Posts By: First Nations Drum

by Morgan O’Neal

A more imaginative understanding of Canadian identity begins by acknowledging whose traditional land self-identified Canadians occupy. One way for them to obtain this understanding is through awareness of the contributions indigenous peoples themselves have made to the construction of Canada. By taking seriously the presence of Aboriginal people, their lands, and the effects of colonial laws (and lawlessness) on their places in these lands, a conception of national identity can be developed that has rally serious educational implications for immigrants and schoolchildren, and indeed for all citizens. A national identity that honestly acknowledges the many mistakes made in the past would force public schools and colleges and universities to become more complex sites of learning, where reasoned discussions of the nature of knowledge and its communication can take place. Established institutions, from government to religions must recognize oral tradition and oral history as legitimate forms of knowledge in Canada’s historical and current contexts.

Award winning Ojibway author Richard Wagamese has just recently launched a website beginning a project to put the above theoretical ideas into practice. He has invited all interested individuals and organizations to join him in an exploration of spontaneous storytelling designed to help people communicate more honestly and effectively by breaking down the barriers that all of us have constructed in our minds and that society has fortified over the years. Wagamese is extremely well-qualified to lead this journey of exploration after having written himself to the very top of Canadian literary recognition and respect. To date his publications include Keeper’n Me – Doubleday Canada 1994; A Quality of Light – Doubleday Canada 1997; For Joshua: An Ojibway Father Teaches His Son – Doubleday Canada 2002; Dream Wheels – Doubleday Canada 2006; Ragged Company – Doubleday Canada August 2008; One Native Life – Douglas & McIntyre Canada September 2008.

The goal of this new project is to pass onto those who wish to participate the secrets of his success. The project is organized to achieve this exchange of knowledge in a variety of ways each designed to appeal to individuals whose time for continuing education is limited by obligations to work and family. First Nations Drum readers will already be familiar with his monthly column “One Native Life” (“a series of reminiscences and recollections from 52 years of living as a Native man in Canada.”) The Drum also did a profile of Wagamese when he was awarded the Canadian Authors Association Award for Fiction in 2007 for his novel Dream Wheels, which the author describes as a “story of Indian cowboys, bull riders, who learn how to stitch rodeo, family and traditional teachings together for a lifestyle that’s spiritual and adventurous.” This description of Dream Wheels might well serve as a general introduction to the new learning project Wagamese is now promoting on his website e-lectronic Indian.

Wagamese’s traditional clan is the Sturgeon Clan and his name is Buffalo Cloud. As he puts it “It’s a storyteller’s name – and that’s what I’ve become. . . . Traditional Ojibway teachers and other shamans and healers, all well versed in Native American spirituality, told me that my role was to be a storyteller. Then they taught me how to do it, starting with spiritual principles and spiritual ceremonies” Wagamese therefore styles himself “a practitioner of Spontaneous Oral Storytelling,” by which he means that he “create[s] stories aloud from word prompts and cues. Improvised tales. On the spot . . . [he] write[s] and sell[s] First Drafts. Of everything.” He goes on to explain in a mixture of modesty and satisfaction how his life has evolved since he left his traditional home north of the Lake of the Woods in Ontario, a settlement formerly called Whitedog and now re-named Wabaseemoong. “This year I will have published four novels and a pair of memoirs with major Canadian publishers. I am the only Native journalist to be honored with Canada’s National Newspaper Award for Column Writing along with a handful of Native American newspaper awards. I’m just a regular guy. How regular? Well, I only have a Grade Nine education for one thing and life kept me so busy that I never had the time for a college or university writing course. I’m under-educated and untrained. But every novel, every script, every award-winning newspaper column and book bearing the name Richard Wagamese, was written in one spontaneous burst because I know how to ‘Defeat Writer’s Block Completely’. . . . On this site I’ll introduce you to the techniques I use to generate ‘Publishable First Draft Manuscripts and Oral Stories’ out of thin air. Your writing and communications will never be the same!!!”

This exciting project includes a number of aspects, which include a Newsletter – Around The Fire about spontaneous oral storytelling and designed to broaden the understanding of storytelling as the prosduct of “vision”. Wagamese views storytelling as the basis of spirituality. “Quite simply, storytelling changed my life,” he writes. “It brought me from a sense of being nowhere to a life of fulfillment, creativity and satisfaction. Storytelling brought me a spirituality that inspires me. It brought me a worldview that drives me. It brought me a philosophy that heals me. And my hope is that you will find the same things for yourself. Because it works the same magic everywhere. It brings about community building, team building in the business and corporate world, and fires the creative imagination of everyone everywhere. . . . Stories touch us. They teach us, inspire us, enlighten us. It’s because of their humanity – the simple, practical magic of one voice talking, telling and other ears listening, hearing, incorporating and ‘sharing’ Stories build community. Period. . . . That’s my vision. I want to encourage people to talk to each other, in their authentic, human voices, telling their authentic human stories.”

Wagamese’s enthusiasm for the word is infectious and his articulation of this excitement is expressed best in his own words: “It used to be that people gathered around a fire and told their stories to each other. Not just Ojibway people but people of all persuasions had the common experience of a fire in the night where stories were told. It’s my hope that this website might lead to us bringing back the fire – into our homes, our schools, our places of business, our communities and our nations. Because stories heal. They are our collective energy. They are our common bond. I come from a powerful oral tradition. In the Ojibway world, creativity and the power of imagination were represented in the magnificent stories and legends told around tribal fires. Those tales were filled with mystery and wonder. When they were told the people were enthralled and traditional teachings were passed on almost without notice. Such is the enduring power of story. The sweep of them, the great, grand clamor of their telling, brings all of us closer to ourselves, our inner lives. Quite simply, that tradition is the collective consciousness of the people as expressed through tale and song and legend. It’s how they view themselves and the world, carried on the breath and shaped into word.”

