FORMS OF ARGUMENT
One of the outcomes of the European racial lens is that the richness of opinions in the indigenous world is reduced to a situation of either/or, unity versus division, exclusion versus inclusion. The fluidity of complex traditional systems is broken down into particles of formal democracy so that First Nations people cannot easily use the elected-chief system. It encourages an adversarial approach in small communities, where it is divisive and destructive, with winners and losers, while undermining a more appropriate search for consensus. And it does not deal with the reality of half the Aboriginal population living off-reserve, in cities where they are creating an interesting new Aboriginal phenomenon as well as an interesting new urban phenomenon.
Having imposed an inappropriate system, the Department of Indian Affairs and their lawyers seem to take pleasure in either standing back waiting for a disaster or intervening in a heavy-handed, paternalistic way. The First Nations Transparency law, enacted in 2014, is a perfect example. The department has had more than a half century to work carefully with the reserves on financial systems, to help through training, on-the-ground support and the advice of accountants. They failed in this most basic service. In 2005, a large program called Accountability for Results was put in place by the AFN, the auditor general and the Treasury Board. These three were to cooperate in establishing transparency in the Department of Indian Affairs and on the reserves. Everyone, except perhaps the Department, wanted to know what was happening to the money. Today the Department receives some 8 billion dollars annually, and there is no public sense of how it spends this money. In 2014, acting National Chief Ghislain Picard called it “a bloated, inefficient and unaccountable bureaucracy.” When the Conservative government came to power it shut down this program, which was aimed in good part at departmental transparency. Now, with the Transparency Act, the government has set out to reveal wrongdoing by chiefs, not the Department. There is nothing wrong with the act except the context, the attitude and the political purpose.
Hayden King, Anishinaabe, one of the new voices of Aboriginal leadership. A professor and director of Indigenous Governance at Ryerson University.
© Windspeaker/AMMSA.
Sure enough a few delinquent chiefs have been uncovered. The media then focused on them, as if they were representative of all chiefs. But the reality is that very few chiefs were found to be acting badly. Most were found to be underpaid.
Did anyone bother to compare the percentage of overpaid chiefs with the percentage of overpaid CEOs in the private sector? The percentage of corrupt or incompetent chiefs with the percentage of corrupt or incompetent mayors? Toronto, Montreal, Laval and London come to mind, representing a large percentage of Canada’s population. On August 2, 2014, Hayden King published a fine analysis of the Transparency Act.
Quite simply, the Ottawa-imposed old imperial model does not help. Indigenous leaders must spend much of their time struggling with how to handle it. At some point the Indian Act system will go. But that will be the result of a broad conversation involving Aboriginals and non-Aboriginals over how to settle the outstanding treaty, land and other issues. This won’t necessarily require a protracted debate. What it will require is that Canadians engage in the conversation instead of sitting back as if it doesn’t concern them. We have to be involved because what is needed is a serious transfer of responsibility and money, the exact opposite of dragging out treaty negotiations one by one. We need to do more than empower our governments to act. We need to push them. We need to make this a make-or-break issue. We need to elect or defeat them with these indigenous issues in mind.
We have become used to the absence of real public debate on almost any topic. Instead, every day, we are presented with predigested packages of what must be done. These packages often come in statements or speeches presented by ministers who have hardly read them in advance. Or they have talking points and stick to them. Or there is the technocratic-populist model in which a utilitarian proposal is made, followed by a tear-jerker story – Last week in (small town), Mary Smith told me…. Or we are induced to focus on a particular financial or administrative detail by the opposition parties and press: someone has lied and must be punished; someone has cheated and must be broken. These transgressions are then flogged until someone’s career dies. Fine. There may indeed have been corruption or laziness or whatever. And punishment is appropriate. And it may signal something larger – for example, that a government has passed its best-before date. But none of this constitutes the public debate that makes democracy work. It is rhetoric. And this off with his head procedure produces the sort of public argument that brings any discussion about ideas to an end. Or it is an expansion of populism, as in: drag down the rich and powerful. Except this method is an illusion. One or two villains fall, and their destruction protects the system and the others. Not only is this not an expression of democracy, it is exactly the system traditionally used by absolute monarchs to divert criticism from themselves. There is, for example, no fundamental tax reform, no breaking up of monopolies.
And so we are not at all prepared for the spilling out of real debate – unruly, not prepackaged, containing natural contradictions. We are even less prepared, for example, for First Nations’ approaches to debate. This might involve an interesting use of memory, a broader sense of history, a non-power-based approach to relationships. Much of this has a circular feel to it, quite different from the dominant linear, managerial, utilitarian language we have become used to. It has nothing to do with the old scapegoat system, in which the king, in order to clear the air, satisfies the public’s hunger for a sacrificial victim.
There is a certain style to Aboriginal debates that is not European-derived. It may include elements of the European tradition and it may be coming from people with PhDs or MAs, but there is a complexity to it that does not fit, for example, with the idea of a solitary heroic leader/speaker/image bearer, the prime minister or president who is the leader. She who must be obeyed, as they used to say of Mrs. Thatcher. This obsession with The Leader, with power, alongside the absence of internal debate is such a curious concept to have arisen in democracies. And I am not simply referring to the obsession of political operators and commentators with image and control – the leader’s image, the control over debate and policy. What we are dealing with is an approach to leadership whose modern origins lie in Bonaparte, in his Napoleonic focus on the image of the Heroic Leader, thanks to which he could exercise far more power than is intended in the democratic system. Yet this is the approach to leadership sought by political organizers throughout the Western democracies.
