http://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/canada/aboriginals-a-growing-force-in-federal-politics/ar-AAf320X?ocid=spartandhp
I am pasting it below because news articles seem to disappear far too often!
Aboriginals a growing force in federal politics
Paul Martin had just rattled off an impassioned, combative speech before the Assembly of First Nations in July, and the audience members quickly rose to their feet.
The former prime minister hammered the Conservative government’s funding caps on aboriginal education, calling the trend “contrary to every value Canada stands for.” Martin’s fiery keynote speech closed the AFN’s annual general assembly — a three-day meeting that centred on a campaign to get indigenous people voting in this year’s federal election.
It struck a chord with many of the national chiefs, who showered him with applause as he walked off the stage at Montreal’s Place Bonaventure.
But there was at least one holdout in the crowd who refused to stand and cheer Martin: Joe Norton.
It didn’t matter that Norton, the long-serving Kahnawake Mohawk chief, was an old friend of Martin, or that he agreed with the substance of his speech. Nor did it matter that the two leaders would embrace moments later, playfully slapping each other’s arms in the middle of a packed ballroom.
Joe Norton will not stand at attention for the former prime minister of Canada.
“(Martin) is a longtime friend of mine, we go way back and I have a lot of respect for him and what he’s trying to do for First Nations,” Norton told the Montreal Gazette. “But he’s someone who represents something I cannot, in good conscience, participate in.”
This is Norton’s quiet act of protest against a government he says encroaches on indigenous sovereignty. It is Norton’s way of declaring that the people of Kahnawake are not subject to the Crown. The gesture speaks to the basic political reality of the Mohawk Nation: even in an election campaign that could drastically alter the relationship between Canada and its First Peoples, the Mohawks say they will not vote.
Though the Mohawks are bound to the Two Row Wampum — a centuries old treaty that affirms their nationhood and forbids them from participating in outside politics — they are hardly the only indigenous people who elect not to vote. Only 44 per cent of eligible voters on reserves across the country cast their ballots in the 2011 federal election. Meanwhile about 61 per cent of non-indigenous Canadians voted that year, according to Elections Canada.
But that could change.
Indigenous people are the fastest-growing segment of the Canadian population, and community leaders believe that young, increasingly urban and politicized aboriginals will have their voices heard in Ottawa this year.
This summer, the AFN launched a campaign targeting 51 key ridings in which aboriginal ballots could swing the national vote against the ruling Conservative Party.
A powerful voice in 51 ridings
After relations between the federal Conservatives and the Assembly of First Nations broke down last year, the lobby group launched a campaign targeting 51 key ridings in which the voices of aboriginal voters could help bring about a change in government. The AFN is just one of the organizations urging Canada’s First Nations to participate in the Oct. 19 federal election.
The last meaningful attempt at cooperation between the aboriginal lobby group and Tories ended in 2014 with a proposed $1.9-billion education bill to fund on-reserve schooling. A few months after AFN National Chief Shawn Atleo and Prime Minister Stephen Harper struck the deal, it fell apart amid claims that First Nations consultation over the bill was limited and that funding fell way short of what’s needed to give indigenous students the resources that the rest of Canadian children have. Atleo ultimately stepped down amid calls, from within the AFN, for him to resign over his handling of the file.Now, National Chief Perry Bellegarde — Atleo’s replacement — says he’ll do something he’s never done before: vote in a federal election. Bellegarde is urging all First Nations peoples to do the same.
For non-indigenous Canadians, October will mark the nation’s 42nd federal election, but that isn’t the case for aboriginals. Before 1960 — when Prime Minister John Diefenbaker’s government granted First Nations unconditional franchise — the only way an indigenous person could vote in federal elections was by giving up their treaty rights.
This fall will only be the 18th federal election in which First Nations people have the right to vote — and many consider it the first election to substantively address issues that affect the 1.4 million indigenous Canadians.
***
There is another story that oddly mirrors the Paul Martin, Joe Norton anecdote.
This time, however, it was Justice Murray Sinclair standing at the lectern last June, presenting the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report to a room full of white politicians in Ottawa. Sinclair, who headed the commission, spoke of the harrowing abuse related to him by the survivors of Canada’s residential schools, but added that he remains hopeful that the country can heal its colonialist wounds.
The Ojibway judge got his biggest ovation when he announced that the report calls for a public inquiry into the alarming frequency of missing and murdered aboriginal women. The crowd erupted in applause and Sinclair paused for a few moments to let the noise subside. There was, once again, at least one notable holdout: Bernard Valcourt, minister of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development.
Perhaps more than any other moment over the last decade, Valcourt’s decision to sit in protest speaks to the increasingly dysfunctional relationship between the governing Conservatives and First Nations. The Tories will not heed Sinclair’s call for an inquiry and won’t implement many of the other 93 recommendations of the TRC’s report.
