Unsettling Canada: A National Wake-up Call (Arthur Manuel and Grand Chief Ronald M. Derrickson)

Unsettling Canada: A National Wake-up Call
Author	Arthur Manuel and Grand Chief Ronald M. Derrickson
Publisher	Between the Lines
First published	2015 Toronto
Edition	2015
Type	Book
ISBN	9781771131780
Source	File:Unsettling Canada PDF.pdf

TODO: DELETE WHEN DONE

List of noticed issues:

1. Mix of -, –, and — to separate/join words/ideas, should standardize on – for words and — for ideas, no space
2. Citations need to be added. Numbers should be in the text from copy and paste, but be sure to check the book anyway

Foreword by Naomi Klein

UNSETTLING CANADA is a book that was a long time in coming, and yet it arrives at the perfect time. It comes at a moment when a great many non-Indigenous Canadians are deeply unsettled by the direction the country is going and are searching for new and bold paths forward.

The current government seems to have one idea about how to build an economy. Dig lots of holes, lay lots of pipe. Stick the stuff from the pipes onto ships—or trucks, or railway cars— and take it to places where it will be refined and burned. Repeat, but more and faster. It’s an approach to the world based on taking and taking without giving back. Taking as if there are no limits to what can be taken—no limits to what bodies can take, no limits to what a functioning society can take, no limits to what the earth can take.

Never mind the impacts on water. On wildlife. On forests. On the stability of the climate itself. Anyone who stands in their way, who points out inconvenient truths about health, human rights, or climate change, is treated as an enemy and various attempts are made to silence them —be they activists, First Nations communities, or the government’s own scientists. The opposition parties offer meek objections and little by way of alternative.

It is in this context that a great many Canadians are discovering that First Nations land rights and title—if robustly defended—represent the most powerful barrier to this destructive, extractivist mindset. And so, unprecedented coalitions are emerging to fight tar sands pipelines in British Columbia, fracking in New Brunswick, and clear-cut logging in Ontario. In these battles we are beginning to see the outlines of a new kind of relationship, based on nation-to- nation respect, not assimilation or merger.

This wise, enlightening, and tremendously readable book will both strengthen and deepen these relationships. Interweaving policy and history with the personal stories of a remarkable family packed with leaders and healers, Manuel offers a unique education in the painful history that brought us to this juncture. He also provides a crash course in the legal concepts and humane principles that will help us all move forward.

With confidence and care, Manuel guides readers through the many clever disguises the Canadian government has used to rob First Nations of their land rights and title, unmasking each attempt at “extinguishment” in turn. This is a heart-wrenching story of how might triumphed over rights. Yet simultaneously, and with a palpable sense of momentum, Manuel takes us through the various legal victories that steadily strengthened the movement’s hand, bringing us to the current turning point. This is the backstory of both grassroots and backroom struggles that created the context in which we find ourselves today, one in which a new generation of First Nations leaders is demanding sovereignty and self-determination, and more and more non-Indigenous Canadians finally understand that huge swaths of this country we call Canada is not ours—or our government’s—to sell.

Even those who are sure they know this material already will be taken aback by the originality of the legal and financial strategies described in these pages, and inspired by the hope they represent. This is a transformative journey of a truly visionary thinker, leading us all to a wide open door.

March 2015

Acknowledgements

When I first sat down to write the acknowledgements for this book, I was a bit overwhelmed. There are so many people to thank for helping in so many different ways. There are those who encouraged me and assisted me directly in the writing process. There are those who have fought alongside me and who have made important individual contributions to our common struggle. And there are those who are part of organizations that have believed enough in my work to help me along the way. Unfortunately I do not have nearly the space I would need to thank all of the people in these three groups, but I would like to mention at least a few of them here.

Those most directly involved in getting the book project launched were Grand Chief Ron Derrickson and Naomi Klein. It was Naomi who first suggested, even gently insisted, that I pull together the ideas I had been promoting in British Columbia, in Canada, and internationally in book form. And she was duly punished for this by having to write the Foreword, which she has done, as she does everything, with great generosity and wit.

Grand Chief Derrickson had echoed Naomi’s call for a book and offered to participate in the project as an adviser. He contributed greatly to this book in every way, including by writing the Afterword. In fact, Grand Chief Derrickson has been part of the formulation of the ideas in this book from the time we led the B.C. Interior peoples into the forest in the Indian logging initiative in 1999. At the time I was the chief of Neskonlith, chair of the Shuswap Nation Tribal Council, and spokesperson of the Interior Alliance of B.C. It was in the aftermath of that action that I developed the Indigenous Network on Economies and Trade, and Grand Chief Derrickson has continued to offer his leadership, support, and unique insights along the way.

I began work on the book almost three years ago, and I have been given invaluable assistance in shaping the manuscript by Peter McFarlane, a writer and friend.

Nicole Schabus provided crucial input during the editorial process; with her contribution, as with so much else, she is in a class by herself. My life partner, Nicole was also a leading contributor, through her legal training and brilliant insights, in the formulation of many of these ideas, and as you see in the book, she has been at my side throughout the international struggle with NAFTA and the WTO.

I would be remiss not to acknowledge how both my parents imprinted on me a deep belief in the nationhood of our people. My late father, Grand Chief George Manuel, taught me about politics but would also call on me as a young person to speak at every meeting, appreciating the energy of our youth. My mother, Marceline, carried the heavy burden of supporting our family through the movement and stood on the front lines. My siblings share in much of the same burden and carry the same strength, from my late brother Robert and sister Vera, to Emaline, Richard, and Doreen to the youngest Martha, George, Ida, and Ara, who are following in the footsteps of our parents.

I also want to mention important contributors to our struggle whom we have lost: I still hear the booming voice of Irene Billy (1928–2011) ringing in my ears, reminding us not to sleep on our rights. I remember the knowledge shared by Dr. Mary Thomas and Coleen McCrory. I miss my friend Qwatsinas (Ed Moody). Nuxalk Strong! Nuxalk Forever! And I think about young leaders we lost far too early: Ethan Baptiste and my dear son Neskie Manuel.

Another person in a class by himself is my Mohawk friend, Russell Diabo, who has never wavered in his commitment to Indigenous rights and Indigenous nationhood. It has been a pleasure to work with him over the years and virtually all of the ideas discussed here were also discussed with him or published in his Strategic Bulletin. Between me and Russell and our friend David Nahwegahbow, LL.B., an Anishinabek from Whitefish River, we have spent decades fighting to change the federal Comprehensive Claims policy, with the important contributions of Algonquin Chief Harry St. Denis of Wolf Lake and former Chief Jean Maurice (Poncho) Matchewan from Barriere Lake. I would also like to thank Chief Donny Morris and Sam McKay from Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug, who have also inspired us all.

I want to mention some of my partners and friends from my early political life who remain friends to date: Beverly Manuel, Stó:lō activist Eddy Gardner, the late Stan (Butch) Plante of the Metis Nation, Tantoo Cardinal, Ken and Dana Williams, Pottawatomis from Moose Deer Point, Dave Monture, a Six Nations Mohawk, and Maya Lix Lopez.

At the community level, I have worked closely with my own chief, Judy Wilson, and with Secwepemc activists Dr. Janice Billy, Dawn Morrison, and Garry Gottfriedson and Elders Sarah Deneault (91) and William Ignace (82). I believe that it is important for Elders to speak out on political issues, to teach younger generations how to protect our land and build upon our values. We need them to take their place in every part of our lives and to speak out and give guidance in the political sphere.

I have also been honoured to work with community activists like Bertha Williams from Tsawwassen, Judy DaSilva of the Asubpeeschoseewagong Anishinabek (Grassy Narrows First Nation), Rosalin Sam and Hubert (Hubie) Jim, the lone fighter from Sutikalh and fishers June, Fred, and Rick Quipp of Cheam.

I would also like to thank Tsilhqot’in chiefs, Chief Roger William from Xeni Gwet’in, Tribal Chairman Chief Joe Alphonse of Tl’etinqox, Chief Francis Laceese from Toosey Indian Band, and Chief Russell Ross Myers from Yunesit’in Government. I would also like to thank Tsilhqot’in leaders like Stanley Stump, Danny Case, and David Quilt.

There are also many young Indigenous activists like lawyer June McCue, my IGov master’s student Ryan Day, and young Indigenous leaders from across Canada all the way home to my own children who give me new hope every day in our struggle for self-determination. As do all of the members of the Defenders of the Land and Idle No More, with a special thanks to the four women founders of Idle No More—Jessica Gordon, Sylvia McAdam, Nina Wilson, and Sheelah McLean—to whom we all owe a debt of gratitude for inspiring a new activism among our peoples.

I would also like to acknowledge the work of a small team of very talented volunteers who have worked with INET: Dr. Shiri Pasternak, Emma Feltes, Corvin Russell, and Pam Baley as well as activists like Harsha Walia and Brigette DePape who have understood the importance

of our struggle and the broader struggle for Indigenous self-determination. A special thanks goes to Judy Rebick, one of the great progressive thinkers and journalists of our generation whose support is always much appreciated.

There are so many others and I am afraid it would take another book-length manuscript to mention them all. But I must make room to mention Ed Bianchi from KAIROS, an organization that has always stood by us. As have Ramsey Hart from Mining Watch, Maude Barlow from the Council of Canadians, Tara Scurr from Amnesty International, Dave Bleakney, the national union representative from CUPW, and those like Dr. Peter Schwarzbauer, Michaela Mayer, Gawan Maringer, and Evelyn Schiemer from Arbeitskreis Indianer Nordamerikas (AKIN) from Vienna, Austria. Vivian Gonik and Olivier de Marcellus from Geneva and Helen Nyberg from Incomindios in Zurich, Switzerland, and Ludwig and Monika Seiller from the Aktionsgruppe Indianer & Menschenrechte e. V. from Munich, Germany, who defend us in the solidarity network in Europe, as well as my friend Kenichi Matsui from Japan. I would also like to thank Nicole’s parents, Eric and Traude Schabus, for their hospitality while we are in Austria. Closer to home I would like to thank singer/songwriter Kelly Derrickson and the ongoing support of the RMD team (Cathy, Kim, and Julia).

I would also like to thank leading academics like Professor Kent McNeil, Professor Brian Noble, Professor Michael Asch, and Professor Constance McIntosh, who have helped me develop my thinking in clarifying our Indigenous territorial authority. Along with Terry Tobias, traditional land map maker, and Herb Hammond, an ecosystem-based conservationist, who have helped me in resource-based planning.

I would like to offer a special thanks to my colleagues on the board of the Seventh Generation Fund: Vice-chair Tupac Enrique Acosta, Dr. Luis Macas, Dr. Henrietta Mann, Oren Lyons, Chris Peters, and Deborah Sanchez, and the executive director, Tia Peters. All of us were deeply saddened by the recent death of our chairperson, Tonya Gonnella Frichner, a woman who inspired us all.

I would also like to thank the North American Indigenous Peoples Caucus (NAIPC) and the present two Co-chairs Dr. Debra Harry, Northern Paiute from Pyramid Lake, Nevada, and Janice Makokis LL.B. from the Cree Nation of Saddle Lake, Alberta.

Finally, my biggest thank you goes to my children, Mandy, Niki, Ska7cis, and Anita-Rosie, and my inspiring and energetic grandchildren—Aaron, Mahegan, Tuwiwt, Suli, P’exmes, Anaoni, Ske7cissiselt, and Mali Nali—who give me reason to continue the struggle that I inherited from my mother and my father, my grandparents and great-grandparents, for justice for our peoples. I love you and I am proud of you.

Arthur Manuel
March 2015

The Lay of the Land

There is no denying the beauty of the land. From the hills above Neskonlith—the community where I was born and grew up and where I served as band chief from 1995 to 2003—you can see the blue waters of the Shuswap lakes, the dry scrubland of the valley, and the cooler hills shaded by stands of ponderosa pines. Below, the South Thompson River empties from the lake and winds westward through the valley toward Kamloops, where it joins the North Thompson and flows to the Fraser and down to the sea.

This is British Columbia’s Interior Plateau. The land my people have shared for thousands of years, and still share with our ancient neighbours. Our Secwepemc territory spreads north to the Dakelh lands, south to the Syilx (Okanagan) lands, west to the Nlaka’pamux, St’at’imc, and Tsilhqot’in lands, and to the east by the Ktunaxa territory, where the Rocky Mountains rise to the sky, marking the boundary between the Interior tribes and the Nakota and Cree peoples on the Great Plains.

The village itself is moulded around a wide bend in the river. From the hills above, you see a handful of houses and the band office, and on the west side of the river, the gas station and store. Along the riverbank are small gardens, and now, after many decades of grasslands, the hayfields have been replanted with the help of the new sprinkler irrigation system.

Further upstream, where Little Shuswap Lake empties into the river, is the town of Chase. It began to form around the lumber mill built just before the First World War. We have generally had peaceable relations with the people of the town, with only occasional flashes of open conflict. But even when it is peaceful, there has been a steady note of racism from across the river. Our parents and grandparents faced open Jim Crow and were forbidden access to most services in the white world. The only restaurants that would serve us were the Chinese restaurants; for the rest, Indians would be stopped at the door or, even more humiliating, left to sit unserved until they slunk away. My generation felt the sting of blatant racism in a less formal way, but it was still shocking to be confronted by it. A generation later, as chief, I was still dealing with racist acts against our children.

As co-chair of the Global Indigenous Peoples Caucus, reading the statement on the colonial doctrine of discovery at the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, New York City, May 7, 2012

There are, of course, many decent people in Chase, as there are anywhere, but the underlying noise is there. And even the well-meaning people of the town have a difficult time understanding us. To a large extent, we live in separate worlds. They live in Chase, British Columbia, Canada. We live in Neskonlith, Secwepemc territory.

I drove up to the hills above Neskonlith on an afternoon in June 2012. I was just back from New York, where I was serving as the co-chair to the Global Indigenous Peoples Caucus at the United Nations’ Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII), and I was looking for a quiet place to think things over.

Somehow we had gotten our message through the clamour of states that make up the United Nations. We had condemned, as Indigenous peoples, the innocent-sounding doctrine of discovery, which was the tool—the legal fiction—Europeans used to claim our lands for themselves. Even that claim rested on obvious mistruths. The Americas were first portrayed as terra nullius on European maps. But in almost all cases, Europeans were met, at times within minutes of their arrival, by Indigenous peoples. There was an attempt to get around this inconvenient fact by declaring us non-human, but this was difficult even for Europeans to sustain over time. The doctrine of discovery remained because it was a legal fig leaf they could use to cover naked thievery.

In New York, the United Nations report had called this doctrine frankly racist and described it as no more legitimate than the slavery laws of the same era. Most important, the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues’ committee report attacked the ongoing efforts to extinguish our title to the land through force or one-sided negotiations as a continuing violation of international law.1

I would like to think that we live in a world where enlightenment—like the Permanent Forum statement on the doctrine of discovery—is a warm breeze spreading across the planet, and that with patience and good faith we will finally be warmed by the justice we have been so long denied. But I know that is not the case. At an earlier session of the UN, Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand fought bitterly against the whole world to try to block the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), which eventually passed in 2007 by a vote of 144 to 4, with Canada leading the charge of the rights deniers.2

Nothing we have ever gained has been given to us or surrendered without a fight. When circumstances forced the Europeans to make concessions, as was the case with the parts of the Royal Proclamation of 1763 that recognized Indigenous sovereignty, the next generation would take advantage of a resurgence in its strength to reverse the concessions and try to push us even further into poverty and dependence.

Still, we have not given up and, as my father, Grand Chief George Manuel, often pointed out, the most important gift we have received from our parents, grandparents, and great- grandparents is the legacy of struggle. They have opened the trail we now pass along and, in a very real way, set the destination for our journey.

Before we look at where we are today and where we are heading, it is important that we first look at how we arrived at this place. I will briefly describe the process for my Secwepemc people. Among the other Indigenous peoples in Canada and throughout the Americas, there are many variations, but there is one constant: the land was stolen from underneath us.

Europeans made their initial land claim on our Secwepemc lands in 1778 when Captain Cook sailed along the British Columbia coast, more than four hundred kilometres away from our territory. According to the tenets of the doctrine of discovery, all that Europeans had to do to expropriate the lands in a region was to sail past a river mouth and make a claim to all of the lands in its watershed. Our lands, given to us by our Creator and inhabited by us for thousands of years, were transformed into a British “possession,” not only without our consent and without our knowledge, but also without a single European setting foot on our territory.