Historically, each First Nation had three or four leaders – the hereditary chief, the fire keeper or spiritual leader, the military leader and what we would today call the elected chief. Big Bear and Poundmaker were chosen chiefs – more or less elected – in the second half of the nineteenth century. They were chosen for their ability to lead and to hold together societies in which full, open, fundamentally oral argument was much admired. These debates would include other elders with opinions and different, sometimes critical roles for women. Amidst all of that the chosen leader would need to carry the broad argument over the long rough-and-tumble debates that led to decisions.
Pitikwahanapiwiyin “Poundmaker” (1842–1886), Plains Cree. One of the great chiefs of the Prairies in the second half of the nineteenth century. A sophisticated peacemaker destroyed by the events of 1885. Note the chain leading to an ankle iron. Somehow in this photograph he rises above the humiliation of his arrest and trial. © Library and Archives Canada, C001875.
And because these debates were about community, the community’s relationship to place and the complex relationship between the various sorts of leaders and elders, they would rarely lead to a simple understanding of winners and losers.
That is part of the context for the rough-and-tumble of AFN politics. The press corps tends to see this only in their own terms – a Manichaean struggle ending with winners and losers. They don’t understand or don’t want to understand the powerful orality in these arguments, the absence of the prepackaged technocratic messages most of us are now addicted to, the complexity of the social structures involved.
Over the winter of 2012–2013 the parliamentary press corps reported endlessly on profound divisions in the First Nations community. It was these opposing positions that they focused on, and so we, the reading public, could not help but be riveted by the actions of one chief or another. Would Chief Spence break her fast? Would one or another go to a meeting with the prime minister? Would the presence of the governor general change this? These were presented as clear and irreconcilable divisions. Make-or-break gestures. Make-or-break meetings.
Except that the next day that same chief would make little of it, mentioning that he had decided to go or not to go to the meeting in question on the basis of a particular sense of obligation. And that was all. There was no irreconcilable division; in the long run, there was hardly any difference of opinion. The press were confused, and concluded that the chief in question had backed down. It scarcely occurred to them to try to understand the nature of the debate going on.
Does that mean there are no divisions? No. Of course there are differences of opinion. Are they important? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But many things are happening on many levels. And to the extent that any divisions are real they are in good part an outcome of the old imperially imposed system of governance. Even if a few words have been changed, the Indian Act still functions as if First Nations peoples are wards of the state. The elected chiefs must manoeuvre around this. Young people quite naturally do not feel part of it. Why should they?
And here is the essential point. Aboriginal peoples have a hundred and fifty years of experience with Ottawa’s attempting to impose its idea of argument, of concluding that First Nations debate should be taken at European-style face value. This has been used to impose the methods of written law. And to use First Nations debates in order to divide them. In this way Canadian authorities managed to win many legal and administrative battles in the first half of the twentieth century.
What has changed on that front is the clarity coming out of the courts, and the Supreme Court in particular, which has meant a gradual rolling-back of those government victories that were based on a linear, utilitarian, heavily written approach to the law. Instead, in such cases as Delgamuukw, Sparrow and Haida, they have recognized elements of oral memory based not on the letter of the law but on the intent of the original agreements. They have answered questions centred on ethics. They have attempted to understand circular concepts as well as indigenous beliefs about relationships, both among people and between people and place. The Court has not ordered governments to comply. But it has made it clear that governments must take these more inclusive interpretations into account.
Niigaan Sinclair, Anishinaabe, professor, activist, writer, editor. An important voice in the new leadership. © Niigaanwewidam Sinclair.
The result is that Aboriginal peoples can now engage in broad public arguments built within a different framework. They can assert with confidence that the Canadian authorities have not been listening, that they have not even tried to understand the real meaning of what their interlocutors were saying. Worse still, it is clear that our governments have been intentionally trying to impose narrow, self-serving interpretations on whatever they hear. And have done so since the second half of the nineteenth century.
Aboriginal leaders have gradually worked out how to deal with these interlocutors. When I talk of a tough, sophisticated new elite, I am talking about people who can see these tactics coming a long way off. Their many victories at the Supreme Court are a sign that the lesson has been learned by at least some parts of the Canadian system of governance. To this we must add the admirable flexibility in Aboriginal strategies that allows them to avoid many of the utilitarian and Manichaean traps set for them by Canadian authorities and by many Canadian journalists.
The truth is that most Canadians seem weary of the old politics practised by our federal and provincial authorities. Most seem to want to move on, if only they could work out how.
Of course a few haven’t moved at all. Some with influence still believe in the old assimilation arguments. They have not evolved beyond the Trudeau White Paper of 1969, which was the last broadly articulated attempt at assimilation. In the name of European-style nationalism and Darwinian determinism, this small group holds on to the old concepts of superiority, which they continually reintroduce, with little refinements, as inevitable and modern.
But Trudeau himself quickly moved beyond his own initiative. He began to include indigenous leaders to some extent in federal–provincial meetings. He oversaw a revamped Constitution in which Aboriginal rights were recognized. Turner, Mulroney, Chrétien and Martin: each prime minister contributed new bits and pieces, even if none did what was necessary. Turner, as justice minister, introduced some Aboriginal legal concepts into the court system. Martin began a serious reform – the Kelowna Accord – but did not survive in office to put it in place.
I am convinced that all four knew there was no turning back. Perhaps none had fully focused on the indigenous comeback and its full implications. But they knew the situation had changed.
Mr. Harper made a full apology, in 2008, for the residential schools. He must surely sense the breadth of the changes under way and the looming dangers, which are enormous. As are the opportunities. He hates to fail, and history has handed him a central role at a historic moment in this Canadian drama. A prime minister has the responsibility and the opportunity to help us back onto an honest track. By strengthening our foundations, of which treaties are a central part, our present reality will be strengthened in turn.
