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  • A new Assembly of First Nations for the people? Second thoughts on a ‘One Indian, One Vote’ AFN

    Last month’s election for the Assembly of First Nations’ National Chief has once again stirred calls for change.

    On election eve, for example, fellow MEDIA INDIGENA contributor Waubgeshig Rice published an op-ed on CBC.ca entitled, “How to make the AFN more relevant.” Then, in the midst of the election, author Richard Wagamese wrote an opinion piece in the Globe and Mail entitled “We want an AFN of the people.” Both articles captured a broad sentiment among Ojibwe, Cree and Lakota peoples: a desire to participate in First Nations politics beyond the Band. Indeed, this AFN election garnered considerably more attention than any in the past, a clear testament to that desire for engagement. In both cases, Rice and Wagamese eloquently identify the problem — the Assembly’s issues with political representation (or lack thereof) — and a potential solution — in effect, a new “one Indian, one vote” AFN. But in considering this idea over the past few post-election weeks, I’m not so sure it’s the answer.

    In the first place, such a new ‘AFN of the people’ could lead to an even more unhelpful pan-Indianism than the current AFN perpetuates. Despite working hard to keep Metis and Inuit peoples out (and avoiding Aboriginalism), as well as “respecting our diversity as First Nations peoples” (as noted under the AFN Charter), National Chiefs have nonetheless had a tendency to claim unity among First Nations. This presumes, or at least results in, a sort of homogeneity across nations, thereby stripping away our regional, cultural and political distinctions. (In reality, the only unity that probably exists among First Nations lies within our near unanimous resentment of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada). An AFN of the people would therefore see even more diversity disappear under one umbrella, both magnifying this perception of sameness and stretching the AFN to something far beyond what it could realistically represent. The result could be a general, simplistic, and generic voice.

    Alternatively, instead of striving to represent everyone, an ‘AFN of the people’ could come to suffer from issues of skewed representation, specifically, an Assembly in danger of capture by particular interests. We already see this to an extent: First Nations who lobby for treaty rights versus those who lobby for Aboriginal rights. But the potential concern here is the growing urban First Nations population (more than half of us live outside our communities already). While urban peoples are in desperate need of political representation, their significant numbers could lead to an erosion of advocacy for the very communities AFN was created to serve, and who would still require an active and focused coordinating and lobbying organization into the future.

    Moreover, an ‘AFN of the people’ would effectively endorse the structural conditions that currently bedevil the organization. In other words, and I say this without irony, a completely transformed AFN along one Indian, one vote lines would maintain the status quo. The AFN is a very bureaucratic, process-oriented organization, steeped in Western-inspired legal and policy discourse. It mimics Canadian electoral politics, voting by majority (often very slim majorities). And it’s funded nearly exclusively by Canada, rendering it subject to AANDC discipline. An ‘AFN of the people’ might placate Algonquin, Pottawatomi and Dene peoples, even convey empowerment, but it seems more likely that we’d merely entrench mediocrity and stasis.

    Finally, an ‘AFN for the people’ would constitute a de facto new order of government, a move which would malign actual nations. And while we’re voting once every three years for a National Chief — a superficial conception of participation and democracy Canadians have come to accept — we might see ourselves forgetting about truly solving the problem of political representation. Of course, that would mean investing in the revitalization of authentic forms of Indigenous governance, e.g., the clan system, the potlatch, the Great Law, adapting them all as needed to contemporary circumstances. It would also mean getting involved in community and nation re-building. Not least, it would mean honoring our differences and re-establishing international relations and international confederacies between and among unique nations.

    The thoughts expressed here are in no way an endorsement of the AFN in its current form. Like Rice and Wagamese, I think we do need change in a serious way. I also agree that we need an outlet for the desire for political engagement that’s so apparent among Mohawk, Wet’suwet’en and Maliseet peoples. While an option to directly vote for the AFN’s National Chief is appealing (really appealing), it could lead to more harm than good. In fact, the whole discussion makes me think about the Cleveland Indians or Washington Redskins; while they’re really bad images of Native people, they’re often the only representation that exists, so we find ourselves supporting images and icons like Chief Wahoo. But it’s probably time to start cheering for another team. Rather, to start playing for another, and in a whole different league.

