welcome back, mr. johnson

In the mid-to-late 1970s, William Johnson at the Globe and Mail (later Montreal Gazette) was a must-read columnist for anyone (especially young journalists) wanting to know more about federal/provincial politics, the developing Canadian constitutional crisis, debates on patriation of the the BNA Act, and native affairs (as it was then called).

Back then, you could count on the fingers of one hand the number of national journalists showing the least bit of interest in native issues. Johnson was anything but a cheerleader for native peoples. But he understood the policies that confronted them, and explained them to his readers. He had a keen eye for those little flashes in huge events that reveal so much, such as this that he describes in today’s G&M:

A telling moment occurred at Tuesday’s all-candidates meeting when a Quebec chief, Gilbert Whiteduck, said: “We’re telling each other what we already know. We’re telling each other that we own the land. What we need is action. And I ask all of the candidates: Are you thinking about the poorest of the poor, of our men and our women and our children who are suffering? Is your message just wait and see, I have a vision for change, while they’re suffering now, tomorrow, the day after? When will we rise?”

what you don’t know…

…can hurt us. I mean us who live out here in these communities and territories. Not you who comment from afar based on… what?

AFN's logo

Lately, I’ve had some interesting conversations about the Assembly of First Nations and the candidates running for the job of head of that organization. We talked about who might win the job and replace Phil Fontaine. We’ve discussed the way the candidates applied for the job, and the strange method the voting chiefs have chosen to conduct job interviews (elections, if you prefer).

In other words, we’ve analyzed a lot more than what we’ve seen in the coverage by the mainstream news media, and the media’s select court jesters such as Joe Quesnel. (I compare him to one of my regulars and his fascination with a well-know conspiracy theorist-cum-blogger nicknamed “Scenty.” What would life be without them?)

As we talked about the AFN, and picked apart the coverage by the Globe and Mail, the National Post, the CBC, and other news organizations, we agreed that the mainstream has this weird idea (aided and abetted by the aforementioned court jesters) that the AFN is actually a national government.

Now where did they get that idea? More to the point, how might anyone dissuade them of this ridiculous fallicy?

The mainstream news media seems hell-bent on accepting – without a shred of skepticism – that this “election of a national chief” is taking place so that Indians across Canada can select someone who will become, as one CBC reporter said, “the most powerful Indian in Canada.”

WTF!? I damn near fell off my keyboard when I heard that one. Tell me that a senior CBC national reporter did not use those words. Oh, yes, she did. Where did she get the information to back up that statement? Certainly not in any Native Studies or Canadian history or political science course. Because it don’t exist.

In our growing alarm over inaccuracies by the media’s coverage of the AFN, and the selection process of a new head of this organization, we decided to try to correct inaccuracies by explaining what the AFN is NOT. Hopefully, along the way, it might also explain what the head of this organization is NOT as well.

The AFN has never been an organization of individual status Indians. It was once an organization of regional and provincial Indian organizations. It changed into an organization representing the heads of band councils on reserves, aka “chiefs.” This is why 633 chiefs across Canada get to vote for the candidates running for Phil Fontaine’s job. This is also why there is NOT “one member, one vote.”

What’s that, Joe? You don’t get the concept? Hmmm… I wish I had some pop-up pictures. Let’s try this again, shall we?

The AFN is not a national government for status Indians in Canada, despite what some idiots (come on down, Joe) would have you believe. The AFN’s structure is closer to that of a national union, like CUPE, for instance. The union’s membership in a local (say Local 233) vote for a local representative, much like band members vote in band council elections.

Local reps may then elect regional or provincial representatives, similar to the way in which John Beaucage was elected to head up one of the regional Indian organizations in Ontario.

Local and regional union reps then get to select the national executive for CUPE. (Correct me here, but I don’t believe every member has a direct vote for national president of CUPE.) Similarly, every now and then, the chiefs cluster to select a new head of their national organization, the AFN. It was never meant to be a “one member, one vote” system. Capiche?

