First Nations sovereignty demands a new point of conflict
The popular perception in academic research, in government offices, and in media commentary is that embedded grievances in the First Nations’ communities provide the motives for rebellions and insurgencies. The obvious policy solution, therefore, is to remove from these communities the grievances before they ignite a First Nations’ uprising in Canada. This grievance, motive, rebellion and policy fix logic, however, is suspect and, in any case, the least of our First Nations national security dilemmas today.
Over the years, Canadian governments have bought into the grievance logic and attempted to pacify Canadian/First Nations relations in various ways. Governments have supported large commissions, tinkered with the Indian Act, and spent huge sums of money to study and redress grievances. Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s residential schools apology on behalf of all Canadians was heartfelt. Yet disturbances continue and the angry rhetoric grows louder and more widespread.
To some citizens it seems that the more governments attend to First Nations individual or collective grievances, the more abundant or complex they become. For example, the residential schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission meant to continue “healing” between our communities but has apparently become instead a grievance industry. Ironically, rather than healing old wounds, as Justice Murray Sinclair discovered (November 2011) the commission has exposed new dangers: “… one day soon,” he reported, “instead of violence being directed at themselves by other aboriginal people, the violence (in the First Nations’ community) will be directed at the general society.” Nevertheless, despite generations of grievances none have provided sufficient motive to launch a First Nations’ insurrection — a direct challenge to the lawful authority of the government of Canada.
Contests and declarations about territorial sovereignty, not social grievances, are the central and most dangerous issue in Canadian/First Nations affairs today. Declarations, of course, don’t make states sovereign, power does. Political, military, and economic power compels nations to recognize and respect other states’ sovereignty. As never before, First Nations leaders are acting as, and demanding to be recognized as, sovereign leaders. And, however reluctantly, Prime Minister Harper, because he is compelled to by the implicit power of these leaders, is listening to them.
In the Canadian/First Nations context, Canada’s absolute economic dependence on natural resources (by some estimates equal to 30 per cent of the Canadian economy) and the inescapable vulnerability of the transportation infrastructure that moves these resources to the markets in Canada and the United States, gives the First Nations enormous new-found powers.
The facts of dependence and vulnerability are certain. As National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations Shawn Atleo reminded Canadians in 2012 “… almost every resource development activity currently operating or planned in Canada is occurring within 200 kilometres of a First Nations’ community and right in the middle of our traditional territories.”
The link between resources and vulnerability was made sharply in 2010 by Shawn Brant, the Belleville, Ont., Mohawk road and rail blockader: “The government ran its infrastructure though our land … now it serves as an incredibly powerful tool of influence that allows us now as a society to engage the government in a dialogue, a relationship based on us having the power.”
The national defence of this infrastructure — millions of kilometres of road and railway lines and pipelines and hydroelectric systems — is impossible without the co-operation of First Nations leaders. On the other hand, the continual compromise of these systems is technically a very simple matter.
In the midst of the First Nations’ growing demand for sovereignty, the Conservative government recently passed through the House of Commons legislation that to many First Nations’ leaders seemed intent on dismissing even the notion of First Nations “sovereignty association” on native land. This tactic has now ignited a dangerous, smouldering conflict over who in Canada is sovereign where.
Harry Swain, deputy minister of Indian and Northern Affairs Canada (1987-1992), though a champion for meaningful changes in the laws, believed that a First Nations pursuit of sovereignty in any meaningful form is a dangerous strategy. It demands nothing less than the surrender by the federal government of sovereignty over vast areas, an act that Canadian citizens would never tolerate any more than they would tolerate kindly Quebec’s independence. He concluded in his excellent study, Oka, (2010): “At the root of the issue is the persistent claim by (First Nations) that they are sovereign states. It is hard to see anything but capitulation or bloodshed if the issue is forced.”
Dr. Douglas Bland is professor emeritus at Queen’s University and author of Uprising, the story of a future First Nations’ insurgency in Canada. The themes in this article were drawn in part from a major ongoing research project sponsored by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute in Ottawa.