What Do an
Apology, Reconciliation, and a Sacred Obligation to
Constitutionally Guaranteed Rights of First Nations
Look Like in Canada?
By Kim
Petersen
They send a
hundred RCMP to go protect a pipeline and not
protect people’s lives so we need to push back.
They put industry, they put fracking, they put
gas and oil over everyone’s lives.
November 23, 202:
Information Clearing House-- In the nineteenth century, Gilbert Malcolm
Sproat, a colonial official, wrote an account —
The Nootka: Scenes and Studies of Savage Life —
of his time among the Nuu Chah Nulth people on the
west coast of Vancouver Island. He noted that the
Nuu Chah Nulth (mistakenly first called Nootka by
captain Cook) have “known every inch of the west
coast for thousands of years.” In his account,
Sproat recorded a conversation that he had had with
a Tseshaht chief.
Chief: “Ah, but we don’t care do
to as the white men wish.”
Sproat: “Whether or not, … The
white men will come. All your people know that they
are your superiors…”
Chief: “We do not want the white
man. He will steal what we have. We wish to live as
we are.”
The brunt of Sproat’s message: the white man
would decide, and the Indigenous peoples had only to
obey.
It took many years, but indigenous rights would
later become codified. On 21 June 2021, the federal
government of Canada overcame its initial objections
and gave royal assent to the United Nations
Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP).
The annex to UNDRIP calls for:
Encouraging States to
comply with and effectively implement all their
obligations as they apply to indigenous peoples
under international instruments, in particular those
related to human rights, in consultation and
cooperation with the peoples concerned,
There are several Articles within UNDRIP that
would militate against Canada’s invasion of the
unceded territory of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation —
done to push through a corporate pipeline. However,
Article 26 should suffice to demonstrate that Canada
is in violation of UNDRIP:
Indigenous peoples have the right to the
lands, territories and resources which they have
traditionally owned, occupied or otherwise used
or acquired.
Indigenous peoples have the right to own,
use, develop and control the lands, territories
and resources that they possess by reason of
traditional ownership or other traditional
occupation or use, as well as those which they
have otherwise acquired.
States shall give legal recognition and
protection to these lands, territories and
resources. Such recognition shall be conducted
with due respect to the customs, traditions and
land tenure systems of the indigenous peoples
concerned.
The Wet’suwet’en First Nation, who have been
indefatigable in defense of their land, issued a
statement through the Unist’ot’en Solidarity Brigade
after the RCMP invaded their territory:
Militarized RCMP
raided Coyote Camp today, arresting 14 people
including Sleydo’, Chief Woos’s daughter, and three
accredited journalists.
They came in with
assault rifles and dogs, and without a warrant, used
axes to break down the door of the cabin Sleydo’ and
Chief Woos’s daughter we’re in, and violently
removed them from their territory.
Of the people
arrested yesterday, most we’re released this
afternoon. Five people refused to sign conditions of
release that barred return to the territory and are
being brought to jail in Prince Rupert where they
face court on Monday.
Solidarity actions
continued across the country, with rallies, marches,
rail blockades, and road closures.
Is this how past violations are patched
up?
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) was
convened in January 2008 to gather testimonies of
the survivors, families, communities, and others
about the Indian Residential Schools under the aegis
of the federal government and churches. (Kevin
Annett has spoken for years of the unmarked graves
of residential school children in Canada. Despite
much denigration in the mass media, he remained firm
in his conviction; therefore, he has gravitas into
the crimes of state. In the preamble of his book
Murder by Decree, he writes that it was
“prompted by the enormous miscarriage of justice
engineered by the government and churches” and
“written as a corrective response to [the TRC’s]
unlawful and deceptive efforts to conceal the extent
and nature of deliberate Genocide in Canada by
church and state over nearly two centuries.) An
amendment to Canada’s racist Indian Act paved the
way for the Indian Residential Schools. The purpose
of the residential schools was to disappear the
Indian. The deputy superintendent general of Indian
Affairs, Duncan Campbell Scott, made this crystal
clear in his testimony before a Special Committee of
the House of Commons in 1920:
I want to get rid of
the Indian problem.
…
Our objective is to continue until there is not a
single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed
into the body politic and there is no Indian
question, and no Indian Department, that is the
whole object of this Bill.
On 11 June 2008, prime minister Stephen Harper
apologized for the Indian Residential Schools. Not
everyone was impressed by the apology. As Indigenous
activist Mike Krebs
noted, “If there is one thing that Mr. Harper’s
‘apology’ provided that could be considered
groundbreaking or new, it’s the idea that there can
be crimes without criminals.” At its conclusion, the
TRC issued a six volume report in 2015 that included
96 Calls to Action for the federal government to
bring about reconciliation.