Why not, you ask? Have you done any homework at all, Joe? You really should try reading some day. We have some good schools you might ask about.

Similar to the relations between locals and the national office of CUPE, or any number of other unions and associations, locals guard their autonomy or authority with vigour. They resist encroachment on their turf by the regional offices, and much more so with the national office.

At the same time, the locals may recognize that there are some things the national office may do best, such as lobbying, coordinating or conducting research on issues in common across the country, monitoring government actions or changes in policy. But national executives in unions try hard to avoid encroaching upon or undermining the locals or the regional representatives. It tends to piss them off.

Y’unnerstan? To paraphrase that great philosopher, Spider-man: With great executive power comes great checks and balances upon the executive.

This isn’t rocket science, Joe. So stay awake, and listen up.

I know you want to make the head of the AFN into some sort of national king of the Indians. After all, why put up with 633 chiefs that you and your so-called think tank consider corrupt and dishonest? Do I have that right, Joe? You suggest cutting out the chiefs so that the Feds need only deal with one corrupt and dishonest bozo at the AFN. Right?

C’mon, admit it. That’s what you and the Frontier Centre think of the chiefs, and what you propose as more effective and efficient. It’s also dumb, as in: You don’t know what the f*ck you’re talking about.

Big problem. How do you get the chiefs to surrender their local authority and autonomy? Or to continue the union analogy: How do you get the head of a union local to hand over its autonomy to the national executive? First: Why the hell should they? It would be difficult enough with a union local, but the head of a reserve (unlike a union local) is also the head of a local government.

What? You didn’t factor that in when you thought things out? Maybe you didn’t think in the first place? But I digress.

That’s right. Indian band councils have constitutionally and legally recognized political powers as local governments, as per the Indian Act. Band councils can make by-laws, for instance. Okay, they can make by-laws for dog licences – but it’s still a law-making power of a legally-constituted government as defined in Canadian law.

The AFN, on the other hand, does not have governmental powers. It is an organization, a registered national corporation, representing the interests of band council chiefs. Big difference between the two. One can make laws regulating human behaviours and conditions (a government) while the other cannot (an organization).

Do you honestly think any chief in her right mind is going to hand over that kind of power to the next Phil Fontaine? Or hand over the authority to negotiate a land claim? Or make deals on oil and gas exploration? Diamond mines? Local health emergencies? Do you honestly think the folks on any reserve will let that happen? Be honest, Joe.

There are other considerations too. Why should the Mohawks surrender something they’ve repeatedly defended for more than 250 years, have never sold or surrendered, have not had taken away in war or by conquest. Wanna guess? After all, you claim to be Mohawk, Joe. No answer? Can’t figure it out? Refuse to admit it?

Their sovereignty, Joe, as an Indigenous nation. Confused? Or just in deep denial?

More to the point, I dare you to come on down to Mohawk country and ask the folks down here to put their rights into the hands of a Plains Cree, or an Ojibway, or a Coast Salish. I can predict a very tragic outcome in your future, if you decide to do so. The folks down this way would run yer sorry butt out of town faster than the SQ on July 11. I’m just saying.

Go ask the Cree of Quebec to hand over the James Bay Agreement to the AFN and to the next Phil Fontaine. I double dog dares ya.

Next, go ask the Nisga’a to do the same with their Agreement. I think you’d be called a lot of very rude names.

But then ask yourself: Why would those two groups consider such an idiotic suggestion in the first place?

I doubt whether you could ever find a single Cree in all nine communities across northern Quebec, or a single Nisga’a citizen in their B.C. communities,willing to say they’d voluntarily agree to hand over their rights to the AFN (or anyone hoping to become the next Fontaine).

Finally, Joe, the AFN is not now – nor has it ever been a national government. It was never designed to act like one, or to be one. It was created to do a very particular job, and that’s all. I know, Fontaine didn’t like the structure and spent a lot of time and money trying to convince the chiefs to hand over their power. He failed though.