The Harper government has repeatedly dismissed the idea that Canada’s missing and murdered indigenous women represent a sociological phenomenon, and it has held firm on this point in the face of unrelenting criticism from First Nations. All of Canada’s other major political parties, including the premiers of its 10 provinces, oppose the Conservatives on this front.
With each passing story of a young indigenous woman’s body found along the side of a river or in a pile of garbage, calls for the inquiry have grown and this, to many aboriginals, is the issue drawing them into the national debate. An inquiry will certainly not bring back the 1,213 aboriginal women who were killed or went missing over the last 25 years, but advocates say it would humanize the victims and force Canadians to confront some of the endemic problems First Nations face.
“There’s no doubt the need for an inquiry is one of the things that really pushed me to get involved,” said Tanya Lalonde, who works with the Liberal Party’s Aboriginal Peoples Commission, a political outreach group. “You hear about the way these women die and you want to know why it happens so often and you want it to stop. … You want politicians to hear the families of these women, to listen to these families and take action.”
Lalonde’s experience speaks to a possible shift in Canadian politics. Before she became the head of the Quebec branch of the APC in 2013, the position had been vacant for about 20 years. One former Liberal adviser said that courting the aboriginal vote was seen, by politicians of every stripe, as something of a fool’s errand given that they represent such a low percentage of the electorate (and one that doesn’t tend to vote in large numbers). But things seems different now.
A lot of Lalonde’s outreach work involves building bridges between her party and Montreal’s growing aboriginal community.
“Before getting involved (with the Liberals), I did some thinking and I decided that there needed to be someone at the table bringing an indigenous perspective,” said Lalonde. “A lot of the candidates care about the issues, but they don’t necessarily know a lot about them. My job is to give them context.”
Like about 60 per cent of Canada’s indigenous population, Lalonde does not live on a reserve. The 34-year-old hails from a remote Métis settlement in Alberta, and came to Montreal to pursue a degree in social work at McGill University. Although the missing and murdered file is close to her heart, Lalonde’s life story reveals a variety of issues that affect Canada’s indigenous population.
Lalonde grew up poor, in a crowded house without running water, but she says there were happy moments in her childhood. She lived a sort of traditional life: her grandfather was a trapper, a hunter and fisherman and, in those days, Lalonde experienced a deep connection to the land and her culture.
“But I also saw what poverty does to people … when I was a kid I was taken away, apprehended, and I spent the rest of my life in the child welfare system,” Lalonde said. “I lived in a series of foster families, they were loving families but they weren’t indigenous families. So I lost that connection to who I was, and that’s something a lot of children go through.
“I have a sister who is two years older than me who went through this with me. She got pregnant at a young age, she became addicted for a very long time. I was lucky, I got to reconnect to my culture when I was a teenager, I went to powwows and (sweat lodges) and met with elders and that saved me from going down another path.”
Studies suggest there are more aboriginal children removed from their families today than there were at the height of Canada’s residential school program. In the TRC’s final report, Sinclair referred to the trend as a continuation of the assimilationist policies of Canada’s past.
“A lot of the research shows that the reason so many indigenous children are taken away isn’t something like abuse — it’s poverty that gets marked as neglect,” Lalonde said. “Families who don’t have enough money to cover the basic necessities for their children, rather than get help from the system, they’re punished by the system and their children are taken away.”
Lalonde says her own experience shows that First Nations people can succeed inside the nation’s political system instead of apart from it.
***
A few weeks ago, Wab Kinew waded across the Lake of the Woods shoreline in Northern Ontario, hand-picking wild rice from the brisk water.
Later this fall, he will head into the bush to hunt water fowl with his two sons. Like many other Anishnaabe, Kinew fasts in the summer, partakes in the sun dance and sweat lodges, he speaks Ojibway and observes the rituals that keep his culture alive.
Kinew has been a hereditary Ojibway chief since he was 22, in a political sphere that — at least on the surface — feels miles away from the pomp and ceremony of Westminster-style democracy.
But come Oct. 19, none of this will stop Kinew from casting his ballot.
“There’s an argument that you’re sacrificing some part of yourself, some part of your indigenous identity by participating in federal or municipal or provincial elections,” says Kinew, a journalist, author and the University of Manitoba’s director of indigenous inclusion. “But I disagree. I voted in every election since I turned 18. I voted in First Nations elections, civic elections, provincial elections and federal elections.
“And I noticed, along the way, I never spoke less Ojibway after I voted. I didn’t feel any of my treaty rights or aboriginal rights impacted after I voted. I didn’t feel as though the sovereignty of my community was, in any way, impeded. I don’t buy that argument. … It’s like, yes, I’m status (Indian) but I also live in the city, my kids go to public school in Manitoba — so why wouldn’t I participate in the election?”
