‘What do we have to celebrate,' asks chief

Trudeau target of First Nations’ impatience

GATINEAU, QUE. • As he opened the annual meeting Tuesday of the Assembly of First Nations, the organization’s national chief, Perry Bellegarde, looked ahead to 2017, the year in which Canada will mark the 150th anniversary of Confederation.

“What do we have to celebrate? The oppression? The poor housing? The high suicides?” Bellegarde told the 700 or so chiefs and other indigenous leaders.

A few hours later, Gord Downie was in the same hall. The frontman for the Tragically Hip, dealing with incurable brain cancer, has made it his mission to raise awareness of the harm caused by residential schools, and Bellegarde and the chiefs wanted to honour Downie’s work with a blanketing ceremony.

Downie, weeping with emotion, was smudged, an eagle feather was fixed in his hat, and he was given the spirit name, “Man Who Walks Amongst The Stars.”

Then, Downie, too, spoke about 2017.

“It will take 150 years or seven generations to heal the wound of the residential school,” Downie said. “To become a country that can truly call ourselves Canada, it means we must become one, we must walk down a path of reconciliation from now on.”

Then it was time for the man who was supposed to make it all better: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

A year earlier, Trudeau had been prime minister for barely a month when he spoke at the same annual assembly and the chiefs, thrilled to be rid of Stephen Harper, honoured Trudeau with a blanketing ceremony.

But now, 12 months after he was given that honour, several chiefs say Trudeau’s record has not lived up to his rhetoric.

“I’m not too impressed,” said Chief Wilfred King of Gull Bay First Nation in northwestern Ontario.

“I’m disappointed that there has been no real transformative change in the communities. What I see is a lot of great speeches but nothing has translated on the ground level in First Nation communities.”

Trudeau on Tuesday did not shy away from acknowledging that several promises he had made to the AFN a year earlier were still works in progress.

“We’ve taken the first steps in what we all know is going to be a multi-generational journey,” Trudeau said.

“No one here fools him or herself that the path our country overwhelmingly agreed to take will always be a gentle one, or an easy one. We’ve already felt some headwinds. And there will be more.”

Trudeau won applause from the chiefs for committing to introduce an Indigenous Languages Act, which he said would preserve, protect and revitalize the more than 50 First Nations, Metis, and Inuit languages still in use.

But, to some chiefs, there will be a limit to the goodwill Trudeau’s government has been granted.

“During the election campaign (Trudeau) and his party convinced a lot of our people who normally don’t vote in elections to step forward and come to vote with the hope that change would come about. But change has been very slow in coming,” said Jean Guy Whiteduck, chief of the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg, an Algonquin band based in Maniwaki, Que.

“At this stage I don’t know if he gets a passing mark. But one year is not very much time. Give him one more year, I guess. But if things don’t change, most aboriginal people will not support him. In the next election, they’ll go somewhere else or they just won’t vote again. They’re still hopeful. Me, I’m doubtful.”