My Vision Quest - Chapter 2

"How do you eat an Elephant?" About two decades ago now my Mom posed that question to me in an email. She was responding to a note I had sent to her earlier in the day, in which I had expressed my troubled thoughts over the daunting task that lay ahead of me; writing my Master's Thesis. For some time, despite a massive volume of collected research to draw upon, I had been like a man standing paralyzed on a high diving board, with toes gripping tightly to the very edge. I knew I was not going to turn around and climb back down the ladder, but the longer I stood there the harder it seemed to be to take the plunge. Her answer, "one bite at a time!", not only made me laugh, but also reminded me of another piece of profound wisdom; "the first step in solving any problem is to begin." Keeping both of those lessons in mind, the time has come to spring forward. It has been nineteen years since I put my Thesis draft in a box and withdrew from the M.A. program, but it is time now to resurrect the words I wrote back then in a series of articles for my blog, because it is a voice and an argument that is every bit as important to be heard today as it was back in 1996.

Finding a meaningful voice in the dialogue relating to First Nations' aspirations for self-government and self-determination within Canada's assumed territories has required a rather lengthy vision quest. Born into a family of Christian Missionaries, the earliest experiences of my life were from the 'Dark Continent', where my Grandfather was serving as a Doctor in Angola, and my Father was serving as a Minister with the United Church of Zambia at the time of my birth in 1963. Throughout my childhood I was raised to believe in and to respect the dignity and worth of all peoples within the family of humanity, as well as to support and defend the rights of all peoples to equality and freedom from persecution and oppression. The associations and friendships my parents shared were with people from a diversity of racial identities, and I grew up in those early years as comfortable in the companionship of a 'black' child as with a 'brown' or 'white.' It was a world in which I had been one of the 'minority', but also one in which, at least as far as I can recall, race played no part in the friendships I made or shared.

When I arrived in Canada in 1970 my family settled in Medicine Hat, Alberta, for a period of about six years, and it was during this time that I received my first exposure to the images of the 'Noble Savages' of North America. Despite my egalitarian upbringing, like every boy (and some girls) I knew at the time, we played 'Cowboys and Indians', watched the Westerns on T.V., and spent the early evening hours before moms called us off to bed pretending we were settling the 'Wild West' in days of old. The racial composition of my environment had changed dramatically with the move to a 'New World', but my exposure to 'real Indians' was quite limited. There were the occasional despairing souls who came to the door of the Manse we lived in seeking food stamps and lodging arrangements, but I was perhaps too young at the time to appreciate the gravity of their predicaments or to make the correlation between their indigenous character and the socioeconomic conditions they faced. Aboriginal peoples dressed in buckskins and headdresses, mounted on horses, and riding in the annual Medicine Hat Rodeo Parade or Calgary Stampede provided the surreal identity for those "dusky" foe that lurked around the corners of Mr. Gardner's garage or the bushes in the Daniel's front yard. Geronimo was taken down by my steady aim on many a night. I did not perceive myself as a racist at the time, and I do not recall feelings of hatred either. It just seemed like pretending to kill Indians was what kids in Canada did for fun. Years later I would look back on those 'games' with both regret for my ignorance over the indoctrination that such boyhood imaginations were perpetuating, and my naiveté over the implications of 'playing' out genocide against the 'Red Skins' of the Prairies on which I was living.

In 1976 Dad's career required a move to Edmonton, where for the first year we settled into the Strathcona community. My first friend in the neighborhood was Ravin Eagle-Spirit (not his real name), an Aboriginal boy my age who lived a few houses east and across the back alley. Ravin and I spent every day out-and-about; riding our bikes in Mill Creek Ravine, skateboarding along White Avenue, playing street hockey in Kinsmen Park, and smoking cigarettes while hiding in the garage attic with girlie magazines. His indigenous heritage was of no significance to me then, except perhaps in providing a personal affirmation of the authentic humanity within a peer's 'Indian' identity. We were not peer's in every respect though, and it was from my friendship with Ravin and access to his home environment that I was first exposed to at least three aspects of family life that all-too-frequently serve to define reality for a vast majority of Canada's Aboriginal peoples today; abject poverty, spousal violence, and intoxicated requital.