Similar to the office of a national union, the AFN was designed to conduct and compile research in certain areas in support of local reserve or regional initiatives, to monitor governments for changes in policy and law, to lobby government to make changes in policy and law that the chiefs see as advantageous to their populations. It was designed to work from the bottom-up; not the other way around.

The head of the AFN is a national spokesperson, a national lobbyist, a national figurehead with no real power except to run a national office effectively and efficiently. He ain’t no king of the Indians. The media made him out to be the “11th premier” in the mid-1980s, but that didn’t change reality. Get it?

Still, you and most of the news media seem to have decided – without a single fact to back up this lame-brained idea – that this is what the AFN must be or become. Ergo, your dumber and dumberer “one member, one vote” idea.

If you and most of the mainstream media reporting on this story would only educate yourselves before shooting off your big yaps, spreading disinformation, you might actually help advance organizational change.

Instead, you seem determined to lead from a position of ignorance. In doing so, you serve no one but the gods of stupidity – not to mention doing the Canadian public a huge disservice.

Nuff sed.

hmmm… which one do i like?

There are five candidates confirmed, set to run against each other and eventually replace Phil Fontaine at the Assembly of First Nations. Two are considered front runners, possible or likely to win. Two others are considered never-minds; not even also-rans. And one is a bit of a dark horse with a slim chance of moving up to serious contender. Their names are here, and you can decide for yourselves who fits my three categories.

Clue? Which candidates does Indian Affairs consider the least offensive. That, sadly, is one of the prerequisites for the job, and the band council chiefs with an AFN vote know it. Don’t believe me? Remember how quickly Ovide and Matthew found themselves on the government’s shit list, leading to cuts to programs, which precipitated grumbles within the ranks. It’s called a pattern of behaviour, behavioural conditioning, and some other much less polite terms that I can think of.

dat’s it?!?

 

Pope Benedict XVI

I’m no wide-eyed wood faun when it comes to the Holy Church of the One and Only Truly Voice of Gawd on Earth (aka the Pope), so I never expected much from this little trip to the Vatican in Rome by a whole bunch of NishNawbs lead by Phil (make me an offer) Fontaine of the Assembly of First Nations. They went to get an apology from Mr. Benedict hisself for that residential schools thing in Canada. Remember those things?

 

If I was them – and I ain’t because that Church has spent the better part of 500 years on this continent doing everything it could to convey my ancestors to the afterlife, just as soon as they consigned their souls to heaven, and their land to the priests – I would have had a “Plan A” and used it.

I would not be interested in an apology from the Catholics one bit.

No sirree, I would have held out for a bit more than this (below) from the Catholic Church – at least for what it did to Indigenous folks in the Catholic-run schools as part of Canada’s Residential School system:

Communique of the Holy See Press Office
29.04.2009

At the end of the General Audience, the Holy Father met with Mr Phil Fontaine, the Grand Chief of the Assembly of First Nations of Canada, and the Most Reverend James Weisgerber, President of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, together with those accompanying them, and he listened to their stories and concerns.

His Holiness recalled that since the earliest days of her presence in Canada, the Church, particularly through her missionary personnel, has closely accompanied the indigenous peoples. Given the sufferings that some indigenous children experienced in the Canadian Residential School system, the Holy Father expressed his sorrow at the anguish caused by the deplorable conduct of some members of the Church and he offered his sympathy and prayerful solidarity. His Holiness emphasized that acts of abuse cannot be tolerated in society. He prayed that all those affected would experience healing, and he encouraged First Nations Peoples to continue to move forward with renewed hope.

[00674-02.01] [Original text: English]

I woulda gone up to da Pope, y’see. I woulda said: Hey, Pope! Benny, baby. You know all of those Papal Bulls that your Church enacted ever since Cristof Colom landed on our beaches? Y’know, the ones that relegate us Indeo types to some kind of subhuman species, good only for reaping as converted souls – after we sign away our lands to your priests? Y’know what I’m talking about, right?

