symbolic gesture.
“The money doesn’t mean what it meant in the early 1900s. It’s a joke.”
Ben Merasty from Brochet in the far northwest corner of Manitoba near the borders of Saskatchewan and Nunavut said, “I agree that $5 isn’t right, but I don’t know if $5,000 is the right amount. If you were to increase the annuity, I think generally people in Canada would have to be convinced that this is the right thing to do. But it would be one way for fighting for the true value of what treaty money means.”11
However, Eileen Maytwayashing from the Lake Manitoba reserve in south-central Manitoba had been talking to others over lunch, and was rather pessimistic. She concluded that modernizing annuities would only work if the people had someone to champion the idea for them.
“Nobody recognizes us,” she said. “The people who speak about our funding, nobody hears us. Everybody is deaf.”12
It is hard to bring about change when those who have the power to bring about that change cannot or will not hear. Leona Freed, who was walking among the tents and campers on the sunny July afternoon, was still on a bit of an emotional high from the ombudsman bill passing first reading in Parliament, but her anger had not really dissipated.
A month earlier, eight band chiefs under the Swampy Cree tribal council in northern Manitoba had threatened to sue Freed for her statements before the Senate about band corruption. A spokesperson for the tribal council said serving notice of a lawsuit was the chiefs’ way of showing they were accountable. Freed dismissed the threat as an intimidation tactic, and said that the suit would not proceed because a court case would mean the bands would have to open up their books to prove that they weren’t corrupt, and they weren’t going to want to do that.13
The Winnipeg Free Press editorialists struck back in response to the chiefs.
“If they are democratic and accountable, then Ms Freed’s remarks have no application to them, as their members will be perfectly well aware. If the Swampy Cree chiefs agree with Ms Freed that some bands are unaccountable and dictatorial, then they should join with her in urging them to shape up. They should not be using their privileged access to government funds in order to hire a lawyer and try to silence the crusaders.”14
Freed already knew about Allard’s idea for modernizing treaty annuities. When he had urged her to make an appearance before the Senate committee earlier in March, he had asked her to include treaty annuities in her presentation. It would be the first public pitch for the idea. Freed did include it, but it was lost in all the noise her presentation had generated about band corruption.
“The treaty money,” said Freed, as she sat at a rough wooden picnic table at Lac Ste. Anne, “would be money that doesn’t go through Indian leaders’ fingers. A family of four could have $20,000 distributed in twelve equal payments. That is far more than welfare. People would be able to build their own homes. They could live anywhere.” Freed had often pointed out that band membership lists that triggered per capita funding from Indian Affairs were routinely inflated, with significant disparities between who actually said they lived on the reserve according to the Canadian Census and the much larger number claimed by the band council. Indian Affairs officials waved away her concerns, and a spokesperson said, “We rely on First Nations government to inform us of population changes,” and that census figures couldn’t be relied on because not every reserve household filled out the census.15
It was exactly that kind of thinking that nurtured the growth of “a national system of village-level tyrants,”16 as predicted by Harold Cardinal in 1977. After finishing his undergraduate law degree at the University of Saskatchewan, Cardinal went on to complete his Master of Law at Harvard University, with his thesis focussed on the underlying principles of Treaty 8.17 He was working on his PhD in law at the University of British Columbia when he took time to attend the Lac Ste. Anne gathering. There, he met up with Jean Allard.
They were two men who had seen a great deal over the years. Allard had become cynical and contemptuous of the politicians and Indigenous political leaders who continued what he considered a cruel charade that used the pain and suffering of ordinary Indigenous people as leverage to keep the money flowing. He was not at all surprised that the RCMP investigation into band corruption on the Stoney reserve in Alberta wrapped up with no charges being laid. Allard considered reserves to be lawless societies.18 Chiefs and councils were allowed to write their own rules. If the council’s loose rules didn’t explicitly forbid the chief from using band funds to take his entire extended family on a Caribbean cruise, it was unlikely to be successfully prosecuted in a court of law. And Indian Affairs seemed unwilling to hold band governments accountable.
Leona Freed joined the two men in their discussions. Harold Cardinal was a thoughtful man of few words. He listened and said little. But what Cardinal said that day struck both Allard and Freed as a powerful statement of the key reason why the ideals of the Red Paper had never been realized.
“Non-accountability,” Cardinal said, “is the reward Indian Affairs gives to chiefs and councils for their compliance.19
For Allard, that simple statement crystallized all that was wrong with the system of Indian Affairs and Indigenous leadership.
“What has transpired over the past thirty years,” he said at the time, “is that the poorest and most powerless bear on their shoulders the weight of the entire Indian Affairs bureaucracy, Indian political organizations and the army of consultants they both employ. Their problems cannot be fixed because their very neediness is absolutely essential to sustaining the whole system. There is no escape.”20
Sustaining the continued growth of Indian Affairs required band councils to go along with the programs and services the department developed, whether it served the real needs of band members or not. IA had the wherewithal to punish uncooperative chiefs and councillors by, for instance, going slow on processing funding applications, and reward those who played along by not looking too closely at how they managed band funds and band powers. It was, in Allard’s view, inevitable that corruption would take hold in the absence of accountability, not only to band members but to IA as well.
“There have been many exceptions at the reserve level, as people fought the corrupting effect of the bait offered by the system. But slowly, inevitably, greed and personal ambition took hold. People with good hearts and good character, concerned with the welfare of the people, were weeded out. That left in charge the people whose first priority was to serve the system, the source of their power and money.”21
The Canadian public was becoming increasingly angry and frustrated in the late 1990s with the seeming inability of the federal government and Indigenous leaders to fix the problems facing Indigenous communities, despite continually increasing spending. The media focussed on multiple band-level scandals and accusations of corruption, while the international community shone an embarrassing spotlight on the Third World living conditions on many of Canada’s reserves.
Some opinion writers argued that doing away with Indian Affairs, the Indian Act and reserves (as in the 1969 White Paper) would be doing First Nations people a favour. An editorial in The Globe and Mail argued that turning the top-down power structure of IA on its head would give ordinary Indigenous people power and authority over their lives and their band governments.
“One way to change this perverted power relationship quickly and decisively would be for Ottawa to give its contribution directly, on an equal per capita basis, to individual aboriginals. Then let the band councils tax their citizens for the amounts they judge necessary for the provision of public service.”22
In many respects, this was a cry of frustration over a system that seemed intractable and unfixable, and anything had to be better than the status quo. However, even if that was what ordinary Indigenous people wanted — and there was no means in place for determining that — the Indian Affairs department had been undertaking new obligations on behalf of the Crown. It had entered into more than a dozen modern treaties on behalf of the Crown since 1975, covering nearly 40 percent of Canada, mainly in Quebec and the North. Those treaties came with obligations that IA was duty-bound to deliver. With treaties covering some 90 percent of the country, the department wasn’t going anywhere. It was, in fact, in negotiations over another twenty or so self-government agreements and protocols as the 20th century came to a close.
The women of the First Nations Accountability Coalition weren’t demanding a complete overhaul of the Indian Affairs system. There were asking for a federal ombudsman — just one single person — to whom ordinary Indigenous people could take their issues and concerns.