The timing was surreal. Remembering the Children: An Aboriginal and Church Leaders' Tour to Prepare for Truth and Reconciliation concluded mid-March. A week later, Ontario judge Patrick Smith sentenced six leaders from Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug (Big Trout Lake First Nation) in Northern Ontario to six-months' jail for contempt of court. Their crime? Failure to abide by a court-ordered injunction aimed at preventing them from peacefully protesting against mining exploration on their traditional lands.
At stake? Possibly one of the largest platinum deposits on the continent as well as uranium deposits.
One of Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign planks was “the economy, stupid.” If only.
The roots of the word economy in Greek are household (oikos) and law or plan (nomos). The economy should, then, refer to the ordering of the entire fiscal well-being of a country and all its inhabitants. Not just investors in mining companies. Not just governments seeking royalties to fatten our coffers.
So why are the aboriginal people of Canada still forced to go to jail to defend their right to negotiate over land that was theirs ó as is now acknowledged in Canadian law ó before Europeans arrived?
Even the treaties that are so frequently violated reveal their primary purpose was to wrest the land from the various tribes so that the federal and provincial governments and resource companies could become rich.
As a 1905 agreement between the federal government and Ontario notes: “No site suitable for the development of water-power exceeding 500 horse-power shall be included within the boundaries of any reserve.” This is reinforced in Treaty 9: “No valuable water-powers are included within the allotments.”
Power and wealth is not for natives.
Witness also the opening of Treaty 9 which, incidentally, includes Big Trout Lake.
“[T]he said Indians have been notified and informed by His Majesty's said commission that it is His desire to open for settlement, immigration, trade, travel, mining, lumbering, and such other purposes as to His Majesty may seem meet, a tract of country …
[And] His Indian people may know and be assured of what allowances they are to count upon and receive from His Majesty's bounty and benevolence.”
That bounty and benevolence must have been hard to resist, offered as it was by a commissioner from the Department of Indian Affairs, Duncan Campbell Scott, who's most famous statement was: “I want to get rid of the Indian problem. I do not think … that the country ought to continuously protect a class of people who are able to stand alone … Our object is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic, and there is no Indian question and no Indian Department.”
Even if Duncan Scott meant it less pejoratively than it reads now, he was still articulating the received wisdom that the native population needed to be “civilized,” then assimilated, as the Gradual Civilization Act of 1857 envisioned.
It's curious how we are indignant regarding Communist indoctrination in China and the subjugation of other tribal groups there to the Han majority, while the collective Canadian reaction to the forced indoctrination through church-run residential schools generate but a blip.
Canadians are all too quick to note that some ó maybe even many ó residential schools teachers were good and kind and that learning English and other disciplines was a good education. China and the former Soviets might respond the same. After all, some principles of Communism (communal sharing) are Christian in origin.
On top of this was the horrific abuse so many children endured at the hands of often violent predators who exploited weaknesses in supervision in the schools to feed their voracious dysfunctional appetites.
To what extent the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is able to address these issues remains to be seen. So far, it has hardly galvanized the country.
As for the Clinton dictum about the economy, at least when it comes to native issues, that's not been the case.
Put crassly: It's “the greed, stupid.”
