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Top News - May - 2001
From left to right) Luke, 7, Jared, 5, and C.J., 7, took time out from their rough-housing to pose for a picture outside a hockey arena in Saskatoon on April 7 where friends and family were gathered for a youth hockey tournament.
Photo Credit: Debora Lockyer Steel
Funds withheld to pressure chiefs, say First Nations leaders
Some say the FNG is NFG - Guest ColumnAre you ready to be consulted? - Editorial
The expert witness-fully grown or fully owned?
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Funds withheld to pressure chiefs,
say First Nations leadersBy Paul Barnsley
Windspeaker Staff Writer
OTTAWAFirst Nation chiefs are getting ready to fight the Indian Affairs minister on several fronts as details of how the federal government will change the way First Nations are governed begin to surface.
Three separate pieces of legislation are being prepared that will fundamentally change the role of First Nations leaders. Along with a proposed First Nations Governance Act, a First Nations Financial Institutions Act and an act that will create an independent claims body (ICB) are being framed.
Assembly of First Nations Grand Chief Matthew Coon Come met with Robert Nault, the Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, on two occasions in late March. The AFN executive met with DIAND Deputy Minister Shirley Serafini and other department staff on April 12. The executive members were provided with two documents (a total of seven pages) during this briefing. AFN staff members are working on an analysis of the government documents. When completed, that analysis will be forwarded to chiefs across the country.
Former national chief Ovide Mercredi, now a political advisor to Coon Come, wrote a four-page response to these documents that criticizes the federal government for not being more open about the process. He also predicted that the minister's plan to consult Native people, and then have a broadly supported bill ready for Parliament by the autumn of 2002, will fail.
Coon Come wrote a letter to the chiefs on March 29 that tells the them to be ready to make a decision about the AFN's approach to Nault's proposal when they gather for the spring Confederacy in Vancouver from May 8 to 10.
"There is no question this legislation will affect us all," the national chief wrote. "The AFN will require a mandate from the confederacy on our strategy with respect to Minister Nault's Governance Act. Paramount to our actions will be the necessity to have the Canadian government recognize the rightful place of First Nations people in this country. Our treaty and Aboriginal rights are not negotiable nor should they be subject to political manipulation or further entrenched in regulatory minutia that effectively moves control further away from the First Nations governments."
First Nation sources say political manipulation has already begun in the form of financial pressure. More than two weeks after the beginning of the fiscal year, the Atlantic Policy Conference of First Nations Chiefs (APC) had only received $200,000 of its expected $700,000 annual core funding. A well-placed source at the APC told Windspeaker the chiefs believe they are being pressured to sign fishing agreements with the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.
Several sources confirmed that a travel ban is in place at the AFN because funding there has not been finalized. The national chief confirmed that his organization is still not sure what its final budget for this year will be.
"That's still outstanding. We'll be meeting them again next week to review the budgets," he said during a phone interview on April 18.
Several sources, including Penticton Indian Band Chief Stewart Phillip, said it's extremely unusual for an annual financial agreement to still be incomplete several weeks after the beginning of the fiscal year. Coon Come was asked if he saw it as an attempt by the government to pressure his organization to co-operate.
"That's not rare, that's always been the government's attitude," he said. "It's the same approach they've always taken. They'll string you along. They will approve an interim budget and then you end up scrounging and trying to make do until your budget is finalized."
Still Coon Come may get stung by his own words as an excuse to cut the budget. His election campaign position was the AFN shouldn't be a "super band office."
"Right now, I've heard that they're cutting back right across the board," he said. "I think they'll try to use that but the question will be, if they do cut back, where will that money go? They're saying it's going to go directly to organizations or to the communities. But if they're going to cut off two or three million from our budget, let's find out where that money's going."
Some observers believe the government is cutting the AFN back in direct response to Coon Come's more adversarial, rights-based approach.
"Well, people can make all kinds of assumptions," the national chief said. "I know they've said they don't like a rights-based agenda, that's for sure."
