Now they know how it feels

Page 4

COMMENTARY

I had a lot of trouble understanding all the noise about the Musqueam band's leasing deal in the mainstream press this month.

A number of mainstream press pundits have taken on the task of championing the cause of the leaseholders, mostly well-to-do non-Native seniors who, by taking advantage of a bargain created by a massive, illegal and immoral land theft, were able to build very nice homes on reserve land which they leased for years for the absurdly low price (for pricey downtown Vancouver) of less than a dollar a day.

Now, all you West Coast commentators, where were you when Chief Justice Allan McEachern dismissed the claims of the Gitxsan and Wet'suwet'en people in the Delgamuukw case and followed it up with an insulting decision which on appeal was later decimated by the Supreme Court of Canada?

That high court ruling, which basically impeached British Columbia's traditional way of dealing with Native land claims (i.e. ignore, mock, punish), was a ruling which was hailed around the world as one where the court courageously, and at its own peril, put the rule of law and the principles of human rights ahead of the interests of the Canadian establishment.

Did you take up the Gitxsan/Wet'suwet'en cause with such enthusiasm? Has there been any mainstream uproar about the whole sordid history of Canada's treatment of the Indigenous peoples who occupied the "terra nullius" that European colonizers "discovered" more than 400 years ago?

Please don't tell me you haven't had the time.

Gordon Gibson, in his Globe and Mail column on Jan. 12, did a pretty good job of gathering and reviewing the facts, but his pro-mainstream (we'll charitably not call it an anti-Aboriginal) bias was showing.

He believes the federal government dropped the ball by giving the band too much power. He believes the feds should pick up the bill for a Federal Court of Appeal's ruling which allowed the Musqueam band to charge market value rent for their leasehold lands.

He believes the system stinks and the Department of Indian Affairs is favoring the band over the leaseholders. Gibson enumerated the things he finds unacceptable in the history of the relationship between the band and the leaseholders. Strangely enough, that list looks an awful lot like the list that Aboriginal people have compiled and complained about ad nauseam over the last 100 or more years (previous to that it was unthinkable for an Aboriginal person to even think about complaining. That was in the days when Indian culture and traditions were officially banned; that was in the days when Native people were prevented by law from hiring lawyers to represent them).

Yes, the system stinks. In South Africa, they got rid of a similar system. One of the "Natives" is now the president of South Africa, in fact.

But that would really be giving the lawful owners of British Columbia way too much power, wouldn't it, Mr. Gibson?

Please don't think we're jumping to the aid of the band on this one. From a distance, it looks like the band could have handled this better. It really does, as Gibson appears to be saying, look like the band is acting like the federal government. The band is not treating the leaseholders very gently as they get caught up in a confusing and inadequate system that the band knows, better than anyone else, can be cruel.

The point is that the sheer volume (both in the sense of decibels and size) of the coverage of the discomfort of the white people caught up in this Indian Act system - which has become convoluted and nonsensical because it was created to perpetuate the indefensibly false notion that Canada had the right to steal land held by Indigenous people - is very distasteful to those Indigenous people who can very clearly see the irony in it.

We could have used this kind of attention, this kind of sympathy, this level of support in our fight against this system and we could have used it a long time ago, Indigenous people say.

Where was that support?Why wasn't it forthcoming?

That's a subject for a column that, forgive us, we don't expect to see on the top of the Globe and Mail's editorial page any time soon.