Canadians (34 page)

He had for a while, but not by the time I saw him again. The familiar ponytail was there, but the heavyset man was a shadow of his former self. He was now in his mid-fifties, still recovering from a mysterious illness that had struck not long after he switched from the Manitoba provincial NDP to the federal Liberals and won a seat in the House of Commons in the 1993 general election. He'd lost seventy pounds and had often been in such pain he wished he could die. Unable to function well enough to campaign in 1997, he had lost his seat. Since then he'd worked as a consultant, living mostly in Ottawa. He had grown somewhat bitter about the inability of federal politicians and the Canadian media to give credit where credit was due—or, as some others would see it, blame where blame was due.

That Clyde Wells, far more than Harper, had borne responsibility for the accord's demise can be explained in part because he was a premier who inherited his province's initial agreement but questioned it. In part it was
because Wells was eloquent, articulate, and outspoken, whereas Harper essentially restricted his comments to a single word. And in significant part it was because Clyde Wells was white and Elijah Harper was not.

“We know the truth,” Harper said.

In his opinion, Brian Mulroney had made a scapegoat of Wells for political reasons. “He had to portray what had happened as rejection of the accord by English Canada,” Harper said. “Besides, he couldn't blame us because everyone knew that we were morally right.”

After that moment, he said, Aboriginals would never again be taken for granted by any level of government in Canada. “When we said no to Meech Lake, we said no to the entire relationship.”

Much has happened, and much has not happened, in the years since. On the positive side, the Charlottetown Accord—even though it was turned down by the Canadian people for other reasons—gave Aboriginals the accommodation that Meech denied. The land-claims process has been taken seriously, even if it moves at a snail's pace. Natives in the Northwest Territories, where most land claims are now settled, have been offered a one-third ownership by the major resource companies in any Mackenzie Valley Pipeline that might, finally, be built to carry natural gas and oil to southern markets. From the James Bay Agreement in 1975 to the tough negotiations thirty years later with the Deh Cho of the Mackenzie Valley, there has been an increasing acceptance that claims are legitimate and agreements are necessary.

Over Canada's long history, before and following Confederation, there isn't much to commend the various governments for their approach to Native affairs. And yet, for all the paternalism and betrayal, there is undeniable change—even if it's only what John Ralston Saul calls a “halting acceptance” of some return to the very early status of mutual dependence. And for that small change, that “halting acceptance,” Aboriginal Canadians have Elijah Harper to thank.

On the negative side, the events of Oka still resonate periodically in places like Burnt Church, New Brunswick, and Caledon, Ontario. The tragedy of the James Bay babies shows up again on the Kashechewan reserve on the Ontario side of the huge bay, where tainted water in the
spring of 2006 led to the evacuation of the entire village of eighteen hundred. The nearly hundred thousand Natives who live off-reserve remain as ignored and, by and large, as impoverished as those living on Canada's most isolated and poorest reserves.

Racism, while never as explicit as Commander-in-Chief Jeffrey Amherst and his smallpox-infected blankets, has continued unabated, and on both sides. Former AFN head David Ahenakew was stripped of his Order of Canada after a 2002 interview in which he slammed immigrants and expressed great admiration for Adolf Hitler, claiming that if Hitler hadn't “fried” six million Jews they “would have owned the goddamned world.” As Ahenakew himself had told a parliamentary committee nearly twenty years earlier, “Racism is as Canadian as
Hockey Night in Canada
.”

Despite Ahenakew's unfortunate outburst, however, attitudes have been somewhat shifting—again on both sides.

In late September 2006 I happened to be in Fort McMurray, Alberta, at the same time as a conference on Aboriginal economic development was being held. I dropped in on the morning the gathering was opened by Chief Clarence Louie of the Osoyoos Indian Band of British Columbia's Okanagan Valley.