Indian Affairs Minister Nault told Windspeaker he has not ordered any cuts. He suggested that First Nation leaders are playing some politics of their own.
"No. There's no review of tribal council funding," Nault said. "There's been no discussion of tribal council funding, at least not from the minister's perspective. There's going to be a review of the mandates of tribal councils. I've indicated to headquarters and to the officials before the election that I wanted to look at the mandates of tribal councils to see whether they still met the needs of First Nations based on the fact that they were set up to give them technical services."
Yet rumors persist that something is up within the department in regards to funding. The minister explained that some internal changes had been made, but only in response to First Nation requests.
"There's no negotiations with tribal councils. They get core funding," said Nault. "What I instructed the officials is that, historically, the [political tribal organizations] . . . that those negotiations had been done by the [regional director generals] but they will now be done out of headquarters and approved by the minister. I have also said that funding will be the same as it was last year. But the whole objective of this new process was to accommodate what I had been asked to do by grand chiefs right across the country, which is to try to find a way to do multi-year funding, versus one-year funding," he said. "I've been trying to accommodate that but the first step is to change the process."
He couldn't explain why APC had received only a portion of its funding, but denied the department was applying any financial pressure.
"I'm not familiar with why APC has got $200,000 and not the rest," Nault said. "It's probably because they have not submitted their detailed plans."
Rumors about budget cuts at the AFN were flatly denied as inaccurate and uninformed.
"I'm hearing all this conversation about AFN; their budget is close to $20 million. Their budget has never been $20 million. Their core funding is $2.1 million," said Nault. "And their budget, that has gone that high, is based on joint initiatives that the government of Canada has entered into with the AFN based on a lot of things that occurred in the last two years. Now, a lot of those things are starting to wrap up. Obviously, when they do wrap up, a lot of those funds will disappear," he said. "Unfortunately, I think what's happened in a lot of these organizations is that certain people have gotten used to a level of funding and they have been hiring staff when they shouldn't have been and now they're into a tussle internally, as far as I can tell.
"For us, the AFN [budget] fluctuated close to $20 million last year. Now they're down to $16 million. For us, that's not a cut because their core hasn't changed. So the portrayal of that obviously is technocrats and bureaucrats over at AFN who want to continue doing the same thing. You know I've said before we do a lot of talking around here and we don't deliver a lot. I'm interested in seeing some deliverables, and so far my relationship, or the government of Canada's relationship with the AFN over the last two years, has delivered very little."
Nault talked about AFN funding during a face-to-face meeting with the national chief on Feb. 12. Windspeaker obtained minutes of that meeting and several points in the minister's opening comments questioned how the AFN is using government funding. On April 18, Nault explained that those remarks reflected his impatience to produce tangible results.
Veteran First Nation political observers who were not at the meeting, however, interpreted the minister's focus on funding as a veiled threat and a form of pressure. Nault said that was not the case.
Many chiefs are very suspicious of the government. The unforeseen negative impacts of past legislation always seem to erode Native rights and serve a suspected government agenda of extinguishing Aboriginal rights and decreasing federal obligations, they say. Hard line chiefs who insist that Canada recognize their sovereignty are especially wary. Chief Phillip, who is also president of the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs, said the governance initiatives seem to fit in with other government policies and regulations that he sees as threats to his people's rights.
"There's a pattern here," he said. "It's not coincidence."
Phillip believes the Cabinet, Treasury Board and Prime Minister's Office are unhappy with the costs associated with residential school litigation and such high profile lawsuits as the billion dollar Samson Cree Nation's oil and gas action. As a result, he believes Indian Affairs is under pressure to cut costs and limit future spending and that will lead the department to impose taxation, cut funding levels and seek to force band councils to raise their own incomes.
