What to do?

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What to do? Kevin Christmas, a Mi'kmaq Nation citizen who lives in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, has been circulating essays he wrote that are harshly critical of those chiefs who have chosen to work with the government. He has been especially tough on members of the AFN executive.

He told Windspeaker the Mi'kmaq Elders have identified a pattern of co-optation that is used by the government.

"They call it MICE," he said. "The 'M' is for money. Some chiefs can be bought. But they also use 'intrigue' in the sense that some of our leaders love to be close to power and influence and they can be pulled in by being allowed to get close to powerful people. The 'C' is for compassion. False compassion. They tell the chiefs they understand how hard their people have it and promise to do something. The 'E' is for ego. Too many of our leaders get their heads turned by being treated like they're someone important by these government leaders."

He said any one of these tactics can neutralize a chief and even persuade that chief to work against his own people.

Christmas has written that the AFN has lost its way, that it spends more time lobbying for money to run its various programs than it does lobbying on behalf of First Nations people.

"The Assembly of First Nations has failed in its role as the principle national advocate for the First Nations of Canada and has become a cause in itself," he wrote. "The AFN is incapable of re-organization or re-structuring as an effective organization and should be dissolved in favor of a more representative body of collective action and interests."

The former senior advisor to the Union of Nova Scotia Indians was particularly hard on the vice-chiefs. He wrote that the office of vice-chief is "functionally erratic and unruly."

"The unpopularity of the office stems from five main privileged manipulations: the manner of selection, the intangible mandate, the distortion of policy, the poison of false representability and the intrinsic authority of greed," he wrote. "There exists no independent means for evaluating or determining the effectiveness, efficiency, performance, accountability, relevance, utility, need or relative authority of the position."

Christmas recommended dismissing all vice-chiefs and abolishing the position in favor of an elected, representative executive. He advocates giving a veto power to the national chief that he can use in the event attempts at seeking consensus within the executive fail so that the national interest can take precedence over the various competing regional interests.