Extinguishment or not extinguishment?

Page 4

Editorial

We're expecting that the big brains in Indian Country will soon be wrestling with the question of whether the certainty model employed in the Northwest Territories in the Tlicho (Dogrib) self-government agreement is really extinguishment in disguise. A rose by any other name still smells, wrote Shakespeare, and many surrounding this agreement already think that is the case here.

We tried to contact John B. Zoe, the chief negotiator for the Tlicho people, to see what he thinks. His phone was busy for two straight days (that happens in northern and remote communities quite a bit), but we sent him an e-mail message well in advance of our deadline and did not hear back from him.

So we asked Robert Nault. The minister of Indian Affairs tells us it's not extinguishment, but the "reverse" of extinguishment. Of course, he'd have to say that considering Canada's promise to the United Nations to not extinguish Aboriginal rights.

We can't help but look at the issue through a writer's eyes, with a plain English common sense approach. If you tell someone they have to promise not to ever assert or exercise their rights, then those rights are gone forever. It doesn't matter how many lawyers you hire to say the opposite. It's obfuscation and it worries us.

If you look to the story on page 8 about the U.S. judge that found the American equivalent to the minister of Indian Affairs in contempt of court for what the judge described as covering up the department of the Interior's "disobedience through semantics and strained, unilateral, self-serving interpretations of their own duties," you might wonder if this certainty model might not be another example of such tactics.

Just before deadline a negotiator for the Akaitcho people of Treaty 8, a group that insists the Tlicho agreement encrouches on its territory, told us the First Nations Summit in British Columbia rejected the same certainty model. It was too late to verify that so it isn't mentioned in the news story, but we can put it here for you to think about.

We also get to wondering when we hear government officials (and the First Nations leaders that work closely with government) talk about the rights-based agenda in derogatory terms. You can almost see them sneer when the term is mentioned, even when you're talking on the telephone a thousand kilometres apart.

Other First Nation leaders say it's all about rights. Anything that seeks to undermine rights is a needless compromise and a huge and terminal step backwards.

We're not going to close our minds to any of the possibilities, but we, like you, feel the need to ask the questions and examine the answers.

We expect the Tlicho people will be doing the same thing during their agreement consultation period over the next couple of months.

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Last month we mentioned that the chiefs who organized the push to pass a resolution rejecting the First Nations governance act broke the rules of the Assembly of First Nations charter, but we didn't spell out how they did that and that was a mistake that we regret and will remedy here and now.

Article 11 of the AFN charter states that " one representative for each region plus one representative for each 10,000 First Nations' citizens of that region" can vote at Confederacy of Nations meetings. The meeting in Ottawa where the governance workplan was defeated was a Confederacy of Nations meetings and far more than the allowed number of delegates from British Columbia voted on that resolution-and all the votes were counted.

AFN staff members were aware of this irregularity, but bowed to the will of their political bosses and did not enforce the rules.

Many sources tell us it's not a new problem at the AFN and it's one that causes many senior officials within the organization a certain amount of worry.