Kill the sacred cow

Page 6

Look a leader in the eye today and ask a few questions, primarily: Is the Indian Act a sacred cow, or a deadly disease?

Dateline, Calgary, early May

In a display of unabashed public relations, the Minister of Indian and Northern Affairs Canada (INAC), Robert Nault, Canada's top Indian agent, rode into the sunset when he announced his governance initiative to high school students. There were no chiefs in sight. It took the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) a week to respond. Agent Nault scored the first blow in a fight that's bound to last for at least the summer of 2001. His audience on this day will be voters in four years.

Dateline, Vancouver, mid-May

Dressed in a spiffy suit and surrounded by one of the most expensive teams in AFN history, National Chief Mathew Coon-Come, crybaby for all the chiefs in Canada, held forth in a press conference that denounced Agent Nault's proposed changes to the Indian Act.

"We'll have our own process," bellowed the chief echoing the sentiment of informed First Nations everywhere. But what is their own process? Are we just going to see more money squandered in the next three years?

Yes! Ask some questions, but you should also know that for the better part of the last two years the INAC and AFN have been sleeping together in the so called "Lands and Trusts Services" (LTS) review. They even gave the affair a cutsy name, "Joint Initiative." A SWAT team was organized of senior bureacrats at INAC and they were equipped with a team of lawyers. Aboriginal civil servants were recruited. Mike Watts, Ray Hatfield and Randy Brandt were put in charge of the INAC project. Roger Jones and Norma Diamond were the AFN counterparts.

The work culminated in a national gathering in Winnipeg during June 2000. The meeting was huge, attended by nearly 1,000 delegates. Roger Jones was optimistic by the end of the week-long series of meetings indicating that he had enough background to draft proposed changes to the Indian Act. However, a month later the AFN elected a new leader.

All it took was one AFN election to kill the momentum. Phil Fontaine and Jane Stewart's Gathering Strength initiative began to wither and atrophy.

The AFN was silent for the next few months as Cree leader Coon-Come's campaign cronies plotted their takeover of the national office. Coon-Come hired former national crybaby, Ovide Mercredi, as a senior advisor and Coon-Come's political staff have been rejecting every proposal from their experienced AFN staff, and from INAC too, ever since.

Agent Nault, on the other hand, wasted no time. He saw that the Indians were deeply divided on Indian Act changes and looked for allies. He found them in Saskatchewan, and here and there across the country, mostly Fontaine sympathizers and people who had worked on Fontaine's doomed campaign for re-election.

In Ottawa, Agent Nault played tiddly-winks with LTS and the Indian Act. He tried to find the limelight. But he was awkward about it. He acted cowardly in Atlantic Canada running away from Mercredi in Burnt Church, N.B. during the thick of the fishing fury last fall. His chance to play a role that could have got him great press disappeared right before his eyes.

Perhaps more typical of a paranoid plotting his defence, the Agent quietly got rid of the Indians working at senior management. He shifted the responsibilities of Mike Watts, sent Rae Hatfield off to Winnipeg to learn French and lost Randy Brandt to BC Hydro. He then assigned the task of writing the "Governance" draft to Ottawa lawyer, and former Ron Irwin crony, Brad Morse. Now he expects the Indians of Canada to lay down and spread their legs. Whoa!

I asked myself as I began to consider this column topic: Why don't we want to change the Indian Act? I'd like to see it changed. I've lived with it most of my life. And, yes, our politicians should be more accountable. I wouldn't mind having access to the AFN's financial records, or better yet, to the Tobique band of Maliseet's fiancial records. Shouldn't we all be concerned at how carefully the millions of dollars is spent each year bringing all the chiefs of Canada together? Making decisions on our behalf?

I've been a journalist watching the chiefs in action for the better part of two dozen years. I have seen them all condemn the Indian Act. I have heard them all proclaim that the Indian Act is a tired old piece of paternalism that must be abolished. How many meetings must they have to agree to do something? Must we cater to the whims and fancies of every national chief?

Why can't his political team roll up their Armani sleeves and research their own archive of decisions?

Consider this First Nations. It is our inherent right to know the truth. It is our treaty right to be informed and apprised of our condition and our leaders are responsible for that, but we are responsible to inform ourselves. The majority of our population is young. Do we want to leave the future generations the legacy of having wasted away all these years in fruitless meetings and national chief processes?

Let's forget all the rhetoric and the disdain. Look a leader in the eye and ask, Is the Indian Act our sacred cow?

Jeff Bear is a member of the Maliseet Nation of Tobique, N.B., living in Vancouver. Meganumbe was one of the first treaty negotiators, a Maliseet, who helped negotiate the provisions of the 1725 treaty which stands as the template for the 1760 treaty referenced in the Marshall court case.