INDIGENOUS
Our real road toward reconciliation
Reconciliation with Canada’s indigenous people has been an underlying theme of Canada’s yearlong 150 celebrations.
“You can only do this in a relationship, and my new friends, who are First Nations, Inuit and Métis, have changed my understanding of what it means to be Canadian,” Minister of Indigenous and Northern Affairs Carolyn Bennett said last December at a sunrise ceremony in St. John’s, N.L., to launch the initiative.
Some say reconciliation has the potential to be transformative for Canada, to bring to fruition such notions as healing, hope and togetherness, to rebuild relationships, to acknowledge harms, to offer restitution and to move forward to a more inclusive future for this country.
In prefacing a lecture at Carleton University last month, Ry Moran, the first director of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation at the University of Manitoba, said the “truth” part of reconciliation is its essential element.
“It’s the starting point for the conversation. While we can’t be stuck in the past, we must be aware of the past,” said Moran, who points out that a recent survey showed 40 per cent of Canadians are aware that there is a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
“We are not the country we think we are. This is really true.”
It is the work of individuals, of institutions and of government — but reconciliation is not the work of a single year. Reconciliation means something different to every individual. The Citizen asked indigenous people in Ottawa what it means to them. Their answers ranged from the intensely personal to the philosophic and spiritual. Cody Coyote grew up in Ottawa’s east end and is of Ojibwa ancestry from Matachewan First Nation. He struggled with his cultural identity as a teen and, eventually, he joined a gang. “I joined because I thought they had my back. I thought it was a brotherhood,” he says.
“It was hard to get out of the road of destruction. I’ve done some things I wasn’t proud of.” Coyote stopped using alcohol and drugs five years ago.
“I didn’t want to be a stereotype,” he says. He started recording in high school and is now a hip-hop/ experimental songwriter and performer, a workshop facilitator and a motivational speaker.
“I am in a place where I have an understanding of what it means to be a warrior. A true warrior understands that it’s about taking care of the people, protecting and honouring women, for they are sacred, and protecting children, for they are the future generations of this world.”
Hip-hop is about the reality that people see around them, he says. “It’s all about the storytelling. The artist can bring something new to the table.”
He took the stage name Cody Coyote, Cody being his first name and Coyote as a reference to the indigenous trickster/clown figure.
“It has a deep meaning to me. I naturally like to joke and see people smile, but I feel it acknowledges that there are people out there who will try to trick you along your journey.
“It’s difficult to celebrate a country where we find ourselves subject to ongoing racism. Reconciliation for me would be to right all the wrongs, to allow us to learn our languages and our culture and to have freedom.
“Indigenous people are overrepresented in the prison population. Our women make up a mass amount of those incarcerated. They are our water carriers and our direct connection with Gitchie Manitou (the Creator). When they imprison our women, they eliminate their chances to bring future generations into this world, resulting in us as a people slowly being killed off. This is a prime example of how this country is systematically set up for us to fail.”
(In federal corrections, 25.4 per cent of the incarcerated population are of aboriginal ancestry. In the Prairie provinces, 48 per cent of federal inmates are aboriginal people. More than 36 per cent of incarcerated women are of aboriginal descent, reported Howard Sapers, Canada’s former prison ombudsman, in 2016.)
“Indigenous kids in the childwelfare system need to feel acceptance and have workers who are culturally sensitive. Also apologies go only so far, actions speak louder than words. I haven’t seen many actions lately. When you have people, for example Conservative Sen. Lynn Beyak, who felt that there was good that came from residential schools, you can feel a sense of how colonized and ignorant this country can be.
“I also think the government should help communities become more self-sufficient. We should be educating people, teaching them how to build greenhouses and do water filtration to create healthy communities, but also monitoring where government funds go. When this country chooses to use its money to fund events nationwide in celebration of 150 years while we have people starving, living in poverty and who do not have proper water filtration, there is something very wrong here.
“As for police, filter out the bad cops, keep the good ones. We should be getting the non-indigenous community involved. Starting with places like Thunder Bay, where racism is found anywhere from the police department to across their city, resulting in unsolved murders of indigenous youth/people that have been labelled as suicides. There are strong hearts of every nationality. Let’s bring them all together. It won’t happen overnight. But I would like it to change before I make my way back to the spirit world.” Colleen Cardinal, then only an infant, was “scooped” by childwelfare authorities along with two older sisters from Saddle Lake Cree Nation northeast of Edmonton in 1972.
All three girls were placed in foster care and later adopted by a non-indigenous family in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont.
“We picked you out of a catalogue,” her adoptive mother later told her. Cardinal did not know she was Cree until she was 13.
The adoptive home was violent and Cardinal’s older sisters were sexually abused by their adoptive father, who was later charged and convicted. Cardinal’s older sisters both ran away when they were 15. They later received restitution of $15,000 each, but the money proved to be a curse to the oldest sister, Gina, who was killed for her cash and jewelry in Edmonton in 1990.
Gina’s killer was charged and convicted, but both surviving sisters found it difficult to recover from the trauma.