In the early 1800s, European traders and advance men like Simon Fraser did begin to show up on our rivers. For the first fifty years, they were seen and treated as guests on our lands. We had more or less friendly relations. We traded with them, we shared food with them, and we often helped them on their journeys through our territory. On a personal level, we tolerated their eccentricities and they tolerated ours.

But gradually, the numbers of these uninvited guests began to increase, and they began to act less and less like guests and more and more as lords. It was a process that Indigenous peoples around the world have experienced. The strangers arrive and offer trade and friendship. The Indigenous population responds in kind. Gradually the strangers begin to take up more and more space and make more and more requests from their hosts, until finally they are not requesting at all. They are demanding. And they are backing their demands with garrisoned outposts.

In the case of the people of the Interior Plateau, we are fortunate to have a document from our ancestors that describes the precise pattern of usurpation. This declaration, which is known as the Laurier Memorial, was presented to Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier on August 25, 1910, by the Interior chiefs when the prime minister was visiting Kamloops on an election campaign stop.3

It was prepared in the months before in mass meetings by our chiefs and people, who wanted to ensure that Canadians knew that we clearly remembered the betrayals of the previous century and that we demand redress in the current one. We called it a memorial because it represented, in a very precise way, our collective memories of our history with the settlers.

Europeans first came to the Interior Plateau looking for things they could pick up and cart away, as they did around the world. In this case, it was precious metals. The following are excerpts of what our chiefs told Laurier about their initial experience with Europeans:

At first they looked only for gold. We knew the latter was our property, but as we did not use it much nor need it to live by we did not object to their searching for it. They told us, “Your country is rich and you will be made wealthy by our coming. We wish just to pass over your lands in quest of gold.”

Soon they saw the country was good and some of them made up their minds, to settle it. They commenced to take up pieces of land here and there. They told us they wanted only the use of these pieces of land for a few years, and then would hand them back to us in an improved condition; meanwhile they would give us some of the products they raised for the loan of our land.

Thus they commenced to enter our “houses,” or live on our “ranches.” With us when a person enters our house he becomes our guest, and we must treat him hospitably as long as he shows no hostile intentions. At the same time we expect him to return to us equal treatment for what he receives.

It soon became apparent that the settlers were not offering equal treatment, and they were not planning to leave. On the contrary, their numbers were increasing. This led to growing unrest in the 1860s at a time when the route to the newly discovered Cariboo gold fields passed along the Fraser River to the Thompson and North Thompson rivers, directly through Secwepemc territory. The trickle of prospectors grew into a full-blown gold rush. With the unrest putting this new mining wealth at risk, James Douglas, the governor of the small colony on the coast, sent an emissary to meet with Chief Neskonlith to try to defuse the situation.

Chief Neskonlith, who was known as a tough and uncompromising leader, had been chosen to speak for the four bands around the Shuswap lakes. At the time, our people were under great stress because European diseases were sweeping through our country. First smallpox, then waves of measles, influenza, and tuberculosis. But even with our people in a weakened state, Neskonlith was forceful with the colonial representative. He told him that the encroachments on our land had reached an intolerable level and we would not accept any more European settlement. The emissary understood that this was not a bluff. But he had no financial or other resources that he could offer a deal with. So he simply asked Chief Neskonlith what the necessary lands were for his people and the other three Secwepemc bands.

Neskonlith showed the essential area on the emissary’s map. Together they marked out the territory for exclusive Secwepemc use; today, this area is known as the Neskonlith Douglas Reserve 1862. On this map, our land area totals almost a million acres; the emissary agreed this territory was for the exclusive use of our people. Chief Neskonlith then went out and staked the land where non-Secwepemc settlement was to be forbidden.

But as Indigenous peoples around the world have discovered, a deal is not a deal when it comes to settler governments. No restraint was placed on settlers moving onto our lands. In fact, colonial powers began to give away 160 acres of our land, free of charge, to each settler who applied. At the same time, in an astounding act of racism, the authorities allocated only 20 acres for Indian families. Our forests were then handed over to the control of the lumber companies. Our million acres was gradually, without our consent or even notification, whittled down to barely seven thousand acres scattered in small strips across our territory. The Interior chiefs told Laurier in 1910 that they had been betrayed by the government.

[The settlers] have knocked down ... the posts of all the Indian tribes. They say there are no lines, except what they make. They have taken possession of all the Indian country and claim it as their own.... They have stolen our lands and everything on them.... After a time when they saw that our patience might get exhausted and that we might cause trouble if we thought all the land was to be occupied by whites they set aside many small reservations for us here and there over the country. This was their proposal not ours, and we never accepted these reservations as settlement for anything, nor did we sign any papers or make any treaties.... They thought we would be satisfied with this, but we never have been satisfied and never will be until we get our rights.

Bitter insult, the Interior chiefs told Laurier, was added to injury when the settlers not only invaded our territory, but also began to treat us as trespassers and bar us from the lands that had been ours since time immemorial.

Gradually as the whites ... became more and more powerful, and we less and less powerful, they little by little changed their policy towards us, and commenced to put restrictions on us.... They treat us as subjects without any agreement to that effect, and force their laws on us without our consent and irrespective of whether they are good for us or not.... In many places we are debarred from camping, traveling, gathering roots and obtaining wood and water as heretofore. Our people are fined and imprisoned for breaking the game and fish laws and using the same game and fish which we were told would always be ours for food. Gradually we are becoming regarded as trespassers over a large portion of this our country.

Indigenous peoples from around the world recognize this process of slow, lawless confiscation of their lands, with promises made and laws of protection enacted, then quickly broken as soon as the coalescence of forces again favours the settlers.

Non-Indigenous readers may be thinking—yes, terrible things went on in those days, but really, it’s all ancient history. To you, I want to stress that this is not at all ancient history. The meeting with Laurier occurred in my own grandfather’s time. When I was young, I hunted on Secwepemc lands with my father, and I remember being surprised to see how nervous he was that he would get caught by the authorities. In recent years, my daughters have been arrested and sent to jail for protesting a new encroachment on Secwepemc lands. My people have been beaten, jailed, and shot at by the authorities simply for occupying our own lands.

And it is the loss of our land that has been the precise cause of our impoverishment. Indigenous lands today account for only 0.36 per cent of British Columbian territory. The settler share is the remaining 99.64 per cent. In Canada overall the percentage is even worse, with Indigenous peoples controlling only 0.2 per cent of the land and the settlers 99.8 per cent. With this distribution of the land, you don’t have to have a doctorate in economics to understand who will be poor and who will be rich. And our poverty is crushing. Along with suffering all of the calamities of life that hit the poor with greater impact, our lives are seven years shorter than the lives of non-Indigenous Canadians. Our unemployment rates are four times higher. The resources to educate our children are only a third of what is spent on non- Indigenous Canadian children. Our youth commit suicide at a rate more than five times higher. We are living the effects of this dispossession every day of our lives, and we have been living this misery in Canada for almost 150 years.

What has been the response of the Canadian government when we protest the illegal seizure of our lands and the intentional impoverishment of our people? Generally, it has been to simply turn away. Until our voices become too loud to ignore; then false promises or outright repression come into play. This was the response after our chiefs made their determined plea to Laurier. First, silence from Canada. Then, after the First World War, when Indigenous veterans returned to their communities and began to insist on action on the land and on rights issues, the Dominion government responded with unprecedented repression.

The returning First World War veterans, like my father’s uncles, François and William Pierrish, were radicalized by the war. François had been band chief before he went overseas, and he returned to his post at war’s end with a new determination to hold the government to account for its broken promises to our people. François had the toughness of old Chief Neskonlith, and he began to resist the government at every turn. But the stress of the war and the fight against the government took its toll on him; while still a young man in the 1920s, he died of a heart attack in his hayfield. His brother, William, who had lost an arm in the nightmarish battles in the trenches in France, took over as chief and as leader in our resistance. In 1926, William Pierrish and two other B.C. chiefs travelled to London, England, to present a petition to the Privy Council to demand action on the land question. Their petition stated:

We Indians want our native titles to our native lands, and all our land contains as we are the original people of Canada. We Indians want our consent before laws are made upon our possessions.4

The Privy Council refused to get involved in a fight with the Dominion government and pointed the chiefs back to Ottawa. Ottawa responded to the threat posed by this new Indian activism by passing draconian Indian Act amendments in 1927 that tightened the control over our daily lives and that made Indian organizing, for all intents and purposes, illegal. The government tried to separate activist veterans like Chief William Pierrish from the people by offering them citizenship—with the basic human rights afforded other Canadians—but only if they surrendered their Indian status. Virtually none of the veterans accepted this poison pill. Chief Pierrish summed it up when he said, “We do not want enfranchisement, we want to be Indians to the end of the time.”5

The purpose of these measures was made clear by the Indian superintendent in the 1920s, Duncan Campbell Scott. Speaking with uncharacteristic frankness, he called our people “a weird and waning race” and said: “I want to get rid of the Indian problem. Our object is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed.”6

The 1927 Indian Act amendments, which were in force until 1951, brought about a shameful period in Canada’s history. Our people were, by Canadian law, virtually forbidden to leave our reserves without permission from the Indian agent, who now controlled almost every aspect of our lives, and the courts were effectively cut off to us as an avenue for addressing a land claim against the government. Our reserves began to resemble the internment camps that were set up during the world wars for enemy aliens.

But this repression did not extinguish resistance. It merely drove it underground. Communities met at night with travelling activists like Andrew Paull, who kept the fight for Aboriginal title alive. Paull, a Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) political organizer, had attended law school, and he was able to travel the country as the manager of an Indian lacrosse team. He founded the Allied Tribes of British Columbia in the 1920s and later founded a loose coalition he somewhat grandly called the North American Indian Brotherhood. Because of the restrictions of the day, both organizations existed mainly in his briefcase, but Paull, tirelessly criss-crossing the country to preach resistance, provided the light in this period of darkness.

It was at these travelling meetings, where Andrew Paull called for justice on the land question, that my father and many others of his generation headed down the path of national and international struggle. In the 1950s, when some of the more oppressive laws against our people were finally lifted, my father’s generation began to build the national organization—the National Indian Brotherhood (NIB), forerunner of the Assembly of First Nations (AFN)—to take their fight to Ottawa and to Canadians. But first they had to find each other again. Organizing meant taking a collection at a local meeting, travelling long distances, and sleeping in their cars. As we will see in the following chapters, these men and women—for women were extraordinarily present in these battles—led us back out of political wilderness and fought for our rights in the national and provincial capitals, in the courts, and when necessary, by demonstrating in the streets. The struggles of my parents’ generation are part of this book not only because it is important that we honour them, but also because we can learn from their successes and their failures.

Along the way, we will examine their civil rights battle in the 1960s, the critical battle against the 1969 White Paper, court victories like the 1973 Calder decision, and the direct action of the 1980s that won recognition of Aboriginal rights in the Canadian Constitution. We will also look at how their ongoing fight for justice on the international stage transformed our struggle from a group of isolated activists fighting for survival to a movement of more than 350 million Indigenous peoples from around the world working together to regain our land and dignity.

The book then focuses on how my generation has been able to build on the successes of our parents’ generation, but we will also look at some of our missed chances and wrong turns. This history is still being written with our deeds; the story includes some tensions and conflicts within our movement. As we search for the path through the chaotic and often bruising world we all inhabit, we should not be afraid to disagree among ourselves.

This is a fault that sometimes appears in our movement. It is a fundamental tenet of Indigenous peoples that everyone is allowed to speak their mind. That is the only way we can move forward as a people. It shows no lack of respect to point out that someone may be leading us down the wrong path or that another path may take us more quickly to our goal.

Finally, before we embark on this journey, it is important to note that when we speak of rebuilding Indigenous societies and Indigenous economies, we are not seeking to join the multinationals on Wall Street or Bay Street as junior partners, but to win back the tools to build our own societies that are consistent with our culture and values. Our goal is not simply to replace Settlers Resource Inc. with Indigenous Resource Inc. Instead we are interested in building true Indigenous economies that begin and end with our unique relationship to the land. This is essential so we can be true not only to ourselves, but also to a future we share with all of the peoples of the world.

Our Indigenous view—which includes air, water, land, animals, and people in a continually sustaining circle—is increasingly seen by both scientists and citizens as the only way to a sustainable future. As Indigenous peoples, we must always keep in mind that taking care of Mother Earth is the most important contribution we can make. This is how we can support a new international economy that is not based on the outdated and environmentally unsound laissez-faire concepts of economics. In this endeavour, we can be an important ally of those growing forces—in Canadian society and internationally—that understand that for our collective survival on the planet, fundamental changes must be made. Mother Earth cannot simply be reduced to the industrial binary of profit and garbage.

We welcome the new alliances. And when we speak about reclaiming a measure of control over our lands, we obviously do not mean throwing Canadians off it and sending them back to the countries they came from—that is the kind of reductio ad absurdum that some of those who refuse to acknowledge our title try to use against us. We know that for centuries Canadians have been here building their society, which, despite its failings, has become the envy of many in the world. All Canadians have acquired a basic human right to be here. We also know that Canada does not have the astronomical amount of money it would cost to pay us for the centuries of use of our lands. We are certainly asking for compensation for the illegal seizures, but those amounts we can discuss. And we can begin these more precise discussions with Grand Chief Ron Derrickson’s Afterword to this book. At present, we are asking for the right to protect our Aboriginal title land, to have a say on any development on our lands, and when we find the land can be safely and sustainably developed, to be compensated for the wealth it generates.

That is the thought I had in the hills above Neskonlith that warm June afternoon, when I returned from the UN meeting. The land retains its power and its beauty. All we have to do is rethink our place on it. Simply by removing the shadow of the doctrine of discovery, you find a rich tapestry of peoples who need to sit down to speak to each other as equals and build a new mechanism to co-operate with each other, to satisfy each other’s needs and aspirations in the modern world.

There is room on this land for all of us and there must also be, after centuries of struggle, room for justice for Indigenous peoples. That is all that we ask. And we will settle for nothing less.

Institutionalizing a People: Indian School, Indian Jail

My own history of challenging the unacceptable treatment of my people had modest beginnings. I was still a teenager at St. Mary’s residential school in Mission, British Columbia, and I was just back from summer vacation. Seated in the noisy dining hall, I was eating another mushy macaroni dinner when I realized that the food they were serving us was worse than the food they serve in jail. That moment led to my first political act—a strike over the food in residential school, where meat and fresh vegetables were almost unknown.

I knew the school was below the standards of jail food because I had spent most of my summer holiday housed at the Spy Hill Gaol in Calgary. That adventure began in July when I decided to hitchhike to nowhere, heading east and meeting up with others on similar journeys. Canadian highways were full of wandering young people then. Immersed in the youth culture of the 1960s, we all wore our hair long after the fashion of the day.

When I reached Golden, an old logging town and railway junction just west of the Rockies, thirty young people were lined up for rides. The group I was with went to the back of the line at the foot of Ten Mile Hill. I thought it would be days before we’d get a ride out. But late in the afternoon, we noticed a freight train, made up of a long line of empty boxcars, chugging up the hill parallel to the highway.

“I know how to jump freights,” one of the older guys said, and he began to run across the scrubby field to the tracks. We followed. The train car doors were open. We ran alongside the slow-moving train, then slung ourselves on board by grabbing the door handle, feeling a kind of youthful euphoria as we stood in the open doorway watching the valley disappear below.

The sun was setting as the train levelled off at the five-thousand-foot-high Kicking Horse Pass. By the time we reached the foothills in the east, moonlight filled the doorway. It was the type of adventure that you dream about when you are trapped in the airless dormitories of residential school.

But my journey to nowhere ended abruptly in Calgary. When the train halted along a side track in the Calgary yard, we stayed quiet in the corner of the box car while a flashlight swept by the open door. We expected that at some point the train would move east again, so we waited wordlessly. But half an hour later the flashlight returned, this time with Canadian Pacific Railway police and a barking German shepherd. They hauled us out of the freight car, and it seemed that they were about to let us go when the CPR police sergeant came by, looked us over, and made some remark like, “Call the police and send these girls to jail.” Girls no doubt referred to our long hair.

We spent the night in the city jail and were led into court the next morning. The charge was trespassing, and we were given thirty days in jail or a twenty-five-dollar fine. The two older boys paid their fines on the spot. The other young guy was from Ontario. He called his parents, who actually drove non-stop from that province to get him out. I did not have anything near twenty-five dollars in my pocket or anyone who would send me the money. And that, finally, was the “crime” I was jailed for.

