a canadian fiction
ABORIGINAL CLAIMS OF SOVEREIGNTY
by
DAVID SOLWAY
______________________________
David
Solway is a Canadian poet and essayist (Random Walks)
and author of The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism, and
Identity and Hear, O Israel! (Mantua Books). His
editorials appear regularly in PJ
Media. His monograph, Global Warning: The Trials of
an Unsettled Science (Freedom Press Canada) was launched
at the National Archives in Ottawa in September, 2012. His debut
album, Blood
Guitar, is now available, as is his latest
book, Reflections
on Music, Poetry and Politics.
Canada’s Social
Justice agenda did not fare well in the renegotiated NAFTA deal,
rebranded as the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA). A chapter
dedicated to gender rights, something Canada pushed hard for,
was not incorporated into the Agreement. Trump would have no
part of it.
The
exclusion makes good sense since special gender privileges for
women, the spawn of hard-core feminism, have nothing to do with
economic issues, tariffs or trade and manufacturing reciprocities.
Equally
significant, a separate chapter on Indigenous Rights failed
to make the cut, a serious blow to the aboriginal resistance
movement which has become a rallying cry not only for Native
activists but for the Canadian political, media and academic
elites. These latter are committed to abrogating national jurisdictions
and dismantling the historical structure of the country in a
torrent of land-claim and legal negotiations favoring the so-called
First Nations.
The
sentimentalizing of Native history and culture has given the
indigenous peoples pride of place in the Canadian imagination
and in Canadian law. It has permitted radicals to wreak havoc
for years in communities like Caledonia, which became a war
zone, or, with the complicity of the Supreme Court, permitted
indigenous activists and leaders to use treaty claims and land
rights to block much-needed economic development projects.
Admittedly,
not all band chiefs are on board with this divisive program,
and certain tribes like the Osoyoos Indian Band, a member of
the Okanagan Nation Alliance, led by Chief Clarence Louie, have
prospered by
adopting entrepreneurial methods and practices.
As Louie understood, there is more to solvency and self-reliance
than casinos and cigarettes. But such instances of visionary
prudence are exceptions to the general rule.
On
the whole, one may be forgiven for suspecting that a shakedown
operation has been in play for years. Who can forget Theresa
Spence, an Attawapiskat chief of markedly portly stature who
staged a hunger strike to protest the Conservative government’s
failure, as the CBC website put it, “to take First Nations
[sic] concerns seriously”? Reportedly nourished on a traditional
fish soup diet during her ordeal, she emerged to national acclaim
six weeks later as rotund as when she began her protest. But
there was a fly in the ointment. As Maclean’s
reported, “the results of a damning audit into Attawapiskat’s
books . . . show[ed] the band had not properly accounted for
millions of dollars in federal spending dating back to 2005.”
Band
chiefs and their adjuncts are notoriously prone to cooking the
books and raking in exorbitant salaries. Spence’s partner,
Clayton Kennedy, paid $850 a day to manage the band’s
finances, was shortly after the hunger games charged with fraud.
As the Toronto Sun reports, the Spence household was
swimming in cash. Despite the controversy, Spence was re-elected
to a new term as band chief. And indeed, notwithstanding a number
of negative reports, pro-Native sentiment has not diminished
much among Canada’s left-leaning polity. Indian bands
are generally given a pass when it comes to allegations of corruption
and mismanagement.
Canada’s
indigenizers bear a spooky resemblance to that committee of
“sappy women” in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
imploring the governor to be merciful to “Injun Joe,”
“believed to have killed five citizens of the village.”
Many “tearful and eloquent meetings had been held”
in Injun Joe’s favor and there were “plenty of weaklings
ready to scribble their names to a pardon-petition.” Our
own weaklings are sappily prepared to surrender portions of
the country to aboriginal claims of sovereignty over tribal
territory. Longmire in a sweat lodge is not American policy.
Justin Trudeau in Theresa Spence’s teepee is the Canadian
way.
The
delusion doesn’t stop with our political elites, fellow-traveling
journalists and the mass of popular sentiment. Our universities,
ostensibly centers of learning and the quest for objective truth,
have also lent their authority to this farrago of nonsense,
turning a feel-good fable into a scholarly farce.
More
than twenty years ago, for example, the University of Saskatchewan
began hiring Native professors not on the strength of academic
merit or scholarly attainment but on the pleonastic grounds
of “lived experience” -- prompting the question
of what would constitute its opposite. Dead experience? The
latest campus initiative in this country, of which faculties
and administrations are inordinately proud, is “indigenization”
studies in which the Native peoples are regarded as peaceful
and responsible stewards of the land ruthlessly oppressed by
white European settlers.