Well, Benny, I woulda said, whyncha rip dem up? Y’know, repeal them? Why youse still got dem hangin’ around anyways? Capiche? Maybe then we can begin again, eh? But not until then.

Y’see? It’s nothin’ personal, Benny. Just business. And dat’s a lotta bull you got dere.

Of course, I didn’t get the chance because I ain’t Phil (let’s make a deal) Fontaine.

questions unasked, answers avoided

A few years ago in Ottawa, something strange happened. What took place had all the earmarks of open democracy in Indian country but with few of its safeguards. It touched upon fundamental questions for Indian nations – and for Canadians – but avoided debating them. Shining lights in Indian country produced a glitzy report with a foregone conclusion. It was promoted by an expensive PR firm, hired to sell it to Canadians – if not to Indians. It raised more questions than it answered; some of them uncomfortable questions that have been around for a long time.

The effort cost the Assembly of First Nations lots of money, but went absolutely nowhere. It was supposed to reform the AFN; to transform it from an “organization of chiefs” into something else. The report fudged what that “something else” might be. It left Indians, and the chiefs, guessing when it should have proposed something definite. If that weren’t bad enough, journalists (native and non-) across Canada failed miserably to ask basic questions before, during and after this fiasco. Here’s a rough sketch of what happened.

The AFN chiefs dumped Fontaine in favour of Matthew Coon Come eight summers ago. The chiefs felt Fontaine was too cozy with the federal government. A career civil servant and closet Liberal, the chiefs considered him soft on Indigenous rights, someone who would compromise rather than fight. Coon Come, though hailed by the chiefs as a tough advocate, was a lame duck almost before he began. His “rights-based” approach angered the federal government. He insisted that government road blocks could only be broken once Canadian governments acknowledged and recognized nation-to-nation relationships domestically, and Indigenous rights internationally.

Ottawa made clear it had no time for Coon Come. “Nation-to-nation” recognition was the opposite direction that the federal government wanted Indians to go. It launched a hugely successful PR campaign to spin Coon Come from a Cree lawyer and peaceful environmental activist, into a dangerous radical who could not be trusted. Indian Affairs slashed the budgets of both the AFN and band councils. The federal government gave the chiefs a choice – dump Coon Come or face even more cuts.

At the next AFN election, Ottawa also made clear it wanted Fontaine back. Coon Come had refused to run again. Although five candidates, one a woman, ran for the job only Fontaine had Ottawa’s nod. It was no surprise when Fontaine was elected. This is not a comment on Fontaine’s integrity. It is a statement on the degree of manipulation by the federal government on the internal affairs of the national Indian organization in Canada, and how easily it was for Ottawa to do so. It did not stop there either.

Fontaine had chafed at comments during his first term that he was little more than a national figurehead, a national spokesperson and chief lobbyist employed by band council chiefs across Canada. Ever since the days of the Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords, which Fontaine had helped scuttle, a couple of basic but key questions kept popping up: What kind of organization was the AFN? More to the point, what was the role of the “national chief”? Was he the “eleventh premier,” as the Canadian media had tagged the position ever since Meech Lake? Or was he merely a national mouthpiece, with no real power; able to act only on direction from the chiefs?

To answer these questions and more, the AFN commissioned a “blue ribbon” panel to examine the issues, hold regional hearings, commission research, and produce a report. Some of the questions facing it and Indians across the country: Was the AFN structure, as an organization of band chiefs, still relevant or workable? Was the AFN an assembly of “first nations”? To what degree did “residual sovereignty” of Indian nations, such as the Mi’kmaq, Mohawk, or Nisga’a, continue to apply? Was the AFN, as an organization bound by the Indian Act, helping to erode that “residual sovereignty”? Was the AFN evolving into, or was it preferable to become, a national government (displacing Indian nations in the process)? Should each registered status Indian have a direct vote to choose a national chief?

