Having power brings success: Stephen Maher,
Membertou Mi’kmaq no longer pushed around
In September 1915, the federal government went to the Exchequer Court of Canada to seek an order to force the eviction of the Mi’kmaq from the seaside Kings Road Reserve on the outskirts of Sydney, Cape Breton.
Former Sydney mayor W.A. Crowe testified that the Mi’kmaq had to be moved: “They are hardly over the nomad state yet. This is an anomaly in my judgment that in the centre of a city which is the size of Sydney that there should be two acres occupied by Indians in that spot.”
Chief Joe Christmas said his people didn’t want to move.
He said his people “do not like to live away from that place. It is handy for their work, and they have a good schoolhouse and everything is complete, and we have good doctors and good agents and good teachers and the children go to school every day.”
But they were bringing down property values, so Justice Audette ordered that they be evicted.
“No one cares to live in the immediate vicinity of the Indians,” he wrote. “The overwhelming weight of the evidence is to the effect that the reserve retards and is a clog in the development of that part of the city.”
The Mi’kmaq were moved inland a few kilometres to Membertou, to a bowl of swampland that nobody wanted, out of sight and mind, where they lived as second-class citizens in a community of tarpaper shacks and outhouses.
In 1971 a young man from the community, Donald Marshall Jr., was wrongly convicted of murdering his friend, Sandy Seale, in a Sydney park. Marshall spent 11 years in prison, where he was disciplined for loudly proclaiming his innocence, before he managed to show that another man killed Seale and was released.
In the summer of 1993, Marshall went fishing i n Pomquet Harbour, caught 210 kilograms of eels, which he sold for $787.10. He was charged with fishing with- out a licence, but claimed in court that he had a right to fish based on treaties from the 1750s. The case went to the Supreme Court of Canada, which ruled for Marshall in 1999.
Mi’kmaq immediately went out on the water to exercise that newly restored right, fishing for lobster, which fetches a better price than eel.
This almost set off a shooting war in Burnt Church, N.B. To avert the crisis, the federal government sent officials around to all the Mi’kmaq communities, and the chiefs bargained hard, winning fishing licences, boats, gear, training and money.
In Membertou, Chief Terry Paul and band CEO Bernd Christmas were determined that Junior’s legal victory would make a difference for the community and they were ruthless at the table.
They put the money they won from Ottawa with money that they wrested from a pipeline company after winning an injunction against the National Energy Board, which had approved a project crossing their traditional lands without consulting them.
“It was like a one-two punch,” Christmas recalled this week. “It was great at the time. We were using the system to get to where we wanted to be.”
They used this seed money to develop businesses. Membertou now has a casino, a mall, a fancy restaurant and a convention centre-hotel complex.
Nobody in Sydney would now say the reserve retards development, since the band has $112 million in revenue a year and employs 700 people.
Cape Breton-Canso MP Rodger Cuzner said Cape Bretoners are proud of Membertou.
“I think people are impressed that they are able to find a way through themselves,” he said.
“It’s seizing those opportunities and making the best out of those opportunities and not squandering them. I think they’ve developed a certain degree of acumen.”
Membertou was able to do these things because it had the power to do so, because the courts forced the federal government to honour the treaties their ancestors signed.
First Nations had power when they signed those treaties, but over time the Crown came to ignore them, and aboriginals were powerless.
That powerlessness was at the root of the abuse at residential schools. Aboriginals couldn’t say: No, you’re not taking my child from me.
They couldn’t travel freely, own property, vote, organize politically or get a fair shake from the courts.
Those days are done, thanks to people like Marshall, who used the justice system that wrongly imprisoned him to enforce his people’s rights.
People on both sides make a mistake when we think about our relationship with First Nations as a zero-sum game, where the Crown has to yield something that will cause the rest of us hardship.
We are better off when our neighbours are prosperous, and they will be prosperous where they have the power to win access to resources and the acumen to use those resources wisely.
Across Canada, aboriginals are demanding that the Crown recognize their treaty rights. The prime minister has committed to work with them to do so.
We’ll all be better off if they succeed.