“Gina was my hero. She was so tough. She protected us and told us stories to distract us,” says Cardinal, who left Edmonton in 1998 and studied to become an addictions counsellor. She has reconnected with family at Saddle Lake and has lived in Ottawa since 2011. Cardinal is one of the founders of the National Indigenous Survivors of Childhood Welfare Network and the author of an upcoming memoir Ohpikiihaakan-ohpihmeh (“Brought up somewhere else” in Plains Cree) a ’60s Scoop adoptee’s story.
“I didn’t know my mother went to residential school until I started working on a documentary three years ago. I was very angry at her and never acknowledged her pain. All I had heard was the bad stuff.
“I started to heal with the help of reconnecting to ceremony and culture as well as mainstream medicine. My biggest fear has always been that my children would be taken away from me. I’m sometimes invited to speak to university students, and the first thing I do is put up a treaty map to help them understand the context of the treaties and the making of Canada. If you don’t understand that, you can’t understand why we’re so angry today.
“The wealth from those territories finances Canada. Indigenous Peoples should be sharing the resources and the profits. The treaties were meant to share the wealth, not for First Nations to be segregated and be in economic apartheid. Indian and Northern Affairs Canada controls those monies, yet our people continue to live without running water or proper health care in the wealthiest country. When people have the context, they can understand. Context is everything. Empowerment comes when you know where you come from. As a Plains Cree woman, I come from somewhere.
“The last time I went home, I felt so much pride. We don’t want everything back, but I want to be able to read the paper or go online and not see racism anymore directed at indigenous people.”
PHILIP EDWARDS
Philip Edwards was born beside the railway tracks north of Thunder Bay in 1959, the year before legislation was enacted giving First Nations people the right to vote in federal elections without losing their treaty status.
His mother was a status Indian and his father was a non-status Indian, possibly American. Edwards lived with his grandmother and with an aunt and uncle, but left at 16 to travel across the country, taking temporary jobs.
He attended two universities, eventually earned a bachelor’s degree and did social science research, including tracking down information about missing indigenous women in Ontario. He has also taught English in Korea and Saudi Arabia, and is currently studying robotics at Algonquin College.
“There is no simple answer to the reconciliation question. The context is so complex. I would call myself a refugee in this country. I get tired of unemployment and underemployment. My adoption records are sealed. Much of my family history is unclear and I wish I knew the answers. I don’t fit in either world, really.
“For me, reconciliation is centred around the ’60s Scoop legal case and what it will mean for me.”
In February, after an eight-year court battle, an Ontario Superior Court judge found that the federal government failed to prevent on-reserve children from losing their indigenous identity after they were taken from their homes. The federal government has said it wants to compensate victims.
“My life has been a series of three-month contracts and social assistance. I don’t think you can say ‘thank you’ to Canada for that. It would help if I would be compensated. I would like to build some kind of a business.
“Native culture is as fundamentally different from Western culture as two societies could possibly be. We need a constitution that is appropriate to us with the environment, ecology and the children before everything else. I would say this is a critical issue for our cultural and political survival.” Bridget Tolley’s mother, Gladys, died half an hour before midnight on Oct. 5, 2001, after she was struck by a police cruiser on Highway 105, which runs past Kitigan Zibi near Maniwaki. Gladys’s death was found to be accidental and the case was closed. Since then, Tolley, 57, has been fighting to get the case reopened. She still lives a few doors away from where her mother died. Tolley is the mother of three, grandmother of six and great-grandmother of one. She is an active member of Families of Sisters in Spirit, which holds an annual vigil to draw attention to the cases of indigenous people who have died violently.
“For me, it’s hard to really picture reconciliation. I feel left out because they won’t do anything for the closed cases. There have been so many problems with the police lately, especially in Thunder Bay. (In May, indigenous leaders in the Thunder Bay area asked the RCMP to investigate after Josiah Begg, 14, and Tammy Keeash, 17, were found dead in the McIntyre River.) If they did such a damn good job, why won’t they talk about it?” she says. “For reconciliation to happen, the first step would be acknowledging the wrongs that have happened. And there have been so many. I can’t celebrate anything until I get my peace. I want justice, I want truth. I want the dignity and respect that my mother deserves. Even the coroner said my mother died because she was drunk. The report said my mother drank beer every day in the first paragraph of the coroner’s report. My mother wasn’t just another drunken Indian woman. My mother was a loving, caring person. If I don’t fight for my mother, I would worry that something would happen to my children and my grandchildren. But I believe that there is hope. I couldn’t do this if I didn’t have that hope. All I want is justice. That would be a great start.” Shady Hafez is Algonquin Anishinaabe and Syrian from Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg. He is a men’s traditional dancer and artist who can frequently be seen on the regional powwow trail.
Hafez is also a graduate of Carleton University and is now working on a master’s degree in indigenous governance at the University of Victoria, focusing his research on law, justice and policing. He currently lives in Kitigan Zibi and writes a blog called Not Your Average Indian and tweets from the username @shadyhfz
“The project of reconciliation, as it is currently framed, is a project I have little faith in. The reasoning is simple: The root of historical and current conflicts between indigenous nations and the Canadian state is land, more specifically the occupation of indigenous lands and the dispossession of indigenous bodies from our lands.