I was only sixteen years old and I knew that I wasn’t supposed to be held in an adult jail like Spy Hill. Whoever processed me must have known this, too, but they went ahead and locked me up anyway. I didn’t protest because even more than jail I feared being turned over to child protection. As Indian kids, we all knew that that was the worst that could happen to you. Any of our friends who were taken away had disappeared into the system only to be thrown out a few years later as emotional wrecks. It was something we talked about as kids. Until I was eighteen, when anyone asked my age, I would lie and say I was older. It was safer that way.

Still, for a sixteen-year-old, Spy Hill was a fearful place. The building was made of cement and iron and, at first sight, the men there also seemed to be made of cement and iron. I kept very quiet and tried hard not to attract attention to myself.

But I soon realized that, with the regimen and boredom and the dorm-style sleeping, it was not so different from residential school. Most of the men were there on drunk and disorderly charges. Virtually all of them were Native, and the main pastime was playing cribbage. I still remember the relentless sound of it. The shuffling of the cards and the snap of the deck: fifteen two, fifteen four, a pair is six ... All day long. With breaks only for meals or to take their turns at the other jail pastime, cutting the expansive jail lawn with rattling, old gas-powered mowers.

It was a familiar routine for these men, as they passed in and out of the jail’s revolving door. Quite a few were released and returned to jail even in the short time I was there. In Canada then, as today, it is not uncommon among Indigenous peoples to have family members go to jail. It is part of the system that we live with, in which a young Indian man still has a greater chance of going to jail than he does of finishing high school.

It is another a sad commentary on our place in the world that what struck me most about Spy Hill was how superior the food was to what they served us at residential school. Instead of the school’s pasta mush, we were served meat and potatoes, pork chops, broiled chicken, and sometimes even steak. Breakfast, I was especially impressed to discover, included sausages.

Like most teenagers, I was not given to thinking too deeply about things. When I started agitating for a food strike at the school that fall, I was inspired most, I think, by the sausages. But even then, I understood instinctively that this simple injustice, of feeding Indian kids food below the standards that you feed jail inmates, was a symbol of—and very much part of—the vast system that placed my people at the bottom of the heap in Canadian society. I began urging my classmates to join me in a strike, and I found a number of willing comrades. But we were still a minority. I decided we needed outside support.

I wrote to an organization, Native Alliance for Red Power (NARP), that I’d read about in The Star Weekly magazine. It was portrayed as a radical Indian organization that was ready to take direct action against any act of racism against Indian people. I wrote the letter in secret, all in red ink, and sent it to their address in Vancouver, asking for help in fighting the poor food at residential schools.

For a long while, I heard nothing. I was beginning to think that the organization was just some white journalist’s invention when NARP, quite literally, appeared before me.

It began as a bit of a mystery. I was told by another student that I was to show up at the school clinic for an eye exam. I knew the examiner was at the school, because some of the students had been called to go for an examination, generally on the recommendation of one of the teachers who had noticed them straining to read. But my eyesight was excellent. I couldn’t imagine why the eye examiner would insist on seeing me.

When I arrived at the clinic, the Stó:lō Indian eye technician, whom I came to know as

Wayne Bobb, held the sides of my head, looked into my eyes, and said quietly, “Don’t say anything, just listen. I’m from NARP. We received your letter. We support you.”

I couldn’t believe my eyes and ears. The travelling Indian eye technician was a NARP agent. Bobb, who would later become chief of his Seabird Island Band, explained, “We didn’t want to risk sending a letter because the school would intercept it. But we will support the strike.”

He then slipped me a pack of papers, which he said were for my eyes only. Later, when I opened them, I was deeply impressed to find not only the NARP newspaper but also radical writings of Malcolm X and the Black Panthers. I was amazed and thrilled by the cache and by NARP’s clandestine wiles. Looking back now, I understand that Bobb risked losing his job in this act of solidarity.

I hid the papers in the locker beside my bed, which was protected by a combination lock. I eventually showed this material to some of my closest friends, but I kept it well hidden from most. I knew that the majority of my fellow students, especially those who had been in residential school since they were five or six years old, were frightened at even the thought of breaking the rules or challenging the authority of the priests. But word travels fast in institutions. My strike plans and my contact with NARP were quickly transmitted to the teachers, and I was summoned to the principal’s office.

When I entered, I was surprised to see a stocky figure in a brush cut sitting with the principal. It was my father. He was the last person I expected to see there. We were not close in those years, and I had built up a certain amount of resentment toward him. I blamed him for the family breakup. I blamed him for my being forced into residential school. I blamed him for leaving me in jail in Calgary for almost a month because I couldn’t pay a twenty-five-dollar fine.

At the time, I was aware that he was working as a community development officer in Cowichan on Vancouver Island. I wondered how he had gotten here and how he even knew about my troubles. It turned out he had been almost 750 kilometres away at a meeting in Prince George when the call came from the school. He had immediately flown down to Vancouver and rented a car, the first time in his life that he had ever done so, and driven to St. Mary’s. The principal outlined my acts of insurrection. My father listened quietly. Then he asked if he could take me out for a while.

We drove to Sumas, about a half an hour away, just across the American border, for lunch. To my surprise, my father showed both concern and understanding. “I know what these places are like,” he said. “But if you keep pushing the food strike, you are responsible for all of the kids you lead out. You have to think on how you will feed them. Really, if you are going to lead people, you are responsible for your actions, not only for yourself, but for the people who follow you. And if you can’t feed them, you’ll find yourself with both sides mad at you.”

Then he surprised me again by adding, “But I’ll support whatever decision you make.”

It was the beginning of our reconciliation. From that moment, I began to know my father not as a dark force driving the family apart, as he had seemed in my childhood, but as the man I would soon come to know: a fighter, yes, but also a man of rare intelligence and a profound understanding of people.

My father, George Manuel, would go on to become national chief of the National Indian Brotherhood and founder of the World Council of Indigenous Peoples (WCIP). In many ways, I was both lucky and unlucky to grow up in a family that was devoted to the struggle of our people. Lucky in the sense that I often had a front-row seat in the political theatre of my father’s generation, and witnessed their often single-minded determination to advance the cause of our Aboriginal title and treaty rights. Throughout my childhood, I felt their unshakeable commitment, something that I came to understand through living my own life. At one time, I was very upset with my father and mother as parents, but I now know that they did their best under some extremely difficult circumstances.

I will not go into a great deal of detail about my childhood; this is not that kind of book. But to understand the struggle of my parents’ generation, you have to understand how exceptionally difficult their day-to-day lives were. They lived in a hostile world. They weren’t welcome in the town and, in their youth, had been explicitly excluded from the life there. Their economic prospects were slim to non-existent. It was a daily struggle simply to survive.

In my parents’ case, these challenges were compounded by the fact that they were both physically disabled at a time when disabled people were routinely mocked and ridiculed. My father had osseous tuberculosis as a child, which left him with a twisted hip bone and a profound limp. My mother, Marceline, suffered throughout her life from painful arthritis that left her, in many periods, unable to walk; she was also hospitalized for long periods as a child. That is what life dealt them.

But their circumstances left no time for self-pity. Both of them had to work hard physically to ensure the survival of the family. My father, despite his bad leg, became a boom man on the South Thompson River. It is dangerous, exhausting work, requiring exceptional balance. The boom man leaps from log to log, corralling and keeping the booms together and moving them to the conveyor belt that feeds the sawmill. He was the only Indian working for the lumber company, and to do his job while physically handicapped took amazing athletic ability and an iron will. To make extra money, he also worked as a Secwepemc language interpreter for a very understanding local lawyer, Henry Castillou, who defended our people in court. My father was a man determined to find a place in the world for himself and for his people.

My mother was a Ktunaxa (Kootenay) from the St. Mary’s Indian Band near Cranbrook, British Columbia. She was also a very hard-working woman. She was skilful at beadwork, and she would make tanned hides from the deer and other animals. She came from a long line of strong women. Her mother, Mary Paul, known by her Indian name of Kupe, had always expressed pride that the whites had not undermined her Ktunaxa language, which she passed on to my mother. In fact, she had taken the school bell from the school in her community as a kind of trophy for her victory against the nuns there, and passed it down to my mother. I kept it to remind my own children and grandchildren that we can and must outlive our oppressors.

On summer weekends, we all pitched in to take in the hay from our fields. Even when I was seven or eight years old, I would work dawn to dusk haying with the family. When haying was done, we repaired fences or hauled wood. In the late fall and early winter, we would go into the bush and cut Christmas trees. We did this after school, so it was always in the dark. My mother used to cut the trees and my older brother, Bobby, and I would haul them out to the logging road where my father was waiting with the car—with the seats stripped out to make room for the trees—and take them down to the valley where they were sold. I remember those cold, dark nights and my mother—despite her physical disabilities—bent over in the snow cutting the spruce trees with her double-bladed saw by the light of the first winter moon.

For several summers, my mother took us down to Washington State to pick strawberries for industrial producers. She had done this since she was very young. The farmers used to send battered old school buses up into British Columbia to pick up Indians to work in their fields because we could cross the border to work without a permit. For many years, it was an important source of income for our people. But then Mexican workers began being brought in for the first time and Indian berry pickers were pushed aside—housed in the worst camps and sent to the lower-yield fields where it was difficult to make any money. After a few seasons, my mother realized that we were no longer wanted as farm labour, either, and we never went back.

Despite their unrelenting toil, both of my parents understood that you had to give back to your community. In my mother’s case, it was as an active member of the homemakers’ club. The club raised money through raffles and sales for community projects or for emergency help for those who needed it most. In later years, she also became an alcohol and drug counsellor, and she was recognized in the community as a medicine woman.

My father’s personal work was Indian politics. It took up increasing amounts of his time and energy, as well as family money. He had grown up with his grandparents, who had reached adulthood before the intense invasion of our territory and the founding of the town of Chase. Through his grandparents, he understood what had been lost and what that loss had done to us. In the early 1960s, he had inherited the leadership of Andrew Paull’s North American Indian Brotherhood, a role that kept him on the road most weekends. Few Indian people had telephones, and writing letters was the only way Indigenous activists could communicate with each other between meetings. When he was home, I remember him working long into the night, pecking away at an old Underwood typewriter with his fingers smudged from the carbon paper, working long after I fell asleep, and then up and already working at his daily chores when I awakened in the morning.

As I grew older, he was more often on the road, travelling as cheaply as possible, sleeping in his car or in the homes of political supporters, but still having to spend his hard-earned money on gas and food that my mother knew was needed for the family. It is not that she didn’t support the struggle, but she became increasingly frustrated at her children having to do without while meagre family funds subsidized my father’s political work. I remember my mother and father getting into arguments about this, which I think were made a little more fierce because each knew in their hearts that the other had a valid point and that really there was no resolution. My father was a determined, independent man who saw the struggle as the only avenue to make life more livable for his children; my mother was an equally determined and independent woman who knew that the cause, however noble, was hurting the family. Tensions grew until they pushed my parents completely apart and we found ourselves boarding the train with our mother for Chilliwack, leaving my father behind.

I remember the five of us standing on the platform. I was about thirteen years old at the time. My sister Vera was fifteen, Arlene was nine, Richard was seven, and Doreen was only five years old. My older brother, Bobby, was not with us. He was seventeen and he had run off a few months before. By coincidence, he was getting off the train, returning for a visit to Neskonlith, just as we were leaving. He had picked up some mill work while he was away and he had money in his pocket. There were lots of jobs in those days, to the point that you could arrive in most Western towns in the evening and by the next morning be working as some kind of labourer. Bobby was happy to see us at the station—thinking that somehow we had known he was coming and gone out to meet him.

My mother explained that she was leaving our father, and Bobby said he understood. She asked him not to tell our father that he had seen us. Bobby said don’t worry, he didn’t even plan on speaking to him. That’s how things were between Bobby and my father in those days, and they would remain like that for some time. My father, for all his accomplishments, was not a great success at fatherhood in those early years. He later recognized this and made efforts to make amends.

My brother Bobby stayed on the platform, and we headed south to Chilliwack. Looking back to our time there, it seems like a strange sort of exile. My mother rented a house in the rundown part of town. My brothers and sisters were upset with the sudden breakup of the family, and my mother was forced to work hard as a domestic and at local farm work to support us. We did not realize that the family crisis had only started.

The new ordeal began while we were in the fields picking strawberries for a local producer in Yarrow, British Columbia. While we were working, the owner came out to speak to my mother. He pointed at a government man waiting for her in the shade at the end of the field.

My mother limped over to speak to him. A few minutes later she returned and called us around. She said the man was from Indian health services. He had told her that if she agreed to go into the Coqualeetza Indian Hospital in Sardis right away, she would be eligible for a long- awaited hip replacement operation that could relieve the daily pain from the arthritis and ensure her continued mobility. If she didn’t accept the immediate operation, he told her that her name would be put at the bottom of the list and it could be many years, if ever, before she would be eligible for treatment again. The operation would involve months of convalescence in the hospital, which meant she would not be able to take care of us for a long time. It was her only chance if she hoped to remain mobile.

My father drove from Neskonlith to pick us up a few days later. We went back with him to our house on the river, but even this would be temporary. At the end of the summer, he would leave for a community development course at Laval University in Quebec City. It was the 1960s and a faint breeze of reform was passing through the Indian Affairs Department. There was a program to select the most active and effective local leaders and train them in skills that they could apply at the community level. My father was one of those selected. It was supposed be an independent initiative, but the design of the program still had the Department’s fingerprints on it. The Indian community development workers were to be paired with white workers, who were paid far more and given leadership roles. Indian community workers described this as working Lone Ranger style, with themselves inevitably given the role of Tonto.

But the course would get my father off the river and position him to work full-time for our people. He had to go, and Indian Affairs made it clear that he would not be able to bring his children with him. For the family, my father’s imminent departure presented a painful choice. We were faced with going either into foster care or to residential school.

School, we hoped, was a way that at least some of us could stay together. My father, like most kids of his generation, had spent much of his youth in institutions, first in the Kamloops Indian Residential School and then, when he was sick with tuberculosis, several years recuperating at the Indian hospital. He knew residential school could be tough and he warned us about it. He told us that, at the school, what they teach you is to follow a set of institutional rules and minute-by-minute instructions. So all they really teach you is how to follow orders from the authorities. We would sleep in large dorms, he told us, and we would have to line up for everything.

That summer my father continued to work as a boom man on the river and at his political work. Bobby returned to his mill job and my oldest sister, Vera, who was now sixteen, had elected to stay in Chilliwack. So I was the oldest one at home, in charge of the cooking and taking care of the younger ones. When the summer ended, it was finally decided that my youngest sister, Doreen, would stay with a family on the reserve and the three of us—Arlene, Richard, and I—would go to the Kamloops Indian Residential School.

I remember feeling profoundly sad when my father drove us up to the school. As I sat in the waiting room with my sister and brother, that sadness was overtaken by fear. The principal, Father Noonan, came into the room, introduced himself, and told us we would be divided up. My sister would go to the girls’ dorm. My brother Richard would be a junior boy and I would be a senior boy. We were split up after all and although we would remain close for most of our lives, we never did live as a family again. In fact, it would be a couple of years before I even saw my mother. But when I did, she always made me understand that we were a family and that I had to help my sisters and brothers. That feeling has remained with me all of my life. My mother was a very strong spiritual leader whose medicine I learned to trust.

During these years, I went to three different residential schools (Kamloops Indian Residential School, St. Mary’s in Mission, and St. Eugene’s Residential School in Cranbrook, British Columbia). I did not suffer any extreme abuse, nothing like the terrible legacy of physical and, as we have all heard, sexual abuse that was suffered by many. But even without this extreme abuse, I remember the residential school experience as a time of great loneliness and alienation. The schools are cold places to spend your youth, and the staff worked diligently to reinforce in us a sense that in Canadian society, we were the bottom of the heap and were powerless to resist. They demanded, and rewarded, obedience. Nothing else.

After my lunch in Sumas with my father, I went back to the school and dropped the planned food strike. But not the ideas behind it. I understood from my father that simply lashing out against injustice is rarely productive. You have to think things through; you have to work with people first and develop clear objectives and then be ready to act. You are responsible for those you lead.

At that moment, my father and his generation were ready to act. They were aided in an unexpected way by rise of the civil rights movement in the United States. Canadian journalists suddenly began to compare the treatment of Indians in Canada to that of blacks in the United States, and Canadian politicians began to look at program solutions they could borrow from the Americans. There were, in fact, important similarities in the situations of American blacks and of Indians in Canada. Both peoples had been subjected to prolonged institutional and informal discrimination that had left them in abject poverty on the fringes of society. But there was an important distinction as well. Indigenous peoples had not been stolen into slavery and brought to a foreign land, but had had their land stolen out from underneath them.