That
the indigenous peoples were no less ruthless in warfare and
tribal exterminations and engaged in hunting practices that
led to the near extinction of native species is rarely mentioned.
As the Foundation for Economic Education has shown, history
textbooks have been eager to promote the myth of the “ecological
Indian.” Though European settlers were also complicit
in the thinning of herds, especially the plains bison, native
hunting techniques were indisputably destructive. No matter.
The early inhabitants of the land are seen as pastoral angels,
noble environmentalists avant la lettre.
The
act of genuflection shows no sign of abating. Wilfrid Laurier
University in Ontario, albeit a tenth-tier institution on the
same level as the University of Namibia, acknowledges that it
sits on the “traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee,
Anishnawbe and Neutral Peoples,” and has opened a Centre
for Indigegogy where the visitor is fulsomely showered with
coruscating greetings: Boozhoo, Wachiya, Kwe, Tansi, and She:kon.
And woe betide any professor who wishes to initiate a conversation
about Residential Schools, as did the unfortunate psychology
professor Rick Mehta, fired despite tenure by Acadia University
in Nova Scotia.
A grassroots
resistance movement called Idle No More has arisen to advance
the claim of aboriginal sovereignty and to “reinstitute
traditional laws.” Organizing protests and flash mobs,
it seeks to oppose “a time when global corporate profits
rule,” and has jumped aboard the intersectionality bandwagon
-- “race, gender, sexuality, class and other identity
constructions in ongoing oppression” -- which will appeal
to the university crowd and promote its influence in the media
and political echelons. But it is based on a complete fiction,
which political scientist Tom Flanagan has thoroughly debunked.
In
First Nations: Second Thoughts, Flanagan analyzes claims
of aboriginal sovereignty. Advocates of aboriginal rights believe
that “Indian nations were at one time sovereign nations
of equal status with European nations under international law,”
something that did not exist at the time. “Whether, like
the Mohawks, they now aspire to sovereign statehood or, like
the Assembly of First Nations, they are content to demand a
share of Canadian sovereignty, they are united in thinking that
their ancestors were unjustifiably deprived of the sovereignty
they once possessed.” In the U.S., of course, such claims
are less threatening owing to the supremacy of Congress, an
institution whose plenary powers the Canadian Parliament lacks.
In Canada the aboriginal claim of an inherent right to self-government
“is an assertion of sovereignty contrary to [our] history,
jurisprudence, and national interest.”
As
Ricardo Duchesne points out in Canada in Decay, a tribe
is not a nation. “The natives of Canada were organized
in tribes, and a tribe consists of people with a distinct set
of cultural and linguistic traits that are not yet integrated
into a nation with clear boundaries and a centralized authority.”
The characteristics which identify a civilized state of living
comprise “a written language, a legal code, a network
of communications, a reasonably centralized army [and] a bureaucracy
capable of enforcing state authority over an extended territory
with some boundaries.”
According
to these criteria, the “First Nations” were not
nations by any stretch of the imagination. They were a loose
collection of tribal cultures. And Turtle Island, the name given
by some of these tribes to the land mass we call North America,
is not a country but a vague geographical designation or part
of a Creation story. The presumed national status of the indigenous
inhabitants is a sentimental myth invented by native proponents
of sovereign rights and privileges and by a guilt-ridden people
-- good Canadians -- wedded to the canard of “Social Justice”
and to the liberal ideology of anti-colonialism.
Flanagan
concludes his volume by suggesting that improvement in the lot
of the Native peoples -- who in some respects enjoy more than
equal status compared to their fellow citizens, including, as
the Indian Act stipulates, reserve-based tax exemption -- will
not depend on a web of complex and draining negotiations that
disrupt the conduct of Canada’s affairs. Rather, independent
and entrepreneurial activity on the part of individuals and
enlightened band chiefs, as noted with respect to the Osoyoos
Indian Band, is the sine qua non for Native development,
prosperity and dignity. Individuals and tribes must take responsibility
for their lives rather than rely on vociferous and parasitical
demands for an ahistorical restitution and on an endless tangle
of legal ratifications.
Perhaps
all is not lost. Sometimes one comes across refreshing instances
of cultural sanity. Chief Clarence Louie is a far-sighted leader.
And I think of my friend Neil Gabriel, a self-employed tradesman
and ancestral Mohawk from the Kanesatake Reserve in Oka, Quebec,
who was humorously skeptical of the claims, exemptions and romanticizings
surrounding the Native populations. “If we want to know
what kind of winter we can expect,” he once joked, “we
look at the white man’s woodpile.”
