Solving the Indian problem

Page 4

I wrote in an earlier column (What about my human rights? Sept. 1999) how I believe that it is our people's basic human right to determine their own membership. This is a basic belief that underlies the whole debate from an Indigenous perspective, and one which separates those of us who believe in true justice from those who adhere to its historically modified Canadian (read: colonial) form. Given some recent and forthcoming developments in Indian Country, I must return to this subject for the next couple of columns. But first, a cautionary note: all the compliant, complacent and Canadian "Aboriginals" who believe in the moral rightness of their country's laws, especially the principle that an individual's rights matter more than the survival of our nations, should stop reading now. You're likely to be spitting mad in a few minutes.

Let us understand that it is Canada's goal, advanced through policy and the co-optation of our own people, to undermine the strength and very existence of our nations by taking away - or having sell-out politicians sign away - everything that makes us unique and powerful. In addition to our languages and beliefs, these are also things like our tax immunity, our lands, our treaty rights and our independent jurisdiction. Historically and into the present day, it's clear that the Canadian government believes that by forcing or enticing us into the legal, political and cultural mainstream, every bit of distinction between us and them will gradually disappear. Then in the future, with all the differences erased, there will no longer be any moral and political justification for laws that support special rights and separate lands for Indian people.

Indian problem solved!

It's that simple. In effect, Canada wants to create Metis out of us all: to make us people with "Aboriginal heritage" (a necessary ingredient in the multicultural mosaic, after all), but at the same time just another ethnic group with no specific legal, political or territorial rights.

A long time ago, Canada declared war on our right to be who we wanted to be; to this day Canada is dead serious about controlling us. Membership is a key battleground. In this battle, it is crucial that Canada win control of the right to answer the question, "Who is an Indian?" We all know that it has been Canada's long-standing goal to control our people by determining membership in our communities. We cannot concede to Canada's Parliament, to human rights tribunals or to the Supreme Court the right to answer that question for us. When we lose or give up the right to say for ourselves who we are, Canada will have won the war they declared on us. Through the imposition of Indian Act regulations, Department of Indian Affairs policies, entitlement clauses in self-government agreements or beneficiary clauses in land claims negotiations, the federal and provincial governments continue to deviously manipulate the issue of membership to their own advantage.

The techniques of this manipulation include portraying our stand for our heritage and against Canada as wrong, and the demonization of communities that challenge Canada's assumption that it can determine membership and reject the right of individuals to claim membership in opposition to community consensus. A notable case of demonization and legal persecution by Canadian authorities is my own community of Kahnawa:ke, where the people have defiantly enacted a membership law with strict provisions against marriage to non-Indians and membership criteria based on lineage. Is it wrong to tell our people that they must marry an Indigenous person? To demand that people take up their responsibility to become part of our culture and participate in our community? Or that membership will be determined by us based on the strength of a person's lineage within our community? We believe that in light of Canada's long-standing policies and the ever-present threats to our existence, it would be wrong not to dothese things.

The perversity of this situation is that it is the individual rights advocates and the Canadian Government who are the ones pushing a racist agenda. What else can we call Canadian policy and individual rights but racist? They are based on a notion of Indian status and membership that demands no community consent, no participation in the culture, no knowledge of language or history: no responsibility. Nothing is required but a biological relationship or descent from an Indian parent. Divorced from community control, people claim and are accorded the right to be called members simply because they have some Indian blood.

In the long run, these ideas will lead to a situation where our people are defined not by their relation to a living culture and community of people, but by their biological descent from an ancestor who was an Indian. We cannot continue to allow Canada to answer the question "Who is an Indian?" If we do, down the road we will be overwhelmed by people who have some Indian blood but no knowledge of the culture, no desire to participate in the community and no stake in the future of our nations: a country full of "Aboriginal" people.

Indian problem solved. It's that simple.