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The tortured relationship between Indians and the rest of us |
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In the early 1990s, three Gordons contested the leadership of the British Columbia Liberal Party. In retrospect, the outcome was all to the good. Gordon Campbell, the most attuned to the art of governing, became Premier. One of the losers, Gordon Wilson, has over the years displayed more ambition than ability, and has now largely disappeared from the public stage. The other loser, Gordon Gibson, thereafter reconciled himself to the role of political observer. Had he won, he would probably not have delved deeply into the tortured relationship between Aboriginals and the rest of us. Nor would he have written A New Look at Indian Policy. The choice of Indian in the title is not casual. The first chapter is about semantics. Gibson rejects First Nation as a term that implies a particular political agenda of “nation-to-nation” treaties to the exclusion of alternatives. He has no objection to Aboriginal, the common term in Canada for all those who identify with their indigenous ancestry. But this is not a book about Métis and Inuit. It is a book, he insists, about “registered Indians,” those granted historical collective rights dating to the Royal Proclamation of 1763, rights reconfirmed by the 1867 BNA Act and the Indian Act that followed within a decade. This is a book about how a modern state, in which citizens primarily enjoy rights and incur obligations as individuals, should address claims for collective rights. Early in his career, Gibson served as an aide to Pierre Trudeau. No Canadian administration has been more committed to ending Indian poverty than Trudeau’s first government. In 1969, Jean Chrétien, at the time Minister of Indian Affairs, tabled in Parliament the famous “White Paper” making the case for affirmative action programs, the better to integrate Indians into the Canadian mainstream. The grave error of the White Paper, in Gibson’s eyes, was to propose the rapid phasing out of reserves. To do so was to deny legitimacy to historical collective rights among Indians. Led intellectually by Harold Cardinal in Alberta, the Indian leadership successfully counterattacked. Trudeau shrugged, and ever since Ottawa has abdicated pursuit of coherent policy concerning Indians. The same can be said of federal policy toward Inuit and Métis. Admittedly, there have been attempts post-1969. For example, Brian Mulroney set up the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. The RCAP report elaborated an ideal of Indians living in parallel societies having very limited interaction with the “settler society.” RCAP was a report, Gibson concludes, in which cultural anthropology trumped demographic reality: it paid virtually no attention to the ongoing rural-to-urban migration of Aboriginals, including Indians. According to the 2006 census, half the registered Indian population lives off-reserve. Not surprisingly, RCAP’s recommendations were shelved. To the extent that anyone has provided policy direction post-1969, it has been the judges who have breathed life into the ambiguous words of early treaties and other such documents. Gibson affords readers an excellent survey of the dozen key court decisions over the last quarter century, culminating in Delgamuukw, the 1997 Supreme Court decision that defined a broad Indian title to traditional lands. At the heart of this essay is an evaluation of those who have grappled with the appropriate limits to collective rights in the context of a liberal society whose ideal is that citizens possess roughly equal rights and obligations. In the range of scholars Gibson discusses, he puts to shame those of us in academe who have written about Aboriginal affairs. He summarizes the argument of political philosophers – including Will Kymlicka, Charles Taylor and Alan Cairns – who have attempted to define what is and what should be the boundary between, on the one hand, rights and obligations of shared individual citizenship and, on the other, collective powers legitimately exercised by cultural communities (such as francophone Quebecers). The range extends from Tom Flanagan, who argues for minimal accommodation, to Taiake Alfred, a rigorous Aboriginal advocate of a parallel society wherein Indians can escape individualism and market relations. Gibson presents Calvin Helin, from an elite Tsimshian family in northern B.C., whose book Dances with Dependency is a tough-minded analysis of the social damage wrought by on-reserve dependence on Ottawa-financed social assistance disbursed by band councils. Jean Allard, Métis activist from Manitoba, appears in the book to propose that Ottawa transform much of its transfer to band governments into “updated treaty money” paid to individuals. Gibson concludes with his own sketch of a compromise between the collective and the individual. He is sceptical of the trend toward providing ever-larger powers to small Indian governments, but his recommendations envision survival of the Indian collective. He simultaneously wants Ottawa and the provinces to pay more attention to those Indians who have chosen to “go to town” and to render Indian participation in mainstream society more attractive. My critique of Gibson’s agenda is that he does not place enough emphasis on K–12 education. Among young Aboriginals, education outcomes are disastrous – particularly among those who define themselves as First Nation/Indian. In an industrial age, the most important obligation of government – federal, provincial or band-run – is to ensure that the great majority of the next generation complete secondary education. Without this as a minimum, children cannot make a realistic choice between participation in the collective and participation in mainstream society. Most will remain on-reserve, and thereby face a high probability of leading lives of poverty. A final note. The publisher of this essay is the Fraser Institute. Fraser Institute authors have a reputation for relentlessly harping on the sins of government and proposing libertarian alternatives. I fear that many potential readers will assume Gibson has adapted Fraser Institute boilerplate prose to denounce all that has been done over the last three decades to right historical wrongs. Don’t judge this book by the cover: read it. |
John Richards is co-publisher of Inroads, teaches at Simon Fraser University and is a resident scholar at the C.D. Howe Institute. His latest publication is an evaluation of Aboriginal students in B.C. schools.
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