Way of life at stake in vote, says candidate for AFN chief
Mohawk leader vows changes if elected
• In the race to lead the Assembly of First Nations, Russell Diabo isn’t running a campaign so much as a call to arms.
His message: The Trudeau government wants to narrow and ultimately terminate Indigenous sovereignty.
In other words, what’s at stake Wednesday in the election for AFN national chief is nothing less than the right of Indigenous people to uphold their way of life, he says.
“Our people are in serious trouble,” said Diabo, a Mohawk from the South Shore Kahnawake territory in Quebec. “We’re being coerced into accepting the government’s definition of our rights. They’ll pay for on-reserve, Indian Act dependency, but they won’t recognize our rights to land, water and resources.”
Diabo is one of four candidates running to unseat Perry Bellegarde at the AFN’s general assembly in Vancouver. The other three are Sheila North, Miles Richardson and Katherine Whitecloud. The lobby group represents 900,000 Indigenous people in 635 communities across Canada.
If he were elected, Diabo would be the first Mohawk leader in the AFN’s 26-year history. But he doesn’t merely want to win, he wants to upend the organization from “head to toe.”
“The chiefs are too conservative. They report to Ottawa instead of to their people,” said Diabo. “Justin Trudeau doesn’t care if Perry (Bellegarde) wins or loses. As long as one of the other candidates wins, he gets the status quo.
“I’m proposing something totally different.”
To call Diabo’s style combative would be an understatement. The background photo on his Twitter profile is a protester giving the middle finger to Indigenous Affairs Minister Carolyn Bennett.
He has accused Prime Minister Trudeau of trying to “re-colonize” Indigenous peoples by converting First Nations into municipalities.
Bellegarde, for his part, was elected during the height of tensions between the Harper government and First Nations. At the outset of the 2015 federal election, he led a campaign to get more Indigenous people to the polls and oust the Conservatives from power.
In the end, a record number of Indigenous people cast their ballots and the Liberals were swept into office.
But while Trudeau was elected on a promise to fundamentally change the relationship between First Nations and Ottawa, he has continued many of the policies that proved unpopular under the Harper government.
Perhaps none of those has been more controversial than the government’s decision to take over the $4.5-billion Trans Mountain pipeline from Kinder Morgan. While Bellegarde has preached the need for Indigenous consultation on the project, Diabo has been unequivocal.
He says he will fight the pipeline at every turn.
When he first announced his candidacy in April, Diabo was known primarily as a policy wonk. The former adviser to AFN national chiefs Ovide Mercredi and David Ahenakew, Diabo spent most of his 40-year career working behind the scenes.
Three AFN delegates told the Montreal Gazette there was little enthusiasm for his candidacy at first.
But he’s since taken his message on the road, driving his truck from Ontario to Vancouver ahead of Wednesday’s vote. As he has zigzagged from one reserve to the next, a grassroots movement has been born, but the AFN’s central tension has also been highlighted.
He may be popular among the people, but Diabo needs to win over the elected band council chiefs to win.
“(Diabo) is the only AFN candidate I’ve seen on Native Facebook, or heard even mentioned from regular Native people,” Robert Jago, a prominent Indigenous writer, said on Twitter.
“If he can’t win, it really says there’s a problem with the organization.”
Though Diabo’s political awakening came during the American Indian Movement in the 1970s — he hitchhiked across the states as a teenager, following protests from Washington, D.C. to South Dakota — he traces his world view to his grandmother.
In Kahnawake, the band council system never fully took root. Instead, Diabo’s grandmother introduced him to the Longhouse — a traditional form of government in which clan mothers appoint chiefs after consulting the people.
Traditionalists describe it as a system in which the people (and not the chiefs) are the sovereign.
“When we had to resist the federal government during (the Oka Crisis), it was the warrior societies that led the charge. It was the clan system, the Longhouse, the people,” said Diabo.
“My grandmother, she introduced me to that world. She taught me to be a good person, to be kind but to fight when you have to fight.”
For a time, in the early 1990s, Diabo worked with the Liberal Party on a set of policies that would redefine the relationship between Ottawa and First Nations. In the end, the party published its recommendations in a document called the Red Book.
The result was deemed a failure by Diabo and National Chief Mercredi, who burned a copy of the Red Book outside a Liberal Party convention in 1996.