THE VOICES OF THE PEOPLE
“For too long, the voices of Aboriginal people have not been heard in the councils of government or in the management of their own economic, social and cultural affairs. Too many still live in grinding poverty and lack the tools necessary to improve their quality of life. To overcome these challenges we must enter into a true dialogue and a true partnership with the goal of building a better future.”
Although this quotation might sound like it’s been pulled directly from a news story today, it is actually from a speech made by Prime Minister Chrétien nearly two decades ago in 2001.1 Frankly, the exact same statement could have been made fifty years before by a much younger Chrétien in 1968, which strikes directly at the heart of a conundrum that has long caused frustration, confusion and anger among ordinary Canadians. Why are we still talking about “grinding poverty”? Or the need for a “true dialogue” and a “true partnership”? Why have these not been resolved yet?
Since Indian Affairs (IA) became a stand-alone government department in 1966,2 a great many men and women of goodwill and enthusiasm — Indigenous and non-Indigenous — have expended considerable time and energy attempting to “fix” the seemingly intractable issues of poverty and despair facing so many Indigenous people and their communities. The Indigenous Affairs (IA) department is still struggling with the same issues.3
IA is a unique department in Canada’s federal government. Other departments, such as Justice, Transportation or Public Safety, provide specific government services for the benefit of all Canadians. IA does the opposite. It provides nearly all government services to a specific group of Canadians. However, that “specific group of Canadians” has no meaningful influence over what services the department decides to provide. Ordinary Indigenous people are uniquely powerless when it comes to federal Indigenous policy. They are left with the options of protest, civil disobedience or the courts to influence the government department that has control over almost all aspects of their lives, especially those living in First Nations communities. It is not a battle of equals.
The Indigenous Affairs department has long been viewed by those who have fallen away, bloodied and bruised, in their battles against the institution and its policies as an immutable monolith that is impervious to change. There is an old saying in Indigenous politics: You don’t change Indian Affairs; Indian Affairs changes you.
The only people who have clearly shown that they have the power to drive change at Indigenous Affairs are prime ministers. Justin Trudeau did exactly that in 2017 when he announced the first significant restructuring of IA since it became a stand-alone department.4 That change involved hiving off some 80 percent of the existing IA department dealing with programs and services to create the new Indigenous Services (IS) department, with a new minister. The previous IA minister was left with a reduced portfolio covering mainly governance issues in the renamed Crown-Indigenous Relations (CIR) department. But splitting the department wasn’t the only change. The Northern Affairs part of the portfolio was severed from Indigenous Affairs altogether and transferred to the Internal Trade department. And then Health Canada’s programs and services for Indigenous people were rolled into the new Indigenous Services department, shrinking the Health Canada portfolio by about 80 percent.
Time and again over the past half-century, we’ve seen prime ministers who use the weight of their office to shift Indigenous policy, with mixed results.
Liberal prime minister Pierre Trudeau, for instance, used the clout of his office in 1969 when he ordered IA minister Jean Chrétien to scrap the Indian Act, terminate all special Aboriginal rights, turn over responsibility for services on reserves to the provinces, and eliminate the Indian Affairs department.5 The PM’s “termination policy” was developed in secret, with input from selected IA bureaucrats but without any input from Indian band chiefs or the handful of regional Indian political leaders who did not yet have a national voice. The dramatic policy change publicly backfired on Trudeau, and in the face of public opposition led by Indian leaders, he had to withdraw it.
Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney tried the same tactic fifteen years later in 1984 when he ordered his deputy PM Erik Nielsen to conduct a hush-hush review of IA.6 The review resulted in a plan to devolve most of IA’s responsibility for services and programs to the provinces, allocate the remaining federal responsibilities to other government departments and eliminate the Indian Affairs department altogether. However, the policy that was jokingly named “Buffalo Jump of the 1980s” by Nielsen’s team had a darker agenda. The plan was to squeeze band governments financially until they accepted the status of ethnic municipal governments. To sweeten the pot, band governments were to be offered the financial relief of five-year block funding, but only in exchange for voluntarily surrendering their peoples’ now constitutionally protected Aboriginal rights. An explosive leaked memo detailing this new variation of a “devolution-and-then-termination policy” triggered a public backlash. The IA department once again survived. However, unlike the Trudeau back-down, the Mulroney cabinet quietly set in motion the devolution and termination priorities of the Buffalo Jump policy.
In 2004, Liberal prime minister Paul Martin took a different path. He oversaw closed-door, by-invitation-only meetings to develop a multi-billion-dollar accord that he hoped would set the stage for a new relationship between the federal government and Indigenous people.7 By this time, the federal government was funding three Aboriginal Representative Organizations (AROs) that it had sanctioned as the official and sole voices of First Nations, Inuit and Métis people at the federal table. There were two smaller AROs specifically for Indigenous women and girls and for Indigenous people not represented by the three main organizations. In the Martin negotiations, the five AROs all got to sit at the table with senior IA bureaucrats, some Members of Parliament and a few other selected people.
