The Congress of Aboriginal Peoples’ grassroots tour

The Congress of Aboriginal Peoples’ grassroots tour (COMMENT)

By Whitehorse Star on February 19, 2015

A small First Nations/aboriginal/Metis crowd gathered around Betty Anne Lavallée, National Chief of the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples (CAP), last Saturday afternoon at the Skky Hotel in Whitehorse. 

The city is one of 12 stops during the 2015 CAP Grassroots Engagement tour.

The format was one of conversation around a large table set up. 

Chief Lavallée provided context on the mandate and history of the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples that had been founded in 1971 under the name Native Council of Canada (NNC).

Out of 1.4 million, one million aboriginal people in Canada live outside of reserve or settlement lands and in CAP, their interests have a voice, which is one of unity.

She is concerned about a “continuation of genocide by pen, not by sword.”

CAP has a long history and list of achievements fighting for the improvement of aboriginal survival and rights while carefully respecting existing rights.

One example was CAP involvement in the precedence of the 1999 Corbière case, based on which First Nation members, or band members, living outside settlement lands have achieved voting rights.

In the Daniels decision of the Supreme Court, Non-Status Indians and Metis were included in the terms of Section 91 (24) of the 1867 Constitution Act.

In 2013, the federal government’s appeal to reinstate the old division was rejected by the Canadian Supreme Court.

The case was named after the late Saskatchewan Metis elder Harry Daniels, who had initiated and carried the file and who had been national chief for many years.

Before and during 1982, Daniels had been responsible for another breakthrough.

From the 1982 Constitution Act, Part ll Section 35 (2), onward: “Aboriginal peoples of Canada” include the Indian, Inuit and Métis peoples.

In the spirit of Daniels, who is well remembered for fighting, in his words, “shrinking the definition of who is an Indian,” National Chief Lavallée poses the challenge, “How to unite when we are divided by government?”

Some of those gathered last Saturday have senior responsibilities in health, education and judicial community services and programs.

In the discussion, connections and findings of understanding surfaced of how political agendas operate on a nitty-gritty level trying to abolish aboriginal existence in Canada.

Deceptive and supposedly tough-on-crime policy designs aim at racializing and dulling Canada by unfairly, unequally over-policing and consequently over-incarcerating aboriginal people, and artificially undoing public safety structures such as:
• Test case funding towards direction finding of positive judicial precedence;
• Court justice workers;
• Access to legal council with traditional knowledge;
• Aboriginal community outreach workers and meaningful programs in penitentiaries; and
• Resources for families in need. 

Non-aboriginal people should also worry about being colonized by an increasingly totalitarian state and join aboriginal people in opposing the new anti-terror Bill C-51. 

National Chief Lavallée understands it as an out-of-control device to “put elders in jail because they peacefully protect their traplines,” which is already happening in central Canada and the Maritimes.

The chief and the participants alike felt that the current federal government is particularly destructive in its actions and aspirations, but previous governments have also taken attacks to the extreme. 

One such dark moment of complicity with extremism was brought up that had set tone and direction for things to come.

Paul Martin, as prime minister, had hired Tom Flanagan, the Calgary political science professor and then Stephen Harper mentor and operative, as history consultant in the feds’ drawn-out land dispute with the Metis.

Flanagan is spearheading the concept of a Canadian Manifest Destiny. He asks openly for the abolition of aboriginal rights, land titles and the disregard of agreements and treaties.

In his 2008 book First Nations? Second Thoughts, Flanagan’s diatribes remind one of 1830s Georgia, brimming with land-hungry speculators lobbying the Cherokee Removal at fever pitch. 

He writes: “In much of Canada, their (the First Nations) present place of habitation postdates the arrival of European settlers.”

Chief Lavallée said it’s a good thing a growing number of aboriginal candidates are coming forward across the country to run in the coming federal election.

There was interest in forming a Yukon territorial organization of the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples.

It looked like a discussion that has the energy to go on.