Not only does Wagamese invite us to participate in the collective work of knowledge exchange through spontaneous storytelling but he includes links which direct us toward other sites of important information such as the Sacred Breath Page, Buffy Sainte-Marie’s Cradleboard Project, the research site Native Tech and the educational site of musician and speaker Shannon Thunderbird. As the e-lectronic Indian site grows Wagamese will invite participation in contemporary issues through the technology of “teleseminars, one to one mentoring, and a handful of amazing e-books that will outline the process I use. . . You can create spontaneously because we are all Creators. We were made in the image of the Creator of all things and so, we hold that magical, creative energy within us. We just need to remember, reclaim and energize it. That’s the secret.” Four Seasons, Four Directions: Notecards for a new Millenium: Personal notecards for your friends and family with poems and photos by Richard Wagamese will soon be available online.The poems are built on traditional principles or observations and are unlike anything else available.

As for the present Wagamese already offers a number of services related to native writing and storytelling bin general. In order to draw attention to native writing he has created a Native Writers store where you can get his books and those of other talented native writers.“We look forward to building a community of storytellers. This electronic gathering place is the modern equivalent of tribal fires where stories were told and shared. There, the people who gathered were blessed with the feeling of belonging, shelter and community. It’s my hope that this site can serve in exactly that way. ” Products available now are the e-lectronic Indian monthly newsletter jam packed with Native American spirituality, culture, tradition and philosophy. Subscriptions start Feb. 1, 2008. Free one month trial. Available in PDF. $69.95/yr; From The Oral Tradition To The Printed Page, a comprehensive e-book mini-course that will get you started on the spontaneous generation of stories and ideas. Broken into five days you’ll be amazed at how quickly you harness your creative imagination and free your authentic voice. Follow the program and you can jumpstart your creative process like you never have before. Available in PDF format. $149.95; How To Be The Writer You Always Wanted To Be – “Discovering the Path to Creativity,” a Special Report that tells you simply and directly how to lay the foundation for a career as a professional creative writer. No academic rhteoric or gobbledy-gook, just simple, helpful ways to jumpstart your creative process. Practical and insightful, it’s already helped teachers and is a great tool for beginning writers and storytellers. Available in PDF format. $18.95;

And workshops are now available for schools, corporations, writers’ groups, theater groups, and community organizations and offered in one and three day intensive forums. Obviously, the longer you spend acquiring a skill the more chance it has to enhance work, life and writing so the three day works best for most purposes. And coming soon Writers’ Retreats in five, ten and twenty day formats where you can relax in a country setting, surrounded by woods and mountains, with evening campfires and day long explorations of spontaneous storytelling techniques. And One to One Mentoring is available where you get the private ear and eye of an award-winning author and journalist. Rates and details are available on request. To begin participation right now you can subscribe to a Free Monthly Newsletter, Around the Fire, all about spontaneous oral storytelling, the Ojibway oral tradition and articles pertaining to the development of a storytelling community with tips on how to bring storytelling to children, classrooms, boardrooms and the community. You will receive the newsletter on the 15th of every month. Free.

by Morgan O’Neal

After the two tiny sisters were found tragically frozen to death on Tuesday, January 30th, apparently abandoned in the snow by an inebriated father in minus 50C temperatures, local and national media attention has focused on the appalling conditions on Yellow Quill, located a short drive east of Rose Valley, Saskatchewan. And things don’t look much different than they did in 2002 when former vocal critic of the system Chief Whitehead took over administration of the band. The housing shortage is still desperate and mould in existing homes still makes residents sick. Officials are still rumored to attend meetings drunk.

The seeming failure of First Nations governments to manage the most basic of public services is not uncommon in Canada. The Auditor General reports that 3/4 of all First Nations are being run by inexperienced, untrained staff and that there exists a shortage of at least 80,000 homes on reserves across the country. If such statistics came out of any other Canadian community, heads would begin to roll. They certainly did in Walkerton where even Ontario’s premier was made to answer, before an inquiry, for contaminated water resulting from bureaucratic bungling. In Walkerton the politicians and their underlings were answerable to the communities they were elected to govern and hired to provide safety and services. That is not how things work on the reserve.

Six years ago, Robert Whitehead was without a doubt the loudest critic of the Yellow Quill First Nation government. A disgruntled band member, he had publicly chastised Chief Hank Neapetung, complaining about band employees — including teachers and social workers — stumbling around the Saskatchewan reserve, drunk. He complained about the lack of housing for members and the rotten conditions of ones already built. Whitehead was beaten up physically, sued by the chief, had his house shot at and his water cut off, and then he lost his job. But Robert Whitehead is now Chief Whitehead (since 2002), after winning a fluke election from which Hank Neapetung (who had ruled for 18 years), was disqualified for failing to attend an all-candidates debate. Whitehead is the one now facing harsh criticism.

The community, which counts about 2,000 people as members, is, according to the Chief “bankrupt.” He blames the situation on a dysfunctional council and intransigent trustees who refuse to allow access to the Yellow Quill nest egg of $29-million in treaty land settlements that is, according to his reckoning, being hoarded rather than spent on the urgent needs of band members. It is common that First Nations politicians come to office promising reforms and end up failing to implement the necessary changes once elected. “Over and over again, you see this happen. The chiefs come in and they see how things are done, and they pick up right where the last chief left off.” Don Sandberg, a member of Manitoba’s Norway House First Nation, implies quite justifiably. However, this sort of individualistic greed and sloth simply replicates the political culture western European white Anglo-Saxon Protestant governance and residential school brainwashing forced upon indigenous peoples in every colony they captured.

