Cree activist’s leadership helped build indigenous organizations
In interviews with Allison KirkMontgomery in 2011 and 2012, Delia Opekokew recalled activist Walter Deiter realizing during his stints driving trucks that grassroots-based self-governance was the key to a better life for indigenous peoples.
Hearing radio snippets about “what was going on with decolonization” in other countries, Deiter, a Cree, figured, “if you’re going to assist people to improve their lives, the best way is to organize them, through community organization … rather than imposing changes on them,” she said.
Deiter made those trucking daydreams a reality, as he went on to lead the labour-focused Federation of Saskatchewan Indians (FSI) — the forerunner of today’s Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations (FSIN) — from 1966 to 1968.
His daughter Patricia told the Leader-Post Deiter remortgaged the family home to raise money for the cause when his organizing was in its infancy, but the volunteerbased FSI was really off and running when it was awarded $67,000 of government funding.
In the following years FSI leaders — and the funding know-how they developed — came to the fore when the National Indian Brotherhood (NIB) was created after the National Indian Council split along status and non-status lines.
Deiter was the NIB’s first president in late 1968, and it was expanded from its Saskatchewandominated core into a network of locally elected leadership groups in other provinces, as Deiter explained in 1977 interviews with Murray Dobbin.
Perhaps the NIB’s biggest win was against the 1969 white paper on Indian policy, which was eventually killed off after a backlash the group spearheaded.
Deiter spent only those first two years in charge on the national stage but by 1982 the NIB had morphed into the Assembly of First Nations, which now represents 634 communities countrywide.
In later years the one-time army man led the National Indian Veterans Association, served as a band council member at the Peepeekisis Reserve, and was made an officer of the Order of Canada in 1980. A longtime advocate on indigenous substance abuse issues, he also founded the Native Alcohol Council.
Deiter died in Regina in 1988, aged 72.