Self government only way to stem tide of economic disparity

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Chiefs, lawyers, consultants, professors from a wide range of disciplines, negotiators and others gathered at Simon Fraser University's downtown Vancouver Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue on March 1 and 2 to discuss ideas related to the British Columbia treaty process.

The discussions were off-the-record so the participants could feel free to throw out ideas and opinions that they might not want to see attributed to them in the press. But Raven's Eye was invited to sit in on some of the discussions and meet some of the contributors.

Brian Mitchell, a communications officer for the British Columbia Treaty Commission, said stakeholders from all sides in the treaty process were invited by the commission to attend.

"The intent was to stimulate discussion and generate informed debate about treaty making," he said.

It was the second such meeting. Participants at last year's one-day gathering said it would be worthwhile adding a second day, a request the organizers willingly granted. The first day was a roundtable discussion in the Wosk Centre's main room, which resembles a scaled-down version of the United Nations central forum. The second day was dedicated to discussions in small groups. Mitchell said each group submitted a paper at the end of the day. Those papers will be released to the public in the near future, he added.

Two of the keynote speakers spoke to Raven's Eye. Alan Cairns, visiting professor of political science at the University of Waterloo and author of Citizens Plus, a scholarly analysis of where Indigenous peoples fit into Canadian society, commented that Canada has come a long way since the 1969 White Paper. Stephen Cornell, professor of sociology and of public administration and policy and director of the Udall Centre for Studies in Public Policy at the University of Arizona, said that economic development and self-governance are the key issues for tribes in the United States.

Professor Cornell began researching reservation economies while teaching at Harvard University.

"Economic development and tribal governance, they're intimately connected. We started research at Harvard 15 years ago, an economist and I, on Indian nations in the United States and our primary interest was economic development. But what we discovered was, if we really wanted to understand why some Indian nations were doing better than others economically, it turned out that the political factors were far more important than the economic ones," he said.

Canada seems to be slowly following the lead of the U.S. in a number of ways related to developing economies for First Nations. Gaming agreements exist in some provinces, but not all, and only recently has Indian Affairs Minister Bob Nault decided to ignore legal and jurisdictional barriers to economic development by working with the provinces and the private sector to encourage Native businesses. Native leaders and academic observers often say that the U.S. is 10 years ahead of Canada when it comes to the government giving ground on self government issues. Cornell, who has worked for Aboriginal governments on both sides of the border, agreed partly with that sentiment.

"It depends what you're talking about, he said. "From a policy point of view, I would say, from an Indian nations standpoint - I'm not a member of an Indigenous nation. I'm a white guy-the U.S. is ahead in the sense that genuine, substantive self government is recognized by the federal government. It is at least given lip service by the federal government if not substantive support. It has a fairly robust record in the courts. It's continually under attack but it's established. It's where people start from.

"My sense is in Canada, that battle for real, substantive self-rule where the major decisions are being made by the First Nations, that battle is still being fought. On the other hand, I think the Canadian government is paying a hell of a lot more attention to Indigenous issues thanthe American government is. Te Indians are a tiny blip on the American government's screen. I come up here and people are actually . . . you get a sense that the government, it maybe confused, it may be flailing around, but it is wrestling with this stuff and you seldom get that sense in the U.S."

Despite criticisms by First Nation leaders that Canada still resists sharing wealth that is derived from resources taken from Native lands, Cornell said it's his impression that Canada is a more compassionate country than the U.S.

"My sense is that Canada prides itself in some way in having a larger degree of concern for the have-nots in the world," he said. "The U.S. has a great deal of rhetoric about it-the Statue of Liberty and all that -but when it comes to public policy this isn't a prominent part of U.S. policy thinking."

Cornell thinks Native issues get more attention in Canada. Civil rights issues in the U.S. are dominated by black-white relation issues, he said.

"That issue tends to just predominate the discussion of equity and equality and have-nots, etc., in the U.S. So Indians, often, are an afterthought. It looks very different in Canada," he said.

Raven's Eye asked if there was any indication the U.S. has found the right formula for avoiding the racist backlash when oppressed minorities fight to establish their rights and win back a share of resources.

"I'm not convinced there is. There's certainly hopeful signs out there, but for every good sign there's a disturbing sign. Just in the last two years, what are the big political stories? Indian gaming in California was challenged. The Indians won. They spent a lot of money to win. Las Vegas spent a lot of money to stop them from winning. But when it came right down to it, the general public said, 'These Indians have a right to engage in gaming. They've gotten the short end of the stick forever and we don't think you should shut this thing down.' I think it was a genuinely, broadly felt opinion.I was living in California when some of thi was going on and my sense was there was a great deal of public support for a level of tribal sovereignty or tribal powers that allowed Indians to engage in gaming and use that to their advantage," he said. "Sovereignty is under attack. For every good thing you see, there's a bad thing. On some of these resource issues, it's clear that there may be broad public support for Indian rights. But when it comes down to the people who actually are competing with Indians for these rights, understandably, there is less tolerance because as [German dramatist Bertolt] Brecht, said, 'Grub first, then ethics.' The moral issues tend to get a little bit submerged under the practical things. I think part of what's missing there, is that our research strongly suggests that successful, Indian economies spin off benefits to non-Indian economies. The key to successful Indian economies, according to our research, is genuine self-governance, which means that there is an incentive-it's not a widely known incentive and we have to make the argument -but the research suggests there is a practical incentive for non-Indians in supporting Indian self-governance. It looks in the short run like a loss, but in the long run tends to enlarge the economic pie. Better to have an Indian reservation in the United States that is contributing to the economic pie than one that is high on the welfare rolls, is burdening taxpayers, is a problem to the federal government. And if getting them economically successful requires self governance, then it's a pretty strong argument."

As a sociologist, Cornell also said that self-governance is the best way to diminish or eradicate social problems on reservations.

Professor Alan Cairns believes the fall of colonialism is still being felt in Canada.

"The larger message from the international world was that hundreds of millions of Indians in South Asia were subject to, really, a handful of British officials. It was taen for granted that a much larger Canadian populatin should have a similar position of paternal authority over a smaller, mainly again Indian community. I don't think people realized at the time but the argument is that the moral justification or maybe the parasitical justification for domestic policies in Canada, Australia and New Zealand evaporated when all those empires collapsed. Suddenly you were getting a different international message. The UN had more non-white states than white. So, that challenged domestic policy and then we get a series of responses and that enters into the mindsets of both Aboriginal peoples and those who formerly had kind of had unquestioned authority. So, the world changed. But changing at the level of reality is a different thing and that's where we're hung up."

He didn't seem to feel that the gradual pace of change and the ability of everyday Canadians to come to an understanding of that change is moving too slowly.

"Lots of movement has been in the right direction. There's a very significant academic community that's totally supportive of the inherent right of self government," he said.

Academics such as University of Toronto law professor Patrick Macklem and Cairns have written that history has created an "Aboriginal difference." Conservatives in Canada see that as a lack of equality but Cairns sees it as the conservatives failing to understand the changes required by the end of the colonial era must include different treatment for the former subjects of colonial rule because they have a different history. He writes about his ideas in that area in Citizens Plus.

"I did say we might have difficulties selling this to the Canadian people. But in fact the whole plus component has gone a very long way. There's a lot of movement in the plus direction. There's no way it's going to be rolled back. I think uniformity is a bad thing. The idea that we all have to be cut from the same cookie-cutters is a bad thing. But I don't th