What do the steps toward reconciliation
look like in Canada?
Do the RCMP in militarized gear displaying
weapons point the way to reconciliation? Can this be
what reconciliation looks like?
APTN National News has been
underwhelmed by federal action on the Calls for
Action. In an opinion piece on APTN titled “An
inquiry is not enough for international crimes
against Indigenous children at the Indian
residential schools,” Cheryl Matthew, the Executive
Director of the Protect Our Indigenous Sisters
Society, wrote:
There was an apology,
but for what use is an apology when there is little
change in the actions that led to it?
…
Haven’t we suffered
enough from pre-contact times to the genocide of the
Indian residential schools and colonial policy where
we lost our lands, languages, children, cultures and
our families? At what point will the federal
government of Canada stop its war against Indigenous
people?
It is said that the
best predictor of the future is the past. Based on
reconciliation efforts—which up until today have
been little more than lip service—it is clear that
Canada will not stop its war against Indigenous
people. We had the Royal Commission on Aboriginal
Peoples in 1996, the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission in 2015, the National Inquiry into
Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women in 2019, and
nothing has changed.
The Wet’suwet’en are also skeptical of Canada’s
true intentions for reconciliation.
It may be that some of the police were
discomfited about trespassing on Wet’suwet’en
territory in violent garb, but the fact that they
obeyed orders instead of following their conscience
speaks to integrity.
Do the RCMP’s actions reflect a “a renewed,
nation-to-nation relationship with First Nations
peoples” that Canada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau
called for?:
It is time for a
renewed, nation-to-nation relationship with First
Nations peoples, one that understands that the
constitutionally guaranteed rights of First Nations
in Canada are not an inconvenience but rather a
sacred obligation.
Whose territory?
Just how is it that the Canadian government
claims
jurisdiction over unceded Wet’suwet’en territory?
The Indigenous Peoples have been
living on their land for at least 14,000 years,
while so-called British Columbia was a colony formed
in 1858, which confederated with Canada in 1871.
Call to Action 47 stipulates:
We call upon federal,
provincial, territorial, and municipal governments
to repudiate concepts used to justify European
sovereignty over Indigenous peoples and lands, such
as the
Doctrine of Discovery and
terra nullius, and to reform those laws,
government policies, and litigation strategies that
continue to rely on such concepts.
Whose law?
How is it that the government of the
settler-colonial newcomers can legitimately or
morally impose settler law over the law of the
people who have inhabited the land for millennia?
If the territory is unceded by the Wet’suwet’en,
then application of settler law must be null and
void.
The Supreme Court of Canada Delgamuukw v
British Columbia decision in 1997 held that the
Wet’suwet’en People still possessed their land
rights and titles to 22,000 square kilometers of
land in northern BC. The ruling also recognized the
rights invested in the hereditary chiefs.
Consequently, Canadian law has recognized that
Wet’suwet’en territory is unceded. Delgamuukw
was further upheld by the 2014 Canadian Supreme
Court ruling in Tsilhqot’in Nation v British
Columbia.
Moreover, British king George III’s Royal
Proclamation of 1763 stipulated that the territory
east of Quebec was the Hunting Grounds of the
Indigenous peoples where they “should not be
molested or disturbed in the Possession of such
Parts…”
Thus, both colonial law and Canadian law uphold
Indigenous title. But should that even matter?
Morally and legally, one would infer ipso
facto that the people who have lived since time
immemorial in a territory have the right of first
occupation and that their law would apply in the
territory.
In the interest of reconciliation, Call to Action
50 states:
In keeping with the
United Nations Declaration on the Rights of
Indigenous Peoples, we call upon the federal
government, in collaboration with Aboriginal
organizations, to fund the establishment of
Indigenous law institutes for the development, use,
and understanding of Indigenous laws and access to
justice in accordance with the unique cultures of
Aboriginal peoples in Canada.
Also applicable is Call to Action 42:
We call upon the
federal, provincial, and territorial governments to
commit to the recognition and implementation of
Aboriginal justice systems in a manner consistent
with the Treaty and Aboriginal rights of Aboriginal
peoples, the Constitution Act, 1982, and the United
Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous
Peoples, endorsed by Canada in November 2012.
Given all the aforementioned, a question begs:
What the heck is Canada’s unwelcomed armed
gendarmerie doing in the territory of the
Wet’suwet’en people?
Kim Petersen
is a former co-editor of the Dissident Voice
newsletter. He can be emailed at: kimohp@gmail.
Twitter:
@kimpetersen.
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