POWER ON THE LAND
Despite governmental prevarication, these repeated legal victories and the progress – horribly slow but nevertheless progress – in treaty settlements are creating a new reality on the land.
There is an ironic, darkly comic side to the situation. In many treaty negotiations during the second half of the nineteenth century and early in the twentieth, government negotiators tried to push First Nations off arable lands and into the rock and forest. Immigrants wanted farmland. But today Canada is more dependent than it has been for half a century on commodities – mining, oil and gas, forestry. Where are these commodities? Largely in the rocks and forest.
Very present in these interior and northern regions – reinforced by numbers and the law – indigenous peoples are in an increasingly powerful and strategic position.
By the simple decision not to cooperate, they could bring the Canadian economy in good part to a halt. This is true. And this has been threatened by some. Ask yourself this question: What would you do if you had their experience of betrayal and denial and were now in their position? Is there any reason why they should stand by and allow the riches to flow south as they have for so long? They are increasingly in a strong position to get a fair share or to determine the shape of what happens or does not happen. Look at the pipeline debates of 2012–2014. The balance of power is changing. Once the First Nations in British Columbia made it clear that they would not go along with the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline, the B.C. government seemed to have few realistic choices. Besides, the idea of an Aboriginal–non- Aboriginal consensus has become important in B.C. And there is already a consensus between Aboriginals and the environmental movement. This slowly emerging reality is not the result of an abrupt change. You could see its early shapes in the hydro settlements of northern Quebec decades ago. The result there is that some of the largest corporations in the north belong to Inuit and Cree. These are powerful and well-run operations. Makivik Corporation, for example, has used its role in the Arctic to ensure that there is decent transport through First Air.
“There is already a consensus between Aboriginals and the environmental movement.” © Zack Embree.
Or go to the annual meeting of the Canadian Council for Aboriginal Business. You will see thousands of up-and-coming indigenous business leaders. Many of the big commodities companies have understood this. They are increasingly negotiating with indigenous peoples – in a new way – over participation, profit sharing, training, jobs. Not all of them, of course. As a First Nations engineer consultant friend of mine said, “A lot of them think if they delay long enough the world will go back to 1952.” In Canada it will not, for all the reasons I have been explaining.
Of course, these are still early days. And this is a new type of relationship. After all, mining and forestry executives have a strong tradition of very narrow, very linear attitudes. Often that is helpful in this kind of business. Why? Because they are struggling more often than not against nature at its toughest. So they succeed because they themselves are tough and focused in a narrow way.
But the ability to build roads through wild mountains, to seek out minerals in isolated places, to tunnel into an unwilling earth, does not necessarily suggest a talent for human or societal relationships. Look around the world. Look over the last century and a half. Extraction industries have never been associated with democracy. It is a brutal, often violent history. Local inhabitants, Aboriginal or not, are in the way, unless they are on the payroll or can be bought off.
Fortunately a new generation of mining leaders is coming along, brought up in the era of environmentalism and indigenous rights. They know this is reality. How many there will be of this sort versus new generations of the old sort, we don’t know.
Either way, they are businesspeople. The last thing they want is the forest roads or mine roads blocked by angry locals. If they are smart, they would rather negotiate than fight.
But the long-term key to such negotiations has four parts. First, it is true that indigenous people want more on-site jobs, the sort that are well paid, usually shorter term and hands on, such as working in the mine, cutting the trees, driving the trucks. Second, and more important at this stage, What about the indigenous managers, lawyers, accountants? They want their share of the longer-term top jobs, but these are rarely forthcoming because of the corporate mentality.
These first two elements are more complicated than they at first seem. The basic on-site jobs still require very specific training and experience. A young person in an isolated northern community is unlikely to have either. The traditional private-sector answer to this challenge was an apprenticeship system. This came out of the medieval guild system and took on its capitalist form in industrial cities throughout the Western world around the middle of the nineteenth century, when those struggling for the public good convinced the capitalists – by social persuasion and public regulation – that they had long-term community responsibilities. The corporations themselves began to realize that if they wanted quality products they needed to train their employees, starting as young as possible.
It wasn’t until the globalist movement came along in the 1970s that corporations began to say they could no longer afford to train their workers, that in this new world they had no long-term obligations. Apprenticeship programs shrank or were dropped in most places, except in Germany. Interestingly enough, Germany is the only Western country to have come through the globalization era without a major employment crisis. Elsewhere, the training once done through apprenticeship was transferred over to schools and colleges, thus undermining the education and citizenship-preparation role of public education. Plus the corporations concentrated, successfully, on convincing governments to cut corporate taxes, thus undermining the possibility of funding the training programs they now expect from the public sector. This is only a partial explanation for the crisis in education, growing functional illiteracy and a sense of confused direction in public school systems. But it is one of the explanations.
