The Inconvenient Indian (27 page)

Remember our earlier chat about Legal Indians?

From a Native perspective, Indian land is Indian land. From a contemporary, somewhat legal North American perspective, Native land is land that belongs to the federal government and is on indefinite loan to a certain category of Native people. To say that these two views are in conflict is to state the obvious.

Indian land as Indian land was certainly the idea behind early treaties and agreements. But by the middle of the nineteenth century, new attitudes had taken over, and a treaty such as the one struck with the Yanktonai band of the Dakota at Fort Sully in 1865 stipulated, “Any amendment or modification of this treaty by the Senate of the United States shall be considered final and binding upon the said band, represented in council, as a part of this treaty, in the same manner as if it had been subsequently presented and agreed to by the chiefs and head-men of said band.”

One of the great phrases to come out of the treaty process is “as long as the grass is green and the waters run.” The general idea behind the phrase is not new. Charlemagne supposedly used such language in the eighth century, when he declared that “all Frisians would be fully free, the born and the unborn, so long as the wind blows from heaven and the child cries, grass grows green and flowers bloom, as far as the sun rises and the world stands.”

Great Britain, the United States, and Canada, depending on how you want to count, signed well over 400 treaties with Native tribes in North America. I haven’t read them all, but none of the
ones I have read contains the phrase. So, I’ve always wondered if “as long as the grass is green and the waters run” was ever actually used in a treaty.

I know that Andrew Jackson promised the Choctaw and Cherokee that, if they left their lands east of the Mississippi and moved west of the river, “There beyond the limits of any state, in possession of land of their own, which they shall possess as long as grass grows or water runs, I am and will protect them and be their friend and father.” And I know that over a century later, in 1978, David Sohappy, Sr., a Yakama fisherman, said that he had been told by elders that the 1855 treaty with the Yakama had come with the promise that the treaty would last so long as Mount Adams was standing and so long “as the sun rose in the east and long as the grass grows green in the spring and rivers flow.”

I’m betting that poetic constructions such as “as long as the grass is green and the waters run,” “Great White Father,” and “Red Children” were part of the performances, the speeches, and the oral promises that attended treaty negotiations and did not necessarily find their way into the official transcript. While a phrase such as “the hatchet shall be forever buried” does appear in Article 13 of the treaty the Cherokee signed in 1785, I suspect that, in general, lawyers and politicians were not comfortable with metaphors. As a rule, easily understood language is not welcome in legal documents.

Treaties, after all, were not vehicles for protecting land or even sharing land. They were vehicles for acquiring land. Almost without fail, throughout the history of North America, every time Indians signed a treaty with Whites, Indians lost land. I can’t think of a single treaty whereby Native people came away with
more land than when they started. Such an idea, from a non-Native point of view, would have been dangerously absurd.

In fact, treaties have been so successful in separating Indians from their land that I’m surprised there isn’t a national holiday to honour their good work. But we could fix that. We could, if we were so inclined, turn Columbus Day and Victoria Day into Treaty Day. After all, Columbus didn’t discover America, and Queen Victoria never set foot in Canada. Folks in the United States would get a day off in October, just as the leaves were turning colour in New England, and folks in Canada—perhaps even in Quebec—would get a day off in May, just as most of the snow had melted. We could encourage schoolchildren in both countries to memorize the top ten treaties in terms of land acquisition, and turn that knowledge into a contest. Maybe get the Blackfoot to donate ten acres of reserve land along the Old Man River as first prize.

Of course, no one in Canada or the United States is going to support a holiday that isn’t a celebration of national power and generosity, so we’d have to disguise it, much the way we do Thanksgiving.

There it is. Treaty Day. I’d do my part. Read Robert Frost’s poem “The Gift Outright.” Sing a few verses of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” as part of the festivities.

Now I don’t want to give anyone the impression that I think treaties are a bad idea. Treaties aren’t the problem. Keeping the promises made in the treaties, on the other hand, is a different matter.