Sandberg is an Aboriginal Policy Fellow at a Winnipeg based think-tank, The Frontier Centre for Public Policy. The diseased and corrupting institutional culture habitually passes the buck to whatever scapegoat is in the wrong place at the wrong time. Chiefs regularly refuse responsibility for troubles on reserves. There are numerous recent examples of this type of cowardice that are different only for the fact that they are less well publicized copycat versions of crimes like the Liberal scandal that became public when Jean Chretien left office and the shameful misappropriation of money that Brian Mulroney is obviously guilty of in his relationship with the German white collar crook, Hans Schrieber. When in the Wild, Wild West do as the Cowboys do: Fix the Rodeo.

For example, members of the Piikani Nation were evacuated from their Alberta reserve in November after Health Canada condemned their mouldy, crumbling homes as “unfit” for human habitation, Chief Reg Crowshoe blamed the Department of Indian Affairs for not providing enough homes. “They’re saying they don’t have enough money, but we can’t wait any longer,” Crowshoe told reporters at the time. What he didn’t mention was that just five years earlier, the 1,500-member Piikani had received $64-million from Ottawa and the province of Alberta to settle a dispute over a proposed dam project. Ottawa sent another $450,000 in housing assistance to the reserve in 2006. Today, 500 Piikani are still waiting for houses, and despite the fact that Indian Affairs routinely allows First Nations to use settlement money for necessities, the band insists it cannot afford to fix existing housing.

When Ontario’s Kashechewan reserve was evacuated in 2005 after E.Coli was found in the water system, the federal Ministry took the blame. Under immense public pressure, the government dropped hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of cases of bottled water into the community and deployed over 40 engineers and soldiers of the Canadian Armed Forces to install and operate a new 10-tonne reverse osmosis purifier (designed to filter water contaminated by chemical weapons). The province meanwhile arranged a massive airlift and evacuated 1,100 reserve residents. At first, Kashechewan seemed like an aboriginal community left alone to cope with rundown under-funded infrastructure, but the water treatment plant was just 10 years old and the band had received $800,000 for upgrades just a year before the crisis unraveled. When a water engineer from Red Lake arrived, he found that the only problem was a plugged chlorine injector. This injector cost 30 dollars and took the engineer all of six hours to install in order to make the water drinkable again. The Kashechewan plant managers (band members) had never been trained to operate the water treatment facility. When the automatic alarm system had signaled the problem by annoyingly ringing to warn of the imminent contamination of the water, workers had simply unplugged it.

It is understandable that chiefs are quick to deny accountability to their members when things go horribly wrong, and in reality, because they are not accountable, similar crises come and go on reserves all over the country, just as they do in government departments because of bureaucratic bungling at all levels of governance from the municipal to the national. No one in power is accountable to the citizens of Canada as a whole. How could it be any different on the reserves created by that same governing criminality over a century ago, a modus operandi force fed into children kidnapped from their homes and families and severed from their traditional ethical and moral code. Whether Canadians choose to recognize First Nations as a legitimate constitutional level of government (an issue remaining a matter of debate within the Department of Indian Affairs), Ottawa entrusts a huge amount of governmental responsibility to chiefs and councils in relation to health, education and other public services. It is to a dysfunctional federal government that these Chiefs and Councils report their actions. The people at large are left out of the loop. As even minimal standards of real grassroots democratic governance do not exist at the level of the larger bureaucratic system, First Nations have little choice but to replicate this sort of top-heavy administrative chaos just in order to maintain the status quo in the face of any unknown changes in the direction of true democracy and collective progress. When cultural genocide succeeded in alienating First Nations peoples from their own traditional ways, the most important guardian of those ways was destroyed with them, the communities, the families, the bonds to the earth which had guided the spiritual existence of these Nations for millennia.

Canadians of all backgrounds have an expectation that public officials in charge of urban planning in water systems or health administration have some kind of experience and training. This is not the case on reserves, where positions of authority in regard to safety and provision of services are frequently allotted to members unqualified to hold them. It does not matter what the immediate reasons for this turn out to be when such information becomes public during critical failures– nepotism, patronage or simple lack of properly trained people to hire are all in play here. “In our talent pool, we don’t have thousands of people to pick from,” says Clarence Louie, chief of British Columbia’s Osoyoos Indian Band. Louie received the 2003 National Aboriginal Achievement Award for a number of achievements including the reduction of the band’s dependence on social assistance by creating jobs within the community through the band’s eight businesses. (You can learn more about Clarence Louie in a Drum article collected in the book Smoke Signals from the Heart published by Totem Pole Books.)

Chief Louie created a human resources department to ensure people hired by his council are properly qualified. This move sets the elevated standard of action necessary to fulfill the promise of the opportunities his attitude in general has opened up. “I consider myself a ‘worker’ for OTB. All awards are about the band, not about me.” This is the spiritual base from which a log term program of development can be confidently put in place. Band jobs are sometimes the only ones available, but at the same time they are almost always the highest paid. This inevitably puts chiefs under a great deal of pressure to distribute wealth to friends and family first in the form of legitimate employment. If Clarence Louie’s laudable attempt at breaking the cycle is to succeed in the long run, there must be a simultaneous return to traditional ethics of governance that guided native communities for centuries before Europeans brought their diseased egocentric ‘dog eat dog’ survival of the fittest philosophy to North America.

Not surprisingly, a 2003 Ekos research poll conducted for the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs Canada found that just 37% of on-reserve aboriginals considered the performance of their band’s government to be “good” or better. The reason is not hard to discern. While politicians are assumed to be answerable to voters in democracies (a myth that will be critically examined at another time), Chiefs and Councils on reserves report only to the same sorry Department of Indian and Northern Affairs which has no incentive to alter the chain of command. And to make matters worse, these local chiefs are the same ones who go on to elect the grand regional chiefs and the national chief of the Assembly of First Nations. In other words, about 600 chiefs elect someone who claims to speak for 700,000 status Indians, the American Presidential electoral system writ small. At every turn and at every level there is strong incentive not to elect grand or national chiefs who might complicate things by demanding reforms.