In Canada we have the added element of a commodities-dependent economy in which corporations function in northern or isolated areas near small, isolated populations, in good part Aboriginal. Clearly, an apprenticeship program could play an important role. But to make that work serious consultation with local communities would be needed. And that in turn would require a critical mass of Aboriginals in middle and senior managerial positions.
Even if there were both managerial and on-site jobs available in acceptable numbers, and solid apprenticeship programs to make this work, we would still be talking about jobs related to the “exploit and move on” mentality of the industry. Equally, if not more important, Aboriginals want their share of the business itself.
That is the third part, the third desire. Equity. This is where power and long-term money lies. And this exploitation is taking place on their territory.
Fourth, it is through equity that they will gain the influence to introduce different business models. What could that mean? Well, take the example of the archipelago of Haida Gwaii off the Pacific coast. The Weyerhaeuser corporation was cutting down first-growth trees at a furious pace. They aimed at clearing out these valuable trees within ten years. The Haida had instead a long-term, sustainable approach. They saw and see themselves as an integral part of Haida Gwaii; they plan on staying and expect their descendants will stay. Their plan was not to maximize short-term profits and then leave. As for the local loggers, they had always sided with their employers – whoever owned the company – against the Haida. What changed everything was the publication of a credible report demonstrating that Weyerhaeuser did indeed plan to clean out the first-growth trees within ten years, then move on. The loggers were deeply disturbed. They talked among themselves and suddenly realized that they had more in common with the First Nations than with their employers. They also wanted to stay on Haida Gwaii, wanted their children to live there. And so they switched sides, supporting the Haida against their own employers. Like the Haida, they wanted a smarter approach, which meant a different approach.
Governments are only beginning to understand this, if at all. For so long they have been the loyal servants of the commodities corporations, handing off the Crown’s rights in the most agreeable, collaborationist of ways. The last few years have seen an intensifying of this cozy relationship. The principal aim of our elected government seems to have become to serve the leadership of the commodities sector by dismantling decades of environmental legislation, removing any troublesome research from within government and funding industry-friendly research and infrastructure. No doubt the prime minister and ministers will eventually retire to comfortable jobs, board seats and consultancy contracts in the same sector. Don’t think of this as raw corruption. Think of it rather as over-the-top ideology. The industry is being offered more than it could have imagined possible. Sometimes more than it believes wise.
Gordon Campbell came to power in British Columbia in 2001 determined to fight First Nations’ progress. He was going to hold a referendum to justify undoing the Nisga’a agreement. Then he was visited by business leaders who explained that they didn’t want that kind of fight. And so he watered down his referendum and actually became somewhat cooperative when it came to treaty negotiations, which was quite revolutionary for a B.C. premier. Years later you can see small signs of what is possible. For example, in March 2013 the B.C. government announced that the law-enforcement arms of two ministries – Forestry and Environment – would share authority with the Haida Nation on Haida Gwaii. The provincial government’s group of compliance and enforcement civil servants on the archipelago will now include someone named by the Haida. And that group will be largely autonomous. Peter Lantin, president of the Council of the Haida Nation, argued this way: “Haida values are embedded into the day-to-day operations of managing the forests and streams.” But this is only one small initiative. It needs to be duplicated all over the country.
From the point of view of the business world and the government, it should also be said that the general atmosphere has changed. The situation of indigenous people on several continents is now a common topic of conversation. The relationship between the environment, indigenous people and commodities extraction is on the agenda everywhere. Companies are increasingly nervous about being caught in embarrassing situations. In my travels, I hear what people are saying about Canada around the world. I hear it repeatedly, from every direction. We had a respectable reputation, a positive reputation. The negative side of the balance has been growing rapidly. Our reputation has probably never been lower. A great deal of that has to do with our handling of the oil sands, mining, forestry, the environment and the situation of indigenous people.
Go on, huff and puff with indignation. If it makes you feel better, go right ahead and point out that the Europeans have conveniently forgotten their own recent past and are now uncomfortable with the old exploitation methods that once inspired them. See how far that gets you. True, their public actions are laced with hypocrisy. True, our Aboriginal stories of mistreatment cannot be compared to the war, violence, massacres and slavery seen in the United States, Mexico, Central and South America, and the Caribbean, or even Australia. But there is no honour to be had from those comparisons. It is true that much of what was done in those places was actively backed by the parents and grandparents of today’s earnest, well-intentioned Europeans. It is also true that today’s horror stories of mining in Latin America can be traced to the venality of their local governments. But that changes nothing. Attributing virtue to yourself is a form of self-delusion. The fact is that people around the world don’t like what they are hearing about Canada.
Perhaps these outsiders don’t know much about us and our realities. Perhaps they are indeed self-serving and hypocritical. That simply doesn’t matter. The indigenous peoples’ situation is real. Our incapacity to face that situation with humility and active goodwill damages our reputation around the world.
Countries need their reputations for everything from diplomacy to business to investment. We can’t afford to damage ours in this way.