"The residential school compensation, the oil and gas lawsuit in Alberta, what we're hearing is they're all having an impact on finance. In the big, big, big picture, somebody's budget has to get tagged for it. There's some pretty dramatic changes being proposed," he said. "The crunch is on this year. I see this as a watershed year."
Nault rejected Phillip's allegations.
"No. If you were to talk to Paul Martin, the minister of Finance, what he has said to me is, through First Nation leadership and yourself, show me a vision. Where are we going here? What's the objective? How do we build First Nation economies? Obviously First Nations should be self-sustaining, dynamic communities as we're told they were before Europeans. What are you proposing? I've not been told, 'Holy jeez, you've got to put a stop to this. We can't sustain this.' No one's had those kind of conversations around the table," he said. "What we're basically doing is we're trying to build a relationship. The speech from the throne was very strong in favor of building a relationship and moving forward, moving ahead instead of looking backwards all the time. I think that was pretty clear. That didn't have to be in the speech from the throne. That was a signal from the highest levels of our government that we do believe that we need to have First Nations people as part of the general economy and part of the overall mosaic of the country and not sort of sitting on the sidelines, having to take us to court every second day. I don't see it that way and I don't feel that pressure."
The original five-year financial transfer agreements (FTA) are expiring and up for renewal. Phillip said more and more bands are finding themselves in debt. While the block funding agreements the department insisted the bands enter into weren't as tightly regulated as previous funding arrangements, and allowed bands more discretion as to how to use the money, the funding still was far below what was needed. He said a financial crisis may be about to unfold.
Chief Arthur Manuel, chairman of the Shuswap Tribal Council agrees.
"Oh, yeah. I think there were a lot of bands that got involved that never understood the implications," he said. "It's a real sweetheart kind of arrangement. At the beginning of the process you seem to get lots of money and at the end you have to make up the difference. Now there's going to be problems. They're using our poverty against us throughout all these negotiations-it's diabolical."
From Coon Come to Phillip to Manuel, none of the chiefs were surprised by allegations the federal government would try to bully First Nations with financial pressure. It appears to be a well-known government tactic.
"I know, generally, funding is used in political purposes," said Manuel. "All of those things use our poverty against us. Even the case with regard to Aboriginal title, with fundamental Supreme Court and constitutionally protected proprietary interests, the government is still telling Indians you need to prove it. You need to pull together whatever little money you might have-and we know you don't have any- and you need to go prove it. There's no question that is probably the most, I guess, 'sharp' kind of negotiating tactic the government uses."
Phillip's preliminary assessment of the First Nations Governance Act reflects his suspicions of federal initiatives.
"The First Nations Governance Act appears to be designed to cut us loose," he said.
As the government begins its consultation process, Manuel believes it has tried to drive a wedge between the chiefs and the people but he urges the people to see through the tactic.
"I tell the people that we have done what we could in trying to establish recognition of Aboriginal title and Aboriginal rights. We've done what we could in terms of having Section 35 added to the Constitution and having the Supreme Court recognize our rights. We have written letters. We have passed resolutions. The government has always responded that they won't recognize these rights. They don't recognize the resolutions and they get kind of curt about responding to our letters," he said. "It's up to the people now. The people have to understand that those rights belong to them and the chiefs need to learn how to support the people."
The expert witness-fully grown or fully owned?By Paul Barnsley
Windspeaker Staff Writer
VANCOUVERA Department of Fisheries and Oceans posting on MERX, a website that lists available government contracts, lists a position for a treaty fishing rights researcher and expert witness. The job will pay between $500,001 and $1 million.
A Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development posting offers between $250,001 and $500,000 for a research position in its litigation management branch.
According to several respected academics, the government is offering a lot more for this work than the going rate. Are federal government departments looking for people to research arguments against assertions of Aboriginal and treaty rights in court?
Indian Affairs spokesperson Bernice Timmers told Windspeaker her department's posting was routine and that the previous contract had expired. She said the contract was for research only and defended the amount of money offered by saying, "litigation is expensive."