Of course, having local chiefs elect a provincial or national leader makes no more sense than having all Manitoba’s mayors, animated as they are by their own local political agendas, choose the Premier of the province. “Mostly what they [local chiefs] are looking for is more government money passing through their hands, basically, so a little bit of it sticks,” says Calvin Helin, a Vancouver aboriginal lawyer and author of Dances with Dependency: Indigenous Success Through Self-Reliance.

The only way around that, he says, is to ensure that the head of the AFN, the most powerful aboriginal in Canada and the one who often has the Prime Minister’s ear, is elected directly by Canada’s aboriginal people, through a general vote. “We can do that these days by a referendum,” Mr. Helin says. “It used to be a case where geography was a barrier, but with the Internet these days, and all of the sorts of things we have at our disposal, everything is possible.” There are, of course, many chiefs and councils who take responsibilities to their fellow band members seriously; they run squeaky clean elections and govern with integrity. But as long as Ottawa continues to send money directly to First Nations bosses who are then, in turn, in charge of doling out funds in the form of housing allowances, social assistance and available employment, band members will depend on their politicians for survival and social mobility. According to Calvin Helin, “If there are any problems, [these politicians] are not answerable to their community. They are [only] answerable to the Minister of Indian Affairs. That is just a recipe for corruption . . .”

In 2003, an Indian Affairs poll showed that Minister Robert Nault’s Bill C-7, the First Nations Governance Act, designed to provide bands a codified system of elections and financial management, was backed by a majority of First Nations people. The Assembly of First Nations, however, opposed the legislation and convinced Prime Minister Paul Martin to create instead the Kelowna Accord which was later killed by the incoming Conservative government under Stephen Harper. But more accountable leadership is the only route to making governmental intervention in economic and social development more effective and responsible. Band members themselves should decide democratically how and when and where funds should be allocated. A democratic environment of financial accountability would encourage people from outside reserves to bring investment and jobs to on-reserve natives.

The bizarre strictures of the present Indian Act make contracts and leases very difficult to enforce in the legal grey zone within which reserves are forced to do business. Better councils do not eliminate investment risks created by the Indian Act, but they can reduce them substantially. A decade ago, the Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development concluded after a study of the most prosperous tribes in the U.S. that “poverty in Indian Country is a political problem — not an economic one.” Tribes that succeed have in common a few key characteristics. “They settle disputes fairly,” and that “sends a signal to investors of all kinds that their contributions will not be expropriated unfairly.” In addition, “they separate the functions of elected representation and business management,” which counters the urge of politicians to “interfere in business on behalf of voters.” Similarly, Canadian bands that have succeeded in implementing governmental reform are in virtually every case the same ones who have managed to lure millions of dollars in investment. The examples of success in this realm include Bands governed by accountable leaders already mentioned above.

For instance, Chief Clarence Louie of the Osoyoos, created an economic development corporation which was mandated to distance band business (including a winery and a vacation condo development with Calgary-based Bellstar Hotels and Resorts) from political interference. He also hired a former executive from juice giant Sun Rype Products Ltd., from off the reserve, as chief operating officer.

In Sydney, Nova Scotia, the Membertou First Nation posts all its band finances online and in 2001 achieved International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 9001:2000 certification, verifying the band had met globally recognized business standards. In barely a decade, Membertou moved from just scraping by on a $4.5 million annual budget (nearly all federal transfers), to collecting $65 million in annual revenues from partnerships in seafood processing, tourism, retail, and high tech industries.

On the Westbank First Nation in B.C., Chief Rob Louie recognized that the reserve political system as it was typically structured provided no mechanism for local industry concerns to be heard. In 2005, therefore, the band as a whole went to work in order to meet several conditions demonstrating in Westbank governance sufficient levels of accountability and transparency to attain self-government status. It enshrined in the band’s legislation, laws requiring the establishment of an advisory council representing non-member business interests. In another legal precedent Westbank now applies the Judicial Review Procedures Act of B.C. to its own lands; in essence, volunteering Westbank as accountable to the same legal system other businesses rely upon to protect them off-reserve. Indian Affairs now calls Westbank “one of the most economically successful Aboriginal communities in Canada,” and no doubt takes undeserved credit for some of this development.

There are a dozen other bands like this, maybe two dozen. In every case the formula works pretty much the same: when First Nations people are given real control over their leadership and the fate of their own lives, they start demanding, and getting, things we all want to demand even if we seldom end up getting; thriving economies, well-paying jobs, access to housing, effective government services, and water we can drink without getting sick. We have never been compensated yet for the deaths from small-pox which became our ancestors’ common fate. When those two little girls froze to death in the harsh winter cold of the northern winter for what ever reason their father was moving them from one shabby house to another in the middle of the night Yellow Quill takes on a tragic meaning as a place name, some snow covered village in equatorial Rwanda or a brothel in Kenya commandeered as a temporary morgue for murdered voters who voted in the wrong place at the wrong time. And just as all the lunatic violence in far off places which supplies pictures of malnourished children for television advertisements coaxing donations out of well-meaning bored and emptied middle class Canadians can in very large part derives from hastily drawn boundaries of post colonial Africa and a segregated education system that deprived generations of black children from real knowledge, so the great majority of the tragedies befalling the peoples of the First nations of Canada can be traced to the last great symptom of the genocidal lunacy of the European ego which allowed established churches and psychopathic individuals to use the residential school system to abuse small children in the name of a bitterly deformed god of their narrow understanding with the conscious support both moral and economic of the Government of Canada and its citizens who stood by sheepishly for decades in the face of mounting evidence that something was horribly wrong inside the walls of those schools modeled on the incarcerating perimeters of American prisons.