Our time of companionship on the road of life only lasted for about a year before my family moved to the west side of the city and we lost touch. As the years passed though, like many other Canadians, I followed the resurgence of the First Nations' political agenda leading up to the Patriation of the Constitution in 1981. My prior friendship with Ravin provided an intimate frame of reference in which I was able to identify with some of the consequences attributed to divestiture, which it has been proven that the Canadian government has practiced against the First Nations' peoples throughout the state. The 'games' I had played around the neighborhood in Medicine Hat and the movies I'd watched with friends at Saturday Matinees flashed back to provide mental images of the type of treatment that Aboriginal peoples faced during the formative years of our nation's history, and still continue to struggle against. Images of dire poverty and social decay in reserve communities, reports of abhorrent levels of unemployment, and evidence of disproportionate hardship through incarceration statistics captured the media spotlight and were graphically portrayed with increasing regularity on National and local news broadcasts throughout the 1980s. As I passed from youth, through adolescence, and toward adulthood I was quickly becoming a 'less-proud' Canadian, and the road was being paved for the years of intellectual inquiry that were to follow during the course of my endeavors in post-secondary education.

I became more intensely interested in the plight of Canada's Aboriginal peoples as the Constitutional Conference mandated by S.37 of the Constitution Act, 1981, and the three subsequent Conferences, proceeded to capture center-stage on the national political and media agendas during the period from 1983 through 1987. Then, in 1987, while I was studying toward a Diploma in Law Enforcement at Lethbridge Community College (L.C.C.), in Lethbridge, Alberta, a more localized set of circumstances became the focus of my attention. For a couple of years thereafter the 'coffee-house agenda' in Lethbridge periodically centered around discussions over a number of deaths of Kainaiwa Nation (Blood) peoples in Lethbridge and on the reservation that stretches south from Fort Macleod to the town of Cardston, in southern Alberta. Being privy to some of those conversations as a consequence of over-hearing them while performing part-time Server functions in the Restaurant Industry, I became disillusioned by the assumptions of inferiority and worthlessness I repeatedly heard used to define Aboriginal identity. The Constitutional Conference process failed to reach consensus on the establishment of understanding in relation to the 'rights' of First Nations' peoples to self-government and self-determination, and the climate in Lethbridge provided me with ample evidence of unresolved intolerance from 'white' people toward 'Indians'. An attachment to the principle of a 'cultural mosaic' as the defining characteristic of Canada's identity and my altruism both served to motivate me into searching out an argument that could provide the moral and legal authority to convince fellow Canadians that the premise of an inherent right to self-government and self-determination for Aboriginal communities throughout the nation was one that they must acknowledge and give credence to.

In 1988, Chief Roy Fox sent letters to the Premier of Alberta that expressed his community's concerns over what was perceived as a pattern of  increasing incidents of deaths and murders of Kainaiwa Nation members under peculiar and mysterious circumstances. Those letters, and others sent by concerned parties, also expressed dissatisfaction with the police investigations into those deaths, and suggested that the authorities had been either unwilling or unable to solve the tragedies to the satisfaction of the community. A Public Inquiry was established under the direction of Commissioner C.H. Rolf in 1989, and shortly thereafter hearings began in Lethbridge and Cardston. Coinciding with the climate of intercultural tensions in southern Alberta at the time, in 1988 I had graduated from L.C.C. and had decided to move across the Coulee to the University of Lethbridge (U. of L.), to begin a four-year term of study toward a Bachelor of Arts Degree, majoring in Political Science. Throughout my years of study at L.C.C., and during the years that would follow at the U. of L., I became increasingly disturbed by the allegations of racism and genocide that members of the Kainaiwa Nation claimed were motivating the treatment they received at the hands of the authority figures responsible for justice administration within their community. Hitherto I had not given much thought to the colonial regime that provided the foundation of our nation's historical evolution, nor had I understood how many comparisons were possible with the Apartheid regime in South Africa and the colonial administrations that had emerged to exploit and oppress the indigenous peoples across Africa during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Driven by the influences of my early life in Africa; by the experiences of thirteen years living in southern Alberta and the exposure I had to some racist attitudes; by my belief in the concept of a 'just' society, fairly and impartially governed by the 'rule of law'; and by my passion for investigating, rooting out, and exposing injustice, the appeal to learn more about the historical and legal arrangements between the Crown and Aboriginal peoples magnified.

The cumulative impact of all of these experiences stimulated my interest in pursuing graduate studies, and in 1993 I began course work at the University of Alberta, Department of Political Science, toward the Master of Arts Degree that this, my Thesis draft paper was prepared for. By that point I had already been influenced by reading the reports and findings of the Royal Commission on the Donald Marshall, Jr., Prosecution in Nova Scotia, the Report of the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry of Manitoba, the Report of the Task Force on the Criminal Justice System and its Impact on the Indian and Metis People of Alberta, the failed Meech Lake Accord process, the Oka Crisis in Quebec, and the Lone Fighters Society attempted blockade of the Old Man River Dam project in Southern Alberta. The evidence available to stand in support of the dismal treatment Aboriginal peoples have experienced during their centuries of association with the Imperial and Canadian Crown is abundant, and yet the political and legal will in Canada has been quite resistant to the acceptance of an inherent right to self-government and self-determination for First Nations' peoples. For at least the past thirty years Canadians have been struggling to articulate exactly what is meant by the sentence, "existing aboriginal and treaty rights are hereby recognized and affirmed," as it reads in Section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1981.