Department of Fisheries and Oceans spokesperson Lorraine Kinney denied the government is over-spending on its request for proposal.
"I think it's $250,000 . . . up to $250,000 a year for three or four years or possibly five," she said. "It's not a million a year. It's for total project costs."
But every one of the half-dozen academics interviewed in connection with this story said the dollar amounts were several times the rate for research contracts.
When shown the Department of Fisheries and Oceans posting, Dr. Dara Culhane, a Simon Fraser University professor of anthropology, said the contract compensation was indeed not normal.
"The average SSHRC (the Social Sciences/Humanities Research Council), which is the major funding source for social sciences, the average grant that an anthropologist would get- and be really happy with- would be maybe $50,000 over three years. Five hundred thousand, million dollar grants, we never hear about them. To do this kind of research, it's a huge amount of money. When you think about what is there, in terms of documentation, to examine. When you consider that the Crown rarely talks to Aboriginal people or Elders, what exactly is involved in this type of research? It's basically reviewing and interpreting historical documents."
Some academic observers were outraged the government was offering such a lucrative contract for research. Professor Andrea Bear Nicholas of St. Thomas University's Native studies department backed up Culhane's assessment of the going rate for academic research.
"Exactly, and those are like hen's teeth. You don't get them just every day," she said.
Bear Nicholas described the amount of money offered in the government request for proposal as "shocking" and "astonishing," and well above accepted averages. She believes the amount of money is bound to have an impact on a researcher's approach because no one would want to alienate a future employer that pays so well.
"How could it not? How could it not? How could it not?" she asked.
Culhane stopped short of saying the amount of money the government is offering is an obvious attempt to influence a scientist's findings.
"Not necessarily. But if you look at the record of Crown witnesses, that's what you find. Crown expert witnesses have tended . . . if you look right back to the James Bay trials in the mid-1970s, there's a pattern, and a similar pattern in the United States, of Crown witnesses being people whose careers are based in and often limited to being Crown witnesses," she said. "They tend to not be people who have academic positions. They tend to be people whose work has not been subjected to peer review within their profession. They tend to be people who don't hold teaching positions or academic positions."
Many Crown witnesses put forth ideas in court that have not been through the critical examination of a peer review. And academics that haven't secured tenure have also not seen their research analyzed and criticized by senior professors. Academics who put forward ideas that haven't been peer reviewed are seen as taking short cuts, Culhane said.
"You know, it's like doctors practising without a license," Culhane said. "You just can't appoint yourself a doctor. Since the Supreme Court (of Canada) Delgamuukw decision, . . . the court said oral history has to be taken seriously, it has to be given equal weight. Yet, the Crown is still hiring people whose work completely excludes Aboriginal history or any research into Aboriginal oral history. They're still hiring people whose expertise is based only on reviewing fur traders' journals and Crown documents."
Pitting one side against the other in court is not the best way to get to the bottom of questions of scientific or historical knowledge, Culhane said.
"It's completely dominated by the adversarial legal system as opposed to really looking at what does the historical research say or what are the principles of justice at work. It's all about winning, losing, hair-splitting, twisting arguments, you know, lawyers' games. Over the years there have been lots of proposals about other ways of doing this. Having expert witnesses who are . . . licensed isn't the word I'm looking for but, you know, who go through a review by an independent panel who are not affiliated with either party to the case," she said. "An expert review so that expert witnesses are accredited by independent bodies, maybe by professional associations. That's been one proposal that's been put forward a lot. Another proposal is that the judge or the Supreme Court should have an expert who reviews all the expert testimony, who would also be an independent person. That would at least give the expert evidence some sort of credibility and would not be subordinated to the winner/loser, who can make the most abstract kind of bamboozling argument in court . . . It would give expert testimony some kind of credibility whereas now it's you hire your expert and I'll hire mine and we'll waste a few million dollars. To what end? In my point of view, that's not justice."