Whether indigenous peoples of this continent die alone and one at a time on the dismal streets of the Downtown Eastside, or are extinguished as families in the flames of three alarm fires devouring dilapidated housing, or are buried as a bunch after massacres of whole communities on the gun club prairies, or who perish in the ongoing genocide of an entire civilization, there will be certain historically significant events and legal precedents that will stand out when looked back upon through the indigenous eyes of those whose grief has mercifully been transformed into a wisdom of partial tentative forgiveness (for they know not what they do, they are so god dam stupid). The guilt and shame of such events are calculated in degrees of intergenerational consequences, the half lives of the contaminations wreaked upon grandparents, parents, children and grandchildren and great grandchildren by the trauma of the residential school. The headlines attest to the ever present parasite eating away at the gut of the Aboriginal people of this country.

by Lloyd Dolha

Freezing deaths prompts call for ban of alcohol in northern community

The Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations says creating bylaws prohibiting alcohol on First Nations reserves is only a surface solution unless such laws are enacted with parallel, sustainable treatment programs.

“The agenda for First Nations people is to treat the person who is addicted – not to punish them,” said FSIN leader Chief Lawrence Joseph. “Filling up our jails is not the answer.”

Joseph voiced his concerns about the issue of dry reserves following the tragic freezing deaths of two Yellow Quill First Nations toddlers in late January. The dead children’s father, Christopher Pauchey, was said to have been heavily drinking the night of the children’s senseless freezing deaths.

Yellow Quill Chief Robert Whitehead, said its time his reserve bans alcohol on reserve in light of the tragedy, and has since announced the band will submit a proposal to the provincial and federal governments for a drug and alcohol treatment centre.

The reserve community, located some 260 kilometres east of Saskatoon, has suffered from the effects of high rates of alcoholism abuse, attempted suicides, unemployment and inadequate housing for decades.

In the early morning of January 30th, Pauchay, who was said to be heavily drinking by relatives, decided to take his two daughters – Kaydance 3, and Santana, 1 – to his sister’s home, when the youngest was struck with a possible illness just after midnight. With the two girls only wearing T-shirts and diapers, headed into the early morning on a path to his sister’s house as temperatures dropped to -50C from the wind chill. With no phone to call for help, he tried to run to his sister’s house 400 metres way. Christopher was found suffering from hypothermia and frostbite on his sister’s doorstep. The RCMP said when they arrived, Pauchay couldn’t communicate, and it wasn’t until eight hours later in the hospital that he asked to see his daughters, setting off the search that led to the discovery of the two children found frozen on the path.

The freezing deaths of the two young children has shone an unwelcome light on the “bankrupt” Saskatchewan. The band has had money troubles since 1999, when runaway deficits forced the federal government to put the reserve under third-party management to maintain basic services for its residents. It has remained in third-party management since.

“Basically we are a bankrupt community,” said Chief Whitehead. “I think we are going to need some help. The situation we are in, it’s a sad situation.”

Faced with increasing suicide rates, the band has recently tried to move ahead with a bylaw banning alcohol on the reserve, but the proper paperwork was never filed with the federal government.

Whitehead said the band held a vote in 2005 in which the majority endorsed a motion to make Yellow Quill a dry reserve , but Indian Affairs refused to certify the vote because it didn’t receive formal notice within four days of the balloting as required. The chief said the initial push for the ban came from elders upset about four suicides that occurred in a short period that year.

At least 14 of the 70 some Saskatchewan reserve communities have banned alcohol on reserves are in the north of the province.

But federal Indian Affairs Minister Chuck Strahl said such a ban would not likely solve the problem.

“It’s very complex. Sometimes these communities have a multitude of issues they’re dealing with. So just passing a bylaw doesn’t make the world alright.”

Since then, the Saskatchewan government has announced it will consider proposals for an addictions treatment centre for the First Nation.

“I believe that if the proposal looks like its going to be of value to the children, and that means all levels of government agree on it, there will be public support,” said Saskatchewan First Nations and Metis Relations Minister June Draude.

by Morgan O’Neal

One look at the Community Well-Being Index compiled for Indian and Northern Affairs Canada (if we can plug our noses and hold our breath long enough to believe what we see) shows that it is precisely those First Nations communities recognized as having implemented more progressive standards of governance are almost always the highest ranking reserves on the index. Members of First Nations regularly complain of not being able to vote in band elections when they live off reserve: this, in violation of a Supreme Court ruling protecting their franchise. For example, in 2000, the Mohawk band council of Kahnewake in Quebec evicted and revoked the voting rights of any members who were not able to verify they had the minimum amount of Indian “blood quantum” — uncontaminated by racial mixing. In another instance, according to Don Sandberg, a member of Manitoba’s Norway House First Nation, “In advance of one Norway House election, . . . 392 voters were struck from the rolls, while the chief crammed a warehouse with refrigerators, stoves and other basic appliances, to hand out to those who would back him. Once such a chief is in power, “they have total control of funding and when anyone runs against them they’re running against millions of dollars,” says Rod Sutherland, a former councilman from Peguis First Nation, in Manitoba, where long-time chief Louis Stevenson was recently accused of stacking the public service and boards with cronies, and entering into secret deals with lenders, without band approval (these allegations have not been proven in court).

Electoral officers, who are supposed to be in charge of preserving the integrity of the voting process, are not of much use: “They are appointed directly by the chief, leaving open the possibility of backroom deals” (On Peguis, Mr. Sutherland says, the chief and his longtime electoral officer were, at one point, in business together). When reports surfaced in 2005 that members of Saskatchewan’s Red Pheasant First Nation had allegedly sold their mail-in ballots to a candidate for chief — one member claimed to have received a three-bedroom trailer — the chief electoral officer, who admitted she took unsealed ballot boxes home with her, refused to intervene, insisting it wasn’t her job to monitor vote buying. The same officer was in charge of an election on the nearby Mosquito First Nation where “Individuals provided money to electors in exchange for votes and mail-in ballots, forged voter declaration forms and mail-in ballots, and intercepted and destroyed valid mail-in ballots,” according to a federal investigation that same year.

