What is the federal government's policy?

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Roger Obonsawin had lots to say when he was contacted for comment on his Federal Court of Canada victory in the Schilling case.

He said he believes the Assembly of First Nations has lost sight of the fact that taking government money leaves them open to intimidation and political manipulation. He talked about his opinion that the Statement of Reconciliation was meaningless without a hard and binding promise from the government that it would change its approach to Indian Affairs.

In a nutshell, that policy was and is (Obonsawin and others believe) that the politicians and bureaucrats believe the voters don't have a lot of patience with political leaders who tell them their country was built on lies, theft, racism and overt, eyes-wide-open disregard for the law. That's a problem because all of those terms accurately describe the colonial process - the way the Crown came into possession of the land that's now called Canada.

The Canadian public can't handle the truth, the politicians and bureaucrats believe.

It's not just Native activists who are saying this, by the way. Ask just about any lawyer (Native or non) who deals with human rights issues or international law.

#So the political landscape looks like this. The government will do the right thing only when backed into a corner; the government will try to keep any of its genuine efforts at finding true justice for Aboriginal people secret from the public; the government will happily crow about band-aid solutions that don't cost so much they alarm the taxpayers and try to dress them up with baffle-gab and double-speak to make them look like genuine efforts at finding justice for Aboriginal people.

Obonsawin believes the AFN should be attacking this state of affairs instead of exploiting the difficult political situation the government finds itself in to pull in more and more core funding and program dollars. Administering programs isn't government, he said. It's just clerical work that doesn't require the arts of statesmanship or leadership.

Now let's look at the Aboriginal Healing Foundation.

The AFN negotiated the $350 million healing fund as part of the same deal as the Statement of Reconciliation. It was clearly an AFN/federal government initiative. Georges Erasmus, a former AFN national chief, is the AFN-appointed head of the foundation.

When the foundation announced its first wave of funded projects in late June a lot of familiar names were listed as contacts for grants averaging a couple of hundred thousand dollars.

One would think the money would be targeted to where it was most urgently needed - Vancouver's East Side, Toronto's inner city, Winnipeg's Native ghettos, etc.

Erasmus, however, told Windspeaker that wasn't part of the foundation's strategy for the first wave. That's a curious development.

Is the Healing Fund about healing or is it about politics? The next wave of announcements will be released in a few months and the right moves then might change our mind, but right now it looks like the latter.