The non-Native academic saw a contradiction between the federal government's fiduciary obligation and that government awarding a million-dollar contract to argue against Native rights.
"It's a wonder that the courts seem so frequently, or at least occasionally, to not take account of the Crown's evidence. But I think one of the major issues is that by continuing to hire people who have very little credibility in their fields and who construct evidence in support of legal arguments, the pursuit of justice becomes subordinated to the adversarial, winner/loser mode of the legal system. Also, I think a big question is, what's become of the ruling in Delgamuukw that the oral history and the testimony of Aboriginal Elders should be given the same weight as other expert evidence?"
First Nations are trying to meet government halfway in breaching the cultural divide, but the government isn't budging, she said.
"The point is that First Nations are trying to develop systematic ways of presenting oral history and creating rules on how information can be presented, etc. But hiring somebody to just say, 'Oh well, stories change over the centuries.' Well, duh! If I could get paid $500 a day to do that, I'd retire.
"It's just like shooting frogs in a barrel. You can always pick away at things, but is that really the point? Isn't the point to find justice and ways of respecting oral history?" she asked. "Which doesn't mean being completely uncritical. First Nations themselves have said there's a difference between oral history and whatever any particular chief might say or not say. It's a systematic way of holding or transmitting knowledge in the same way that whatever any white guy on the street has to say can't be taken as the legitimated history. There are different systems of legitimating knowledge and First Nations have different systems, but they have systems. And I think the kinds of critiques . . . that rest on the fact that once upon a time they talked to an Indian that didn't agree with another Indian-well, so?"
University of Lethbridge Professor of Native American Studies Tony Hall agrees with Culhane's view of the Crown's use of expert witnesses. He, too, has seen relatively unaccomplished academics present testimony on behalf of the Crown.
"That's one of her main arguments," he said of Culhane's work, "that the Crown cultivates this class of transient experts and pays them really well. She noticed that on . . . could I say the Indian side, that their witnesses were tenured people. People who didn't need the money and, presumably, the people who are in a position to be objective. Whereas the other, on-contract folks, well, they need the contracts and the major employer pretty well makes it clear what type of information they're supposed to come up with or what their interpretation is supposed to be."
Old school anthropologists and historians tend to represent the government in court. Scientists who have come to grips with the mistakes and biases of the past tend to represent First Nations, Hall said. Old style anthropological methods treated Indigenous peoples as historical curiosities, as remnants of a dead culture. Native people found that attitude dismissed them and denigrated their cultures and, in recent years, anthropologists have examined the pro-European bias responsible for that approach and admitted their discipline helped in the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, he added.
"Anthropology has this history, the discipline sort of grew up in connection with imperialism. They would hire themselves out to the British Colonial Office and write about different Indigenous peoples in different parts of the world with the view of helping different empires to govern those people. Anthropology has worked hard to distance itself from that legacy, you know, good people within the discipline have owned up to the responsibility of that. In fact, now you'll get a certain amount of criticism that anthropology has sort of joined the Indian side and lost its objectivity by becoming a proponent."By Cheryl Petten
Windspeaker Staff Writer
BORDEN, Ont.Native youth living in Northern Ontario will have a new tool to take with them when they head out for the spring hunt - a bright red plastic whistle, courtesy of the Canadian Rangers.
The whistles are being handed out to school children in northern communities through the Canadian Ranger Red Whistle Program, the brainchild of Major David Scandrett, commanding officer of the 3rd Canadian Ranger Patrol Group (3CRPG), which operates out of CFB Borden.
The theme of the program is "wear the whistle."
"We want the kids to wear the whistle, and put it on their parkas and their life jackets and windbreakers and so on - on their outdoor clothing, so that when they go outside then they'll have this thing, and basically put in on and then forget about it, until such time, if and when they need it. And they're not fumbling around in their pocket, but it's right there on the zipper pull, and there they go, they've got a whistle."