The process was a success, insofar as it resulted in an accord that provided a framework for devolution of more powers and responsibilities from IA to band governments. However, it’s not clear what effect the new devolution policy would have had since it was never enacted by Stephen Harper, the Conservative prime minister who followed Martin.
Liberal prime minister Justin Trudeau adopted Martin’s successful methodology in 2017 in negotiating the newest, new relationship between Indigenous people and the Crown, but this time it was a much tighter circle of people sitting at the table in the secretive, closed-door meetings. It was almost entirely bureaucrats from IA and a range of other departments delivering Indigenous programs, and representatives from only one ARO, the Assembly of First Nations, which represents First Nations chiefs. Some regional chiefs’ groups were also consulted, while others boycotted the process. The new plan that slowly emerged in 2018 called for the gradual elimination of the Indian Act and Indigenous Services, after the devolution of most of the Indigenous Services responsibilities to provincial governments and to band governments. The band governments would then take the form of municipal-style entities, complete with a ten-year block funding plan. At the time of this writing, the requirement that chiefs sign away their people’s rights in exchange for gaining block funding and freedom from the Indian Act was still government policy.
There is a certain irony in Justin Trudeau’s promising the elimination of Indian Affairs and the Indian Act; his father promised the same thing nearly fifty years earlier, but Pierre Trudeau’s 1969 termination policy triggered a national outrage, not a national move to reconciliation. And yes, the current Trudeau plan gives off more than a whiff of the Mulroney Buffalo Jump policy. However, it is not what is in the policy plan that is cause for immediate concern. It’s what is missing — the voices of ordinary Indigenous people.
Why are the voices of Indigenous people still not heard in the councils of government or in their own affairs? The simple answer is that ordinary Indigenous people have no political power, and hence, no political voice. They don’t have a seat at the table when their futures are being negotiated by others. They didn’t have a voice when the Indian Act was established in 1876; they do not have a voice today. And since ordinary Indigenous people are voiceless and powerless, they are shut out of the very policy decisions and governance issues that could provide the means to empower them.
There is an old saying attributed to Lord Acton that power tends to corrupt. A corollary to that saying, played out in Indigenous politics, is that powerlessness tends to destroy. Is it possible that the well-documented social inequities in Indigenous communities — high levels of poverty, suicide, incarceration, children in care, family violence — are, in fact, the symptoms of institutionalized powerlessness?
If that is the case, then all the public inquiries, royal commissions, compensation awards for government-sanctioned historical abuses and prime ministerial apologies will ultimately be futile if the root cause of hopelessness, powerlessness and despair are not addressed.
Ordinary Indigenous people have no political power, and no political voice.
At first blush, this statement may seem absurd. In the mainstream media, it may appear as if Indigenous voices are omnipresent, whether it is commentary about murdered and missing Indigenous women, pipeline protests, announcements of federal/provincial funding to address boil-water orders, housing, child care services or another controversial court case on Indigenous rights.
Ordinary Indigenous people certainly have plenty of organizations to speak for them. There are the five national Aboriginal Representative Organizations, with nearly seventy regional and territorial counterparts.8 There are also some eighty tribal councils across Canada to advocate for Indigenous interests.9 And there are more than 4,000 Indigenous groups and organizations across the country funded by IA and Canadian Heritage,10 mainly in culture, arts, women’s issues and support for Indigenous media. And then there are all the Indigenous musicians, artists, actors and writers who are giving voice to the pain, beauty and drama of their lives and cultures.
In the face of such significant media, political and cultural coverage, it may seem ridiculous to suggest that ordinary Indigenous people are voiceless and powerless. Yet when it comes to being heard at the federal political level, they are exactly that.
Power from the top down
In its simplest terms, power in Indigenous politics — and the money that goes with it — flows entirely from the top down, with IA at the top and ordinary Indigenous people firmly entrenched at the bottom of the power hierarchy. There is no mechanism for power to flow from the bottom upwards, and no means for ordinary Indigenous people to hold the department that controls almost all aspects of their lives accountable to them.
The Indian Act was passed by Parliament in 1876 to give the Indian Affairs branch rules and regulations by which bureaucrats could administer the provisions of the historic treaties signed between Indian bands and the Crown. For roughly the first 100 years of the Act, Indian Agents employed by IA had dictatorial control over what happened on the reserves they were assigned to manage. The Act did allow for chiefs and councils to be elected, but this colonial governance system had little meaning for ordinary Indians, other than it provided a chief with an extra $25 a year and a new suit of clothes every three years, and an extra $15 for councillors. Chiefs had no real power and neither did ordinary band members. The power was all held by the Indian Affairs branch.
