Welcome to Canada?

Page 4

As the dignitaries gathered to mark the beginning of the Nisga'a adventure in self governance on May 11, the federal Indian Affairs minister "welcomed" the Nisga'a people "to the Canadian family."

Politics, of course, kept him from saying, "Welcome to the family of self governing nations," even though that was the goal the Nisga'a people set out to achieve more than a century ago.

The Indian Act was imposed on the Nisga'a people 113 long years ago and, you could say, it took them this long to finally wriggle out from underneath. If you look at the history, you wouldn't be out of line to say the Nisga'a should have been killed off.

That's not to say that the framers of the Act and their successors (Canada and British Columbia) didn't do their best to make sure they did kill off the Nisga'a people, and it's no thanks to them that they didn't.

All the time, effort, blood, sweat and tears of the Nisga'a people has, for the last 113 years, been dedicated to gaining their liberation from, as British Columbia Premier Ujjal Dosanjh so accurately described it, "the shackles of the Indian Act."

It's thanks to the astonishingly deep and powerful will to survive that lies within the hearts of all colonized Indigenous peoples, qualities that are clearly present in generous quantities in the Nisga'a people, that the Nisga'a have steered their canoe home through dangerous and mysterious waters - led by the likes of Dr. Frank Calder, James Gosnell, Alvin McKay and Dr. Joe Gosnell. Their journey will now be filled with a new set of unknown perils and adventures, but it will be their own and there's more than a bit of dignity in that.

That pale and bloodless comment by the Indian Affairs minister could have been - and should have been, we feel - a direct apology for more than 11 decades of torture and torment at the hands of the minister's various predecessors.

Two questions, Mr. Minister and Mr. Premier: If it was such a wonderful moment and such a triumph for justice, why was it so hard? And why did it take so long?

We pass along our congratulations and best wishes to the Nisga'a, secure in our belief that they will treat their Gitanyow neighbors much better than the Nisga'a have been treated by the Crown during the last century. We believe you'll work hard to find a good faith solution to the overlap question. We're sure you know far too much about oppression to want to be on the other side of it.