Time to kill the BC Treaty Process

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Since coming to live on the West Coast, I have spent many hours talking with people who are involved in the so-called BC Treaty Process, and the overwhelming consensus is that this process has failed. A typical reaction comes from a disappointed community negotiator who recently told me that she had decided it was time to quit the negotiating table and get back to asserting their rights in a more real way.

Indigenous people (except it seems for those who draw extra big salaries from the government to keep it going) realize that the process is incapable of providing a resolution to the conflicts that gave rise to the need for negotiations in the first place. These conflicts include physical confrontations, jurisdictional conflicts and legal disagreements over competing notions of Indigenous rights and Aboriginal title. As a potential bridging institution between the First Nations of the land and Canadians, and as a forum for reconciling the continuing existence of Indigenous nations and the Canadian state on a shared territory, the process is effectively dead. A complete lack of integrity and the total failure of both the federal and provincial governments to demonstrate a commitment to reconciliation have slowly but surely killed it.

A treaty is a formal agreement between two or more recognized, autonomous nations operating in an international forum, negotiated by designated representatives and ratified by the governments of the signatories. By this standard definition, the BCTC process is not about negotiating treaties at all. In essence, the BCTC process is designed to solve the problem of Indigenous nationhood by extinguishing it; it wants to bring the First Nations of this land into Canada's own domestic political and legal structures with certainty and finality. The BCTC process is not about negotiating treaties, which would in fact represent the start of a new relationship between the First Nations and the newcomers to this land. The process is all about assimilation and control; it uses base manipulation of our people's poverty and weakness in an attempt to terminate their freedom and achieve a final degree of control over the futures of Indigenous peoples.

The pattern of using 'agreements' framed within the context of colonial (Canadian) laws as a substitute for true mechanisms of nation-to-nation relations is relatively new. For example, the Nisga'a agreement is not a treaty; the word 'treaty' is not even mentioned in the legal agreement. The use of 'treaty,' is simply a manipulative tool to add weight and respectability to an empty process of surrender. 'Agreements' are put in place by states as a substitute for treaties; they are the mechanism used when settler governments feel confident enough to disregard the political and human rights of Indigenous peoples and impose a final solution to the problem of unjust internal colonization. When states decide to embark on a policy built on the denial of Indian nationhood and sovereignty, they sign what a United Nations report recently called 'agreements and other constructive arrangements.' Previously, settler governments negotiated treaties in the full sense of the word with Indigenous peoples, but these same governments now advocate 'agreements' that involve state-imposed stipulations and which embed Indigenous nationhood into the state's own sovereignty.

Treaties are the mechanism by which settler states such as Canada may achieve legitimacy in North America and are, in effect, the founding documents of the United States and Canada. European settlers in other parts of North America first gained their political existence out of the nation-to-nation relationships they formed with Indigenous peoples. The original treaties of peace and friendship between Indigenous peoples and the Dutch, French, and English peoples who settled in their territories were the instruments of consent that allowed the colonial states to begin an existence that eventually led to thir own autonomous nationhood.

Without such treaty relations with the First Nations of this land, there cannot be any legitimate occupation of territory by subsequent authorities. In places such as what is now known as British Columbia, areas largely without treaty relations between the Indigenous peoples and the settler states, the society remains in a perpetual colonial situation; aside from very limited areas governed by what are called the Douglas Treaties, there are no founding documents to validate the province's claim to the land. Thus, there is no legitimate basis for British Columbia's existence outside of racist arguments rooted in colonial mentalities, which allow for a claim of legitimate authority based on the inherent right of white people to impose their order on brown people. There is a compelling need for treaties in British Columbia to legitimize Canada's occupation and governance in this territory and to engage for the first time in post-colonial relations with the First Nations.

But to de-colonise itself, Canada must first transcend its own racist justifications of the white right to dominate and start building new relationships with Indigenous peoples based on respect and the truth.