One of the complaints that Whites have had about Aboriginal people is that they didn’t know what to do with land, or that they weren’t using the land to its full potential. And North America has been quick to rally around the old aphorism “use it or lose it.” Ironically, Canada currently finds itself in a pseudo-Native position
with regard to the far north. Knowing that the Arctic is a treasure trove of oil and gas, minerals and precious metals, and fish, the United States has been pushing jurisdictional boundaries, insisting that the Northwest Passage is an international waterway rather than a part of Canada. In 1969, the United States sent the S. S.
Manhattan
to sail into the Passage without first getting Canadian permission. In 1985, the U.S. icebreaker
Polar Sea
did the same thing. Nasty words flew back and forth. One solution to this problem that is being bandied about is to strike a treaty, wherein the United States recognizes the Passage as Canadian waters and Canada gives the United States the right to travel the waterway unimpeded.

A treaty with the United States. That should work out well.

Lost in all of this gunship diplomacy was the 1953 saga of eighty-seven Inuit who were moved from Port Harrison to Grise Fiord. The official reason Canadian bureaucrats gave for the move was that it would allow the Inuit to continue to live off the land and maintain their traditional ways. The unofficial reason was that Canada wanted to use the Inuit as placeholders in the continuing debate over who had territorial rights to the High Arctic and its resources. The government has always maintained that the families who relocated did so voluntarily, while the Inuit maintain that the moves were forced.

Wherever the truth lies, it is amusing to watch politicians validating Canada’s land claims in the far north on the backs of Aboriginal people. It’s ours, Ottawa tells the world. Our people are there.

When it comes to the matter of land, one of the key questions is: “What is the proper use of land?” This is both an historical and a contemporary consideration in Native rights. In the early days, hunting and gathering were seen as inferior uses of the land compared to farming. Where Indians did farm, their farming
practices were considered inferior to those of Whites. And these days, heaven help the tribe or band that wishes to keep a section of land in its natural state when a golf course or a ski resort or a strip mine comes looking for a home.

Sometimes a close reading of history is helpful in understanding the question of land, and sometimes representative stories will do just as well. Personally, I prefer stories. And I happen to have several that you might consider.

One.

In 1942, during World War II, the Government of Canada went looking around for a place to set up a military-training base. Surprise of surprises, they found such a site on the Stoney Point Ojibway reserve in Ontario.

Ipperwash.

The government offered the band fifteen dollars an acre for the land. The band refused, and the government confiscated the land with the explicit promise to return it after the war.

I should mention that wars have provided excellent opportunities for the theft of Indian land. The Stoney Point Ojibway were not the only people to have land confiscated in the interests of a war effort. In 1917, in the dead of winter, the U.S. Army moved the Nesqually out of their homes in Washington State and “condemned” more than two-thirds of the reservation. Then the land was transferred to the U.S. Department of War, which used the gift of 3,300 acres to expand Fort Lewis and construct an artillery range.

Further west on the prairies following World War I, amendments to the Indian Act in 1918 gave Canada’s Department of Indian Affairs the power to lease band land and give it to non-Natives for proper cultivation. “We would be only too glad to have the Indian
use this land, if he would,” lamented Arthur Meighen, the Minister of the Interior and Superintendent of Indian Affairs, “But he will not cultivate this land, and we want to cultivate it; that is all.”

But back to Ipperwash. The war came and went as wars will do, yet the land was not returned. Over the years, at various times, the Stoney Point Ojibway protested the original confiscation, and, in 1996, that protest took on a new life.

In September of that year, about thirty-five Natives took over the park to call attention to the long-standing land claim. At first, things were reasonably peaceful. And then harsh words were exchanged. An Ontario Provincial Police cruiser had its window smashed. A band councillor had a rock thrown at his car. One story about a woman in a car being attacked with a baseball bat proved to be a fabrication by the police, supposedly for public relations reasons. The pushing and shoving escalated, and the confrontation came to a head with police firing on a car and a school bus, wounding two of the Native protestors and killing Dudley George.

