Ottawa blackmailing Innu of Labrador

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Ottawa reached new levels in bureaucratic backward-thinking last month. Federal negotiator Ross Reid and Indian Affairs Minister Pauline Browes suggested in a letter to Davis Inlet Chief Katie Rich and Innu Nation President Peter Penashue that the Innu register under the Indian Act to receive federal government programs.

Reid and Browes called the registration a "stepping stone" to a modern relation-ship between the Innu and the federal government. Registration will help meet the Innu's request for federal programming sooner, rather than later, the letter said.

And if the Innu find that registration is an unacceptable option, then Ottawa can always wait for the outcome of land claims and self-government negotiations to get the programs under way.

Reid and Browes closed the letter expressing their concern over the Innu's hesitancy to register like every one else. They said they have difficulty understanding

how the federal government could respond in a more positive fashion to the Innu.

The feds have agreed to the Sango Bay site, agreed to address the village's urgent problems of substance abuse and housing and drinking water shortages, and they agreed to offer federal programs to the Innu as they are provided "to all other Indians for whom the Government of Canada has assumed the primary program delivery role."

Reid and Browes have completely missed the point.

Apart from the nasty fact that only offering federal programs quickly under registry in the Indian Act is blackmail, Ottawa does not understand, or perhaps care, that the Innu are holding out for something better.

The feds are missing a prime opportunity to show us that we can trust the government when it says it believes in Nat0ive self-government, self-determination and economic autonomy.

The Innu were not registered under the Indian Act when Newfoundland entered Confederation in 1949. The Innu were simply not considered to be any government's responsibility. Certainly Newfoundland never saw the need, or cared, to take a hand in their destiny.

And now that the province has walked away from the Davis Inlet relocation negotiations, Ottawa is free to handle the situation any way it sees fit.

One possible route might have been to use the Innu's freedom from federal bureaucracy as non-registered Natives to set an example, establish a test case, for the rest of Canada's Aboriginal peoples. Here the government has a group of people who have never been subject to the restrictive and paternalistic policies of the Indian Act, the legislation that has irrevocably reshaped the politics and destinies of almost every other First Nation in Canada.

Ottawa seems hell-bent on destroying the Innu's political autonomy. The Innu have never been politically subjugated and if the feds handle the situation with the Innu's interests genuinely in mind, these Aboriginals could become one of the first First Nations in North America to actually achieve self-government.

Once they are moved to the new site and life begins to return to a tolerable state, Ottawa could back out of their lives and allow the Innu to recreate their own politics in the Innu image without the Indian Act hanging over them like a sharpened axe blade.

But this does not seem likely.

Despite months of negotiations and countless rhetorical speeches on Native self-determination, Reid, Browes and the rest of the paper-pushers in Ottawa seem determined to corral the Innu into the already over-crowded pen that is the Indian Act, to calf-rope them with restrictive government policy and brand them "Indian."