Without question, the greatest source of dissension has arisen out of the correlation between inherent rights and sovereign rights. Instructed by Brian Slattery's observation that, "issues of sovereignty are implicated in many current disputes between native Americans and governmental authorities over such matters as land claims, treaty rights, the application of customary law, and powers of self-government," I arrived at a similar conclusion to the one that he reached in a 1991 article, "Aboriginal Sovereignty and Imperial Claims," (published in the Osgoode Hall Law Journal, Vol.29, No.4, at p.322). Slattery noted that, "[u]ntil some understanding on this matter is reached, it seems unlikely that the disputes will be resolved or fade away."

The argument presented in this and subsequent articles on this blog is primarily addressed toward reaching resolution of these disputes. In an effort to bring closure to the debate over the scope and content of Aboriginal rights, therefore, I intend to focus the analysis within these articles on the following question:

Is the right to self-government and self-determination an inherent right possessed by Aboriginal peoples as a consequence of being the original occupants of the lands now claimed by the Canadian state, or is it a contingent right, based on the benevolent 'grant' of powers and jurisdiction from the Federal and provincial governments?

Further on the examination of this point, I want to consider the underlying question that inevitably flows from a consideration of the dichotomy between these opposing schools of thought toward the rights of First Nations' peoples in territories claimed as being a part of the sovereign domain of the Canadian state:

In International Law, does Canada possess an unfettered sovereign title to the territories it has assumed control over; based on Imperial Crown transfer of land title, Post-Confederation Treaties with First Nations' peoples, and/or premised on a 'Settlement Thesis' legitimating acquisition of title to lands over which no treaty was signed? Or, conversely, regardless of Treaties and the settlement of Canada by peoples of European heritage, do First Nations' peoples still possess a sovereign title to the lands that their ancestors have inhabited since time immemorial that can serve to fetter Canadian sovereignty over British North America?

During the course of the past three decades I have traveled a trail through eight centuries of convoluted legal and historical scholarship with the aim of discovering a conclusive appraisal of those seemingly elusive 'existing aboriginal and treaty rights'. As a consequence of the research I have completed, I defend the argument that the historical archives and my research supports:

First Nations' peoples in Canada possess an inherent right to self-government and self-determination. Further, and coincident with this right, there must be an acknowledgment by the Government of Canada, the provincial legislatures, and the people of Canada that First Nations' peoples continue to enjoy a sovereign title over the lands on which they live and have a right to establish whatever processes and institutions they deem necessary and desirable for the good and orderly governance of their communities - including the right to make laws and to establish independent justice systems for dispute and conflict resolution functions within First Nations' territories.

Undoubtedly, there are those who will shudder at the potential for jurisdictional chaos within such a hypothesis, not to mention the possible threat that such a conclusion could hold for the very complex of the existing Confederation. Those who hold and manipulate the strings of power and authority under the current 'quasi-federal' system will most certainly resist, as they have for well over a century, any infringement on the 'rights' and 'titles' that they have come to believe they inherited from the forefathers who reached terms of agreement for the formation of Canada, and from the imperial Crown that preceded them. Those prone to 'doom and gloom' imaginations of such a complication of legal entitlement over Canada's assumed territories will hesitate in giving any credence to such an argument, regardless of its merit, for fear of the change that it will bring to the identity of the state that they have found a sense of security within and an allegiance toward. In response to such resistance and defensiveness, I intend to suggest that, far from tearing apart the very fabric of our society, there is the potential within such an acknowledgment for a positive and dynamic reconstruction of the ties that bind us together. As a means to articulate this vision, I propose that in fact:

Syncretism of 'distinct societies' within 'the Village' (Canada) can be achieved through the paradox of pluralism in governing bodies and institutions, by adopting and promoting a new 'Longhouse' paradigm of cohabitation.

As the above synthesis of my vision quest infers, this work is the product of many contributions. If the evidence and insights I share herein serve to improve the lives of First Nations' peoples and help to strengthen 'the Village' in the twenty-first century, the credit goes to those people who I have met and been influenced by along the journey to now. I thank them for their teaching and guidance, for their support and encouragement, and for the wisdom I was able to glean from their thoughts. If this endeavor does not prove to contribute to those aims, the burden for failing to do so is mine alone. That said, I believe my conscience will be clear, for all that I am attempting to do is share with you 'the truth as I have come to know it.' Beyond that, no person can go.