Why Idle No More is Important for Non-Aboriginal People

This is an intervention I made at a teach-in last weekend in Montreal.     

Because it isn’t just an Aboriginal struggle; it is a problem for all those who are Canadian citizens, above all, and the impact is on the Aboriginal peoples.  The roots of the issue lie not in Aboriginal history but in Canadian history!

    In Quebec we tend to see Ottawa as absent and irrelevant. We couldn’t be more wrong! And this is true also of the issues raised by Idle No More. Bil Cé45, the Treaties, the Indian Act, are all Canadian issues, policies and laws created by the Canadian government that affect all Canadians. And, they have great impact on us here in Quebec.

   Some of us are sovereigntists. We should be aware that the struggle for sovereignty is one more nail in the life of Aboriginal people. To achieve sovereignty without having dealt with its impact on Aboriginal people would be to repeat the history -- and we generally don,t know that history or take it into account when we talk about sovereignty. Simply to cut with Ottawa would immediately cut Aboriginal people loose from a whole history that they turn to instinctively for their survival: the history of the proclamation of 1763, the treaties, the Indian Act. Remove all this and they are at the mercy of an entirely new reality without any reference for their survival.

   Canada is quite unique among States: as far as I know it has the strongest history of establishing treatings with First Nations. While this has created lots of problems, it has also established a framework for working the problems through and has been a guarantee that First Nations had a voice in the discussions about their own future. We are not a that has full title to the land north of the 49^th parallel coast to coast. We share every bit of it and have done so since the first settler arrived. None of that land has been ceded. We are a land of many nations who co-habit -- we just forgot about that.

   There’s another thing we forget about: we are an apartheid nation. In fact we are the model, root apartheid nation. Apartheid may be an invention of the Netherlands, of the Boers. But they got the idea from us, with adaptions and refinements. We too, adapted and refined our own version. But the rock bottom point is that we are an apartheid nation. The sooner we recognise it, the better. And our apartheidism is grounded in the Indian Act. It is a perverse interpretation of the two-row wampum that said that each nation would follow its own path, with dignity, respect and reciprocity. We turned it into an path where we took all and told the others to stay out of the way. And at one point, we even decided simply to eliminate them -- we took the route of genocide. We are a country that has applied genocide on our own territory.

    Finally, there is the question of territory.  Perhaps this is the root issue; the one we really need to deal with. It is at the root also of most of the armed conflicts in the world today. The Western world developed a notion of territory that has upturned everything even we believed up until the beginning of the industrial revolution. At the beginning of that revolution, the industrialists wanted workers for their factories. The factories were in the cities, so they had to draw people to the cities. So they closed the commons. They privatized territory in such a way that most people were excluded. Territory became private property. Ownership became exclusive. The settlers, from the beginning of the 18^th century, arrived with this notion. It has run up against our own earlier tradition and that of Aboriginal people ever since.  Up until 1960, Quebec was a very traditional society in which private property, while it existed, did not pose a threat to the well-being of other Quebecois. There was room for all -- well, except for the Aboriginal people who were shoved out of the way.  But the shift to the industrial and urbanized model of society did not really come about until after the 1950’s. Today it has eaten away at the very fabric of who we are. As large corporations create ever grander projects to devoir the environment in search of oil, gas and metal, Quebecois also have found themselves pushed aside.

    Today there is perhaps an opportunity for Aboriginal peoples and Quebec society to examine together their bonds with their shared territory and their concern about what is happening to it. Both regards are, in my view, grounded in a profound love and respect for the gift that this territory is and an enormous will to care for it. Together, based on that shared bond with the territory, we can perhaps together build a different future. But that will happen only if we come to terms with our shared history also.