I must admit, I know little about Ipperwash. I’ve never been to the park. What I know of the confrontation that led to Dudley George’s death, I know from newspaper and television reports, and I have always had a problem trusting those accounts. But I did have an interesting conversation with a government official a year or so after the tragedy.

I had gone to Ottawa to give a lecture, and, on the flight back to Toronto, I sat next to a fellow who was actually involved with the Stoney Point Ojibway land claim at Ipperwash. He had heard me speak and wanted to get my opinion on the matter. Now, it’s not every day that I get asked by the government for my opinion. Helen hardly ever asks me for my opinion. So, I was flattered.

Ask away, I said.

Ipperwash, he agreed, had been part of the Stoney Point Ojibway reserve, and it had been taken as part of the war effort, and with the war long gone and the military-training base dismantled, the perception, on the part of the Ojibway certainly, was that the land should be returned. However, the official told me, besides the problem of public perception—the government returning land to Indians, no matter what the circumstances, was not a vote-getter—there was the problem of live ordinance. Because the land had been used as a military range, there were unexploded shells and nasty whatnots in the ground, which made some areas dangerous.

What are we supposed to do about that? the official wanted to know. How could the government, in good faith, return land that was unsafe to the Ojibway?

I suggested that the government clean up the land and then return it. The government didn’t make the mess, the man told me, the Army did.

Now, in my house, if you make a mess, you clean it up. Most of the time.

Okay, I said, have the Army clean it up.

They don’t have enough money in their budget to do that.

Then put the money in their budget.

If we do, they’ll just spend it on things that are higher priorities.

It was a pleasant conversation, and, the more we talked, the more I felt as though I were talking to a bowl of Jello. By the time we landed, I realized that I wasn’t being asked
how
the land could be given back so much as I was being given a briefing on
why
that wasn’t going to happen.

The real problem, the official told me as we sat next to each other on the plane, is the “cultural recalcitrance” of the Ojibway. The hostile feelings, the takeover of the park, the killing of Dudley George could all have been avoided if the Ojibway had simply sold the land to the government in the first place.

Well, that’s certainly one way to look at it.

Since that conversation, the government of Ontario, in 2007, did announce that it plans to return the fifty-six-hectare park to the Chippewa of Kettle and Stony Point First Nation, though not right away. In May of 2009, a transfer-process agreement was signed stipulating a full transfer of the land within a year. In 2010, legislation was passed to deregulate the park lands, a legal move that was supposed to be the next step in actually returning the land. By May of 2012, nothing more had happened. Though the cleanup of the old military base had begun, the bottom line remains the same. The land still hasn’t been returned.

Two.

Kinzua Dam, in the Allegheny National Forest in Pennsylvania, is one of the largest dams east of the Mississippi River. Work on the dam began in 1960 and was finished in 1965. The dam cost more than $120 million and is over 1,900 feet long and 179 feet high.

The main purpose of the dam is to control the Allegheny River while, at the same time, providing hydroelectric power for homes and industry, and places for folks with leisure time on their hands to park their boats. The reservoir that the dam created is twenty-seven miles long and has about ninety miles of shoreline.

The dam created the deepest lake in Pennsylvania, around
130 feet deep, and at the bottom of that lake is the Seneca Indian reservation.

The reservation wasn’t supposed to be at the bottom of the reservoir. The Seneca had signed a peace treaty with the United States that guaranteed this particular piece of land for the Seneca. Article Three of the 1794 treaty allowed that “the United States acknowledge all the land within the aforementioned boundaries, to be the property of the Seneka [sic] nation; and the United States will never claim the same, nor disturb the Seneka nation.”

That was 1794. So in 1956, the Seneca were probably surprised to learn that Congress had appropriated funds to build a dam on their land. The government had held hearings. The Army Corps of Engineers had briefed all of the interested parties. Except the Seneca. No one invited the Seneca to the hearings. They weren’t even advised that hearings were being held. They found out about the dam project after the fact.