The reconciliation bandwagon?

One of the hot words in Canada on Aboriginal rights these days is “reconciliation.” British Columbia now has a “Minister of Aboriginal Affairs and Reconciliation.” The federal government trumpets its “Statement of Reconciliation,” acknowledging federal responsibility for the devastating impacts of Indian Residential Schools. Recent Supreme Court decisions on Aboriginal rights have interpreted past breaches of faith through the lens of “reconciliation,” and call for a new relationship between governments and Aboriginal peoples.

But across the country, many Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal communities and governments face ongoing and escalating or even newly-erupting conflicts. Where is this road to reconciliation going wrong?

The current Aboriginal rights landscape

The most visible rift right now is at Caledonia, Ontario where deep hostilities are threatening to erupt into terrible violence after Six Nations’ members put up barricades this spring and occupied a subdivision under construction. The subdivision is in an area called the Haldimand Tract which has long been the source of conflict between the Mohawks and Canada. The Crown granted the tract to the Mohawks in 1783. It was to repay Mohawk support and compensate them for the six-million-acre homeland taken by the Americans in upstate New York during the American War of Independence.

Over time, Canada sold many of those lands without consulting Six Nations, supposedly putting the sales and lease funds into trust for the First Nation. Instead, Canada used the funds to build infrastructure that continue to benefit non-Native Canadians: canals, highways, railroads, McGill University in Montreal, the law courts in Toronto and many other public projects. When Six Nations asked for an accounting of the trust funds, they found the government used it for loans to build this infrastructure, and then had often either forgiven the loans or neglected to collect repayment.

Put baldly, Canada stole both the land and its income from the Six Nations.

The rest of the story is entirely predictable, following a depressingly common pattern in Canada. When the First Nation community discovered the government’s breach of faith, it asserted a series of claims. The federal claims machinery ground slowly, resolving nothing. Six Nations filed an enormously expensive law suit, eventually derailed by limited funds and frustration with the length of the court process. Finally, local officials lit a potentially lethal fuse when they allowed a contested development to go forward despite the outstanding claim.

Ontario is trying to keep the situation peaceful. The government and provincial police force were painfully aware of the Ipperwash Inquiry, grinding away in the background, with dramatic testimony about the 1995 shooting of Aboriginal protester Dudley George over a land rights dispute a couple of hours drive from Caledonia.

Faced with enormous costs, and with rising tensions in the non-Native community (including the developer who contended their company was being brought to the edge of financial ruin), Ontario bought the land from the developer and is attempting to settle the dispute. Tensions still seethe at the occupation site, however, and the land issue is far from resolved yet. The federal government has resolutely minimized its own involvement in the conflict, despite a constitutional responsibility for Aboriginal affairs.

The mixed federal record

This federal abdication of responsibility is an unfortunate reflection of current priorities and policies. The Conservative government’s signals and actions on Aboriginal issues are decidedly mixed. On the positive side, federal Minister of Indian Affairs Jim Prentice pledged to slash the hefty backlog of outstanding land claims, which had soared from 200 to more than 800 under Liberal tenure. The Conservatives also committed to honour the residential school survivor compensation deal struck with the previous government. There are problems with the proposed deal, but confirmation that schools survivors (particularly those sexually or physically abused) will finally receive compensation is welcome news.

On the other hand, the Conservatives chose not to honour the Kelowna Accord struck between Canada, the provinces and Aboriginal leaders. If implemented, the Kelowna Accord would channel $5 billion to upgrade Aboriginal health, housing and education over 10 years. Aboriginal communities still lag far behind Canadian non-Aboriginal communities in these key social infrastructures and other quality of life indicators. And after decades of work on the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Canada is now refusing to support or sign the declaration the UN will pass this fall.

Positive developments at the provincial level

On the provincial front, there have been a few surprises. The western provinces (particularly British Columbia) criticized the federal Conservative’s abandonment of the Kelowna Accord. Manitoba Premier Gary Doer publicly chastised the Prime Minister, calling it “morally wrong” to backtrack on commitments to address the critical socio-economic gaps between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal communities.