“I can't stand people who are late,” Chief Louie scolded as he stood on stage, the PowerPoint presentation on the screen behind him temporarily halted. He'd been scheduled to begin speaking at 10:00 a.m. He himself had shown up early and was decidedly unimpressed by the straggling in of so many, even revered elders who'd been invited to begin the session with the appropriate ceremonies. “‘Indian time' doesn't cut it,” he told them, only partly tongue-in-cheek.

Clarence Louie had been chief for twenty years. He'd taken over a troubled, impoverished band that, after running a deficit of $221,000 in 1990, had been declared insolvent and placed under third-party management by Department of Indian Affairs officials out of Vancouver. Louie was re-elected and within a year managed to get the deficit erased. He led the negotiation of two specific land claims and slowly turned matters around to the point where Ottawa returned control to the small band of 430 Osoyoos.

In 2000 Chief Louie and his council set themselves the goal of becoming self-sufficient within five years. And they did—though not without a few toes being stepped on, noses put out of joint, and the creation of more than a few critics. Inspired by Billy Diamond's argument that “economic development is the key to extending Native rights,” Louie led the band in several acquisitions and new developments. Today the Osoyoos have their own vineyard, winery, golf course, tourist resort, and construction company. They're also significant partners in a nearby Baldy Mountain ski development. In 2005 the Osoyoos contributed $40 million to the area economy.

As Chief Louie told the tale of his little band's success he sprinkled his talk with comments—some original, some taken from other sources and often delivered humorously—that no Native leader would have dared deliver in previous years and no non-Native could possibly deliver.

My first rule for success is “Show up on time.” My No. 2 rule for success is follow Rule No. 1.

If your life sucks, it's because
you
suck.

Quit your sniffling.

Join the real world—go to school or get a job.

Get off welfare. Get off your butt.

Our ancestors worked for a living—so should you.

WHEN PEOPLE ASK Clarence Louie how he is, he tends to answer “I'm busy,” having no interest in “wasting time with the usual social BS” and wanting to get right down to business. “People often say to me, ‘How you doin'?” he said at one point during the morning session, pausing for effect before answering: “Geez—I'm working with Indians—what do you
think?
”

He addressed the perception of “the lazy, drunken Indian.” It might be unfair but it exists, he said, and the best way to deny it is not to complain but to demonstrate otherwise. Develop “business manners,” he said, and
stick to them. “Create a climate for success.” His idea of a business lunch, he told them, is “drive through”—and right back to work. And real work, he cautioned: “The biggest employer shouldn't be the band office.”

He wasn't against tradition, but he was also all for reality: “You're going to lose your language and culture faster in poverty than you will in economic development.” He told them the time has come to “get over it.” No more whining about hundred-year-old failed experiments. No foolishly looking to the Queen to protect rights. “I have no faith in the Queen,” he said. “She wasn't there for us a hundred years ago. I can guarantee that she isn't going to be there for us now.”

“Blaming government? That time is over.”

IN THE EARLY SUMMER OF 2003, Paul Martin's minority Liberal government was sworn in at Rideau Hall with a full Ojibway smudge ceremony. He had, he said several times during the campaign, two main priorities he wished to deal with quickly: Western alienation and Aboriginal poverty. Within eighteen months the West would respond to his overtures by bouncing him out of office in favour of a Western-based leader and party, Stephen Harper's Conservatives. And the Aboriginal population would be left wondering what would become of the one significant achievement the Paul Martin government had managed to pull off—almost: the Kelowna Accord.

The $5.1-billion accord had been signed in the fall of 2005 by the Government of Canada, the ten provinces, the territories, and the various Aboriginal leaders. It was, as Martin said at the time, “a historic breakthrough.” The accord was intended to significantly improve education conditions throughout the country—to bring an end to the all-too-familiar story of Kashechewan.

It had its critics, of course. The Conservative Party obviously didn't care for it, and even some Native leaders were wary. Chief Clarence Louie, for one, thought “the government as well as the First Nation leadership needs to be ‘spanked' for not making economic development a priority.” There was money for economic development, but the vast majority of funds would go toward social spending, which some, like Louie, considered “a hundred-year-old failed formula.”