The first basic human rights opening had come after the Second World War. In the 1951 amendments to the Indian Act, the explicit barriers to Indian organizing that had been put into place in 1927, and a few of the more ridiculous laws such as barring Indians from pool halls, were repealed. But the heart of the Act was left intact—with final decisional power over every aspect of our lives under the control of the Indian Affairs minister, and, more precisely, Indian Affairs bureaucrats. The amended Act even presented a new danger by opening the door to provincial powers invading reserves in areas like child welfare, but at least it decriminalized our struggle and allowed our leaders to emerge from the shadows.

Then, in 1960, the Diefenbaker government extended the federal vote to Indians. It was a controversial move for my people. Admittedly, it was clearly an improvement on the earlier policy that allowed certain Indians to “enfranchise,” that is, to become full Canadian citizens instead of “wards of the state,” but at the price of losing their Indian status. This right had been offered to the thousands of Indians—like my great-uncles François and William Pierrish—who fought in the First and Second World Wars, but only a tiny handful of veterans accepted it. Enfranchisement was also required for Indian people to be accepted into certain professions, like medicine and law. It was because of his refusal to give up his Indian status that Andrew Paull had pulled out of law school before receiving his diploma.

The 1960 change was a significant departure because the clearly racist part of enfranchisement—demanding Indians give up their heritage in order to vote—was dropped. At the same time, many Indian individuals and communities resisted the right to vote. They did not see themselves as Canadians but as members of sovereign nations trapped inside a country they had never sought to be part of.

My father accepted the vote, preferring to see it as a tool we could use to further our cause. Indians became, at least for that brief period during election campaigns, important to whites. As soon as we got the vote, Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) candidates came to the reserve and witnessed the crushing weight of our poverty. They began to raise issues like our terrible housing, the low levels of assistance given to Indians compared to whites, and the racism we lived with on a daily basis—including the racist drinking laws and the restaurants that refused to serve us. My father fought on this civil rights basis in the 1960s because it was a way to build support for the larger battle to come.

When he finished his course in Laval, my father went to work as a community development worker in Cowichan on Vancouver Island, where he deepened his lifelong respect for the coastal peoples, their spiritualism, their fabulous art, and their rich cultural heritage. It is also where, finding himself parachuted into a community not his own, he learned how essential it is in any social movement to begin by listening to the people—their hopes and dreams, sorrows and fears—before prescribing remedies.

At first, he tried to call the people to action on a range of issues that he thought needed to be addressed. He was met with politeness but no sense of commitment to an outsider’s agenda. He called meetings but no one came. Finally he understood that he had gotten it backwards. First listen, then call a meeting on what the people are interested in.

So he visited every household in the community to sit with the people at their kitchen tables and listen to what they had to say. In an overwhelming number of cases, the issue that arose was the crowded and unsanitary housing conditions. When my father finally called a meeting on housing, the community hall was packed. He picked out some natural activists and brought them in to help develop a strategy on fighting the government for improvements. At one point, he led a group of local activists to Victoria and physically walked them through the provincial government departments so they would have a sense of who the people were they were fighting. Finally, they decided that the only thing the government reacted to was embarrassment, and they called in the media to see the terrible conditions the people were living in. As we have seen so often, this strategy can get results, although generally only in the short term. In my father’s community development work, however, it lit a flame of resistance in the community, and some of the activists there continued fighting at his side for the rest of his life. I understood the impression he made when, almost fifty years later, I was embraced by the community because of my father’s work.

The lesson he took from his experience in Cowichan, which he hung onto throughout the rest of his time in politics, was simply that you have to begin by listening. Programs and organizations that don’t serve the people’s most basic needs are less than useless—they are hindrances to development.

While he was working in Cowichan, my father was still active in the provincial and national political struggle. He was invited to sit on the National Indian Advisory Board the Liberal government had set up to shape what they promised would be a new approach to Indian Affairs in Canada, and he was elected co-chair of the board.

File:Grand Chief George Manuel and Authur Manuel.png

With my father, Grand Chief George Manuel, Edmonton, Alberta, 1969

As a community development worker in Cowichan, he was nominally an employee of Indian Affairs. In 1968, he moved to Edmonton to work at the Indian Association of Alberta (IAA) with the dynamic young Cree leader Harold Cardinal. In Alberta, and across the country by this time, there was a perceived need to build a truly national Indian organization that could take the fundamental issues of the Indigenous struggle to the power centres in Ottawa. Not as advisers to the government, but as representatives of the people. Harold developed a great respect for my father during this period, seeing in him someone who combined a fine strategic instinct with a talent for delivering a stump speech and a boom man’s way of attacking problems head-on. My father, for his part, admired Harold’s quick intelligence and considerable courage in challenging the government from his Alberta base, rare qualities in those days. He was also impressed that while Harold had been well educated in white schools, he still spoke his Cree language and was profoundly rooted in his culture.

Shortly after my father moved to Alberta, Harold suggested he consider running for the presidency of the newly formed National Indian Brotherhood. But at the time, my father wasn’t ready. He was planning to return to British Columbia and he was already working with other leaders at founding the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs (UBCIC). The Union would make a concerted push on the B.C. land question, to have our legal claim to our lands recognized by the government.

There was also, in these initial months, a sense that the National Indian Brotherhood lacked clear focus. It was designed to represent the ten provincial and two territorial Indian organizations, and this made it a grab bag of some six hundred communities, sixty nations, and treaty and non-treaty peoples who were only indirectly represented through their provincial bodies. It was uncertain how anyone could bring such a loose coalition together.

Ironically, the impetus for unity, and what finally put my father into the leadership of the National Indian Brotherhood, was provided by the Trudeau government’s Indian Affairs minister, Jean Chrétien. In June 1969, Chrétien unveiled a legislative time bomb that was designed not only to destroy any hope of recognition of Aboriginal title and rights in Canada, but also to terminate Canada’s treaties with Indian nations. It was the now infamous White Paper (Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy, 1969).

This statement sparked an epic battle that did not end in 1970 when the Indian Association of Alberta presented its counterproposal in the Red Paper. In many important ways, it was the opening shot in the current battle for our land and our historic rights against a policy designed to terminate our title to our Indigenous territories and our rights as Indigenous peoples. The White Paper of 1969 is where our modern struggle begins.

White Paper to Red Paper: Drawing the Battle Lines

It could have been a scene from a movie. More than two hundred chiefs from across Canada packed the parliamentary visitors’ gallery to hear the announcement of the government’s long-awaited new Indian policy. It had been preceded by years of consultations with Indian leaders throughout Canada, including with National Indian Advisory Board that my father co-chaired. When the Indian Affairs minister of the day, Jean Chrétien, stood to deliver his White Paper in the House of Commons, the leaders waited with great anticipation that, finally, a government was preparing to move on their demands.

In the movie version, the young Québécois Indian Affairs minister would have announced a new era in Canadian-Indigenous relations based on historic rights and international justice for all nations. That is what the leaders in the gallery were hoping to hear. But instead, they received the shock of their lives.

After beginning with oddly empty phrases like “to be an Indian is to be a man, with all a man’s needs and abilities,” the 1969 White Paper proposed abolishing the Indian Act and at the same time sweeping aside Indian status and Indian lands and turning First Nations people into ethnic groups—like Italian-Canadians or Irish-Canadians—to be gradually absorbed into the melting pot. Any further services to Indigenous peoples would be turned over to the provinces, and existing treaties would be wound down. This policy would, in the cheerful words of the White Paper, “enable the Indian people to be free—free to develop Indian cultures in an environment of legal, social and economic equality with other Canadians.”7

To understand the full depth of the anger and sense of betrayal felt by my people, you only have to imagine what would have followed if the federal government announced in Parliament that it was stripping Quebecers of all of their constitutional protections, including their political institutions like the National Assembly and all control over the territory of Quebec, under the noble goal of ensuring they were completely absorbed into the English-Canadian mainstream. Outrage is not a strong enough word to describe the reaction of the Québécois in that situation, and outrage is not strong enough to describe the reaction of my people.

The White Paper’s attack on our lands and on our very essence as Indigenous peoples galvanized the newly formed National Indian Brotherhood. For my father, it became the battle of the decade. He and his fellow leaders organized mass meetings across the country to send Ottawa the message that the White Paper would never be accepted. Its mission, after all, was the same as Duncan Campbell Scott’s stated goal in the 1920s: solving the Indian problem by ensuring that every individual in that “weird and waning race” would disappear into the Canadian body politic. Unfortunately, these goals and most of the specific policies of the White Paper have remained constant in Canadian Indian policy ever since.

Concerning our constitutional rights, the White Paper pointed out that “under the authority of Head 24, Section 91 of the British North America [BNA] Act, the Parliament of Canada has enacted the Indian Act. Various federal-provincial agreements and some other statutes also affect Indian policies.” To address this fact, the White Paper argued, “the removal of the reference in the constitution would be necessary to end the legal distinction between Indians and other Canadians.” In other words, we were to be ejected from the Constitution and not recognized at all in Canada.

To drive this point home, the White Paper went after our lands. Again, it began with the banal. “The result of Crown ownership and the Indian Act has been to tie the Indian people to a land system that lacks flexibility and inhibits development. Indian people do not have control of their lands except as the Government allows and this is no longer acceptable to them.”

They proposed that our land, after some “intermediate states,” be reduced to “fee simple” ownership. That is to say, to turn our homelands into real estate that is bought and sold on the open market with property taxes collected by the provinces, as with all other mortgage lots. Aboriginal title lands would be struck out of existence and reserve lands would cease to exist under the fee simple arrangement. As the White Paper put it:

The Government believes that full ownership implies many things. It carries with it the free choice of use, of retention or of disposition. In our society it also carries with it an obligation to pay for certain services. The Government recognizes that it may not be acceptable to put all lands into the provincial systems immediately and make them subject to taxes. When the Indian people see that the only way they can own and fully control land is to accept taxation the way other Canadians do, they will make that decision.

This last point is crucial in our struggle today. A small number of Indian people are working with the government and conservative think tanks like the Fraser Institute in support of the fee simple trap, which is still very much part of the government strategy for getting rid of our collective land base. We will look at the return of this idea, which has risen from the grave like the undead in a zombie tale, in more detail in chapter 15.

The fact that these measures would not only contravene but also render inoperative the treaties was immediately recognized by the chiefs. Their protests were met with an astounding response by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.

“It is inconceivable,” he said, “that in a given society, one section of the society have a treaty with the other section of the society. We must be all equal under the laws and we must not sign treaties amongst ourselves.” Furthermore, “we can’t recognize aboriginal rights because no society can be built on historical might have beens.”8

To finalize the evisceration of Indian status in Canada, and for the federal government to wash its hands of its obligation to Indigenous nations, all federal programs for Indians would be terminated and our people’s welfare turned over to the provinces. This is clearly stated in the White Paper.

The Government further proposes that federal disbursements for Indian programs in each province be transferred to that province. Subject to negotiations with the provinces, such provisions would as a matter of principle eventually decline, the provinces ultimately assuming the same responsibility for services to Indian residents as they do for services to others.

The destruction of our nations and the final theft of our lands was to occur over a very short period. As the White Paper blandly described the timetable:

The Government hopes to have the bulk of the policy in effect within five years and believes that the necessary financial and other arrangements can be concluded so that Indians will have full access to provincial services within that time.

Among the Indian leaders in Ottawa for the White Paper announcement was Walter Dieter, the provisional president of the newly formed National Indian Brotherhood. He issued a press release describing the White Paper as “the destruction of a nation of people by legislation and cultural genocide.” The popular resistance that followed caught the government by surprise; it caught many Indian leaders by surprise as well, as people at the community level rose against the government’s termination policy. The government, true to form, found a small number of leaders willing to work against their own people and sent them and Indian Affairs across the country to try to convince them to drink Chrétien’s Kool-Aid. One of the few who accepted the contract to sell the White Paper in the communities was William Wuttunee, an Indian lawyer who at the time had close ties to the Liberal government. Time and again he found himself ejected from or refused entry to reserves.

As Harold Cardinal saw it: “In spite of all government attempts to convince Indians to accept the White Paper, their efforts will fail, because Indians understand that the path outlined by the Department of Indian Affairs through its mouthpiece, the Honourable Mr. Chrétien, leads directly to cultural genocide. We will not walk this path.” In Alberta, Harold asked his people “forcibly if necessary to eject federal officials from Indian lands.”9

In the House of Commons, the government tried to use the affable and well-respected Len Marchand, an Okanagan Indian who had been elected as a Liberal in the Interior of British Columbia in the 1968 election, as a shield. Marchand stood up in the House several times to try to defend the White Paper, but after catching heat from his own community, he dampened his praise considerably. He was finally reduced in the House to pleading with his own minister to “look at this matter very carefully and clarify it so it will be clearly understood.”10

In British Columbia, and elsewhere, the mass movements against the White Paper continued to grow. In the fall of 1969, Philip Paul and my father organized a meeting in Kamloops to formally launch the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs with a specific mandate to fight the White Paper by any means. Philip Paul, from the Tsartlip band on Vancouver Island, had been a young protege of Andrew Paull; he had roomed in Paull’s house in Vancouver when he was in town for Buckskin Gloves tournaments. A talented boxer in his youth, he went on to become a respected educator and director of Camosun College, a Victoria, British Columbia, college that supports Indigenous students. My father had been working with him in the National Indian Advisory Board since the early 1960s and Philip Paul, a fighter in and out of the ring, quickly became one of the driving forces in the development of the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs.

It was around this time that Harold Cardinal engineered my father’s election as leader of the National Indian Brotherhood. In the serious situation following the White Paper, Harold once again urged him to take over the leadership of the organization. My father, Harold later said, reluctantly agreed to have his name put forward, but not to campaign for the job. Harold told him, “Don’t worry, I’ll do the campaigning. You go take a vacation and I’ll do the campaigning.”11

My father withdrew for a tactical break and Harold kept his promise. By the time he returned, Walter Dieter had been manoeuvred out of the leadership at a special executive meeting in Winnipeg, and my father was offered the presidency of the NIB. He was also given the daunting mandate of battling the White Paper at the same time as he needed to set up and staff an office in Ottawa.

In discussions within the NIB, it was decided that it wasn’t enough to merely block the White Paper; they had to counter it with an Indian agenda. Several agendas were produced by different provincial associations. Among them were the Brown Paper in British Columbia and the Red Paper in Alberta. The Red Paper demanded, first, the obvious: that no changes be made to Indian status without the consent of the Indian people. It stated that “only Aboriginals and Aboriginal organizations should be given the resources and responsibility to determine their own priorities and future development.”12

It then addressed the title and treaty rights threatened under the Chrétien proposal and summed up the overall effect: “We would be left with no land and consequently the future generation would be condemned to the despair and ugly spectre of urban poverty in ghettos.”

The White Paper was not only frighteningly bad policy, the Red Paper continued, it was a profound insult to all of the Indian people who took part in the consultations that preceded it. “Even if we just talked about the weather the Minister would turn around and tell Parliament and the Canadian public that we accepted the White Paper.”

On the land question, the Red Paper flatly rejected the fee simple arrangement.

The government wrongly thinks that the Crown owns reserve lands. The Crown merely “holds” such lands, they belong to Aboriginals. The government also thinks that Aboriginals only can own land in the Old World, European sense of land ownership. Aboriginal peoples should be allowed to control land in a way that respects both their historical and legal rights.

The Red Paper is now best known for the way it was delivered to the prime minister and the full cabinet in 1970, at the same time that the White Paper was formally rejected and returned to its author, Jean Chrétien. The ceremony was accompanied by Indian drumming and singing, something new in Ottawa in those days, and it apparently had an impact on the prime minister.

“You say that the government doesn’t understand, that it is dumb, that it is stupid or arrogant,” Trudeau said. “Perhaps all of these things are true, at least in part, but don’t say we’re dishonest and that we’re trying to mislead you because we’re not. We’re trying to find a solution to a very difficult problem that has been created for one or two hundred years.”13

It was an interesting response, but the real problem hadn’t been that the government was being dishonest. It was that they were moving ahead, quite openly in fact, to rob our peoples of our homelands and our heritage.

The dishonesty came later. While the government officially buried the White Paper, Chrétien told my father unofficially, in private, that they “were withdrawing the White Paper but they would hold it aside for the generation of leaders who will accept it.”

In fact, it has continued to be the federal policy under many different shapes and sizes, in pieces and fragments that successive Canadian governments have unrelentingly tried to get my people to accept. The White Paper lives on in the termination treaty process of the past twenty years. It is in the push for taxing reserves. It is in Tom Flanagan and Manny Jules’s recent policy book Beyond the Indian Act: Restoring Aboriginal Property Rights that the Fraser Institute is promoting to turn our national lands into fee simple real estate, and in Stephen Harper’s “results based” negotiation strategy announced at the end of 2012. All contain essential ingredients of the White Paper: extinguishing our title to our lands, rendering our treaties obsolete, and ending our existence as sovereign peoples.

