Good times with CSIS and me

Page 4

A few months ago, I got a stranger than usual telephone call at my office in Victoria. My usual friendly Mohawk "Kwe Kwe!" greeting was met on the other end of the line with a few seconds of silence, and then some muffled grunts and a bunch of funny clicking noises. I always chalk this kind of thing up to another old white guy from the Reform Party (sorry, I mean the CRAParty) calling me up for a verbal showdown then panicking at the last second and dropping the phone. But this time, someone actually spoke up.

"Good afternoon Professor Alfred, this is the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service. Do you have a few minutes to speak with me today?"

I could tell that it wasn't a prank. If one of my friends wanted to fool me into thinking the Canadian spy agency was after me, they would make sure to sound more like James Bond ordering a martini than the voice I heard, which was more like an anxious student nervously asking me for a grade change. What followed the agent's clumsy introduction was a crass attempt by him to convince me to give up information on people that "may be threatening the security or stability of the province."

To my incredulous response of "why the hell would I want to do something like that," the agent said that it was, in fact, my duty as an author and public employee to inform on troublemakers. CSIS apparently figures that because universities receive money from the public treasury, it makes university professors government employees.

It turns out that CSIS, and the Canadian government's other domestic intelligence gathering units, were interested in knowing more about potential First Nation problem communities and people so that they could take steps to "ensure that there was as little trouble as possible" between Indians and whites in the province of British Columbia.

The young agent was so keen to serve the public interest that he overplayed his hand. He even tried to get on my good side by telling me that his wife was a former student and that I shouldn't worry about this at all, because he only worked for CSIS. If I was really in trouble, the RCMP's secret intelligence unit would be contacting me instead. They work closely together, you see. Then came the kicker. He told me that he had equipped an apartment in Victoria to entertain people like me, and that he wanted me to come over so we could talk and so I could be "interviewed" on tape. It was illegal for him to do it on the university campus!

Unfortunately I have had to deal with this kind of thing from CSIS before when I was a professor in Montreal a few years ago. That time, the agent came up to my office in person. He wore a really cheap suit and looked nothing like James Bond and gave me the same line as the young keener, except then it was tailored to my supposed responsibility to help make sure that there were "no more Okas."

When I told the keener about my previous experience, he responded that he knew about that contact because he had the other agent's notes in front of him. Touche. I wondered to myself if the Montreal agent had noted all the details, like that I demanded an exploding pen-gun or at least a fancy shoe phone in exchange for letting him stay in my office. He didn't have either one, so I made him leave.

In the end, the second contact between CSIS and me ended the same way as the first. I stated in my most professional voice as if my phone was bugged (you think so?) that I didn't share CSIS' goals and objectives. I made clear that neither do I care about maintaining order because after all I'm Mohawk, not Canadian. And, if I do have secrets, I'm surely not telling them to CSIS. Then, I politely declined his offer for a meeting and recommended instead that he buy my books and phone me if he had any questions. He never did. No doubt moved on to someone else.

We are all targets because Indigenous rights are still viewed as a threat by the Canadian government. It's too bad, but this is still a country where hose who speak the truth are targeted. All of our leaders are stalked and harassed secretly by Canadian police and internal spies every day. The whole incident was a useful reminder to me of this fact, and of the forces working against us and how strong we must be in resisting the temptation to become tools for the government's divide-and-conquer tactics.

Indigenous people who I tell these things to find it spooky, and I have to admit that it's not fun being stalked by creeps. Some others find it outrageous and get angry. As for myself, it gets my warrior groove on. The way I look at it, when you're young and Indian and The Man is trying hard to track you down, you must be doing something right.