And yet an argument can be made for both. Economic development is the story of the James Bay Cree, who reached another agreement on more hydroelectric production in 2006, a $5 billion project that will flood land around the Rupert River. While a minority of the James Bay Cree opposed the new deal, the majority were convinced that an arrangement that will pay them $70 million a year in royalties over the next half century is the only way they can survive and even thrive so far north.

The Cree had finally been able to switch on lights and televisions without having to rely on the gasoline-driven generators that roared constantly in the small villages. They built their own transmission lines from the big power plants that had come out of Robert Bourassa's Project of the Century. “Finally, after thirty years,” Billy Diamond told me in early 2007, “we have electricity from the largest hydroelectric project in North America—and a Cree had to hook it up. What irony!”

Economic development has also been a success for the Osoyoos of southern B.C. and for numerous other bands located in areas where resource development or simple good fortune has provided some manner of financial base to build on. Most Aboriginal situations, however, are not so lucky. As Phil Fontaine said upon his 2006 re-election as Grand Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, the cost of poverty is “the most important social justice issue faced by this country.”

The Accord, however, seemed to have become lost in the election and in the changeover from one minority government to another. A federal government that would soon brag about a $13 billion surplus evidently couldn't live up to its commitment of less than half that amount to do something significant, even historic, about its impoverished Aboriginal population.

Then, in the fall of 2006, the Canadian government joined Russia, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand to deep-six a United Nations Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. The resolution, twenty years in the works and once supported by Canada, was to have affirmed the rights and liberties of Aboriginal people wherever they might live on the globe. “Indigenous peoples,” article 26 of the draft declared, “have the right to own, develop, control, and use the lands, territories,
including the total environment of the lands, air, waters, coastal seas, seaice, flora and fauna and other resources which they have traditionally owned or otherwise occupied or used.” And if those lands have already been taken away, there should be appropriate compensation.

Canada said no.

The blockade may have come down at Oka. But a great many barriers still remain in Canada.

Ten

Pier 21 to Pearson

WELCOME TO CANADA.

I was in Halifax, with an afternoon to kill on a late fall day. It was unseasonably warm, as it would continue to be well into the early weeks of “winter” 2006–07, the water bathtub-calm in the harbour, the wharf filled with workers taking their lunch break in the sunshine. I walked from one end of the harbour to the other, my mind drifting despite the lack of wind as I tried to figure out how anyone could ever make sense of the sheer size of this country and the vast changes that had come to it over the years.

And then I saw the sign:
Welcome to Canada
.

But that was only the top lettering over the fading coat of arms on the weather-worn notice. There were other languages down each side:

Serdecznie Witanny w Kanadzie.

Willkomman in Kanada.

Benvenuto a Canada.

Bienvenue au Canada.

Welkom in Canada.

One was even written in the Cyrillic alphabet, and while unreadable to these eyes and impossible to type for these fingers, easily translated to this page by simple deduction:
Welcome to Canada
.

At the furthest end of the Halifax docks, just where the wharfs give way and the harbour begins opening its mouth toward the Atlantic, I had
stumbled upon Pier 21, Canada's national immigration museum. Our Statue of Liberty. Our Ellis Island.

For eight dollars I got to spend a good portion of an excellent day seeing how this empty country began to fill with people. Pier 21 is a museum carved out of what was once a massive warehouse for shipped goods and then, for decades, a holding, sorting, and moving warehouse for human goods. More than a million Canadians arrived here between 1928 and the day Pier 21 closed in 1971. Another 494,000 military personnel passed through during the Second World War, their return at the end of the war to be followed by more than 50,000 war brides and their children.

There are displays here of old and cracked steamer trunks, purses, dolls and teddy bears, crinkled black-and-white photographs of lost and found families, scribbled notes and carefully handwritten letters and typed orders. The faded Immigration Identity Cards tell the story of Canada in the fewest words and numbers possible: Di Sano, Alfredo, July 13, 1948; Bezkorowajny, Katrina, October 17, 1951; Tonn, Gotlieb….