Candidate seeks foreign investment to liberate First Nations

If you go to the Web site of Chief Terrance Nelson, candidate for national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, you might think he may need some classes in geography.
On the home page is a map of what would be Canada, except where the Yukon, Northwest Territories and Nunavut would be, there is an American flag.
Nope, Nelson doesn't need more schooling. He's already got two degrees. What he's hoping for is that the chiefs in assembly buy into his economic plan to seek out the investment dollars of the United States, China, Korea and Japan so that those resources in the north can be developed by the Indigenous people there.
"The resources belong to the Indigenous people. The problem is the immigrants have taken everything."
He said he's looking to develop a $100-billion foreign investment fund and one of his top priorities if he wins in Calgary on July 22 would be to meet with the Chinese, the Americans and the ambassadors of any nation with deep pockets and a desire to access the rich resources found within Canada's borders.
"The Chinese have a very consistent message that they want to work with the Indigenous peoples," Nelson said. "They have mapped out the resources in Canada and they have been denied any access to those resources."
Nelson said the chiefs have to decide if they want to think out of the box and get away from their reliance on the program treadmill they're all running on.
"What I'm talking about is foreign investment for First Nations to develop the resource base themselves."
He said Canada hadn't done enough for First Nations in the good times, and now with an economic grey cloud hanging over the country, the chiefs can expect Canada to do less.
He said Canada was keen to bail out the auto industry to the tune of billions of dollars, but "we have a million First Nations people and they have a huge amount of problems trying to get the $5 billion Kelowna Accord going. The Kelowna Accord was to stretch over five years, so to hell with the Kelowna Accord. We can do it 20 times better than that."
There are a lot of lawyers working at the AFN, said Nelson, but he has stated publicly that an AFN under his stewardship would put the economists to work.
"When we ask the question, how are we going to deal with the education issue, the post-secondary cap that been there for 14, 15 years, all I hear from them is 'Well, we could sue the government in their own court...' We could pay for our own education system, we could pay for our own housing, we could pay for our own schools, we could pay for our own health system, and the thing we have to do is develop our own resources and do the extracting ourselves."
He said First Nations could stop the oil from flowing south to the United States. A plan has been mapped out to the chiefs to do just that, he said. But why stop the oil when they should be able to benefit from it?
He said he understands where the chiefs are coming from, describing them as a frustrated and angry bunch who have to sit in front of their contacts with Indian Affairs and listen to them ask for reports and audits and cluck about accountability and transparency.
"We're the ones financing Ottawa," he said of the resources found in and under First Nations territory.
He said Ottawa says there has been $100 billion spent on First Nations in the past 10 years.
"Well, I've got news for you. Seven trillion dollars came from the resource base and the availability of the resource base in the last 10 years....That's what I'll be telling the chiefs. Chiefs, do you want to continue going down the road of the last twenty, thirty forty years that you've been on, on government dependency? Or do you want to get off and sell your own resources and develop it yourselves?"
Nelson started out late in the campaign. It wasn't until he heard from the other four candidates that he decided to enter. That's because he didn't hear what he wanted to hear from them. They were talking only of maintaining the status quo, he said, and that wasn't good enough for Nelson.
He said a lot of people were just talking about the problems, and weren't offering solutions.
Nelson also believes that not only should the First Nations get away from their dependency on programs and the like, so should their national organization.
"Part of the problem today is that the AFN is totally funded by the government and for any First Nations that try and change government policy when the AFN is paid to implement government policy, it's hard for any national chief to get out of the box."
He used as an example former national chief Matthew Coon Come, who spoke out against Canada's treatment of the Indigenous population while on the international stage. The embarrassment caused to Canada was responded to swiftly, said Nelson. The Liberals slashed the AFN budget from $19 million to $6 million.
"The AFN is quickly punished when they try and change government policies."
He said it's no different today in Ottawa. He said outgoing National Chief Phil Fontaine was told by the chiefs to invite Hugo Chavez, the controversial president of Venezuela, to address the assembly. When he did that, Nelson said the Minister of Indian Affairs contacted Fontaine and said "'What in the hell were you thinking, Phil?' So Phil backed away from that."
"There is no question that the AFN needs to get away from being financed by the government," Nelson said.