  • Victoria’s Secret: The Inconvenient History Behind BC’s Capital City

    A singular vision of history

    Victoria, the capital city of British Columbia, is celebrating its 150th anniversary today. In the lead-up to this occasion, local organizations, artists and businesses have partnered with the City to create a whirlwind of events, promotional material and educational swag to draw people out to its August 2, 2012 celebrations.

    Looking over the City’s website, including a video and list of “fun facts,” a widespread theme emerges: the complete denial of Victoria’s colonial history. A history fundamentally at odds with the ongoing presence of the Coast Salish peoples, upon whose lands the capital was imposed. Throwing around words like ‘cultural diversity’ and a ‘love of history,’ the City of Victoria’s vapid vocabulary glosses over the violent displacement of Indigenous peoples needed to build and sustain the capital.

    In fact, looking over the information about the Victoria 150 celebrations, it is difficult to see any trace of Indigenous people whatsoever. After much searching, I did find an acknowledgement of the Lekwungen people, whose only apparent relevance is that they pre-existed the City’s ‘birth.’ According to its website, the

    “Lekwungen People hunted and gathered here for thousands of years before European exploration, carefully managing the land through controlled burning and food cultivation.”

    Presented with this ever-so-brief statement on Indigenous peoples’ past use of the lands in and around what is now Victoria, it is easy to forget that the Lekwungen peoples’ presence is an unbroken one in the region. They continue to live and thrive here, harvesting fish and sealife, cultivating kwetlal (camas), and otherwise relying on a wealth of local plants for food, medicine and ceremonial regalia. These land and sea-based relationships are entwined with ongoing cultural, political and spiritual practices — none of which have substantively ended despite government policies once declaring them illegal. Of course, these traditions continue to be adapted to contemporary life, as is evidenced in the Songhees nation’s construction of a cutting-edge wellness centre just a few minutes from downtown Victoria. And yet, the past, present and future of Coast Salish livelihoods like the Lekwungen’s are nowhere to be found in the Victoria 150 celebrations.

    By contrast, the colonial history of Victoria is widely celebrated: “The City of Victoria is proud of its British heritage,” trumpets its website. The fact that this heritage is interwoven with violent colonial practices is conveniently forgotten. And so, one must ask: why can’t this proud British history be acknowledged alongside the truths of conquest? What is being gained by turning away from the individual and collective acts of violence that brought this city into being?

    Totems in Victoria's Spirit Square

    While I’m not necessarily surprised by this omission of Victoria’s colonial realities, I am surprised at the lack of promotion behind its recent collaborations with Indigenous people. For example, the City-commissioned totem poles (left) by Coast Salish carvers Butch Dick, Bradley Dick and Clarence Dick Jr., which stand as prominent public artworks in the central “Spirit Square” just outside City Hall. Victorians also recently declared Mohawk writer Janet Rogers as the city’s poet laureate, the first time an Indigenous person has served in this post. Why aren’t at least these more recent developments considered worthy of mention by the City’s sesquicentennial celebrations?

    It seems that any acknowledgement of the ongoing presence of Coast Salish and visiting Indigenous peoples would disrupt the mythical story of a Victoria springing up out of the empty wilderness of pre-historical Canada. Is it so scary to ask what conditions actually ‘birthed’ this city into being? Why?

    As an Indigenous person living in these Lekwungen territories, I will not be attending the Victoria 150 celebrations. Of course, it is unlikely that my absence will even register with those hosting the events, since I and my relations apparently do not exist in their minds, other than as prehistoric museum figures. However, to those non-Indigenous Victorians planning to celebrate the capital’s birthday this BC Day long weekend, I encourage you to consider the following challenge.