That changed in the 1960s when the new, stand-alone IA department recognized that its century-old assimilation policy had not worked, as evidenced by the fact that nearly 80 percent of Status Indians still lived on reserves.11 IA shifted to a policy of devolution of power and responsibility to band councils, with an eye to turning bands into provincial responsibilities. The chiefs were granted new powers to deliver IA programs in their communities and, for the first time, they received core funding for band operations so that the positions of chiefs, councillors and administrators came with actual paycheques. It turned those positions into highly coveted jobs. However, the band governments were not accountable to band members; they were beholden to IA, the source of their power and money.
The Aboriginal Representative Organizations established by the federal government in the 1970s were in the same position. They were totally reliant on federal funding to run their offices, pay for telephones and Gestetner machines, and to pay their directors and staff. If the AROs stepped out of line, IA was prepared to reassert its control by slashing their funding and returning it only when assured of the ARO’s willingness to comply with IA’s agenda.
The reality for both AROs and band governments on reserves was a simple, immutable truth. What Indian Affairs had the power to dispense, it had the power to take back. What Indian Affairs had the power to bestow, it had the power to withhold. That same power dynamic continues to this day, with the exception of a handful of First Nations communities that have developed enough of their own economic resources to free themselves from IA dependency.
Indigenous political/representative groups like the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) and its provincial/territorial counterparts deserve a great deal of credit for what they have been able to achieve for Indigenous people, despite being deeply compromised by their own dependency on IA. Protection of Indigenous rights and the historic treaties, for instance, would never have been enshrined in the Constitution in 1982 were it not for their determined efforts.
However, AROs are fundamentally flawed organizations that are politically weakened by their dependency on IA and undermined by the internal friction among their leaders about whether the organization is too cozy with IA officials or too confrontational. But it is the claim that AROs are the legitimate political voices of their people that is their greatest weakness.
It has long been an open secret in Indigenous politics that the AFN does not speak for all ordinary First Nations (FN) people. It is an organization of reserve chiefs. However, more than half of FN people today no longer live on reserves and the chiefs do not represent their concerns in the AFN. The AFN sought to address this political vulnerability in 2005 by deciding to allow all eligible First Nations members across the country to vote for the AFN’s national chief from a selection of candidates chosen by the chiefs. It would, finally, be a mechanism for ordinary First Nations people to make their voices heard within the AFN, albeit in a very limited fashion. By 2008, however, the AFN had dropped the idea as too expensive and too complicated to deliver.
But, you might ask, are not chiefs empowered through elections by band members who still live on reserves to represent their interests? For the first 100 years under the Indian Act, band elections were largely irrelevant. The Indian Agent had the power to appoint a chief and councillors if communities didn’t bother with elections. That changed with the IA devolution policy in the 1960s. Elections suddenly became very important because whoever was elected had complete control of the power and money dispensed to the band by IA. It quickly became apparent that there was a big problem with elections. The Indian Act had no requirement that elections on reserves be free and fair. The Act did, however, give IA the authority to unilaterally nullify election results and simply replace troublesome chiefs and councillors with people of IA’s choosing who were valued for their compliance.
IA never bothered itself about how the lack of free and fair elections affected ordinary band members because ordinary Indians were of no political value to the department, other than as a continuously suffering client base for IA’s ever-expanding programs and services. Chiefs, on the other hand, had the legal authority to sign “self-government” agreements and sign away their people’s rights. Whether chiefs were legitimately elected by their people was generally irrelevant to IA in advancing the Buffalo Jump policy objectives of squeezing bands financially to force them into signing termination papers.
Because elections have so long been considered irrelevant, or served as snake pits for feuding factions to fight it out over which one controls the band’s power and money, First Nations communities have not institutionalized accountability through elections in place of the traditional, consensus-based form of governance. Band governments answer to IA, not to the community. However, the willingness of the federal government, the IA department, the AROs and the chiefs and councillors (who may or may not be fairly elected) to sustain the pretense that ordinary Indigenous people have a voice in Indigenous politics at the federal level has served to institutionalize their powerlessness. As a result, it has been, to all intents and purposes, a government policy of oppression that renders ordinary Indigenous people voiceless.
It is worth repeating. Ordinary Indigenous people have no political power, and no political voice.
There is another segment of the Canadian population that is shut out of Indigenous politics. Ordinary non-Indigenous people also have no say in policy decisions made by Indigenous Affairs or its AROs that affect them and their communities. The difference is that, for most of the past 150 years, ordinary non-Indigenous Canadians have demonstrated a casually callous lack of interest in the concerns of Indigenous people. The exception was a brief spurt of attention during the civil rights era in the 1960s and 1970s, and again now, as talk turns to reconciliation.