On other reserves, members suspected of supporting opposition candidates have been threatened with losing assistance cheques, single mothers with having their kids taken away by social workers. Unscrupulous band governments will not only close meetings to the public, but will hold them off reserve entirely. Away from their members’ eyes, they are free to manipulate finances for their own gain. In Saskatchewan, the council of one Saulteaux band, comprised of just 800 members, was recently found to have spent more on travel expenses in a single year than the entire cabinet of the province — with the chief alone spending more than $175,000. Sorry, Whitey, it sounds like some reserves just operate exactly the same way as democracy in North America in general. Both American and Canadian manners of governance offer unlimited ways to commit fraud on behalf of one candidate or another, one party or another, once the power cliques are established either by family ties or business interests the dynastic disaster of anti-democracy may stay in place for generations. When is the last time we saw any real change in the way power is transferred at the center of the country; whether the conservatives or the liberals are the ruling party we all know in our propagandized minds that the real moving and shaking, the real control is in the hands of a very few very rich individuals on the boards of the most important corporations in the country. An electronic calculator would fizzle into a blob of black plastic if it had to add up all the money that changes hands from the hundreds ogf other Hans Schriebers to the hundreds of ex-prime ministers like Brian Multroney and all the lesser cronies that have to get their little bit for riding shotgun on the Gravy Train.

Problems (and they are very real and serious) with the governance on reserves in Canada will only continue to fester until the entire system is rotten. Only true political & financial accountability can rescue the struggling cultures of Aboriginals in this country. Some say the missing mechanism is that which off-reserve inspires citizens to hold their leaders to task, namely, the exercise of paying tax and demanding this revenue be used responsibly. “Taxation is one of the most fundamental things” for proper governance, says Tom Flanagan, a right wing political science professor at the University of Calgary who has written several books on, aboriginal policy. He argues that if Ottawa were to begin sending financial support directly to individual reserve residents, requiring band councils to tax it back for public expenditures, First Nations members, like most Canadians, would naturally take a much deeper interest in ensuring that government revenues are being used properly and with efficiency, and have the power to do something if it weren’t.

Studies by Robert Bish, former co-director of the University of Victoria’s Local Government Institute, found that in every country where a government has derived the majority of its funds from something other than taxes, government services have deteriorated, with Norway and its oil revenues standing as the sole exception. Taxes would not end scandalous governance on reserves completely, just as taxpayers off reserves were not spared the Liberal sponsorship scandal or the MFP computer leasing fiasco in Toronto. But it is an important start to ending much of it. “The need to tax does not guarantee good government, but the absence of the need to tax usually guarantees bad government,” writes John Richards, the former Saskatchewan MLA and Simon Fraser University public policy professor, in his 2006 book Creating Choices: Rethinking Aboriginal Policy.

It is easy to see why: When politicians have to start convincing voters to part with cash, citizens are more apt to begin scrutinizing who they elect and how they devise spending priorities. It provides voters the power to check the size of government, something that can otherwise grow as large and expensive as the politicians themselves desire. For an idea of what the worst case scenario might be for a council whose spending priorities were truly out of control, consider the Stoney First Nation, west of Calgary, which has three chiefs and 12 councillors for just a few thousand members; Meanwhile the Ottawa-based Institute on Governance last year reported that the average First Nation spends ten times more per capita on governance than the average Canadian municipality). These percentages force us to want to lay the blame on individuals for their stupidity of even criminality, but this would be a cop-out in almost every case. Most individuals in positions of financial power have never been trained even in the basics of accounting nor educated in the ethics of business. These courses are readily available at colleges all over the country, but there is no mechanism for efficiently hooking potential leaders into continuing education on a large scale so that they participate in a community of learners from the same background and where a package of materials directed toward guiding aboriginal leaders through the growing pains that inevitably accompany the births of new democracy.

When First Nations people begin paying their own way for the band’s administration, the many missing or flawed governance institutions that exist on most reserves — auditing agencies, independent electoral officers, term limits for chiefs — would arouse attention, and if taxpayers demanded it, adjustment would follow. The minor scandals and other examples of failed governance on Canada’s reserves which periodically make it to the mainstream press are merely symptoms of the larger scandals and misappropriations that occur at the municipal, provincial, and federal level of the nation’s government. It is as if we (the entire population) were all held prisoners in the Residential schools of the first half of the century; as if all our moral codes were shattered and our self-esteem reduced to nothing, so bent out of shape that the “dog eat dog/get it while you can” amoral code expressed in the sly sloganeers’ drunken sneers becomes the only intelligent way to plan for your future. After all, when there is always the possibility that the pension plan you have been paying into all your working life all of a sudden without warning goes belly up because some mortgage bank went broke after a greedy feeding frenzy in the housing market in a country you may never have heard of let alone have been able to visit with bikini and snorkel and a cold beer with a name you cannot pronounce.

I believe the Indigenous peoples of this country will rise above these very real obstacles to progress and they will do it one leader, one council and one reserve at a time closely following the best examples there exist out there to imitate. There are already a number of success stories based on different models of governance, but one thing is common to all these successful models; true grassroots democracy has been cultivated and nurtured within the circle of traditional ethical standards based on the spiritual bond to the earth. If the larger country and economy of Canada cannot learn from these aboriginal initiatives it has even a worse chance of developing the kind of environmental and spiritual code which will guarantee that at least some generation down the road of historical time will live in close touch with the spirit of real progress and at peace with its neighbors, and where production and distribution are articulated in a way that provides each human being the essentials of a good and happy existence..

Canadians for Reconciliation is a peaceful non-partisan grassroots movement committed to developing a new relationship with aboriginal people, one that signifies a deep apology for past injustice, a willingness to honor truth now and a resolve to embrace each other in the new millennium.