    As you take a moment or two to remind yourselves of the imperialist erasure effected by these celebrations, take a long look around at exactly what (and whose) version of history is being celebrated and acknowledged here. When Indigenous peoples who have lived in these territories for thousands of years — literally millenia — can be rendered all-but-invisible by a history spanning a mere 15 decades, I think it’s clear we need to ask ourselves what kinds of conversations, and what versions of reality, we’re missing out on. Because it isn’t only a warped version of the past that is at stake: it is the kind of culture and society we inhabit today and the future we might create as neighbors living together.

  • POLL: Should boxer Damien Hooper have apologized for displaying an Aboriginal flag at the Olympics?

    Hooper at his Men's Light Heavyweight (81kg) match-up

    An Aboriginal boxer competing on behalf of Australia who also maintains clear allegiances to his people has gotten into some hot water for his visible display of the latter at the summer Olympic Games in London this week. In what is perhaps an ironically telling comment on the state of that country’s effort at Settler/Aboriginal reconciliation, it appears Damien Hooper is the one who’s been made to say ‘sorry.’

    The nature of his transgression? According to The Australian, Hooper — one of 10 Indigenous athletes on the team — was guilty of

    “wearing a black T-shirt bearing the Aboriginal flag as he arrived for his impressive opening fight win against American Marcus Browne. It went against Australian team rules, which state athletes must only wear the official team uniform.”

    Under those rules, essentially a carbon-copy of Olympic rules, that act of pride simultaneously constituted an act of politics.

    Pressured by the Australian Olympic Committee (itself reportedly pressured by the International Olympic Committee), Hooper soon apologized for the flag flap. But if the 20-year-old athlete is contrite for what he did, the reasons why he did it tell a different story. Or so one is encouraged to wonder by his initial response:

    “I’m Aboriginal, I’m representing my culture, not only my country but all my people as well. That’s what I wanted to do and I’m happy I did it.”

    So, what to make of all this? In her provocative piece, “On the Olympics & Being Indigenous,” Leanne Simpson asserts that

    “[E]very aspect of the Olympics is political…  they reflect the politics of both the ruling nation-states of the world and corporations. You can wear a shirt with Canada on it. You can wear shoes with Adidas on them. That’s fine, because it’s ‘not political.’ Unless of course you’re Indigenous and these corporations and nation states are causing never-ending harm, destruction and trauma to your land and your people.”

    For her part, Simpson says Hooper “should be proud [of what he did] … He took a risk in the biggest sporting event of his life to tell those Old Ones that he remembered.”

    What do you think? Take a moment to vote in our poll and/or leave a comment below.

    UPDATE: Realizing there was no poll option for someone who thought Hooper should not have backed down, come what may, I have added another way to vote, namely, “No: Hopper should have stood his ground, even if it meant his immediate removal from Australia’s Olympic team”

    [polldaddy poll=”6431172″]

  • Why a truly independent First Nations political voice could be just $1 or $2 away


    Yesterday, as I watched the decisive re-election of Shawn Atleo as the National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, my thoughts couldn’t help but turn to the perennial question hanging over the AFN: as an organization funded so heavily from the coffers of the Canadian government, just how independent a voice is it, anyway?

    The question is a fair one. As the old adage goes, when you bite the hand that feeds you, the hand’s owner seldom likes it. Some argue we only need to see what happened to one-term National Chief Matthew Coon Come for evidence of that at work in Indian country. Among other battles he waged against the Canadian government, Coon Come helped lead the charge in 2000 against proposed reforms to the Indian Act, under what came to be known as the First Nations Governance Act. The Indian Affairs minister at the time, Liberal MP Robert Nault, was none too pleased with the Assembly’s opposition. Cuts to AFN’s funding followed not long after, and its annual disbursement from Indian Affairs dropped in one year from $19.8 million down to $12 million, a cut of just under 40% (by 2003, Coon Come’s last year in office, that figure was further reduced to $6 million). Today, some observers look back at this budgetary collapse as a clear cut case of an AFN leader being “punished” by the feds for attempting “to steer a more radical course.”

