Are you ready to be consulted?

Page 4

Ready or not, it's coming to a First Nation near you. The minister of Indian Affairs is pushing hard to get the First Nations Governance Act into law by the autumn of 2002. Our coverage this month fills a lot of space, but it only scratches the surface of a tremendously complex issue.

Hundreds, maybe thousands, of questions abound. The AFN spring confederacy in Vancouver in May will be one place where many of those questions will be asked and maybe even answered. There's no doubt in our mind that the minister is going to run into several fundamental objections to the process.

Mr. Nault seems very comfortable with his authority as a minister of the Crown. He knows what he can and can't do. But, in our minds, he doesn't have the authority to deal with the most fundamental question behind this issue-First Nations chiefs demand the respect of a nation-to-nation relationship with the federal Crown. They see themselves as allies or partners of the Crown, not subjects. Nault wants to cram First Nations into a special place within the hierarchy of Canadian authority and our interpretation of his take on things is that the government of Canada will always occupy the top spot on that ladder.

Our sense is that Matthew Coon Come, the national chief, has his own problems with the minister's initiatives. The AFN can't reach the kind of consensus that Nault requires of them because, essentially, the AFN is an organization that represents many, many disparate Indigenous nations working within a foreign system. That's always been the band council system's biggest problem: whether they like it or not, band councils are parts of the federal system.

Coon Come would like to change that. He has lobbied at the international level for nation-states to recognize Indigenous nations as peoples. His words suggest his approach is similar to that of the traditional chiefs who, in many cases, were forced out of power by a federal government that sought to assimilate Native people by displacing their traditional forms of government and replacing them with arms of the Canadian system.

If Coon Come and the other chiefs are struggling to come to grips with Nault's various initiatives, they shouldn't shoulder all of the blame. The struggle shows they're being true to their people by not jumping enthusiastically into the Canadian canoe.

The minister is offering many positive and much-needed gains for Native people. But his criticisms of the troubles faced by the national chief as he tries to grapple with the complexities of the issue reflects a lack of understanding. The minister should show more respect. The damage that has been done over the years by the Crown is not insignificant.

If, as the minister suggests, the chiefs are dragging their feet in order to protect the status quo, the people will have a rare chance during the consultations to make them pay. But we believe it's only partly that.

The situation this initiative has put the chiefs in is a nasty one. They are responsible to all past, present and future generations to protect their people. Their task is onerous and they have a right to go slow and be cautious.