B.C.’s provincial Liberal government, elected in part on an anti-Aboriginal-rights platform, has shifted its position after pressure from industry and Aboriginal communities. The B.C. Treaty Process (instituted because most First Nations there have never surrendered their land) is churning away slowly. But the province is responding to recent Court decisions that confirm provincial responsibility to consult with Aboriginal communities who could be affected by industrial development.

Interestingly, the business sector across the country has been pushing hardest to resolve Aboriginal rights concerns. Business wants the political and economic certainty that will come with their resolution. It’s less clear how much the non-Native population supports resolving Aboriginal concerns. Conflicting polls before and after the election indicate broader support for funding Aboriginal social needs such as education and housing (hence the Liberal focus in Kelowna), but weaker support for the resolution of land claims and Aboriginal rights.

Reconciliation ahead? Only if there is restitution This road to reconciliation is a long and bumpy one. Time cannot heal these wounds. Only our commitment to a new relationship can.

But talk about reconciliation is not translating into action. A deeper structural process still needs to happen, starting with an honest look at the problems we face, admitting where we’ve gone wrong, apologizing for inflicting the wounds that caused the gap between our peoples, reforming how we regard each other, and making restitution for the suffering caused.

Some of those processes are already happening. Our disregard for Aboriginal rights – and the consequences of that disregard – have been revealed to us in stories of Aboriginal neighbours, in the pages of Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples documents and in the halls of the courts. Churches, governments and individuals have confessed the harm they have done to Aboriginal neighbours and their part in the Canadian collective role in depriving Indigenous people of lands, resources, cultures, languages.

These confessions would ring truer, however, if we changed the way we regard Aboriginal people, and if we reformed our public structures (such as the land claims process) to treat Aboriginal communities justly.

The next and most important stage of the reconciliation process is one of the toughest: restitution. We can make restitution in many ways – for instance, by rewriting history books to include the story of the wounding and the healing in our relationship as Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples.

A key part of restitution, however, is financial restitution for the theft of lands and resources – the “accounting” kind of reconciliation. That includes not just compensating for the past, but also recognizing Aboriginal peoples’ right to control their own resources and communities for the present and the future – and reordering our structures to make that happen.

That means settling land claims, so that First Nations have access to the resources on the land to which they have title. That means, as the courts have begun insisting in recent rulings, consulting Aboriginal communities and compensating them when large industrial developments affect their lands or rights.

Restitution also means addressing shorter term needs, particularly for social infrastructure. The commitments made in the Kelowna Accord to fund basics that most Canadians take for granted, such as drinkable water, adequate housing or education opportunities, are critical.

Some non-Aboriginal Canadians will argue we can’t “afford” this restitution, as Aboriginal people already receive much more government support than non-Aboriginal peoples. In reality, the federal government spends about $9.1 billion per year on services and programs for Aboriginal people, or approximately $6,500 per Aboriginal person. Each non-Aboriginal person in Canada, by contrast, receives, an average of $15,000 per year in services and programs from federal, provincial and municipal governments.

We can’t afford not to address the social and economic gap between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples. Unsettled land rights cause economic uncertainty. Inadequate housing, non-drinkable water, and lack of education take an economic toll in increased costs for health care, social services and other after-the-fact treatments. Lack of access to resources and economic infrastructure also means elevated rates of unemployment and poverty with attendant social problems that will only worsen as the Aboriginal population continues to grow faster than the Canada average.

We also pay a bitter price when unresolved issues lead to social violence, either internalized within Aboriginal communities (seen in disproportionately high suicide and domestic violence rates, for instance), or focussed onto external conflicts with non-Native communities (like the dispute at Caledonia). Ontario’s Minister of Natural Resources, David Ramsay, recently and accurately described the anger and disenfranchisement in many Aboriginal communities as a “social time bomb” waiting to happen.

The real road to reconciliation requires Canada to make a hard commitment to the difficult next steps. Current commitments to deal with social infrastructure are a good step towards ensuring decent standards of living in Aboriginal communities, but public policy needs to go further.

Ultimately reconciliation will not happen until Canada takes the critical next step of restitution, particularly ensuring Aboriginal access to the financial benefits from resources taken from their lands, so that a solid economic foundation can ensure long-term community survival. That kind of reconciliation would be more meaningful than the words in a cabinet minister’s speech, government declaration or pronouncement of a court.