It is up to our generation to not only continue to refuse to accept our own termination but to also move forward beyond this battle. Fortunately, we increasingly have the means to do so. The effective blocking action against immediate White Paper implementation that our fathers and mothers’ generation undertook at the beginning of the 1970s kept the wolf from the door. Over the following ten years, they would win a crucial court battle on Aboriginal title and rights and launch a massive campaign to ensure our rights were enshrined in the Canadian Constitution. This battle would provide us with a constitutional tool for our nation-building efforts.

But part of the strength of the NIB during the 1970s—and in another sense its greatest weakness—was the government core funding that it was awarded. The government funding was necessary to give our people the chance to reply to the White Paper with their own vision. But to continue accepting core funding from the government for our political organizations for decades on end has been a mistake. Slowly but surely, our leadership was drawn into quasi- governmental organizations that reflected the old adage that whoever pays the piper calls the tune. We began seeing the results of this approach in the 1990s, and it is clear to almost all of today’s activists—except those who are getting paid, often handsomely, to do those jobs—that these neo-colonial structures have seriously weakened our movement.

This did not happen by accident. Walter Rudnicki, the Department of Indian Affairs insider who switched sides and worked closely (without pay) with my father, charted the DIA plan to create these Indian bureaucracies in ways that made them completely dependent on the non- Indigenous bureaucracy of the Department of Indian Affairs. In band council offices today, you find the same lethargy that you find at DIA headquarters, as the Indian bureaucrats administer the same programs by the same DIA guidelines as the non-Indigenous officials once did. And at 5 p.m., the offices empty. Our band council offices have become perfect little Department of Indian Affairs branch offices and our leadership, too often, serve as junior government officials.

Occupy Indian Affairs: Native Youth in Action

While my father and his generation were working with the National Indian Brotherhood, my generation was pursuing the struggle in our own way. Many of us were steeped in the radicalism of the day; the writings of anti-colonial activists from around the world drew us in with their calls for an end to world domination by the white race. Native youth of my generation were also profoundly affected by the rise of the American Indian Movement in the United States. AIM provided a kind of romantic outlaw image that was irresistible to younger people. At one point, I went down to visit AIM headquarters in Minnesota with Tantoo Cardinal and Lawrence Courtoreille —not as any sort of official delegation, but more as a group of wide-eyed admirers.

At the time, Lawrence Courtoreille was on the Indian Association of Alberta staff but I was working with Tantoo, then an aspiring actress and always a dedicated activist, at the provincial Native Youth Society, which we rechristened the Native Alliance for Liberation. We had a small amount of funding from the IAA and, for some reason, some support from B’nai Brith. We were all living on a shoestring; the amount of money we were paid barely covered our rooming house rents. Still, we opened up an office and drop-in centre for Native youth in Edmonton’s downtown core where we held meetings and political workshops. We also made prison visits to meet with Native inmates, to give them practical help and as much radical politics as they would accept. In Edmonton at the time, there were many young people brought from local reserves or flown in from far-flung communities to attend schools, and we would go to the students’ events at the YMCA to try to politicize them.

We also supported the battle over Indian control of Indian education that erupted in Alberta in the summer of 1970. It began with the occupation of the Blue Quills residential school at Saddle Lake, Alberta, by community members to run it as an on-reserve school, after the Department of Indian Affairs had announced it was closing the school and busing the kids off reserve. When a new federal policy was announced to close all on-reserve schools and bus Native children to provincial schools, the Dene of Cold Lake in Northern Alberta joined the strike by pulling their children from school. Once again, the Department’s aim was to accelerate the assimilation of Indian children into the Canadian mainstream. Protesters, beginning with Indian parents, demanded to have Indian-run schools on every reserve. The Cold Lake band went as far as organizing a sit-in of the regional Indian Affairs offices on the 27th floor of the CN tower in Edmonton, which our youth group immediately joined.

The school strike lasted until the spring of 1972, and it was strongly supported by Harold Cardinal and the Indian Association of Alberta. The Trudeau government’s response was predictable. Indian Affairs Minister Jean Chrétien did not try to address the issue, but he had his department issue a barrage of propaganda accusing Harold Cardinal and the IAA of mismanagement of funds. It is the same approach the government has taken countless times since, even up to 2013, when the Harper government tried to besmirch the name of Chief Theresa Spence during her hunger strike in Ottawa. The falsity of the claim of mismanagement against Harold Cardinal was soon proven in an audit, and it was underscored a few years later when the Department of Indian Affairs actually offered him the job of regional director of Indian Affairs in Alberta. Still, the trumped up charges were enough to justify the complete cut- off of funds to the IAA, and they created enough of a smokescreen to give Chrétien time to begin part two of the classic strategy—making deals with individual chiefs.

Harold Cardinal was forced to resign from the IAA because of Chrétien’s allegations but he was easily re-elected a few months later. I remember he was philosophical about this, comparing the Jean Chrétien of the Red Paper presentation to a “wounded grizzly bear” whom we had failed to finish off, so he had come after us “madder and wiser.”14

Even though the strike collapsed, the government was forced to drop the most damaging part of its plan: busing all students to off-reserve schools. It was a small victory but an important one. Since then, other gains have been made that have helped some communities regain at least partial control of their children’s education. But it is important to note that the Department of Indian Affairs has ensured that in its transfer of funds for our schools, Indian children receive a little more than a third of the funding provided to non-Indian children. It is yet another way that our children begin their life in a disadvantaged position compared to non-Indigenous Canadians. Another way that we are still kept at the bottom of the heap.

Not that much has changed in the more than forty years since the strike. The Department of Indian Affairs has gone through several renamings (although I will use the old version for consistency) but it remains firmly tied to its nineteenth-century ideals and strategies.

After the school strike of the 1970s was broken in Alberta and the IAA was temporarily crippled by the Chrétien funding cut, I went to visit my father in Ottawa. It was there that I heard about the national Native Youth Association. It was receiving project funding from the Secretary of State, enough at least to hold an annual meeting of Indian youth from across the country. At the time, it was based mainly among Indian youth in post-secondary education institutions and was headed by Blair Stonechild, who has since gone on to become a noted academic.

The annual meeting that year was on the Red Pheasant reserve in Saskatchewan, and I went as an interested member. It was an exciting event. I met up with many of the people I knew from British Columbia and people I had worked with in Alberta. We camped out in a tent city on the reserve, where the air was alive with the energy that only young people en masse can generate. But it was also a time for serious politicking. We held several large assemblies and numerous strategy sessions. The Youth Association board had many young leaders, like Bill Erasmus, who went on to become important figures in the movement. They were not a timid group. The major point of discussion at that meeting was the idea of organizing a twenty-four- hour takeover of the Department of Indian Affairs building in Ottawa.

During the meeting, I was not shy in speaking out and, somehow, when the election for a new Youth Association president was called, I ended up elected to the post. I think the group wanted to shed its university student image and engage more at the street level, like we had done in Alberta. In the board meeting afterward, we discussed the planned Indian Affairs takeover. After having experienced the rapid funding cut-off of the IAA in Alberta when the association had stood up to the government, I warned the board that if we took over the Department of Indian Affairs, this organization was probably finished because the government project funding we were receiving would disappear.

The board was undeterred by this, and so was I. When you find yourself clinging to an organization just to continue it in an ineffective way, you have to seriously ask yourself why. Our role was to confront unjust government policies toward our peoples, and it is impossible to do that in a way that will please government funders. This is a reality that too many of the current generation of leaders have yet to face.

The twenty-four-hour takeover was planned for mid-August 1973. A few days before the target date, we amassed 350 activists on St. Regis Island on the Akwesasne reserve, which straddles the Canada-U.S. border near Cornwall, Ontario. At the time, we were still discussing whether we should actually go through with it, and we made it clear to all that it could be the end of our organization if we did. Some were still arguing that we should try to work with the government from the inside, but when the great majority of members rejected that idea, everyone agreed to carry out the action as planned. Late that night before heading to Ottawa, I found a pay phone and, as a courtesy, called my father, then head of the National Indian Brotherhood, to let him know what was happening. He said little, just thanked me for letting him know.

He was, of course, already well aware of what was going on. The day before, my Uncle Joe, then Neskonlith band chief, had arrived on the island after driving with some Neskonlith youth right across the country. Others have since told me that my father had asked Uncle Joe to join us and to keep an eye on things.

We crossed the river in barges before dawn and made the hour-and-a-half drive to Ottawa in a cavalcade of cars, vans, and motorcycles. We arrived at the deserted street in front of the Indian Affairs building on Laurier Avenue at sunrise, feeling the power of our numbers and our cause as we began to stream into the building. The security guard met us in the lobby, but seeing hundreds of young Indians, many carrying sleeping bags and blankets, filling the building, he took a tactful approach. He asked us politely what we were up to. We explained that we would be there for twenty-four hours and we would remain peaceful. He seemed satisfied, handed us the keys to the door, and left.

The occupation was a political act, but it also had a more practical objective. Indian Affairs was where the minutiae of our lives were controlled and where the strategies like the White Paper were hatched. Among us were some activists who well understood the importance of those files to our people, and they went to work rifling through the filing cabinets looking for specific pieces of information.

They found much of what they were looking for in the office of the assistant deputy minister, John Ciaccia, a Quebec Liberal who many believed was sent to Chrétien’s Department of Indian Affairs for schooling on how to deal with Indians before taking over the file in Quebec.

On a personal level, Ciaccia had made an impression. In contrast to their attitude toward most DIA bureaucrats, people actually liked Ciaccia as a person. Even the radical elements around my father liked him. He had set up a few progressive youth-oriented programs around the country, and at the time, my brother Bobby was working on contract on one of them. It was based in Alberta, but Bobby was in Ottawa that week and he heard about the Indian Youth Association takeover on the radio while driving to work that morning. The radio announced that the Indian Affairs building was shut down and the downtown core was cordoned off, with the building surrounded by the RCMP. With a smile on his face, Bobby turned his car around and headed back home.

Inside, the burst of busyness continued. Our people found a number of locked filing cabinets inside Ciaccia’s office. They hauled them up to the roof and began using fire axes to break off the locks.

The initial buoyant atmosphere began to recede as dozens, then hundreds, of RCMP riot squad officers amassed in front of the building with their menacing-looking helmets, shields, and clubs. Since Indian Affairs was a federal department, Minister Chrétien had been made aware of our presence as soon as we arrived, and he had immediately called in the RCMP riot squad. Inside, Dutch Lerat, our security chief, and some of our more resourceful colleagues had liberated buckets of industrial soap from the janitorial supplies. If the RCMP charged in, they said we should retreat to the second floor, block the elevators, and dump the liquid soap on the stairs to slow the police assault.

When the RCMP began to beat their shields with their clubs in that universal riot squad intimidation tactic, some of our biggest guys stood in front of the lobby to signal that we were not going to give up without a fight. It was a serious group, and we were prepared for serious consequences.

A short time later, an Ottawa police officer came to the door and yelled, “Who’s in charge? We want to talk.”

At first I was reluctant to go outside, thinking that perhaps it was a trick and I would be arrested and prevented from coming back in. I was so suspicious and, in retrospect, naive, that it took some coaxing for the police to get me to step out to meet with them.

I was surprised when the Ottawa police chief, in his brocaded jacket, came up to speak to me. He was forthright. “You are just here for twenty-four hours, right?”

“Yes,” I said.

He nodded. “To tell you the truth, I have no problem with you being here for twenty-four hours, as long as you don’t damage property or harm anyone.”

I told him that we would be peaceful if we weren’t attacked.

“Okay,” he said. “If that’s your promise, you can stay. I’ll tell the Mounties to go home.” Apparently there was some kind of jurisdictional issue. Chrétien had called in the RCMP

to protect federal property. But it turned out that the DIA office was not a government building but private property under lease to the government. The Ottawa police chief, who was not at all happy about the RCMP’s planned rumble with hundreds of Indian kids in downtown Ottawa, told the RCMP they had no jurisdiction and forced them to move away from the building. We watched with some relief as the RCMP riot squad was moved further back and replaced by Ottawa police.

A few minutes later, we were interrupted by some kind of commotion on the upper floors of the building. An early bird Indian Affairs employee who had apparently been in the building when we arrived was waving and holding a sign that read: COME AND GET ME.

We sent someone up to tell the gentleman that he was free to leave. The police escorted the early bird away but remained on the sidewalk with their cruisers parked all along the street. Later we also saw that they had taken up positions on the surrounding rooftops, which caused another problem when the sharpshooters reported that some kids were up on the roof smashing government filing cabinets with fire axes.

The Ottawa police were at the front door again.

“You gave us your word,” they said to me, “that you would not do any damage to property. But there are kids on the roof damaging property.”

I apologized and promised we would put an end to that. Word went up to our team to get off the roof and finish whatever they had to do inside the building.

In early evening, I went back out to the police to tell them that some of our younger protesters wanted to go home and ask if they could be let through the police lines. The police agreed, and the young protesters walked through the lines with the files we had collected wrapped up in their sleeping bags. These files eventually made it, through a circuitous route, to the National Indian Brotherhood, where they provided valuable insight into past and current Indian Affairs activities.

The rest of us marched out the next day, as planned, and returned in caravan back to Akwesasne on the American side. Then we had one more protest to make, this one against the Canadian-American border that cut through our lands. When we left Akwesasne, we didn’t bother stopping at the Canadian immigration and customs booth. A posse of Canadian border police pulled in behind us and brought us to a stop a few kilometres inside the country. But when we left our cars to meet them, the lead officer, seeing our number and our determination, barked that we were to get back into our vehicles and get out of there.

I drove to Ottawa to meet with my father, proud of the courage and discipline we had displayed. I still see many of these former Youth Association people today, as they have gone on to become leaders of their nations. Although some of them, sad to say, left their sense of defiance in their youth.

As expected, the action against Indian Affairs caused the Secretary of State funding for the Youth Association to immediately dry up. We had run a youth drop-in centre in Ottawa, and we had to close it down and lay off our handful of staff. Soon our organization existed only in newspapers, where stories began to appear, no doubt placed by the Department of Indian Affairs, about visits by some of our members to places like Communist East Germany. The Department was engaged in its own little Cold War against us, one that continues today long after the wall has come down in Germany.

That same year, 1973, a much more enduring event propelled our legal struggle into the modern era: the Supreme Court decision on the Calder case. At the core of the Calder decision was the recognition by half of the judges of the Supreme Court (it was a 3–3 decision, with one judge deciding not to rule on a technicality) that Aboriginal title—or, as they called it, “Indian title”—was a property right of Indigenous peoples that could continue, despite the assertion of sovereignty by the Crown.

The split nature of the decision caused some momentary confusion at the National Indian Brotherhood. With very little discussion before the press conference, the NIB lawyer, Douglas Sanders, was going to go to the microphone to admit defeat in having “Indian title” confirmed. But my father was a little more far-seeing than his lawyer. He slipped in front of Doug to claim the decision as a major victory, because it was the first time that anyone on the Supreme Court of Canada had recognized “Indian title” in law in this country.

In fact, the decision clearly showed that Indigenous peoples in Canada were far from the quirky ethnic groups that the Trudeau government had portrayed them as only a few years before in the White Paper. Never again could governments claim that all that was needed to extinguish Aboriginal title was a simple claim of sovereignty by the Crown. Rather, they would have to deal with us within the legal parameters set out in the Royal Proclamation of 1763, the imperial law that put forth the rules that Canada could be settled under.

While the Court had ruled that the B.C. Indigenous peoples were outside of the direct reach of the Royal Proclamation of 1763, because their territory did not fall under British sovereignty until the Treaty of Oregon in 1846, that ruling showed that the precepts of the Royal Proclamation were still in force across the country.

Issued by King George III just after the British conquest of New France, the Royal Proclamation defined Indian lands as virtually all of Canadian territory, with the exception of the strip of land along the St. Lawrence River that made up New France, and a crescent of land around Hudson and James bays that had been ceded to the Hudson’s Bay Company.

The Proclamation stated that the Indians living on these territories “should not be molested or disturbed” on their lands. Until a lawful purchase had been made by the Crown, the Crown held those lands in trust for the self-governing nations of Indigenous peoples. It is this point that our own chiefs had insisted on in the Laurier Memorial in 1910, and it was this message that William Pierrish had brought to London in his plea to the Privy Council in 1926. It was still part of the basic message of Andrew Paull and my father’s generation.

