What do aboriginals really want?

THERESA SPENCE MAY BE DISCREDITED, but challenges of native frustration remain for the prime minister

“We have sent a letter to Buckingham Palace requesting that Queen Elizabeth send forth her representative, which is the Governor General of Canada. I will not be attending Friday’s meeting with the Prime Minister ...”

That, if you’re wondering, is the leader of the Attawapiskat First Nation, Theresa Spence. To be clear, whether Spence attends the meeting is of no importance whatever. A flair for self-promotion and the credulousness of the Canadian media may have landed her on the front pages for a few weeks; she may imagine herself, as such, to be in a position to dictate terms to the queen, the governor general and the prime minister, not to mention her fellow chiefs (who were instructed not to attend in her absence).

But the mundane reality, with the continuing revelations of just how thoroughly she has mismanaged her tiny hamlet, is that her career in the race-hustling business is very nearly at an end. No one person has done more to damage the native cause with the general public, and no native leader who hopes to enlist the public’s support will want to have much to do with her.

But then, for all the attention she has aroused, Spence was never the issue. The broader grievances of native people are no less valid because of the machinations of one incompetent chief; neither is the Idle No More movement likely to diminish in intensity merely because its purported spiritual leader has been discredited. Whatever may emerge from the prime minister’s meeting with the chiefs Friday, we are going to be dealing with the forces unleashed in the past few weeks for some time to come. A prime minister not known for his finesse will have to discover new reservoirs of tact and sensitivity.

Needless to say, these have not been much in evidence to date. Any government that proposes any changes on this file, no matter how benign, is likely to run into suspicion and resistance from native Canadians — not unreasonably, given our history. But a government as given to bullying and secrecy as this one is perhaps least well-placed to carry out major reforms.

Indeed, on aboriginal issues, and on associated files such as pipelines, the prime minister may be running up against the limits of his usual head-butting approach. It is one thing to run roughshod over Parliament, but a section of native opinion has become so inflamed, and so emboldened, as to be more or less immovable. Divinely certain of the righteousness of their cause and undeterred by such niceties as the rule of law, they have the capacity to cause a great deal of disruption, not merely to the gov- ernment’s agenda, but to the economic life of the country.

The collateral damage could well include the native establishment, notably Assembly of First Nations Chief Shawn Atleo, the people with whom Harper must work and the people most exposed in the current atmosphere of confrontation. As I’ve written before, it is Atleo and others like him, more than Harper, whom the more fundamentalist elements in Idle No More have in their sights, precisely for their willingness to cooperate with the government and its “genocidal” agenda.

For the prime minister, then, the immediate objective, now and in the weeks to come, must be to bolster the credibility of Atleo and other modernizers as the legitimate voice of native Canadians — and to marginalize their fundamentalist opponents as unrealistic and unrepresentative. That means, in the short term, agreeing on practical, concrete measures to improve native people’s lives, from clean water to education to economic development; over time, it will also mean making progress toward what everyone agrees must be the objective: freeing natives on reserve from the dictates of the Indian Act, affording them as much room as the Constitution allows to govern themselves.

That will not be done with a stroke of a pen. As Attawapiskat and other disasters make clear, the core requirement of self-government is accountability to the governed. That is unlikely so long as so much of the economy of a reserve is made up of federal transfers, with so few people in control of their dispersal. So the development of a genuine local economic base, one that can generate not only sufficient tax revenues to support the reserve’s activities but taxpaying constituents, with an interest in seeing these are well spent, remains a crucial prerequisite.

Indeed, democratic consultation recommends itself more broadly as an antidote to radicalism. Experience teaches the only thing that ultimately defuses extremist movements is incontrovertible evidence that they do not enjoy the support of the population in whose name they claim to act. By contrast, it is difficult to say just who speaks for aboriginal Canadians at present. We need to know more about what natives really want: whether they favour the sort of meat-and-potatoes, goodgovernance reforms the government and the chiefs have been jointly pursuing, or the constitutional castles-in-theair of the fundamentalists.

And we need to know whom they really support. It has been all too easy for the activists to attack Atleo as illegitimate so long as he remains elected by a relatively small number of chiefs. Is it not time the AFN chief was directly elected, by aboriginal Canadians at large?