    Now, however accurate or appropriate this characterization may or may not be — National Chiefs seem to be routinely positioned by pundits as occupying one of two polarized ends of the conciliatory/confrontational continuum — it does highlight one inescapable truth: financially speaking, the AFN has next-to-no control over its own destiny. And that is never a recipe for independence. As a 2003 Windspeaker editorial put it, “the AFN is funded by government and indirectly controlled by government and is not yet a true First Nation institution.”

    Nine years after those words were written, not much has changed in that regard; the Assembly effectively remains monetarily beholden to the Canadian government. Something else that hasn’t changed over that time are criticisms about how AFN is structured. Critics decry how only Chiefs can vote for the National Chief. They call for a national grassroots alternative where all First Nations people can vote for their leader.

    And yet, as a recent First Perspective editorial asked,

    [If] so many people out there — people who are educated, who are capable, are saying this on Facebook — are disenchanted with the status quo, [why] hasn’t this sentiment coalesced into a grassroots organization to replace the AFN as a genuine political movement?

    Here too, the question is a fair one. But, in the era of crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter, it may no longer be an impractical one.

    Allow me to explain. While the magical series of tubes known as the internet may suffer from occasional bouts of hype, its ever-evolving capacity to coordinate millions upon millions of bits and bytes at the speed of light has now made many things possible in 2012 that were simply unimaginable even three years ago (coincidentally, the first time Atleo was elected). Not the least of these is crowdfunding. With the click of a button (indeed, many clicks of many buttons), individuals can now effectively amass a significant sum of money towards the cause of their choice, each of them submitting one or two dollars at a time through an automated on-line intermediary. Watch that happen a million times and — poof! — you ‘suddenly’ see one or two million dollars aggregate. Google <crowdfunding success stories> if you’re still dubious about how it can happen.

    As the late Johnny Carson would say (ask your parents), this is wild and wacky stuff. And if you believe as I do that a single dollar without strings attached is worth $10 or even $100 of government-controlled funding, it won’t take long for you to see the technological potential here for funding the creation and on-going operation of a truly independent Indigenous political voice, one free of the kind of outside meddling we’ve seen exercised to date.

    Could that voice be the AFN itself? It’s entirely possible. The grassroots, distributed model of funding I’ve described is open to any organization that sees merit in it. Whether that might include the Assembly is, as they say, an open question.

    Allow me to end these admittedly back-of-napkin musings with this final thought: First Nations folk, maybe it’s time to put your toonies where your tongue is.

  • The National Media and the AFN’s “Angry Indians”

    It’s an auspicious week for the Assembly of First Nations. The AFN’s Annual General Assembly will either re-elect Shawn Atleo as National Chief or select one of seven challengers to lead the organization through the next three years.

    Today’s vote is the culmination of a relatively short and mostly unexciting campaign, yet it is one that has nonetheless caught the attention of some in the national media, in particular, the two Johns: John Ibbiston of the Globe and Mail and John Ivison of the National Post. Each have filed a number of stories. Interestingly, both writers share a remarkable and disappointing similarity: a very apparent tendency to cast the field of candidates as angry, ungrateful militants.

    Rather than mask some kind of agenda, Ibbiston’s inaugural AFN-related piece (“Shawn Atleo appears unchallenged in push for native-education reform”) on June 18 perhaps demonstrates the writer’s lack of qualifications to report on First Nations politics. The Globe veteran illustrated this sophomoric understanding when he confidently asserted that, “barring an unexpected last-minute challenger, Shawn Atleo will be acclaimed for a second three-year stint as National Chief to the Assembly of First Nations.” Not only was Ibbitson very poorly informed at the time of his assessment that Atleo would go “unchallenged,” but the field vying for the National Chief position actually became the largest in the organization’s history.