But there was a problem. The commission paid lip service to the key questions in favour of superficial ones. Questions to be avoided: On residual sovereignty, were Indian nations still nations in the context of international law? Were Indians citizens of their Cree or Nisga’a nations? Or were they compromising their citizenship by participating as “status Indians” and band councils, both creations of the Indian Act? In short, how far along to assimilation were Indians in Canada?

Instead of tackling these larger questions and possibly sparking a national debate that might have gone far beyond Indian country, the report concentrated on questions that stayed within the safe, narrow confines of the Indian Act. It asked the same question over and over, but with different words. As a national organization of band council chiefs, what was the best administrative model to follow? How to change the AFN from an “organization of chiefs?” How to increase the executive power of the national office? Were direct elections by every registered status Indian across Canada the answer?

There were problems. The commissioners and their report chose to answer what the national chief wanted to know — not what Indians wanted and desperately needed to know. Could the national chief change the balance of power within the organization, stripping the chiefs of much of their power, without provoking a major fight? Could the national office get rid of constraints so it could make deals and sign agreements without seeking the support of a majority of chiefs first? Fortunately, for the federal government, this was exactly what Ottawa wanted and what it was prepared to pay for. Funding for the AFN increased, with former cuts largely restored with one important difference.

From that point on, how Ottawa funded native organizations would change. Core funding was out. Funding by specific projects was in, with clear restraints in place to ensure the AFN and other native organizations could not wander off-track anymore. Project funding has become the main source of income for native organizations ever since.

what is taking so long?

When the National Indian Brotherhood, or NIB, began using the word “aboriginal” in some of its documents more than 30 years ago, my Mom and Dad railed at those those they called “idiots” and worse. The NIB is the fore-runner of today’s Assembly of First Nation, and the national organization representing band council chiefs in Canada. My parents could not fathom why the NIB seemed insistent upon using generic, one-size-fits-all umbrella terms to refer to themselves.

Why, they wondered, didn’t they go back to referring to themselves as they had for centuries and in their own languages. To my parents, use of those other generic terms showed just how successful decades upon decades of brainwashing had been in erasing their own national identities. So instead of calling themselves “chopped liver,” they should call themselves “onkhwehhonhweh,” “Kanienkeha:ka” or “Anishnabek” instead.

My parents were also quite upset when band council chiefs at the AFN decided to call each of their reserves “first nations.” They felt that was just as divisive as a generic term since it gave each reserve, an artifice of the Indian Act, the pretense of existing as a separate and distinct “nation” but (still) under the Indian Act and without any central, sovereign national identity.

In northern Saskatchewan for instance, you can have a whole bunch of Cree territories separating themselves from each other as “first nations,” refusing to group themslves under their own national identity – as part of the Cree Nation.

To my parents, it was all about “divide and conquer;” it was a simple question of cultural, political and national survival. Our own Indigenous nations would either hang together or, to quote Benjamin Franklin, we would surely hang separately.

It seems someone is now thinking along similar lines. The Union of Ontario Indians (UOI) represents mostly Ojibway and Algonquin bands in eastern and northeastern Ontario. they passed a resolution instructing:

“… government agencies, NGOs, educators and media organizations that they should discontinue using inappropriate terminology when they are referring to the Anishinabek. We respect the cultures and traditions of our Metis and Inuit brothers and sisters, but their issues are different from ours.”

The resolution notes that “there are no aboriginal bands, aboriginal reserves, or aboriginal chiefs” and that the reference to “aboriginal rights” referred to in Section 35 of the Constitution Act of Canada “was never meant to assimilate First Nations, Metis and Inuit into a homogeneous group.”

Now if these Anishnabek can only get away from that clumsy “first nation” bit, and convince the others at the AFN as well, they might get somewhere. They might even get there quicker.

So… listen up. I am not a “first nation person.” I am Kanienkeha:ka (aka Mohawk). Get it?

If Canadian reporters can understand the difference between Shona and Kikuyu in Africa, or Croat from Serb in the Balkans, then why can’t they learn the differences and proper names for the distinct Indigenous nationalities within Canada as well? So can politicians.

Just saying.