“Therefore, if reconciliation is a goal that the Canadian state and the Canadian populace are fully committed to achieving, then why are we not resolving the primary issue of contention between our nations — that being land title and the ability of indigenous nations to have autonomous control over our lands and affairs?
“If Canada is serious about reconciliation and implementing a nation-to-nation relationship with Indigenous Peoples, the process must begin by returning unused Crown lands to their respective indigenous nations or providing restitution for lands that cannot be returned. Following which Canada should abolish the Indian Act and allow for full indigenous autonomy over our lands. Canadians need to understand that part of reconciliation is appreciating the reality that we may not want to be part of the Canadian state.”
ELAINE KICKNOSWAY
Elaine Kicknosway was born in Denare Beach, northern Saskatchewan, the middle child in a family of 13. At the age of two, she was apprehended by childwelfare authorities — one of the ’60s Scoop generation. In the next three years, as part of the adoption process, she would live in five abusive unregulated foster homes.
“They were like puppy mills,” she says.
At the age of 41/2, she was adopted by a non-indigenous family that eventually moved to Ottawa.
Kicknosway says her adoptive family loved her like one of their own, but not every child was so fortunate. The children lost their families, language and culture. Some of her siblings ran away to return home.
Kicknosway was able to recover her status at the age of 24, and has reconnected with her family in Saskatchewan. She has a diploma in early childhood education, and is the children and youth manager at Minwaashin Lodge, a support centre for aboriginal women.
“The reality is that we all make our way home. It’s how we’re perceived when we go home. Anyone under child welfare has this shame. What does Canada’s shame look like? They didn’t keep care of us. They didn’t watch over us. There has to be recognition of the effects.
“Non-indigenous people were affected, too. My adoptive family were given a seriously abused child who was hiding food, startling at loud noises and hiding. If you don’t have a normal childhood, there’s that constant question in the gut: ‘Is that normal?’
“When it comes to reconciliation, they should fund healing. They should put out requests for treatment proposals. Fund it, don’t question it. So much money was given to ensure that we were disconnected. Some should be spent to ensure that everyone feels safe and comforted. We’re not anywhere near that word called ‘forward.’ We’re not even on the first syllable.”
ROMEO SAGANASH
Romeo Saganash is the MP from Abitibi—Baie-James—Nunavik— Eeyou and the NDP critic for intergovernmental indigenous affairs. He was born in Waswanipi, a Cree community in Quebec, in 1961, and attended residential school, later attending law school in Montreal. Saganash’s riding includes all of the Cree communities on James Bay, as well as 14 Inuit communities and two southern Algonquin, and comprises more than half the land mass of Quebec. In April, Saganash tabled Bill C-262, a private member’s bill to ensure that the laws of Canada are consistent with the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
“The basic element of reconciliation is respect. In particular, respect for indigenous people. Two of the central calls to action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission have been 43 and 44, which refer to Canadian governments and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. No. 43 calls on federal, provincial, territorial, and municipal governments to fully adopt and implement the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as the framework for reconciliation; and 44 calls on the government of Canada to develop a national action plan, strategies and other concrete measures to achieve the goals of the declaration.) Any policies and legislation would have to use the declaration as a framework.
“The Liberal government has said implementing the declaration is a top priority. It’s just a matter of the Liberal government living up to their promises. I think it’s one of the most important and fundamental promises.”
JAIME KOEBEL
Jaime Koebel is Michif/Nehiyaw/ German from Lac La Biche, Alta. At the age of 15, she was repeatedly raped by young men at a party. Too distressed to face her family, she fled to Edmonton. About 20 years later, in early 2016, she told her story to the pre-inquiry of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.
Koebel started a university degree in Edmonton and moved to Ottawa in 2000 to work at the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network. She has worked as a consultant with federal departments and is an arts educator at the National Gallery of Canada. She and her three children also perform dances influenced by her heritage with the dance group Prairie Fire, which performed at Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s swearing-in in 2015 and at the closing ceremonies of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Koebel is also the founder of Indigenous Walks, a series of guided walking tours that explore Ottawa’s monuments, architecture, landscape and art through an indigenous perspective.
“I think reconciliation can happen on a local scale and a large scale. For me, it’s about starting to learn abut the territory you’re in. It’s one of the reasons why I started Indigenous Walks. Do you own land? What’s your relationship to the place where you are, your house, the place you work? Who is a local elder? Can you smudge in your building? Who were the people who lived here? What was their language, their basic cultural protocols?
“Raise your children to be aware. It doesn’t have to be overwhelming, just a little bit of knowledge here and there. Keep indigenous people in mind. Anywhere you go, it’s a simple way to enact reconciliation. When you’re recognizing nationhood in a large way, it can be a scary when it comes to giving back lands.
“One of the things people can start doing is talking to indigenous people. Before the city of Ottawa even put shovels to the ground in the LRT project, it consulted with indigenous people. There has to be an education process, especially for bureaucrats. A lot comes from our relationship to the land, including our languages and being protectors of the environment. I think there are a lot of non-indigenous scientists, for instance, who can work within the indigenous system.”