Let’s pause for a moment and be clear about who we mean when we talk about ordinary Indigenous people and ordinary non-Indigenous people. Indigenous people in Canada are defined constitutionally as First Nations (Indian), Métis and Inuit. Canadians, whatever their ancestry or ethnicity who are not First Nations, Métis or Inuit are, by definition, non-Indigenous. That’s the easy part. The word “ordinary” as used here could well be describing people who, in their everyday lives, are extraordinary, one-of-a-kind, remarkable, tragically broken, genius, outrageous, or any other adjective that conveys anything-but-ordinary. However, if they are not the power brokers, political players and decision-makers in the power hierarchy of Indigenous politics, they are ordinary people. Even many of the people employed by Indigenous Affairs, the Indigenous political organizations, or who work for band councils could be considered “ordinary” in the sense that they have no power to affect the laws, policies and rules that impact the lives of Indigenous people. They have jobs; they do not have power. There is a difference.
How do ordinary Indigenous people feel about this state of affairs? The obvious thing to do is ask. Many of the people I interviewed from First Nations across North America who had made a pilgrimage to the shore of Lac Ste. Anne near Edmonton in the summer of 1999 made their views clear. “Our leaders are deaf. No one listens,” they said, sometimes with bitterness and sometimes with a resigned shrug. “No one speaks for us.”12 Almost two decades later, when I interviewed people at the Treaty tent at The Forks in Winnipeg in the summer of 2017, they were still saying the same thing.
When PM Justin Trudeau announced the massive restructuring of IA in the summer of 2017, he called it “an important step in building a true nation-to-nation, Inuit-Crown, and government-to-government relationship with First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples in Canada” that would work toward “making our national journey of reconciliation a reality.”13
The goal of reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people is certainly an admirable one. It offers the promise of an end to fighting, resentment, guilt and anger. A coming together in peace. Solving once and for all the tragic poverty and despair in so many of Canada’s Indigenous communities so that we can live in collegial harmony. How can we not want that?
Trudeau raised the political stakes for delivering on reconciliation in his address before world leaders at the United Nations General Assembly in the fall of 2017. “The good news is that Canadians get it. They see the inequities. They’re fed up with the excuses. And that impatience gives us a rare and precious opportunity to act.”14
He is correct in saying that Canadians are impatient to get on with reconciliation. A national poll conducted by Environics in 2016 asked 2,000 non-Indigenous people how they viewed reconciliation with Indigenous people.15 Not only were non-Indigenous people strongly in favour of reconciliation, more than 80 percent felt that they, personally, “have a role to play in bringing about reconciliation.”16
We are currently witnessing an unprecedented willingness by ordinary Canadians (Indigenous and non-Indigenous) to invest their time and energy to support reconciliation. We saw it when 70,000 people took to the streets in the Walk for Reconciliation in Vancouver in the fall of 2017. It’s there when people participate in the emotionally challenging Blanket Exercises hosted by KAIROS, in healing ceremonies, in Circle groups and other events across the country. It’s there at church events, book launches, NHL hockey games and university conferences where events begin with “We acknowledge that this event is taking place on Treaty lands…”
Sometimes, it’s about more than just talk. The RCMP in Nova Scotia in 2017 began providing eagle feathers to its detachments so that victims, witnesses and police officers would have the option of swearing legal oaths on a feather.17 The feathers have the same legal standing as a Bible for sworn statements to the RCMP. Manitoba, the province with the highest per capita Indigenous population, did the same in early 2019.18
Sometimes, it exactly that — talking. In January 2019, Cree MP Robert-Falcon Ouellette became the first person to speak in an Indigenous language (Plains Cree) in the House of Commons with a live interpreter.19 The Senate has offered simultaneous translation of Inuktitut (an Inuit language) in the chamber since 2008.20
People are looking for a way to do their part for reconciliation, even if they’re not quite sure what that is. This is a rare political opportunity when the public mood and the government agenda appear to be aligned on the complex and emotionally fraught topic of Indigenous issues, but is reconciliation where we’re actually heading? If one party to reconciliation has been rendered voiceless by institutionalized oppression, how is meaningful reconciliation supposed to happen?
Indigenous leaders, on their own, are helpless to change the political status quo inside which they are trapped. If they could have found a way to liberate themselves from IA’s controls so they could speak honourably for their people, they would have.
The power for change lies in the hands of the federal government, specifically the prime minister and cabinet. However, politicians are far more likely to cling to the safety of the status quo than rock the boat on a contentious issue like the oppression of ordinary Indigenous people — unless they are assured that they have the political support of enough Canadian voters.
However, before Canadians raise the considerable power of their voices to advocate for change, it is important to understand how the world of Indigenous politics arrived at this impasse, recognize the cost of entrenched powerlessness and consider meaningful solutions that address the problems rather than the symptoms.