MacBAIN: Trudeau’s unworkable indigenous dream

In his June 1, 2024 statement about National Indigenous History Month, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau reiterated his commitment to “building renewed relationships with First Nations, Inuit, and Métis based on the recognition of rights, respect, and nation-to-nation partnership.”Trudeau has been following his unworkable “nation-to-nation” dream since first becoming prime minister nine years ago.That’s why he is in dire need of a lesson on indigenous history.For starters, there has never been a nation-to-nation relationship between the government of Canada and the indigenous people. Trudeau can’t “renew” something that has never existed.While negotiating treaties with the less-than-50,000 indigenous people living between Thunder Bay and the eastern slopes of the Rocky Mountains in the 1870s, Lieutenant-Governor Alexander Morris said the treaties were for “British Indians on British soil.”On signing any of the seven treaties entered into between 1871 and 1877, each chief received a silver medal, a red suit and a Union Jack to fly over his lodge to show that he was now “an officer of the Queen”.No chief was authorized to sign on behalf of another band. No chief could sign on behalf of all bands. Treaty No. 3, for example, was signed by 24 Ojibway chiefs.On more than one occasion, Lieut.-Gov. Morris — who negotiated four of the seven treaties —threatened to deal with each band separately if the chiefs couldn’t reach a consensus among themselves.There was never so much as a hint that any of the chiefs, or all of them combined, stood on an equal footing with Queen Victoria who ruled over England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales and, also, India, Burma, Australia, New Zealand, Malaya, the British West Indies, Singapore, Java, Gibraltar, Malta, parts of Africa and China and, of course, her recently-established Dominion of Canada. In India alone, she ruled over 200 million souls and her officers did not hesitate to deal harshly with anyone who questioned her right to rule.If any nation had dared challenge the British Queen’s sovereignty over the Canadian land mass and all of its inhabitants — including the indigenous people — its ships would have been sunk on the high seas by Her Majesty’s Royal Navy, the most formidable military force on earth.Neither Lieut.-Gov. Morris nor any other treaty commissioner appointed by the government of Canada considered the scattered bands to be nations in the accepted definition of the word. Unlike Trudeau, they knew better than that.In May, 1877, a year after wiping out Lieutenant-Colonel George Custer and his 7th Cavalry Regiment at the Battle of the Little Bighorn in southeastern Montana, Chief Sitting Bull and his followers sought refuge in southern Saskatchewan.But, the U.S. military made no effort to cross the border and track them down. They were now under the protection of the British Crown.Something similar happened 15 years earlier when several hundred Sioux sought refuge in Manitoba after 400 whites were massacred at New Ulm, Minnesota.No one pursued them. The Americans recognized that everything north of the 49th parallel was British territory.The sovereignty of the Crown was — and in the right of Canada remains — beyond dispute.On another note, it might interest you to know that the term First Nation was coined in the late 1970’s by Indigenous leader Sol Sanderson, former president of the Federation of Saskatchewan Indians. He meant for the phrase to be applied to the Ojibway, Cree, Blackfoot and other tribes.He most certainly did not mean for it to be applied to each and every one of the more than 600 sparsely-populated bands scattered from coast to coast.But that’s what they’re called today and, in his futile attempt at building a nation-to-nation relationship with indigenous people, Trudeau’s Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations is negotiating “self-government” agreements with the chiefs of bands across Canada — many of whom have a population of less than 500 and most of whose residents are totally dependent on government assistance.There’s no future for them or their children in staying on the isolated reserves. Like the thousands of Newfoundlanders who moved to Ontario when the fish ran out in the late 1940s, they should move to where the jobs are.But they’re not going to move as long as Trudeau keeps spending billions of dollars on housing, water and sewerage, health and social assistance and other services about which there isn’t so much as a single word in any of the treaties.The 1985 Ministerial Task Force on Program Review led by Deputy Prime Minister Eric Nielsen criticized government efforts to create modern indigenous urban suburbs in remote areas with “no consideration of the communities’ long-term economic capacity to pay for the maintenance and replacement of this level of service.” The report said the government’s approach had created an “artificial world on Indian reserves where reliance on government is almost total. In effect, the government has created communities in which housing and other services are often far better than those in surrounding communities…. In so doing it has also unwittingly created a disincentive to move to areas of economic opportunity.“This has only been accomplished at great cost to the federal government. As notable, however, is the incalculable human cost in lost pride, purpose, independence and self-motivation.”That was 39 years ago. Nothing much has changed.Despite the billions that have been spent, most reserves are no better off today than they were when Eric Nielsen wrote his 1985 report.That’s because the apartheid-like reserve system does not work, never has worked, and never will work.Note to PM Trudeau: Recognizing a small band of mostly-unemployed Ojibways at the end of a dead-end dirt road in northwestern Ontario as a “nation” won’t change that reality in any way whatsoever.Toronto author Robert MacBain has followed the indigenous file for more than 60 years and was a consultant to the Department of Indian Affairs in the early 1970s. His website is: www.RobertMacBainBooks.ca

MacBAIN: Trudeau’s unworkable indigenous dream

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