From One Raven's Eye

Page 7

Ahneen there and hello. Say, do you wake up every morning to gaze lovingly

at your very own treaty status card? Do you keep a poster-size picture of the current minister of Indian Affairs in your bathroom so when you have a few minutes for a good think you can remember to be grateful and everything? Do you pass non-Natives on the street and smile at them knowing they share with you what they like to call 'special status,' too? Nah, me neither?

The thing is, though our ancestors who signed the treaties were thinking about us when they did so. It's up to us to think about the people who come after us, also. In order to protect those rights we first of all have to know what those rights are. What follows is a one brown-eyed view of how that business goes.

Alright, the whole deal centres in, on and about land. Turf, space, traditional area - call it what you like. Everybody needs some. Anyway, aboriginally speaking, we were living on that particular patch of the stuff first. Not only were we doing that, we were at times busily squabbling amongst ourselves over real estate.

Where I'm from, we, Objibways, and the Sioux fought back and forth across the Lake of the Woods for years and years. We got along fine with the people east, west, and north of us. It was those southern ones who were really the landgrabbers, not us. If you were reading a column written by one of them you might be hearing a different version of the facts but this goes to show that a fierce and sometimes warlike attachment to a land base is not an important idea at all.

The difference is how we dealt with the land question once we got it. But we shall get to that idea a little later.

About the same time as Columbus and other French, English, Dutch, Portuguese versions of him started roaming around the world, getting lost and finding places they'd never hard of before, the churches over there had a lot to say about how countries were being run. The Pope got busy and wrote up this thing called a Papal Bull. It was a set of directions on how to go about dealing with the brown skinned heathens found upon those lost lands.

What the Pope said was that the rights of the Native people to the land had to be recognized.

So what those countries did was sorta mumble to themselves something like, "we recognize their rights to this place." After that they went about whatever means they found handy to rid the place of the original inhabitants, or at least their claim to that chunk of real estate.

One of these ways to get your hands on the land was to get a bunch of your tough and greedy friends together and drive the other guy off the place.

Another method is to buy the sucker out. This worked real good if the other person had no idea what the value of your money was.

In either of these cases, the Aboriginal person lost for good their rights to the land they had been living upon.

The way they went about that up here was by the treaty process.

The government negotiator called a meeting. He stood up to speak. "Look here chief," he said, "you heard about the Indian wars in the states? You know my people are settled down in the east and we aren't about to pick up and leave? We need the space around here for railroads, towns, farms, malls and other things you couldn't possibly understand. So in order to save us 10 or 20 years chasing you people around in these trees, why don't we just make some kind of deal instead?"

"Well, since you put it that way, what else you got to say," our great-great-great grandfathers replied.

Alright what we agreed to was to let them move in and to keep our anger and our arrows to ourselves. In return we got reserves, schools, medical care and as it turns out, all the pride we could eat. But what of the title to the land? Who ends up owning that, you ask? Good question. I'm glad you're keeping up. There could be a test on all this sometime you know.

The government says we gave up Aboriginal title, our Native rights to the land igning those treaties. Maybe, we'll talk more about the deal next week. As far as this card carrying Aboriginal figures, that only goes as long as the treaty does. If they ever quit upholding the thing as they try to do every two or three years or so, they lose their treaty rights as well. Things go back to how they were before the deal was made. They lose our permission to live around here and to live in peace. We get what's left after they leave, what we had before they showed up.

There are some amongst us who say that this place was given us by the Creator. Until we hear so directly, this was, is and always will be our Native land. This probably explains the long patience shown to our treaty partners, some of whom seem to figure that sharing is weakness, that living up to your word is not way to seal a deal.

Anyway let me go over this real fast one last time here before we go wherever we go these seven nights and days we are out of each others thoughts. Native people have rights to the lands they live in. This is recognized in things like that Papal Bull, The Proclamation of 1763, this countries Constitution. In signing the treaty we agreed to share what was ours with those who came in need later. Well, okay, in some ways we were kind of forced to, but then they didn't want to scrap it or buy us out at that time either. We didn't lose our rights completely and forever by warfare or sell them for

money. They got treaty rights. We have treaty rights.

Many of them aren't happy about how their side of the deal is working out,

and there could be improvements made on ours, also. Let's deal with those next time.

See you then.