Our whole movement had up to that point been based on having the colonial government, and later the Dominion and Canadian government, respect our rights as sovereign peoples as set out in the Royal Proclamation. It was unequivocal. Settlers who had already strayed onto our lands were ordered by the king to “forthwith to remove themselves from such Settlements.” The only exception was colonial peace officers, who were allowed to cross into our lands in hot pursuit of criminals who attempted “to fly from justice and take refuge in the said territory.” But even they were not allowed to interfere with us in any way, only to seize the offender and take them “under a proper guard to the Colony where the crime was committed.”

The colonial part of the Royal Proclamation, the part where the doctrine of discovery still lurked, was that it gave the Crown the right to extinguish our rights through treaties. It would be another twenty-four years after the Calder decision before a Supreme Court ruling would open the way to an alternative to this extinguishment process. But with the Calder decision, the Crown’s contention that it held “perfect title” over the non-treaty areas of Canada was debunked.

When it became clear that the evenly split Calder decision had effectively recognized Indian title, the reaction—especially in British Columbia, where few treaties had been signed —was electric. The fight for Aboriginal title and rights had been, for the previous century, a lonely crusade for our people. Now, for the first time, we had an important ally in half of the judges on the Supreme Court of Canada.

Among the Indigenous peoples who had signed historic treaties, the response was more muted. Most insist that in the peace treaties they signed, they never gave up their underlying title. And they certainly have a compelling case that the treaties, especially in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, were legally abusive and signed under duress. In many cases among the nations of the Great Plains, for example, the people were literally starving to death after the wholesale slaughter of the buffalo, and treaties were forced on them in exchange for rations they needed to keep their children from dying. In almost all cases, the verbal agreements that surrounded the peace treaties were far different from the cession, release, or surrender of land that was put down in writing—a key point when you consider that none of the chiefs who signed the treaties could actually read the text. The struggle of the treaty people for justice remains central to the Indian movement today. But the main impact of Calder would be in the remaining areas of the country that were not covered by treaty, which still included the majority of Canadian territory.

The federal government response to the decision was initially tepid. “Maybe you have more rights than we thought,” Prime Minister Trudeau said. This bland response was not as uncalculated as it might seem. It is the government’s public relations response to every major victory of our people. They try—at times with a noticeable measure of desperation—to minimize the consequences of our victories, while working to amass a PR and legislative stockpile to push us back. They would use the same tactic in 1997 when the Delgamuukw decision confirmed and significantly extended our rights.

In the back rooms of Ottawa, the confirmation of our Aboriginal title and rights in the Calder decision gave rise to only one question: How can we extinguish them as quickly and cheaply as possible? The answer was the Comprehensive Claims policy, which was drafted shortly after the Calder decision in 1973 and has been revised several times, most notably in 1981 and 1986, without changing its core purpose. This policy was brought into existence with the simple mandate to get the land back under Canadian control in the most cost-effective manner. The National Indian Brotherhood rejected this policy and its mandate to extinguish Aboriginal title, but the Indian Affairs Department, then still headed by Jean Chrétien, would try to take advantage of our poverty by offering cash-for-land-title deals. They found a test case waiting just across the Ottawa River in Quebec, where the James Bay Cree were challenging the province’s massive hydroelectric development project in the courts—and winning.

It was only months after the Calder decision that John Ciaccia left Chrétien’s office in Ottawa and ran under the Liberal banner in the Quebec election. He was elected to the National Assembly and immediately sworn in as the Indian Affairs minister in the Quebec government, with one enormous item on his agenda. Clear the Crees out of the way for Robert Bourassa’s “project of the century,” the massive hydroelectric development on Cree territory. His job was to get the Crees to “cede, release, surrender and convey all their Native claims, rights, titles and interests, whatever they may be”15 to the Canadian Crown, to the Province of Quebec, and by extension, to Hydro-Québec.

The negotiation of the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement, coming on the heels of the Calder decision, was one of those pivotal points in our history that revealed both our strengths and our weaknesses. It was the Calder decision, with its recognition of the existence Aboriginal title, that forced the Quebec government to put the bulldozers into idle and climb down to talk. But it was clear from the outset that they were willing to accept only one outcome: the cession, release, and surrender of Cree lands. In the end, the road to the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement would be paved with the government’s usual arsenal of intense manipulation, fear-mongering, and slander against individuals and peoples. It its dealings with Indigenous nations we see clearly Canada’s bullying nature, when it determines it is in its interest to beat us into submission.

The young Cree negotiator Billy Diamond began by bravely insisting that Cree land was inalienable and that “only beavers have the right to build dams on our territory.”16 But after he broke with his Indian allies inside and outside of Quebec and decided to go it alone, with his legal team headed by Quebec lawyer James O’Reilly, he was seduced into negotiating away his people’s most prized possession, their title to their lands that they had been given not by Canadian law, but by the Creator.

In their initial meeting with the Quebec government, Billy Diamond and his team had been offered the same kind of impoverished reserves that had been foisted on the Ontario Cree at the beginning of the twentieth century in Treaty Number 9. This they refused. But in a private meeting with John Ciaccia in May 1974, Diamond gave Ciaccia a number. A billion dollars. That’s what Diamond said it would take for his people to sell their birthright. And that was all the government needed to hear. There was a price on Cree lands. All that was left for the government was the haggling.

The Quebec government came back with an offer of $100 million. Diamond and O’Reilly balked. The provincial government then went on a PR offensive. They released their $100 million offer and the Cree billion-dollar demand, and began to portray the Crees and their leadership as extortionists trying to suck the lifeblood out of Quebec by blocking the project of the century. With that signal, the latent racism poured forth in the Quebec media and the demands grew across the province to simply bulldoze the Cree out of the way. On cue, across the river in Ottawa, Chrétien stood up in Parliament and gave the federal government’s full support to the Quebec offer.

My father, still head of the National Indian Brotherhood, knew the Crees were in trouble as soon as the $100 million offer was made public and presented as a kind of gift to the unworthy Cree. He took aim at Chrétien’s support for the deal. He accused him of “grossly misleading the general public, deceiving the federal Parliament and attempting to manipulate the Indian people by his recent statement in support of the Quebec government’s termination policy for the Indians and Inuit people of the James Bay area.”17

But the Cree felt cornered. Across the province, Quebec opinion leaders were up in arms demanding that the project go ahead. When in November 1974, Quebec came out with an improved offer of $225 million, the badly outmanoeuvred Cree leadership grabbed onto it like a drowning swimmer onto a lifebuoy.

My father and other First Nations leaders did the math. The $225 million deal sounded like an enormous amount of money, but it was spread over twenty years and it was pay for the birthright of the twelve thousand Cree. It works out to $937.50 per person per year, or $18.02 per week. Or, considering the hand-to-mouth existence of most Cree at the time, about $2.50 a day. That was the price that was paid for a vast country that had existed for thousands of years. It was the deal of the century as well as the project of the century. The wealth taken out of Cree lands since then has been in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

This was the type of cash-for-land and extinguishment-of-title agreement that Canadian governments began to push for under the Comprehensive Claims policy. James Bay was one of six negotiations that they undertook to bring the mainly northern land under these so-called modern treaties. And time and again we have seen that these deals do not fundamentally address our poverty. At best, they freeze it at a certain level. At worst, they create a tiny Indian management elite that profits significantly, while our people are left in the same or in a worse state of distress. The fight against this extinguishment philosophy remains central to our struggle today.

During this period, I had my own personal brush with the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement. It illustrated the divide between those who were willing to cede their rights and those who refused.

The official signing ceremony was scheduled to take place in Quebec City, with Premier Robert Bourassa and Billy Diamond putting their signatures to the agreement. I was in Montreal at the time and my friend Eddie Gardner was the editor of the Laurentian Alliance, the newspaper of the Métis and non-Status Indians organization. He had been covering the regional meetings on the agreement, and I had accompanied him on some of his travels. When he told me that he was heading to Quebec the next day to cover the final signing ceremony, he invited me to come along. We drove to Quebec City in a rented car and discovered that the conference centre where the signing was to take place was under a security lockdown. We were stopped at the door and refused entry. Eddie fiercely protested. He was a journalist; he had a right to be there.

A CTV reporter, Del Archer, saw Eddie fuming at the door and came over. Eddie told him we were being refused entry, and Archer went to speak to the Cree organizers. He came back and told us that we were being blocked for “security reasons.”

We refused to leave and finally, after the security people discussed it further, we were let in. But when we took our seats, we were suddenly flanked by four burly Quebec National Assembly security officers sitting beside and behind us. One of them leaned forward and whispered in my ear, “Please come with us.”

We were taken to a small cloakroom, pushed up against the wall, and frisked for weapons. The police demanded to know what I was doing there. I explained that I was with Eddie and he was covering the ceremony for his newspaper.

The security officer said, “You were one of the people who took over John Ciaccia’s office.”

At first I had no idea of what he was talking about. I certainly knew who Ciaccia was, but I didn’t remember ever being in his office. After some back and forth, it became clear they were referring to the takeover of the Department of Indian Affairs in Ottawa two years earlier. When the security people were finally convinced that we had no weapons and no plan to disrupt the signing, they let us return to our seats.

The signing ceremony itself was a dismal event. The stage was dark except for a spotlight on the table with the documents. The only two people who came on stage were Bourassa and Diamond. They spoke barely a word, signed quickly, and disappeared into the darkness. Those in attendance were then invited for cocktails at a hall across the street. There was no joyful drumming or chanting. It was a hurried closing of a forced sale on a shadowy stage.

The Quebec delegation quickly left to go to the cocktail party. The Crees hung around for a while talking among themselves. When they finally began to move toward the reception hall, Eddie and I joined them. But we stopped before we reached the hall. We did not really want to go to the National Assembly celebration. There was nothing to celebrate, and we knew it was likely the Cree who had tipped off the security about who we were. These were not people we wanted to eat and drink with. At least not at that sad moment.

We headed to our car with the idea of finding a restaurant on our own. But as soon as we arrived in the parking lot, we heard sirens. Police poured into the lot and we were ordered to assume the position with our legs apart and our hands on the roof of the car while they searched us and the vehicle. By this time, Eddie and I had had enough. We protested loudly to the police, and they returned our insults. While the swearing match continued, they searched the trunk and, since it was a rental car, found only one of those little whisk brooms that you see in rentals. Finally they told us to get in the car and leave the city immediately. That was one police order we were happy to comply with. We waited until we were well out of Quebec City before stopping for lunch.

In later years, this incident became something of a joke between Eddie and me. But it was clear that this country welcomed only those willing to sign away their future. And that was not a course I or my people would choose. For Indians who refused to cede, release, and surrender their homelands to the Crown—or to energy companies like Hydro-Québec—the gloves would quickly come off. The battle would be hard and long, and that’s what Eddie and I talked about as we drove back to Montreal. How we could keep our people, in their often desperate straits, from falling for these shameful $2.50-a-day offers for their countries?

Aboriginal Title: No Surrender

There are some who suggest that the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs’ position during the 1970s and the position of all First Nations that refuse to sign termination agreements with the government—which includes the majority of Indigenous peoples in the B.C. Interior—is to reject all development. Nothing could be further from the truth. We simply understand that the cause of our poverty, and of the enormous distress that comes with it, is the usurpation of our land. The only real remedy is for Canada to enter into true negotiations with us about how our two peoples can live together in a harmonious way that respects each other’s rights and needs. We are looking for a partnership with Canada, while Canada is trying to hold on to a harmful and outdated colonial relationship.

We well understand that economically and environmentally sustainable development of our lands is essential. As long as development respects the integrity of the land and minimizes its impacts, we must take advantage of opportunities to build diversified economies that also take into account the modern imperative of clean energy—which is required to save our planet.

Soon after the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement, I saw how development can be handled in a much different model. In 1976, a year after the Cree signed the James Bay Agreement, Ron Derrickson was elected chief at Westbank, the Okanagan community across the lake from Kelowna. He showed through his deeds that a community could develop its land without selling or ceding it to the Crown—in fact, by making the community’s collective ownership of its land an economic asset.

At the time, Chief (now Grand Chief) Derrickson was already a successful businessman, who had built his business the hard way. He was born into his family’s small farm on the Westbank reserve, where his father was barely able to eke out a living to keep his family fed. When he was school-aged, Ron and his brother were sent to the white school in Kelowna, but they encountered such racism that they soon transferred to the nearby residential school. There, at least, they would not be hounded by white bullies.

Derrickson left school at a young age and worked in the orchards of Washington State. Eventually he moved to Vancouver, where he learned the welder’s trade. Always a hard worker, he lived frugally and saved enough money to return to Westbank to buy a small ranch. Over several years, he purchased small strips of land and built a number of mobile home parks. Later he invested in more capital-intensive developments like marinas, recreational developments, and real estate. Today he is the owner of more than thirty businesses.

When he was elected chief in 1976, Derrickson immediately put his business knowledge and experience into developing the Westbank economy. Over his first five terms as chief, from 1976 to 1986, he brought about a dramatic rise in revenue for the band and in the standard of living of his people. He accomplished both his private business and the later band development by using the existing tools for Indian on-reserve business: Certificates of Possession (CPs).

Most people think that Indian reserves are without private property, but there has been a system in place since the beginning. In our own Secwepemc culture, families had recognized places on the river for their fishing camps, their own traplines, and territories for their mountain base camps and for their wintering houses. These lands were passed on from generation to generation. They were not formally marked off; everyone simply knew exactly what belonged to whom. Today almost half of the Indian bands in Canada continue with this custom allotments system of ownership.

The others operate on Certificates of Possession. CPs have been around since the original Indian Act in 1876, when they were called Location Tickets. They give individual band members individual lands in a formal way, but still largely based on the original custom allotments. But while a CP gives the holder lawful possession of an individual tract of land, it is fundamentally different from the fee simple title that Canadians use.

For reserve land to be allotted to individuals through Certificates of Possession, it requires first a land survey and a band council resolution. Then it requires the approval of the Department of Indian Affairs. The CP is then sent to the band council, which forwards it to the title holder. With a CP, band members can pass on the land to their children or sell it to another band member. What they can’t do is to sell it to non-Indians, and it is protected from forfeiture by any individual or corporate entity, such as a financial institution. So it is not something that can be directly mortgaged in the way that you mortgage fee simple lands. This means it can never be truly alienated from the community.

It does not prevent you from developing the land, though. Instead of mortgaging it, you can lease it long-term. This can be done by either individual or band CP holders, although it requires approval—which generally moves at a bureaucratic crawl—from the Department of Indian Affairs.

It was this leasing system that Chief Ron Derrickson used to develop the Westbank First Nation. He was able to take advantage of the fact that the community was just across the lake from the rapidly growing city of Kelowna. The land’s value was increased when the province built the Connector highway, a faster route to Vancouver joining the Okanagan Valley to the Coquihalla Highway, along the southern edge of the reserve. The band began to lease these lands to businesses, and suddenly a new revenue tap was opened up to the people of Westbank. Today, it is one of the most prosperous Indigenous communities in Canada, and this was done without surrendering an inch of land.

While Chief Derrickson was working to build the economic future of his people, my life was one of wandering. I had returned briefly to British Columbia in 1974 to work with Philip Paul at the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs. My contract was to organize a demonstration to mark the fifth anniversary of the White Paper. By then, it was already clear that while the White Paper had been formally withdrawn, the broad outline of the policy—terminating the legal existence of the First Nations in Canada—remained the central drive of the Liberal government and the Department of Indian Affairs.

Travelling through the back roads of British Columbia was an important education for me. I drove a beat-up old Chevy on potholed dirt roads to remote communities, and everywhere I was confronted with the systemic poverty of the people. Communities left in Third World conditions with little access to education and health services. Living on a tiny percentage of their lands and surviving on what amounted to a few dollars a day under the Indian welfare system.

But even with all this, it was not a sombre experience. Along with the poverty, I encountered the richness of the cultures, pride, and a sense of resistance to the outside forces. I spoke to dozens, even hundreds, of Elders and youth, and they did not need me to tell them we had to continue to fight government encroachments on our rights. They understood all too well the source of their poverty and the solution to it. It was not a philosophical question, but something that they had in their DNA. The land was theirs, it was given to them by the Creator, and they would do whatever was necessary to get it back.