13th annual “Dances with Dragons” is a genuine celebration of another year’s journey between First People and Chinese Canadians and a public testimony that a new journey has begun. We are honored by the presence of First Nation friends from Squamish, Nisga’a, Gitksan, Mount Currie, Dene, Cree, etc.

With B.C. poised to celebrate its 150 anniversary of becoming a colony in 2008, we encourage British Columbians to reflect on BC’s less honourable history with First Nations. To consider reconcilliation with the aboriginal community beyond a series of orchestrated events for the 2010 Olympic visitors, please contact us at ccia@shaw.ca

By Clint Buehler

EDMONTON – The discovery of human remains has halted the extension of this city’s light rail transit (LRT) lines after Native activists intervened.

When the remains were first found, city officials claimed the remains were “historical,” and said there was no reason to halt work on the line.

But Native activists protested.

Gerald Delorme, a 48-yeart-old Cree, said that the bones probably belonged to one of his ancestors, and charged that authorities have a moral obligation to determine if any other bodies are buried in the area before continuing with their multi-million dollar transit project.

He said he wanted the area fully investigated. “Why do our ancestors have to have roads built over them, why do they have to have power plants built over them?”

Initially, the city said that construction would resume.

A day later, the city relented and halted construction until an archeologist can be hired to supervise the work. That news was met with relief by Joyce Bruneau, a councillor with the Papaschase First Nation, which claims the area and much of southwest Edmonton as its historical land. She also fears that the remains may belong to one of their ancestors.

Papaschase descendants claim the federal government forced the band to dissolve through a series of manoeuvres beginning in 1880, mostly by making them members of other bands with reserves of their own.

Bruneau says genealogical studies show there may be more than 5,000 direct living descendants of the original Papaschase. Those descendants go before the Supreme Court of Canada in February to fight for compensation and a new reserve outside of the city. “Because there may be other bodies around, they should be very careful when they’re excavating,” Bruneau says.

In announcing the stoppage of construction, Wayne Mandryk, the city’s transit projects manager, said they are “erring on the side of caution so that, should any further remains be discovered, they will be handled with dignity. Regardless of the ancestry of these remains, the city is respectful of the history and meaning of the area,” Mandryk said.

The stoppage will be restricted to the area where the remains were found and will be under the scrutiny of an archeologist. Mandryk says crews will be careful not to remove any more earth than necessary, and the first six feet of excavation will be closely monitored by the archeologist.

The situation is reminiscent of the discovery of graves with both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal remains during road construction a few years ago in the city’s Rossdale Flats area in the midst of the city.

After numerous protests by Aboriginal activists and lengthy negotiations with the city, the road was rerouted around the site, the remains were reburied, and the city agreed to erect a $1.5 million monument to those buried there which is not yet fully completed.

By Bernie Bates

How time flies – another three hundred and sixty four in the books.? Bang, pow, poof … this last year disappeared faster than a fart in a wind storm.? Some of us had a disappointing year, some had a banner year – that’s life.? But, for yours truly, the part that really gets to me is: Bad things happen to good, kindhearted, hard working people.? And good things happen to the round, brown holes, who profit from society – like a tick on a dog.

Call me (or email my editor) a nut, but I think I’ve come up with a solution to all of societies problems.? Looking back into Native history – we where led by strong, fearless, warriors who protected our homes and families.? And they where counseled by wise, experienced and revered Elders.? If you reflect on why this ancient system worked back then, you’ll realize, it could work just as well in this millennium.? Two thinks are, and will always remain the same: “Our youth and the elderly need each other.”? Most Elders in our society have something that teenagers need: patience and wisdom.? Which works out great, because most teenagers have none.? And to be fair, teenagers have something most elders don’t have: strength and fearlessness.

Back in the day of bow and arrow – Natives had to think of the ‘greater good.’? Everyone had to pull their own weight, utilize their strengths and help each other to overcome life’s adversities.? For instance, if a big, blood-thirsty bear came into the camp, you didn’t trip an Elder and run like hell.? No, of course not, it was up to the brave, the strong and the swift to protect the circle of life.????

…. NEWS FLASH: We interrupt this column, to give you an up date on another bombing, another murder and another home invasion!? I thought that? last few years were bad, and that it couldn’t be topped, but it was.? What can we, as every day human beings, do?? If I may suggest something: “Let’s form a club, with real clubs!”? And the next time some ignorant fool breaks into some poor Elder’s house, our ‘club’ can hand out some swift brutal justice!? Who’s with me?? Dream on … I’ll tell you what will happen, we’ll be saying the same thing next year: “Wow, was that a bad year; violence, war, hunger, I hope next year is better.”??

It’s said: “A coward dies many deaths, whereas, the brave die but once.”? Are we, as a society, becoming so fragmented, so individualized, that we could care less what happens to a person in another town?? How about someone down the street?? Maybe, next door or even within your own family?? Where do we finally draw the line?

When we hear of an injustice, we cry out to law enforcement: “Please, serve and protect!”? And then in the next breath we proclaim publicly for; tempered justice, cruel and unusual punishment … “Have pity!”? When I was a kid I knew four big words: Telephone, television, elephant-shit and consequence.? I couldn’t spell any of them, but I knew what they meant.? A telephone meant: news.? A television meant: entertainment.? And consequence meant: I was a bad boy and I was going to get my backside spanked.? I can now spell consequence and I still remember what it means.? It’s hard to forget the sting of a leather strap!

I also remember another time I was a bad boy – my crime – I had stolen five cents worth of candy.? When my Dad found out he dragged me back to the store, made me confess and ask for forgiveness.? If that wasn’t embarrassing enough, he paid the clerk a dollar, and said it would come out of my weekly allowance.? And to drive the point home, he also told the merchant that I’d be back every day after school to sweep his sidewalk … for a whole month!? For thirty days I swept that sidewalk and for thirty days my schoolmates walked by and giggled as I hung my head in shame and looked at my dusty shoes.

