Unity essential for self-rule

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A couple of weeks ago, Indian Affairs Minister Tom Siddon suggested that a Native parliament may be the next step in securing Native self-government.

The national Native political body would probably not be a parliament in the constitutional sense. An Aboriginal parliament would instead consist of Native officials administering programs for Native people through the same sort of representative democracy that the non-Native provincial and federal systems currently use. That way, Natives at the community level would decide who would represent them.

The politics of deciding the priorities of Natives would no longer be left to non-Native ministers in Ottawa and would instead become the essence of debate among First Nations communities across Canada. The ultimate goal of such a system would be to dissolve the Department of Indian Affairs and hand a newly formed national Native government back to the First Nations.

Native self-rule is not a bad idea. Certainly we ought to be more qualified to run our own affairs, to know what's good for us, than any white government ever could. Proponents of Native self-government are quick to point out that we were managing our own affairs centuries before the arrival of Columbus, Cartier and Vancouver.

They tend to downplay, however, the extent to which we also fought amongst ourselves over resources, land and old grudges. Those old obstacles, the tense relationship that existed between the individual First Nations and their desire to remain autonomous, are still with us even today. Treaty chiefs' recent dissent over their lack of representation in the Assembly of First Nations; the refusal of some chiefs to acknowledge the AFN's right to speak for them at all; Dene disapproval of the Inuit's Nunavut settlement and the Union of B.C. Indian Chiefs' opposition to the First Nations Summit - approved B.C. treaty commission all serve to remind us that we have a long way to go before Native leaders can work together as a constructive whole.

National Native policies are not something that we seem very comfortable with. A feasible Native self-government in this country will require First Nations co-operating on an unprecedented level. That means getting along with each other so we can handle the big boys in Ottawa.

But that seems unlikely at the moment. We can't even agree over something like the first Nations' Chartered Land Act, a proposed piece of legislation that is supposed to hand reserve land management back to us. The land board chiefs, the group that designed the document, who already have land management experience under Sections 53 and 60 of the Indian Act, have met enormous opposition from chiefs all over Canada. Resistance to the act has not arisen strictly from the fear that this is an Ottawa-driven law designed to extinguish our rights. Most dissenters are mad because they felt they were not adequately consulted by the land board.

But bruised egos aside, it doesn't matter who is right or wrong. What matters is that a vital step towards Native self-government, control of our land, is being disputed for the wrong reason. With conflict like this within our own communities, it's unlikely that we will never be organized enough to deal with Ottawa or the provinces,.

What we need, perhaps, is a new kind of philosophy on Native government. For a long time, the only administrations we knew were chiefs and councils - small, local community-driven bodies designed to meet local, community needs. National groups like the Assembly of First Nations and the Native Council of Canada were formed to deal with Canada's non-Native governments, but being big hasn't made Native government better. We are still in the old mind frame of every nation for itself.

Siddon is way off base in suggesting that we need a system like Parliament, but he is right about one thing. We need a single, national political force around which we can focus our energies or we will never be emancipated from Ottawa'sdomination and paternalism.