After my sojourn in British Columbia was over, I went to Quebec as a youth worker, but I can’t say that this period was particularly useful for me. I had a contract as a youth coordinator for Chief Andrew Delisle’s Indians of Quebec Association (IQA), and I soon found myself in an uneasy situation. It was in the run-up to the Montreal Olympics, and Chief Delisle and the IQA had already accepted to participate in their assigned role of providing local colour to the ceremony. When I met with the youth, I discovered they pretty well detested everything that the IQA—with its conservative and deferential approach to Aboriginal title and rights—stood for. When the youth, with me standing with them, began protesting the preparations for the 1976 Olympics as a way of bringing attention to the land question in Quebec, I was quietly laid off from my job.

I stayed on in Montreal and attended Concordia University without any academic plan, spending most of my free time working with a group that was trying to set up a Native Friendship Centre in Montreal. Eddie Gardner was the head of the founding group, but I was temporarily made president when they needed someone who could do a little fist pounding to get official accreditation from the national organization of Friendship Centres. We succeeded. Eddie took over again, and I continued with my directionless studies.

Montreal, July 1975

My life was changing during this period. Now in my mid-twenties, I was no longer part of the “youth.” On my trip back to Neskonlith in 1974, I had met Beverly Dick, a beautiful and intelligent Secwepemc woman, and we soon became a couple. She had been raised in a traditional way by her grandparents and had avoided residential school, so she still spoke our language. She returned to Montreal with me and we were married there. Our twin daughters, Mandy (Kanahus Pa*ki) and Niki (Mayuk), were born in 1976. We would have five children together. Neskie was born in 1980, Ska7cis in 1982, and Anita-Rose (Snutetkwe) in 1986.

The arrival of the twins made me realize that I had to get more serious about my life. I had a family to support. I decided the best way to take care of my family and continue the struggle for my people was to go to law school. I was part of a small wave of young activists of my generation who saw the law as a promising avenue for the struggle to have our rights respected. I think the Supreme Court’s Calder decision had something to do with that. Trudeau had mused that we had more rights than he thought, and we were determined to see how far we could push that.

I buried myself for several months in LSAT preparations, which require an enormous amount of work. I took the LSAT at McGill University, and applied and was accepted at Osgoode Hall at York University in Toronto. I then took the six-week preparatory course offered through the Native Law Centre at the University of Saskatchewan.

At Osgoode, it was not easy to find anyone with expertise on Aboriginal issues. No one at law school was interested, and I felt isolated there as I constantly tried to find ways to apply what I was learning to the struggle for recognition of Aboriginal title and rights. I did have a genuine respect for the law professors, though. They stressed that we were not there to learn about the law, but about how judges made decisions on the law. An important distinction when you see how interpretations of the same laws evolve through time, especially the laws related to my people.

In a personal sense, I was moving from the streets to a challenging and competitive part of the academic world, and it was a big step. My law school experience afforded me the opportunity to study the huge amount of colonial material you have to understand in order to understand the true plight of Indigenous peoples. It provided me with the legal framework to think through Aboriginal and treaty rights problems and understand them in relation to national and international human rights. It also helped me understand the limitations of seeking justice solely through the courts.

Our legal decisions always have that political element that, if we want to see the legal opinions implemented on the ground, requires us to also get the co-operation of the federal and provincial governments. And for that, we must be able to put political pressure on the governments to force them to act. In the last twenty years, I have been working at this on the economic and international civil rights spheres. It will not be lawyers, Indigenous or otherwise, who will bring the fundamental changes we need. That power, I am more convinced than ever, rests with the people themselves.

In the end, I did not finish law school. I left still needing to complete one field course on family law that I had no interest in. I have no regrets about leaving before completion, because I know that even if I had graduated from law school, I would never have practised law. I would be doing exactly what I am doing now.

My father was also seeing the need for a people’s movement to break the deadlock. He left the presidency of the National Indian Brotherhood in 1976 with the idea of trying to build a movement to try to effect fundamental change. By then, he had decided he had gone as far as he could in Ottawa. He had helped build a fairly highly functioning national organization, and he had carved out a place for Indigenous issues on the national agenda—where there had been none. Indians were able to get a hearing, at times at the highest levels, and there were small gains in a number of areas like health and education. But the gains were always small. My father realized that our people could not simply lobby their way into justice.

One of the avenues for fundamental change, he knew, passed through international institutions. And some of his most important activities during this period were devoted to building up the World Council of Indigenous Peoples, which he had established at a mass meeting of Indigenous peoples from around the world that he organized on Vancouver Island in 1975. After he stepped down from the NIB leadership, he undertook extensive travels to solidify the World Council.

At the back of his mind was the idea of returning to British Columbia to try to build a grassroots movement to push the sort of anti-colonial struggle our situation called for, a struggle that would work to decolonize first our minds and then our lands. But when he returned to the province in 1977 to take over the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs and build the people’s movement, he found an organization racked by internal dissent. A number of the key coastal leaders, notably Bill Wilson and George Watts, had left the Union and were openly trying to build a rival organization. I will not go into detail here about that battle, as it has already been chronicled by others. But I did have personal evidence that the break with the Union by the dissident leaders was, if not orchestrated, at least strongly encouraged by the Department of Indian Affairs.

My accidental insight into this situation came while I was a guest in an Indian Affairs car being driven downtown from the Vancouver airport. I was just out of law school, living in Ottawa, and had flown to a meeting in Vancouver with the Anishinabe lawyer David Nahwegahbow. We met Indian Affairs Minister John Munro and his Indian assistants, Raymond Goode and Danny Grant, on the plane. David and I knew Raymond and Danny well, so we struck up a friendly conversation with them. As we neared Vancouver, Raymond said they had a couple of cars coming from Indian Affairs to pick up the minister and his staff and offered us a ride in the staff car. We accepted the offer thinking that, really, things did seem to be changing at Indian Affairs.

But when we got into the car, the driver, an Indian Affairs official, assumed that David and I were also Munroe’s Indian assistants. So during the long drive into the city, he cheerfully described a litany of underhanded actions the Vancouver office was taking to undermine and divide the Union, including secretly supporting the dissidents. Danny, who was in the front seat, turned around with an embarrassed smile on his face and Raymond sat with a frozen grin while the white official spilled the Indian Affairs beans to David, an activist Indian lawyer, and me, the son of the president of the Union. Neither Raymond nor Danny said a word to stop the outpouring from the white guy. I suspect, in their own way, they were pleased to see DIA exposed for what it was.

For me, it was good to be reminded of the type of people, despite their occasional attempts to charm us, we were dealing with at Indian Affairs. As soon as I was out of the car, I called my father with the news. He wasn’t shocked by it at all. He’d known all along about the leadership role the Department was playing in splitting up the Union. His response was to go ahead and try to build the people’s movement.

Within the Union, they were working first on an Aboriginal Title and Rights Position Paper that listed twenty-four areas where First Nations had to recoup rights and powers that had been usurped by the governments. I will quote sections of the position paper here, because it gives a clear contrast to the position taken by those Indigenous leaders who accepted “cede, release and surrender” as the only option.

In its preamble, the position paper states that it “represents the foundation upon which First Nations in British Columbia are prepared to negotiate a co-existing relationship with Canada.” It begins with an invocation of where our rights come from:

The Sovereignty of our Nations comes from the Great Spirit. It is not granted nor subject to the approval of any other Nation. Our power to govern rests with the people and like our Aboriginal Title and Rights, it comes from within the people and cannot be taken away.

We are the original people of this land and have the right to survive as distinct Peoples into the future; Each First Nation collectively maintains Title to the lands in its respective Traditional Territory;

Economic Rights including resource development, manufacturing, trade, and commerce and fiscal relations. National Rights to enjoy our National identity, language and history as citizens of our Nations.

Political Rights to self-determination to form our political institutions, and to exercise our government through these institutions, and to develop our political relations with other First Nations, Canada and other Nations of the World.

Legal Rights to make, change, enforce and interpret our own laws according to our own processes and judicial institutions including our own Constitutions, systems of justice and law enforcement.

Citizenship Rights of each individual to human rights as embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

The conclusion of the paper is unequivocal:

Our people have no desire, under any circumstances, to see our Aboriginal Title and Rights extinguished. Our People Consistently state that our Aboriginal Title and Rights cannot be bought, sold, traded, or extinguished by any Government under any circumstances.18

This is the bar, set more than thirty-five years ago, below which no negotiation with governments can fall. No nation on earth should be forced to enter a negotiation that is destined to end with its own extinguishment. The demand that we extinguish our Aboriginal title and rights is an attack on the fundamental rights of our people and a contravention of our basic human rights as set out in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which even Canada finally felt compelled to endorse in 2010. The UN has explicitly recognized that in its essence, “extinguishment” contravenes international law and “the absolute prohibition against racial discrimination.” As the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Peoples observed in 2010: “No other peoples in the world are pressured to have their rights extinguished.”

Some might argue that all people have the right to do whatever deal they want, including to extinguish their sovereign rights. The problem is that the birthrights they are selling are not theirs alone, they are those of their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren. And those we do not have the right to sell.

When these battles were being fought in British Columbia in the late 1970s, the first issue the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs took up was fisheries. The government had enacted a plethora of regulations against our Aboriginal right to fish and maintain an economy based on fishing. After launching a province-wide campaign with a Fish Forum in Vancouver, and arming itself with legal opinions, the Union supported a series of symbolic “fish-ins” around the province. In Lillooet, this symbolic act resulted in scuffles and fistfights when twenty-four Department of Fisheries officers descended on the protesters and tried to muscle them off the river. As tensions rose, the Union didn’t back down. It issued a press release stating that it would “meet violence with violence.”

At a 1978 assembly in Penticton, my father said the fishery was just the first battle. “Self determination has to be our goal in our quest to recover the lands, energy, resources and political authority that we have entrusted to the White political institutions. We are saying that for the past hundred years we gave you, the White government, the responsibility to manage our lands, energy, resources and our political authority. You have mismanaged that trust and responsibility. Now we are taking it back into our hands and we will manage our own resources through our Indian political institutions.”

The next issue was child welfare. In 1980, the Union led a massive march on Victoria to demand the government stop scooping our children from our reserves and placing them outside of the community. The impetus for this action came from a young Splatsin Chief, Wayne Christian, who had passed a resolution in his community insisting that Indian children would be cared for in the community, except in the most exceptional circumstances. The B.C. Indian Child Caravan moved through the Interior picking up supporters along the way, until more than a thousand people took to the steps of the legislature demanding a meeting with the minister for Child Welfare, Grace McCarthy. Finally, it took the 1981 three-week Women’s Occupation of the B.C. Department of Indian Affairs regional office to win full control of Indian communities to care for their children, an occupation my own mother was part of and was arrested for. The Child Caravan was the opening shot in that ultimately successful Union battle.

British Columbia was in ferment, and my father was emerging now as the war chief of the movement. He was not the only member of my family involved. I had just finished law school when my brother Bobby suddenly emerged onto the national scene to run for the position of national chief. He was still in his early thirties, but he had already made a name for himself in B.C. Indian politics, and he became the torchbearer of the people’s movement on the national scene.

Like most Native youth, Bobby had spent a few years trying to find his place in the world. He worked at mill jobs to earn a little money and moved around to see a bit of the country. In 1970, he had a driving offence with a $250 fine that he couldn’t afford to pay. To escape a jail term, he headed down to Washington State to pick fruit and lay low for a while. But he received the same surprise visit from our father that I had had as a teenager in residential school.

It must have been an interesting meeting. After we had run into him at the Chase train station on our way to Chilliwack with my mother, Bobby had in fact spoken to my father when he saw him in town. He’d told him, “You don’t have a family anymore. They all left!” That was a measure of the youthful anger and resentment he held. But when my father travelled down to Washington to meet with Bobby, several years had passed. Bobby was in his early twenties and my father was beginning to recognize the mistakes he had made with his children. He came to make amends. It was during the period that he had taken his strategic vacation to allow Harold Cardinal to do the politics required to get him elected as president of the National Indian Brotherhood, and visiting Bobby was his first stop. He counselled his eldest son to go back to British Columbia and deal with the legal problem, and he suggested he go to see Philip Paul, then the director of Camosun College. When my father returned to Alberta, he sent Bobby a signed copy of Harold Cardinal’ s newly published book, The Unjust Society.

My father’s visit set Bobby on his own path of activism. Philip Paul took Bobby under his wing, and Bobby enrolled in a course at Camosun on community development. When he returned home to Neskonlith a couple of years later, he was elected chief. Bobby also became active in the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs, where he was a member of the executive in 1977 when my father returned to B.C. to head the Union.

As a leader, Bobby had earned his own base of support across the province, where he was seen as a young, soft-spoken activist with an uncompromising conviction on our Aboriginal title and rights. In 1980, in a last-minute campaign, he took that message to the chiefs across the country when he ran for the National Indian Brotherhood presidency. He began as a long-shot candidate, but by the time the votes were counted, he lost by only a single vote to the much less confrontational Del Riley. It was a message to the government that something serious was brewing in Indian country.

An even greater challenge was waiting just around the corner. In the months before Bobby ran for national chief, my father had visited me at law school. The constitutional issue had been on and off the Canadian agenda for the past decade. Prime Minister Trudeau had tried to patriate the BNA Act from Britain in 1971 and failed when Quebec premier Robert Bourassa withdrew his support. By the end of the decade, Trudeau was trying again to get consensus from the provinces and warning that if they refused, he would do it unilaterally.

This issue was in the news in the spring of 1979 when my father visited me in Toronto. That evening, he told me he was trying to understand the full implications of constitutional patriation for Indigenous peoples. His first thought was that maybe we should just stay out of it, that it was a non-issue for us. And wouldn’t trying to get recognition of our rights in the Canadian Constitution imply that we were part of the country—and therefore put in question our sovereign rights?

I disagreed. After almost three years in law school, I understood that the Constitution was where all of the rights, including territorial rights, were sorted out. It was the document that the courts looked to hold governments to account. If we were not in there, we were not in the game at all.

In the BNA Act, the British had allocated all of the powers in Section 91, which outlined federal powers, and Section 92, which outlined provincial powers. There was no room at all for Indian power. Our sovereignty was effectively stamped out in Section 91(24), which gave the federal government complete control over “Indians, and Lands reserved for the Indians”— in other words, over our lives. After approving this colonial document, the British sent it across the ocean to their successor state. We had to turn to older British constitutional decisions, like the Royal Proclamation of 1763, to find any Indigenous rights at all. And we had to hold the British government to task for our exclusion from the BNA Act, in what is essentially a white supremacist constitution, and find a way to break the Section 91 and 92 stranglehold on power.

When he left my flat in Toronto, my father still seemed unconvinced. But when, immediately after the failed Quebec referendum on independence in May 1980, Trudeau was ready to move on his threat to go it alone, and include in the repatriated constitution a Canadian charter of rights and freedoms, it raised alarm bells for First Nations across the country. Even after ten years, the White Paper battle was still fresh in our memory. What would happen if the charter of rights and freedoms could be interpreted to remove our Aboriginal status and protection of our lands in the name of “equality” with other Canadians?

The worst was confirmed in June 1980 when the Continuing Committee of Ministers on the Constitution released a twelve-item agenda for the constitution that did not include a word about Aboriginal title or rights. The Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs immediately launched a court action to block patriation without the consent of Aboriginal peoples.

At the end of the summer in 1980, while the Child Caravan was still marching on Victoria, the Union met to review the federal government’s repatriation plan and a decision was taken. The chiefs passed a resolution that “the convention gives full mandate to the UBCIC to take the necessary steps to ensure that Indian Governments, Indian Lands, Aboriginal Rights and Treaty Rights are entrenched in the Canadian Constitution.”

By November, the Union launched a massive operation to fight any patriation of the constitution without the explicit recognition of Aboriginal title and rights. The Constitution Express was born.

The Constitution Express: A Grassroots Movement

The Constitution Express was an expression of a people’s movement that changed the country in a fundamental way. Both the issues it addressed and the organization of the protest have important implications for our struggle today.

My own role in the protest was minor, but I was at Ottawa Central Station when the train pulled in on the morning of November 28, 1980. Two trains, with more than a thousand protesters on board, had left Vancouver four days earlier, taking different routes through the Rockies and joining together in Winnipeg, where they stopped for a night of rallies hosted by the Manitoba Indians.

In gathering support for the constitutional battle, the journey had already been a success. In British Columbia, hundreds of Indians had met the trains as they passed through the towns and cities along the route. In Alberta, the crowds reached the thousands. By the time the train left Winnipeg, the whole country was watching. The national news media were filled with speculation of what this Indigenous army would do when it reached the capital. In Ottawa, the RCMP began to fortify Parliament Hill with riot gates, and rumours of violent confrontations began to circulate.

