Trust. Integrity. Reputation.
June - 2007Fontaine looking for delicate balance
By Paul Barnsley, Windspeaker Staff Writer
OTTAWA
The country's attention was squarely on First Nation issues on May 15.
A video was posted on YouTube, the popular video sharing Web site, showing how to bring rail traffic to a halt. The RCMP, Canadian National Railway (CN) and Indian Affairs Minister Jim Prentice called for its removal, which happened the next day. Meanwhile, Assembly of First Nations (AFN) National Chief Phil Fontaine gave a speech to the Canadian Club at Ottawa's Chateau Laurier Hotel. And Roseau River First Nation (Manitoba) Chief Terry Nelson continued to warn the public that he intends to block the CN line heading south from Winnipeg into the United States on June 29, the AFN-mandated national day of action.
The media focused attention on all these issues.
While Fontaine tried to relay the message that First Nations people are getting angrier and combine it with a plea to the Canadian Club audience for more public support for First Nation issues, the YouTube video, entitled "When Justice Fails, Stop the Rails," was posted by a mysterious group known only as "the railway ties collective."
It's impossible to know whether this group is Native or non-Native, but the words of the messages in the video show a close familiarity with First Nation issues in Canada.
"By halting the freight and passenger rail service, we who support Indigenous struggles for dignity and fairness will show governments that Indigenous peoples are not alone," it stated.
Fontaine borrowed the title of a recent Senate Aboriginal peoples standing committee report on the stalled land claim process, "Negotiation or Confrontation: It's Canada's Choice," as the title for his speech.
"Since the first treaty was signed with us in 1701, our peoples have believed that co-operation must pave the way to progress. We like to believe that all Canadians feel this way. Consider where that attitude has gotten us. Obviously, not very far," he said, before laying out the long history of processes that have raised hope that a resolution to First Nation issues may be found but were then abandoned.
The national chief said his people are running out of patience.
"Many of our communities have reached the breaking point. The anger and frustration are palpable. People are so tired and fed up with this type of existence-especially when all around them is a better life . . . and hope. Living without hope is perhaps the worst aspect of life for so many of Canada's First Nations peoples. That lack of hope plays out in many ways. Desperation breeds abuse, suicide, crime, civil disobedience," he said.
Showing that the AFN's relationship with the Conservative Party of Canada government is not as good as it could be, the usually diplomatic Fontaine was unusually forceful.
"As you are all aware, the Kelowna accord was shelved by the current government. What a missed oppor-tunity. Is this a government that thinks it can do better than First Nations peoples on issues regarding our own self-determination? Is it prepared to do better? Does it have better ideas? If so, let's hear them," he said.
"The Conservatives' own campaign material states the following: 'A Conservative government will: Accept the targets agreed upon at the recent meeting of first ministers and national Aboriginal leaders, and work with first ministers and Aboriginal leaders on achieving these targets and . . . replace the Indian Act with a modern legislative framework which provides for the devolution of full legal and democratic responsibility to Aboriginal Canadians for their own affairs within the Constitution, including the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.' Has this happened? No."
He told the audience the AFN made 21 different presentations to the Canadian government in its pre-budget submissions and was then virtually shut out in the most recent federal budget. When working within the system gets you nowhere, he suggested, the next step is obvious.
"So, as you can see, First Nations people are beginning to question the so-called 'rational' process. Many people ask why First Nations peoples are so angry. At this point you must realize we have a right to be. The question for you is how can we make this right.
"There has been a lot of discussion in the media about the possibility of a long, hot summer - about the possibility of blockades like the one we saw recently on the Toronto-Montreal rail corridor," he said. "I am not about to dispel this concern. The frustration people feel is very real. And as I've tried to explain today, there are other ways."
Chief Nelson has never tried to be as diplomatic as Fontaine. He nominated Fontaine for national chief in 2003, saying First Nation people need diplomats as well as warriors. Nelson has always been more of a warrior. He told Windspeaker that it has become clear that the diplomatic approach is not producing results.
"If Ovide Mercredi and Phil had been able to do things through diplomacy and if the public support was there, we wouldn't be in the crisis that we're in today. If there was any power in handing out leaflets at the side of the road and we had a sympathetic general public to look at this, it's what we would have been doing," he said, later adding, "The average Canadian doesn't have any power. Why would you want to pass a pamphlet to somebody that doesn't have any power?"
Not that he's sure that the Canadian public is all that friendly towards Aboriginal people, he added.
"When people talk about the silent majority of Canadians that supports First Nations people, I'd like to know where the hell it is."
Nelson believes money is the bottom line in all of these discussions. He believes big money - or industry - is not responsive to public pressure, but government is responsive to big money and big money doesn't want to share its profits with First Nations even when those profits come from the resources located on First Nation land. All the politicians' comments to justify the decades of inaction on First Nation issues are a smokescreen to hide that fundamental reality, he said.
"When Prentice and Harper talk about the $16,500 per man, woman and child that's designated by Ottawa to the First Nation people on reserve, in Roseau River, and this is what I told Prentice, we have 2,000 people on our band list. So we're supposed to get $33 million if that number is correct. We only get 25 per cent of that. If you count only the 1,200 people on reserve, we should have got $19.8 million if those numbers are correct. We only got 44 per cent of that. I'd love to have some accountability to see what happened to the other 75 or 56 per cent of the money," he said. "We're next door to the world's wealthiest country with a $12.4 trillion gross domestic profit (GDP) and we're feeding that economy with all that resource wealth on the Canadian side. What the Canadian Taxpayers Federation is telling the taxpayers is: 'You know who's at fault here? It's those goddamned Indians that milk the system and are taking your hard-earned money.' And that's bullshit because the reality is that of the $1.15 trillion GDP that Canada generates, the Canadian government, the provinces, industry, all of them are on the resource teat. They're taking those dollars. CN and CP, they haul hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars of the resource base every single year and meanwhile the Indigenous people sit on the side of the railway track and watch the resources go out of the country. I'm sitting nine miles from the U.S. border and I see CN trains two miles long all headed to the States with all of the resource base."
He said Enbridge wants to build 36 inch oil pipeline to Superior, Wisconsin and they want to go through Roseau River territory carrying 800,000 barrels a day to the U.S., which will meet four per cent of U.S. oil needs.
"I said to them, that's 300 million barrels a year, $20 billion and you're telling us that we're just supposed to allow you to go by and you're not going to settle the land claims? You're not going to settle any of the issues, but you want the full use and benefit of the treaty rights but you're telling the Indians . . . you can wait forever to settle your land claims?" he said. "I'm not against development. I don't have a problem with that. The problem I have is they took 70 per cent of my reserve in 1903 and they promised that if we signed the treaty that our reserve lands would be forever. Well, forever was only 32 years. They're telling us, this takes time. Well, it's going to 'take time' for us to let Enbridge through."
The reaction to his remarks tells the chief that he's struck a nerve, something all the polite discussion has not accomplished.
"The reason why it's national news right now is because of the railway blockade. It's got nothing to do with the June 29 national day of action. It's because nobody else is saying railway blockade," he said. "I have some hope that things are going to work out and we're not going to end up in confrontation. But I can't control everybody. There's nobody that can control 633 First Nations; not the national chief, not anybody. There's a whole bunch of sparks going on out there but nothing has been ignited."
Some mainstream observers say he's planning a terrorist operation against Canadian society. He suggested those people are quite intentionally confusing civil disobedience with terrorism for their own reasons.
"We're not bombing anybody. Why the hell are they calling us terrorists? The only thing that we've ever done is we've made the white man late for lunch because we paraded down Portage Avenue or Main Street and they had to wait for awhile," he said.
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