First Nations? Second Thoughts

First Nations?  Second Thoughts
by Tom Flanagan
Montreal:  McGill-Queen's University Press.  2000

Tom Flanagan has been writing on Canadian aboriginal issues for 25 years.  After observing and participating in the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples -- which produced a 3500 page report at a cost of $54 million and recommended a completely new level of aboriginal government, and a bucket-load of new money for aboriginal affairs -- Flanagan has blown the whistle on the whole damn show!

He decided to sketch the orthodoxy that surrounds aboriginal policy in Canada, and tell the story of the great harm its separatist and romantic notions are doing to Canadian aborigines.  There are immense lessons in Flanagan's analysis for Australian policy-makers.  Especially those who are slaves to fashionable ideas.  I note with fear and trepidation the "next big thing" in aboriginal orthodoxy, "the indigenous order of governance".  This notion has been taken up with gusto by The Australia Institute in its September 2000 paper for ATSIC, "Resourcing Indigenous Development and Self Determination." It borrows heavily from the Canadian orthodoxy and recommends that Australian aboriginal governments -- indigenous governance structures to be correct -- should receive a guaranteed share of national tax revenue, i.e., a bucket-load of new money!

The Canadian orthodoxy consists of eight propositions:

1. Aboriginals differ from other Canadians because they were there first.  As first nations, they have unique rights, including the inherent right of self-government.
2. Aboriginal cultures were on the same level as those of European colonists.  The distinction between civilised and uncivilised is a racist instrument of oppression.
3. Aboriginal peoples possessed sovereignty.  They still do, even if they choose to call it "the inherent right of self-government".
4. Aboriginal peoples were and are nations in both the cultural and political senses of this term.  Their nationhood is concomitant with their sovereignty.
5. Aboriginal people can successfully exercise their inherent rights of self-government on Indian reserves.
6. Aboriginal property rights should be recognised as full ownership rights in Canadian law and entrenched, not extinguished, through land-claims agreements.
7. The land-surrender treaties in Ontario and the Prairie Provinces mean something other than the words indicate.  Their wording needs to be modernised -- reinterpreted or renegotiated -- to recognise an ongoing relationship between nations.
8. Aboriginal people, living and working on their own land base, will become prosperous and self-sufficient by combining transfer payments, resource revenues and local employment.

Flanagan answers each of these propositions, one per chapter, in a systematic and effective way.  I will not give you his responses, because I want you to buy the book and arm yourselves for the same fight that is unfolding in Australia.  However, in case you need convincing that there is certain madness in Canada on these matters, try these morsels, which Tom has sent me, extracted from a recent lecture.

Annual federal expenditure on Indians is about $6.5 billion (more than $10,000 per capita).

Last year, the Squamish Nation (about 2000 people) in British Columbia received $92.5 million compensation for "historical injustice".  The alleged injustice is that the federal government did not stop the BC government from relocating the Squamish reserve 100 years ago.  The Squamish surrendered no land rights and continue to maintain their claim for aboriginal rights and title.

The cost of the newly approved Nisga'a Treaty is conservatively estimated at $500 million (for about 6,000 people).  Between 50-80 similar agreements will be needed to complete the treaty process in British Columbia.

In 1998, the federal government set aside $23.4 million to buy farmland in southwestern Ontario to create a reserve for the "Caldwell First Nation".  The latter embraces people who claim their ancestors were missed in a treaty signed in the 1790s.  They have been living as ordinary Canadians for over 200 years but now want to become registered Indians.

I think it is high time in Australia that someone takes a big stick to the home-grown variety of the Aboriginal Orthodoxy:  treaty-talk, recognition of customary law, self-determination, separate funding and more.  In fact, that is precisely what a group of aboriginal and non-aboriginal writers is doing at this very time.  The fruits of their labour will be published in the near future.