    Ibbitson’s second article (“Native leaders risk missing their moment of greatest influence”) a month later was an outright endorsement of Atleo and marked the beginning of this trend. For Ibbitson, Atleo was the wise decision because his opponents are “militant.” More than that, Ibbitson employed some awkward demographic analysis (the First Nations population will flat-line at some point and increasing immigrant populations will have little ‘guilt’ to compel justice for first peoples) as a veiled warning to Chiefs that they should “bear in mind a future of steadily diminishing influence as they choose the next leader of their Assembly.”

    While Ibbiston’s third piece (“Atleo’s second term as AFN chief hinges on 250 votes”) on July 18 largely offered an overview of the AFN Annual General Assembly’s Day One proceedings, as well as some soft predictions on voting, he yet again managed to frame Atleo’s challengers as “determined to set Canada’s native people on a more emphatic path of confrontation with the federal government,” and “(speaking) repeatedly about colonization, occupation, victimization.” In these latter two articles, National Chief contenders Gabriel, Kelly, Nelson, et al. continue to be cast as angry, perhaps wrongfully so. In that sense, they are unappreciative as well.

    The National Post coverage has been equally problematic. Leading it has been John Ivison, who has won few fans over the past week. At the end of Day One’s proceedings, he joked to the Toronto Star’s Tanya Talaga via Twitter, “my security detail should have arrived by [the morning], leaving me plenty of time to don my body armour before entering the breach.” Ivison’s remark is an apparent reference to the general disdain accumulating among Mi’kmaq, Mohawk and Ojibwe peoples for his reporting of the leadership contest, candidates and commentators alike, calling his writing “right-wing propaganda” and “ignorant.”

    Like Ibbitson, Ivison is squarely in the Atleo camp. In “The fight for the soul of the AFN” (July 16), Ivison notes that “only in native politics could securing the Prime Minister’s undivided attention for a day, and hooking hundreds of millions of dollars at a time of austerity, be considered a sellout.” Moreover, and not unlike Ibbitson, Ivision depicts many if not all of Atleo’s seven challengers as radicals who discuss issues like sovereignty, which he deems to be “only a recipe for gridlock.” This perspective encourages two assumptions; firstly, the notion that Dene, Cree and Cayuga peoples are currently well treated, and secondly, that only those issues that the federal government is interested in talking about actually matter.

    While Ivison happily provides candidates his advice, he has tremendous difficulty listening to them in turn. Following his July 16 column, leadership candidate and professor Pam Palmater criticized the writer for twisting her words and the facts; subsequently, in his July 18 piece, “Candidates talk of anger and injustice,” Ivison persisted with his theme. Quoting candidate Bill Erasmus,

    “I’ve travelled across this country and what I’ve seen more than anything is anger. We have angry people.”

    Ivison then goes on to use the sentiment as a way of framing the candidates as threatening to Canadians. But, in fact, Ivison cut Erasmus off. Had he included the full quote from Erasmus,

    “I’ve travelled across this country and what I’ve seen more than anything is anger. We have angry people but we have to contain that anger. It’s not the way (forward) [emphasis mine]”

    one would readily see that the speaker’s full intent and implication are very different from what Ivision would have his readers imagine. Clearly, the foundation of Ivison’s entire article is built on a butchered quote, one originally pleading for reconciliation, not confrontation.

    But it would seem what Erasmus actually said — what any of the candidates actually said — doesn’t really matter to Ibbitson or Ivison. Investigating the anger that does exist in any earnest way (as opposed to excusing it) or covering the candidates’ many expressions of love and hope and sadness (instead of solely frustration) is outside the already constructed narrative of The Angry Indian. Whether the narrative is naturally transposed onto this situation or is being exploited to strategically support Atleo is unclear. Still, a partial answer may be found in Ibbitson’s most recent column (July 18: “Native leaders ponder the path of most resistance”) where he notes “the AFN inhabits a world not easily recognized by those outside the Native community.”

    In Ibbitson’s case, truer words were never written.