Future shock?

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By the time you see this you'll know one very important thing that we, as our deadline for this month arrives, don't know: who won the federal election.

Aboriginal people played an unprecedented role in Campaign 2004. Prime Minister Paul Martin put out the call for Aboriginal candidates to run in this election and many answered. Elections Canada information revealed that as many as 10 federal ridings could have been decided by Aboriginal people if those people decided to vote. With things as close as the polls indicated in this campaign, 10 seats was no small difference.

A couple of weeks into the campaign we knew the Liberals were in trouble. Then we watched in a state of mild amazement as one Aboriginal group after another came out officially in favor of the Liberals, trying to throw them a lifeline as they began to swirl down the proverbial electoral toilet bowl.

In each case, this Aboriginal leader or that claimed the Alliance/Reform party roots of the new Conservative Party were showing and they weren't pretty insofar as Aboriginal rights were concerned.

There was a time in our community when the conventional wisdom guiding relations with Canadian governments was the Two Row Wampum-they stay in their canoe and we'll stay in ours and we'll row forward side-by-side as partners.

So we have to ask if the perceived Conservative Party threat was important enough to abandon that tradition as has clearly been done. We've often been told by grassroots people that their leaders do all right in their relationships with government officials, that friendly chiefs are well rewarded personally for going along and getting along. And there always seems to be well-paying jobs on the federal tab for former chiefs who didn't talk too much about rights or treaties, and who didn't mind too much playing the game by the government's set of rules. So we've got to wonder whether the push for Liberal support was in the service of the people or the self-service of the individual.

We have seen, from time to time, hints that some Aboriginal leaders are leaning just a little too far out over the side of their canoes, leaving their passengers feeling mightily queasy. We hope that the move to formally endorse one Canadian political party was really a desperate act against another Canadian political party that is seen as anti-Aboriginal. We also hope it wasn't a desperate, open admission that the leaders had a sweet deal with the ruling Liberals and didn't want a little thing called democracy screwing it all up.

Although we liked the NDP's Aboriginal platform, we're feeling pretty safe in saying that they aren't the government today. The battle was clearly between Stephen Harper and Paul Martin.

If you're the new PM, Mr. Harper, welcome. One wag told us your party's position on Aboriginal issues can be boiled down to four main points: Shut up. Get a job. Move to the city. Assimilate. If that's true then we're probably not going to get along.

We were in a Calgary courtroom in June 2002 when your advisor Tom Flanagan was forced to admit he repeated racial stereotypes about Native people in his Donner Award-winning book, First Nations? Second Thoughts, without any critical examination of the information he peddled as fact. If he's asking for a senior position with some kind of influence over Aboriginal issues, just say no. He'll have zero credibility. We're pretty sure that it wouldn't be the first time that someone with a bias against Aboriginal people occupied a senior government position in Canada, but you should want to move Canada forwards, not backwards.

And Mr. Martin, if you pulled it out of the fire in the last few desperate days of the campaign, good for you. Now get to work keeping the long list of promises you made to Aboriginal people over the last year or two. We hope the Aboriginal leaders who came to your aid in the darkest days of the campaign were bright enough to get some firm commitment from youthat you would repay that kindness. (Something in writing would have been nice). But even if they didn't, you have a moral obligation to keep your word to the people those leaders say they represent.