While there’s certainly a philosophical concern over elections and indigenous identity, one of the biggest roadblocks preventing aboriginals from getting to the polls is the actual voting process itself. It was once possible for aboriginals to vote using their Status Cards — a form of government-issued identification — but a federal bill passed in 2014 requires additional proof of identification and residence.
While critics of the government say this was a tactic aimed at disenfranchising indigenous voters, it may have had an opposite effect.
“In my home community of Onigaming, you’re seeing voter registration drives where people are going to the band office, getting their proof of residency straightened out so they’ll be eligible to vote,” said Kinew. “I’ve seen get-out-the-vote campaigns before, but never with this kind of a grassroots feel to it.”
Meanwhile, groups like Indigenous Rock the Vote have held a series of monthly voter identification clinics in Winnipeg and online to ensure that young aboriginal people are registered to vote in their ridings. The non-partisan group played a factor in Winnipeg’s municipal election last year, when the city elected Métis Mayor Brian Bowman, and also saw Cree candidate Robert Falcon Ouellette place third with 16 per cent of the vote.
“In some of the isolated, fly-in communities in my riding, we’ve got people calling us and saying, ‘How do I get the vote out in Fort Albany or Kashechewan? I’ve never done this, how do we do it?’ ” said Charlie Angus, the NDP candidate in Ontario’s Timmins—James Bay riding. “We’re seeing, in my region … communities that are doing the work of showing what you need to do to vote. That’s certainly an unprecedented move, and we’re seeing that in ridings across the country.”
Social media is also playing a role in the campaign, according to Angus and Kinew. As with the 2012 Idle no More protest movement, young aboriginal people are bypassing traditional media and connecting with each other directly through Facebook and Twitter.
Still, there are people who cannot reconcile their independence as First Nations with the act of voting for what they consider to be a foreign government occupying unceded indigenous territory.
The Two Row Wampum is an important reminder of this principle. The wampum belt treaty — which the Mohawks presented to Dutch settlers in the 17th century in what is now upstate New York — has two lines that run across it to symbolize both nations travelling side-by-side down the river of life.
“We don’t step into their boat and they don’t set foot in ours,” said Norton. “We’ve always been allies, not subjects, of the colonialists. We fought alongside Canada, defended Canada against the United States in the War of 1812. And we’re proud of our history.”
“But the Two Row Wampum was meant to go on forever. That’s why, when you look at a replica of it, you see strings on the end of it so you can keep adding to the belt as years go by. So we don’t vote, not now, not ever.”
***
The relationship between the Harper government and Canada’s indigenous people hasn’t always been fractured. The prime minister made the unprecedented gesture, in 2008, of apologizing on behalf of the government for its role in Canada’s residential school system.
During a ceremony at the House of Commons, Harper offered a heartfelt, eloquent apology, admitting that for years, the government’s goal had been to forcefully remove aboriginal children from their homes and “kill the Indian” inside them. Harper even delivered part of the speech in Ojibway, Cree and Inuktitut.
“You have been working on recovering from this experience for a long time and in a very real sense, we are now joining you on this journey,” he said, before an audience of survivors.
Even Angus, who rarely passes up an opportunity to criticize the Tory leader, calls Harper’s apology a high moment in Canadian Parliamentary history. But to Kinew — whose father was beaten and sexually abused during his years in residential school — the beauty of that apology did not translate into meaningful action.
Those who “who want to get on with the business of reconciliation,” says Kinew, “have been disappointed that, while the apology was made by this government and a lot of the rhetoric is what people want to hear, the actual policy proposals and funding priorities are not there.”
The Montreal Gazette’s emails to the Conservative government seeking comment for this article were not returned.
Seven years after Harper vowed to accompany First Nations down the path of reconciliation, the gap between the quality of life on Canada’s reserves and in its cities remains significant. On-reserve schools are underfunded, studies suggest 40 per cent of aboriginal children live in poverty and a recently-released Senate report found that the housing crisis afflicting reserves may be worse than previously thought — it could take the immediate construction of up to 85,000 houses, the report says, to accommodate Canada’s surging aboriginal population.
And so there may also be a natural skepticism about what any political party could do to improve the lot of a young, energized population that doesn’t have access to the same resources as their non-indigenous counterparts. Many First Nations people will be poor and feel alienated from the mainstream Canadian experience when the polls open on Oct. 19, and they’ll still be poor and marginalized after a new government is elected on Oct. 20.
There is still hope at a better future, says Kinew, but it has to start at the voting booth — and it won’t happen overnight.
“It’s a long-term investment in building political capital for our communities,” he says. “We want action on the issues that face indigenous people. Well, part of the way you get action from politicians is you vote in sufficient numbers that they realize you vote; and then you talk to them during their time in office and during the election campaigns. Over time, as politicians realize the indigenous people are a significant electoral force, they’ll meet with us and make pitches to us based on what they think will earn our votes.”
ccurtis@montrealgazette.com
Twitter.com/titocurtis
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