My friend Neil Gabriel, a self-employed, successful tradesman and Mohawk warrior from the Kanesatake Reserve in Oka, Quebec, is humorously skeptical of the claims and exemptions abundantly supplied by our Native populations. Many of these indigenous tribes are committed to challenging national jurisdictions and dismantling the historical structure of the country in a torrent of land-claims and legal negotiations.
Neil is having none of it and puts the matter to rest with a joke that is solidly anchored in reality. “If we want to know what kind of winter we can expect, we look at the white man’s woodpile.”
Most, if not all, of the Indian tribes in Canada insist that they are nations with the same rights and privileges that accrue to established nations around the world. They contend that they are sovereign entities entitled to international perks and accords. Ricardo Duchesne points out in Canada in Decay that a tribe is not a nation. “A tribe consists of people with a distinct set of cultural and linguistic traits that are not yet integrated into a nation with clear boundaries, a centralized authority, a written language, a legal code, a network of communications, a reasonably centralized army [and] a bureaucracy capable of enforcing the state.”
In First Nations: Second Thoughts, Tom Flanagan points out that advocates of aboriginal rights believe Indigenous peoples “were at one time sovereign nations of equal status with European nations under international law,” something that obviously makes absolutely no sense. The aboriginal claim of an inherent right to self-government “is an assertion of sovereignty contrary to history, jurisprudence, and national interest,” despite the confusion caused by obscure Treaty Rights that probably should never have been signed by our forebears.
Some provinces, Alberta for example, are what are called Treaty Territory asserting legislative sovereignty, thanks to the famous Numbered Treaties from 1871 to 1921. These were a series of 11 treaties made between the Crown and the Tribes providing the Crown with constitutional rights for land, industrial development, and white settlement while government negotiators promised the Aboriginal peoples special rights to treaty lands, the distribution of cash payments, hunting and fishing tools, farming supplies, and the like. We should remain aware, though, that safety from property seizure by the Tribes may be cancelled by some activist judge eager to render such Treaties invalid or to reinterpret their purport.
Perhaps indigenous claims might work for Turtle Island, a vague geographical designation or part of a Creation story. The name is given by some of these tribes to the land mass we call North America and specifically to Canada. This is a sentimental myth invented by native proponents of sovereign rights and privileges which in themselves certainly merit mythic status. But they have no place in the real world.
Admittedly, not all band chiefs are on board with this divisive program, and certain tribes like the Osoyoos Indian Band, a member of the Okanagan Nation Alliance in British Columbia, led by Chief Clarence Louie, have prospered, as the publisher of Arts & Opinion Robert Lewis writes in a brilliant, no-hold-barred essay, by applying entrepreneurial methods and practices. The band “escaped the deprivations and degradations that consumed other tribes because they sagaciously adopted modern and proven entrepreneurial and agricultural business models.” Like Neil Gabiel, Chief Louie understood there is more to solvency and self-reliance than casinos and cigarettes, and nation-splitting antics and disruptions will ultimately prove ill-advised. But such instances of visionary prudence are exceptions to the general rule.
Indigenous action against settled jurisdictions and democratic expectations, Lewis continues, “stem from an ignorance born out of a twisted sense of romanticism that has been enabled by the white man whose lack of vision and gutless policies have conspired to keep the Indian in a permanent chokehold.” According to a Fraser Institute report, spending on First Nation’s people rose from $79 million in 1947 to $7.9 billion in 2012. Another $32 billion has been added for 2024-25. The tab keeps rising exponentially and seems to have no end, though such expenditures have been totally useless and counter-productive. Tax exemption for reservation-based Indians keeps them in a state of subservience as well.
They also profit from special treatment under the law. According to Section 718.2(e) of the Criminal Code, also known as the Gladue Rights, courts must treat Indigenous offenders with special leniency. “In the on-going blame game,” Lewis concludes, “it’s anyone’s call: the Indian refuses to speak the truth to himself and the white man refuses to speak it to him.” This is merely another form of “race-based” justice.
Our universities and educational institutions in general are an inherent part of the problem, Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, for example, albeit a tenth-tier institution on the same level as the University of Namibia, acknowledges that it sits on the “traditional territory of the Haudenosaunee, Anishnawbe and Neutral Peoples.” The University of Toronto acknowledges that it squats on the ancestral and unceded territory of the Huron-Wendat, Seneca, and Misssissaugas. The same is the case of almost every university in the country.
Woe betide any professor who wishes to initiate a conversation about Indian rights and supposed history, as did the unfortunate psychology professor Rick Mehta, fired despite tenure by another pedestrian institution, Acadia University in Nova Scotia. Ricardo Duchense suffered the same fate at the University of New Brunswick, still another ideologically polluted academy. Jeff Muehlbauer at Brandon University in Manitoba, who reported with evidence that the Residential Schools often had a positive effect on the lives of its pupils and that the narrative of indigenous suffering and “settler” guilt was a piece of blanket propaganda, was ultimately driven from his post. As of this writing, a court case has been launched against the Waterloo Regional District Schoolboard’s mandatory land acknowledgement. So it goes.
The last thing we need in these perilous and unsettling times is a web of complex and draining negotiations that disrupt the conduct of Canada’s affairs. Rather, independent and entrepreneurial activity on the part of individuals and enlightened band chiefs, as noted with respect to the Osoyoos Indian Band, is the sine qua non for Native development, prosperity, and dignity. Individuals and tribes must take responsibility for their lives rather than rely on vociferous and parasitical demands for an ahistorical restitution and an endless tangle of legal ratifications.
As I’ve suggested in various places, Canada’s indigenizers bear a spooky resemblance to that committee of “sappy women” in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer imploring the governor to be merciful to “Injun Joe, believed to have killed five citizens of the village.” There were “plenty of weaklings ready to scribble their names to a pardon-petition.” Our own weaklings are sappily prepared to surrender portions of the country to aboriginal claims of sovereignty over ostensible tribal territory.
“What would I save if my house was burning down?” asks the poet André Breton. “I would save the glowing embers.” Sigmund Freud presumably said he would save his pipe. No one is thinking of calling the fire department. And if the Indian says he is freezing in the middle of winter, the white man will not give even a portion of his woodpile. No need to. He has already given up the house.
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