The idea behind the red whistle program came to Scandrett a few years back, during a shopping trip with his two-and-a-half year old son. Both of Scandrett's children wore whistles on their coats, and when the boy lost sight of his father, he put his whistle to good use.
"I went around the aisle to get a box of tea or something like that, and all of a sudden there was this piercing blast, and the whole grocery store came to a halt," Scandrett recalled.
"And so I said, 'well, this kid's on to something.' So it really kind of went from there, and now it's a wilderness youth safety program."
About 15,000 whistles have been handed out in Northern Ontario so far, with another 15,000 to go. The program has been expanded into the Yukon, N.W.T. and Nunavut, and will eventually take in Newfoundland and Northern Quebec as well.
"Now it's kind of built into the Canadian Ranger program, and so we'll continue to distribute to the communities, and to reinforce the message, because there's another batch of kids coming along.
"It seems to be meeting with success. The response has been quite overwhelming. And that's a good thing," Scandrett said.
"It's a wilderness youth safety program. It's not just for Rangers and Junior Canadian Rangers. There's a broader issue there, and the broader issue is children at risk in what I would call a high threat environment, which is the North under the best of conditions."
The whistles are handed out by members of the Canadian Rangers, who visit schools and make presentations about the program.
The program uses posters and stickers to get its message across, along with a short interactive video.
The video was produced on Constance Lake First Nation in northern Ontario, using members of the Canadian Rangers and Junior Canadian Rangers, as well as some professional Aboriginal actors.
"The interesting thing about the video and the presentation package, when we run it in the communities in northern Ontario is the kids reactions to it," Scandrett said.
"Initially, its kind of 'oh ya, here we go', and then they see that there are Native people in the video, and it's from the get go. And so they generally have a little bit of pride as a result of that, and they're a little more interested and focused. It talks about situations that they're familiar with and the equipment and the locations and stuff."
An interactive CD is also in the works, which will be distributed to all the schools taking part in the project. The CD, like the video and posters, reflects the realities of northern life, Scandrett said.
Trying to get the message out to the kids that the whistle is for use in emergencies is one of the goals of the presentations and the video.
"We have the cry wolf problem of course, and we want to play on that. And when we distribute the whistle, we generally do it in the schools, and maybe go to the gym or the assembly hall or whatever, do the basic presentation there, or we go from classroom to classroom and do it that way," Scandrett said.
"We stress that this is a serious emergency tool. It's not just a toy, and that you should blow it in emergencies. And then we give the kids the whistles in the classrooms and we do the mad minute, when they get to blow the whistles. And the teachers hate us.
"For the next day or so, the kids blow the whistles a lot, but then that dies down, that goes away. And they get used to the fact there's a whistle there . . . it's out of sight, but hopefully in mind, in the event of an emergency."
The whistle program had its test run last summer, during a Junior Canadian Ranger camp held just outside of Constance Lake First Nation. The program went over well there, and was officially launched in the fall.
"It's an inexpensive tool, and the point we're really stressing too is its just one tool in the inventory. It's not going to replace common sense and good bush knowledge and good water safety practices, and filing a trip plan and being properly equipped, and taking your daypack if you're going out on the land or in the bush or on the water, and all those preparations which hopefully you're going to take. We don't want to build a false sense of security into this either. It's just, when you go out into the woods you should carry a book of matches, or some waterproof matches. And you should probably carry a whistle too," Scandrett said.
Although Scandrett said he hasn't yet heard of any cases where the new red whistles have been used in an emergency situation, he expected it wouldn't be long before that changes.
"On the James Bay coast, and up on Hudson Bay, in about another month-and-a-half, two months, the spring hunt will begin. And there's always lots of people moving around on the water and on the land. And people get outdoors as the weather gets better, before the onset of the bugs, there's more mobility in the north. So, unfortunately, there'll probably be situations that will occur there."
"I think it's going to prove interesting," Scandrett said of the whistle program. "And hopefully it will save some children's lives."