Chief Robert (Bobby) Manuel, Constitution Express, November 1980

By this time, Canada was in its own turmoil over the constitution. That September, after the failure of a last-ditch federal-provincial constitutional conference that our people were excluded from, the prime minister announced that he was moving ahead as promised to request unilateral patriation from Britain by a simple Act of Parliament. His idea was to move quickly enough that patriation would be a fait accompli before the Supreme Court had time to make a ruling on the Indigenous case and another attempt to block patriation filed by eight of the ten provinces. All the British had to do was to take a quick vote to approve the Canadian changes, and the deed would be done. Politically, Trudeau knew it was impossible for the premiers— even those most set against patriation and the charter of rights—to argue that the constitution, once patriated, should be sent back to Britain. Or that a charter of rights, once adopted, would be abrogated.

Prime Minister Trudeau presented his constitutional package for passage by the Canadian Parliament on October 2, 1980. Even though most of the provinces opposed the move, polls showed that he had the support of the majority of Canadian people. He also had the support of the New Democratic Party in the House of Commons.

For Indigenous peoples, it was an example of the often sharp differences between us and non-Indigenous Canadians. For the average Canadian citizen, particularly for English- Canadians, the battle between the premiers and the prime minister was a jurisdictional one between two levels of government. Most wanted a deal to be worked out that provided the benefits of patriation and the charter of rights and preserved the current balance of power, but the worst that could happen is that some power would shift from the provinces to the centre. For us, just as much as in the case of the White Paper, our future as peoples was at stake.

In the “equality” provisions of the charter of rights, the federal government would have the tools to undermine our nations by stripping away Aboriginal rights that were not the same as those as other Canadians enjoyed. At the same time, patriation presented us with an opportunity to correct the exclusion of our rights from the 1867 Constitution, which had given all power over our lives and our lands to the federal government. The protection of our Aboriginal and treaty rights in the new constitution was a question of our very survival.

The thousand grassroots protesters on their way to Ottawa on the Constitution Express were demanding that the recognition of Aboriginal title and treaty rights be explicitly written into the constitution. On the train, the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs activists, which included my brother Bobby, were running workshops on the constitution and on what it would mean for our rights. They also laid out plans for demonstrations in Ottawa and stressed the need for discipline from all of the participants.

As the Union information package told participants: “Trudeau has challenged the Indian people to prove that we have our own rights and freedoms and these have meaning for us. We must show him in the courts and we must show him to his face. We must take as many Indian people to Ottawa as we possibly can.” The Union also stressed the utmost discipline from all participants because “the Government can only hope to make us look bad. We cannot tolerate any alcohol or drugs. This is a very very serious journey that we are undertaking, to defend our existence as Indian people.” To ensure discipline, those chosen for the security detail on the trains had been given both physical and spiritual training.

The people on the trains remember the great cultural celebration as they crossed the country, with singing, drumming, and Elders speaking. The protesters drew strength from this celebration with every mile along the track.

They were also made aware of the fears they were generating in official circles. At one point, between giant granite rock cuts in the Northern Ontario bush, the train suddenly screeched to a halt. RCMP officers poured onboard. Bobby asked the RCMP what was happening.

“Bomb threat,” they told him. “Everybody off the train. And take your luggage with you.”

Bobby looked outside and saw that they were trapped between the granite walls. Not a place you would stop a train if you were worried about a bomb exploding. It soon became obvious, as the thousand protesters opened their luggage for the RCMP search in the wet November snow, that it was not a bomb they were looking for but weapons. That is how edgy many in the country were getting as the train wound its way east through the Laurentian Shield.

Many, but not all. Some Canadians, such as Ottawa mayor Marion Dewar, hoped that the Indians would be able to stop Trudeau’s unilateral patriation drive, as the provinces seemed to have failed. While the RCMP were busy fortifying the city, Dewar told the people of Ottawa that the B.C. Indians were on their way and they should open their hearts and their homes to them.

Before the train pulled into the Ottawa station, the Constitution Express had already begun to have a political effect. The House of Commons committee studying Trudeau’s legislation had been scheduled to end its hearings that week, but it decided, when the train was just a couple of hundred kilometres from Ottawa, to extend the hearings to give the B.C. Indians an opportunity to have their say.

At the time, I was living in Ottawa doing contract work, sharing an apartment with my friend Dave Monture. For me, the Constitution Express was not only a major political event that shook the city, but also something of a family reunion. My father, who was having health problems at that time, had not taken the train. He had arrived in Ottawa a few days earlier as part of the advance team, and after making a fiery speech at the All Chiefs meeting that was being held in Ottawa to coincide with the Express, he felt ill and was taken to Ottawa General Hospital. It turned out he had had a heart attack, his second. It was a symptom of the slowly progressing heart disease that would continue to weaken his body over the coming years.

My father was forced to follow the Constitution Express from his Ottawa hospital room. But along with Bobby, my wife, Beverly, was on the train with the twins, Mandy and Niki, and our four-month-old son, Neskie.

When I arrived early to meet the train, I was surprised to find a thousand people, many of them Indians from the All Chiefs meeting, already jammed into the station to greet the B.C. protesters. Indian Affairs Minister John Munro was also there, standing with Del Riley, the man who had beaten Bobby for the national chief’s job a few months earlier. Del did not look particularly happy. I had heard that at the National Indian Brotherhood, they were peeved that the Manuels were storming into town with the B.C. Indians and stealing their thunder in the anti-patriation fight. These men were, after all, politicians, so we all understood their concerns.

As the train pulled in, the atmosphere was electric. There were drummers and singers gathered to greet the B.C. Indians, and more drummers and singers coming off the train. The station throbbed with Indian music and with the excitement of the arriving protesters. It took me a while to find Beverly and the kids in the crowd. When I finally spotted them, I could see Beverly was exhausted but joyful.

When Bobby got off the train, he was met by a couple of the B.C. Union advance men who told him, shouting in his ear above the noise of the drumming, that Mayor Dewar had installed a set-up for a quick press statement. They led him away, passing close by John Munro and Del Riley, but Bobby didn’t glance at them. When he reached the microphone, he didn’t mince words.

Bobby denounced the Trudeau constitutional moves as a direct attack on our people. He said they were part of Trudeau’s vision to steal Indian people’s homelands and leave them to end up in the slums of the cities. He concluded by warning that if the government did not include recognition of Aboriginal title and rights in the constitution, the Constitution Express activists “would not only head to New York to protest at the United Nations, they would begin working toward establishing a seat there.”

Then the Constitution Express organizational team went into action, assigning everyone billets and matching them with those who’d offered places to stay. I was enormously impressed by the way people had responded to Mayor Dewar’s call. When the advance team had arrived in Ottawa, they had only a few dozen billets. Dewar put her city team behind the search for accommodation, and by the time the train reached the station, there were not enough Indians to go around to meet the offers. We should have a special place of honour to acknowledge those like Mayor Dewar who stand by us in our hour of need.

While the others were heading to their lodgings to rest after the four-day journey, Bobby led a smaller group to Rideau Hall to deliver a petition to the Governor General, as the Queen’s representative. It stated: “The Creator has given us the right to govern ourselves and the right to self determination. The rights and responsibilities given us by the Creator cannot be altered or taken away by any other nation.”

The petition asked that “Her Majesty refuse the Patriation of the Canadian Constitution until agreement with the Indian Nations is reached.” It also asked the Crown to enter into internationally supervised trilateral negotiations to decide the issue and “to separate Indian nations permanently from the jurisdiction and control of the Government of Canada whose intentions are hostile to our people.”19

There had been a plan for Bobby’s delegation to take over Rideau Hall and hold their own constitutional hearings for a couple of days, but at the last minute, Bobby decided against it. He was criticized by some within the movement at the time, but in retrospect, the takeover wasn’t really needed.

Over the next several days, our people protested passionately on Parliament Hill. They sang, they chanted, they burned sweetgrass, and they spoke with journalists about the threat that the patriation package presented to our rights as Indigenous peoples. The B.C. Union had done its job well. The protesters were the most eloquent spokespeople imaginable for our cause. They had the grassroots passion and—through the Union workshops before and during the cross-country trip—a deep understanding of how the Trudeau constitutional power play could affect their future.

Their message was getting through to the government and to the Canadian people. In the press, the worried chatter about possible violence in the days before train’s arrival was replaced with increasingly positive coverage. More and more voices in Canada were speaking up to support our cause. Finally, a few days after the protesters arrived in the capital, they had their first big victory. Under pressure from his supporters, party leader Ed Broadbent withdrew the New Democratic Party’s support for the constitutional deal until Aboriginal people were included. The Trudeau alliance was cracking, and Trudeau knew that the British would be far less likely to agree to unilateral patriation if it was the request of a single party in the Canadian House of Commons.

Jean Chrétien, now minister of justice and Trudeau’s point man on the constitution, was sent scrambling to get a deal, of any kind, with the Indians, any Indians. He quickly patched together a couple of clauses that, he said, would ensure that the Indians would not lose anything under the charter of rights and freedoms. Del Riley quickly accepted the offer on behalf of the NIB. But the politics had already moved beyond Riley and the National Indian Brotherhood. My father and the Constitution Express protesters were demanding far more. The constitution could not simply skirt around our rights; it had to recognize and affirm them. The NIB was pushed back onto the sidelines as the Constitution Express continued to dominate Ottawa, and sent a delegation to New York to protest at the United Nations with the support of American Indians.

But the Union continued to direct its main attention to England, where the National Indian Brotherhood had had an active lobby since 1979. Our people understood that ultimately it was a British wrong that had robbed of us our powers in the BNA Act, and it was their responsibility to right it. In Ottawa, the Union sent a message directly to the British:

We have our own relationship with the British Parliament—a relationship which places a constitutional duty upon the British Parliament to ensure that our rights and interests are protected and that Crown obligations to us continue with the passage of time, until we achieve self determination. The Indian Nations are calling upon the British Parliament to perform their duty to us by refusing to patriate the Canadian constitution until it can be done without prejudice to Crown obligations and until the supervisory jurisdiction presently vested in the British Parliament be vested in the Indian Nations and not in the Federal or Provincial legislatures.20

The Union message and the message of the previous NIB lobbying were finally received. While the Constitution Express was still in Ottawa, the British parliamentary committee responsible for passing the patriation legislation fired a warning shot across the Trudeau government’s bow. On December 5, the British announced that there would be no quick passage of the bill on their side. They would not move on it until June 1981, at the earliest.

With dwindling support at home and with the British signalling that they would not be rushed into granting the Trudeau government quick passage while the move was so controversial in Canada, the unilateral patriation drive was effectively stalled. Prime Minister Trudeau extended the deadline for the House of Commons Constitutional Committee report. He would have to go back to the provinces and to Aboriginal people to get a deal.

From his hospital bed in Ottawa, my father felt the tide turning. Doctors and nurses and hospital visitors poked their heads into his room to offer encouragement and to let him know they were impressed by the passion and discipline of the protesters on Parliament Hill. Describing his time at the hospital, he told his supporters, “I was treated like a king. That is how much you stimulated Ottawa.”21

This road would have many twists to come. In February 1981, when the Constitutional Committee presented its report, an affirmation of Aboriginal title and rights was included in Section 35. This set off a new round of the battles between our people, who wanted more, and a group of provincial premiers who wanted Aboriginal rights struck from the deal. The B.C. provincial government delegation took the lead in lobbying for the removal of the clause, and they found support among the other Western premiers.

In September, the Supreme Court blocked Trudeau’s patriation drive without “a substantial measure” of provincial government support. The prime minister called a premiers conference, as a last-ditch attempt to strike a constitutional deal, for the first week of November.

The Union decided this time to target British and international opinion directly and make the Indian voice heard with its European Constitution Express. It was planned for the first week of the premiers meeting. The Union delegation left for Europe on November 1, 1981, with an itinerary that included Netherlands, Germany, France, Belgium, and England. The main destination was London, where the delegation would again attempt to convince the British to refuse patriation without a clear recognition of Indigenous nationhood in the constitution.

Once again, it was a grassroots effort. Because of the cost—$2,500 each for transportation and lodging—participants sought support from their bands. To make the maximum impression, they were told to bring their traditional dress and hand drums, and gifts for their hosts (jewellery, carving, beadwork, and so on). They were also told “bring information on [their] own band or area if possible, for example; pictures on conditions of communities and pictures of various traditional activities like pow-wows, hunting with game, fishing, new houses and old houses, mills or plants close to reserves, forests, construction roadways, or logging.” The instructions to participants also detailed personal goods they could bring through customs in Europe; since it was for B.C. Indians, the list included “1 salmon (FRESH OR SMOKED) Per Person or six tins of 4 ounces salmon.”22

It is important to stress that, just like on the Canadian Constitution Express, the great majority of the people travelling were not leaders or experts but grassroots people. As the Union historian of the period put it:

The Union, under the leadership of George Manuel sent the Constitutional Express to Europe. The UBCIC brought the voices of the people in the communities throughout the country to the international arena and made it clear that the aboriginal people of Canada would not stand back and allow their rights to be infringed upon. The excellent organization, forethought and vision of the Constitutional Express not only raised the consciousness of the public but also brought back the pride of the aboriginal peoples and the strength which has always been needed to fight for the recognition, the survival and the promotion of our rights.23

While the flights were leaving Vancouver, the premiers were landing in Ottawa to hammer out a constitutional deal. After days of deadlock, nine of the ten premiers reached a backroom deal with Chrétien, in what is widely known as the Night of the Long Knives when Quebec premier René Lévesque was stabbed in the back by the other premiers.

But the knife that night was used first against our people. In his account of the evening, lead B.C. negotiator Mel Smith wrote that some of the other provinces were worried about what effect Aboriginal rights would have on their jurisdiction. Others said it was Smith who expressed “strong reservations because almost none of British Columbia had been ceded by the Indians to the province through treaties. There was an uncertainty about the legal effect of this historical fact; the other provinces reluctantly acquiesced to this argument.”24 So in the middle of night, Aboriginal people were tossed out of constitution, along with Quebec.

In Britain, the presence of the European Express guaranteed extra coverage for the new betrayal of Canada’s Indigenous peoples, and once again, British press and parliamentarians began to urge that the Thatcher government refuse patriation under such contested conditions within Canada. When the Trudeau government listened to the Western premiers and presented its final package, without protection for Aboriginal people, it was met with a storm of protest so strong that the premiers themselves were forced to begin a series of conference calls that ended with Section 35 being reinstated.

The result was that Section 91(24) of the BNA Act, which gave the federal government sole responsibility over “Indians, and Lands reserved for the Indians,” would now be framed by Section 35(1) of the Constitution Act, 1982: “The existing aboriginal and treaty rights of the aboriginal peoples of Canada are hereby recognized and affirmed.”

In the BNA Act, only two entities were recognized in the Constitution—the federal government in the list of Section 91 powers and the provinces in the list of Section 92 powers. These seventeen words in Section 35 announced a new entity in the Canadian power structure: Aboriginal peoples, whose own constitutionally recognized rights would be “recognized and affirmed.”

Those who hoped that we had finally reached open water were soon disappointed, however. It is impossible to underestimate the depth and intransigence of the colonial mindset in Canada. While legal recognition of our rights was provided in the fundamental law of the land, political recognition would not be forthcoming.

This political dimension was supposed to be resolved in the series of First Nations/federal and provincial conferences that were mandated in the 1982 Constitution. Meetings to define our self-governing rights were held in 1983, 1984, 1985, and 1987. But each of these constitutional conferences ended in failure. There were some very modest changes to the wording of the subsections of Section 35 but no substantial movement to recognize our new constitutional status at a political level. Despite the promise to “recognize and affirm,” it soon became clear that the approach of the federal and many of the provincial governments would be better summed up as to “ignore and deny.” It would only be years later, when the courts finally stepped in again, that real weight would be given to Section 35.

The constitutional battle was a roller coaster ride for our people, but it also provided a model for Indigenous struggle. The main reason it was effective in having our rights recognized in the Constitution was that it focused on mass mobilization of the people rather than on leaders pleading their case in committee rooms or behind closed doors with government officials. Throughout this battle, the B.C. Union leadership had numerous invitations to appear before government committees to plead their case, but they refused the offers. They understood that we needed a much wider playing field.

We need to get outside the narrow bounds of parliamentary procedure and official negotiating tables, and demand our rights with a show of strength. Governments are not moved to listen by arguments or pleas for justice from our leadership. These rain on them at all times and governments are oblivious to them. What moved the government and the people of Canada was the passion and power of our people unified at the grassroots level, demanding justice for themselves and their children. The Constitution Express turned the patriation from a serious threat to an important gain for us that we can continue to build on into the future.

This is what our people accomplished by determined action together. And these are the means by which we can make continued advances today.