If you just thought: “Ah, poor little guy.”? You’re the problem with today’s society!? I did a bad thing and I paid a high price for that candy, but to this day I haven’t stole another damn thing.? If a person commits a crime against the laws of a society, then I have no problem with public punishment.? Humiliation, set me straight – that and a good whack on the ass.? I hope next year gets better – don’t you?

THE END

Dear reader: Please feel free to contact, B. H. Bates at:? beeinthebonnet@shaw.ca

By Clint Buehler

EDMONTON – The leaders of the Alberta Metis are not buying the efforts of the province’s Minister of Sustainable Resources to subvert Metis constitutional hunting rights—confirmed by the Supreme Court of Canada in the Powley case in Ontario—by instituting policies that grant hunting rights to all Albertans whose circumstances justify them to hunt wild game to feed their families. Metis Nation of Alberta (MNA) President Audrey Poitras says Alberta Sustainable Resources Minister Ted Morton’s new policy “misses the mark.

In December, Morton announced changes to Alberta’s hunting subsistence license, a special license for Albertans who rely on moose, elk or deer to feed themselves or their families, that he hoped would be viewed as a “gesture of goodwill” by Metis hunters who had protested his scrapping of an Interim Metis Hunting Agreement (IMHA) the MNA had negotiated with his predecessor.

In July 2007, Morton replaced the IMHA with the subsistence hunting licenses that were only available to people living north of Highway 16 and outside of towns and cities, and could only be used in winter. And government officials would decide who qualified for the licenses.

With the rule changes in December, the license may now be used anywhere in the province, any time of year. The new rules were also criticized by MNA Vice-President Trevor Gladue, who said they were “a slap in the face of the needy. “It sends a poor message to Albertans at large that if you are really poor and really hungry you can run out in to the bush and try to shoot something.

“I don’t know how many people who are really poor or really hungry first of all can afford to go and get a FAC (firearm acquisition certificate), to go get (rifle) shells, to get in a vehicle and get the gas to drive out to the bush to get a moose or a deer. It’s really sent a poor message to the poor people.”

Alberta’s Metis have been fighting to hunt year-round, arguing that it’s their Constitutional right, just like other Aboriginal people.

That, he says, is an inherent right of the Metis and this latest change is only a misstep in the right direction to restoring the year-round hunts.

Hunters who fought against the Metis don’t have a problem with letting poor people do the same.

“Metis do not have constitutionally protected harvesting rights because we are poor or handicapped. We have these rights because harvesting is integral to our unique culture as an Aboriginal people. Harvesting has been an historic tradition of our people since before Canada was formed,” Poitras says.

“Our people continue this practice today as a means of sustaining our distinct identity and nurturing our special relationship to the land. That is why our rights are protected in Canada’s Constitution.

“Based on this constitutional recognition, the Alberta government has an obligation to accommodate our rights within its fish and wildlife laws. The Supreme Court has said these accommodations cannot be arbitrary or discretionary..”

Naturally, :Poitras says, “since our rights are affected, we must be involved in how these accommodations are arrived at. In order to avoid conflict and costly litigation, partnership and compromise is required on all sides.”

Poitras says the Metis Nation has consistently shown its willingness to work in collaboration with the province to arrive at a mutually agreeable accommodation.

“In September 2004 we signed the Interim Metis Harvesting Agreement with the province that worked well for more than two years. In August 2005, we agreed to renewed negotiations towards a final agreement. In May 2007, we arrived at points of agreement with Guy Boutilier, the minister for Aboriginal Affairs, who led these renewed discussions on behalf of the Alberta government.

“Unfortunately, these joint points of agreement were rejected by Morton, and he implemented a unilateral harvesting policy effective July 1, 2007.”

As a result, Poitras says, the Metis Nation is defending its harvester against Alberta’s “unconstitutional laws and policies” in the courts.

“The Metis, as taxpayers and citizens of this province, believe in, support and abide by Alberta’s laws. However, Alberta’s laws must accommodate our harvesting rights in order to be constitutional.

“Metis rights have been recognized in Canada’s Constitution for more than 25 years, but our harvesters are still treated like criminals when they are exercising constitutionally protected rights. Understandably, our people become frustrated when they see politics trump our rights.”

Poitras says challenging Alberta’s laws in court is not the MNA’s preferred choice in resolving this issue, but “what other option do we have when negotiated points of agreement are ignored and Metis harvesters are being charged?”

The managing director of the Alberta Professional Outfitters Society says the change makes sense. He admits only a small percent of the population, mostly in remote areas, would make use of it.

“I don’t see someone from inner-city Edmonton being equipped and knowledgeable enough to go hunting,” said Colin Reichle. Subsistence hunting isn’t a bad idea, said Todd Loewen, owner of Valleyview’s Red Willow Outfitters. However, he added that hardly anyone relies on game as their sole supply of meat.

“There’s very, very, very few anymore,” said Loewen. “I think with all our social programs and everything we have, it’s not done. I’m sure there are some families that could use it, but it’s very limited.”

Reichle said hunters were upset about the old Metis agreement because there was no reporting mechanism to determine how many animals were being hunted. Gladue said last summer the Metis Nation of Alberta drew up its own policy for a self-regulated hunt where tags would be issued to Metis.

Loewen said he would want to see the new hunting rules limited to does. That would prevent people abusing the system by using it for trophy-hunting males and not for subsistence. Deer are also in overabundance right now, he said.

By Morgan O’Neal

British Columbia’s aboriginal youths are taking to the city in increasing numbers and at an accelerating rate, giving the Provincial government something to think about. According to new data pulled from the 2006 Census, 60 per cent of the province’s aboriginal population – 196,075 persons in all – are living off-reserve in urban areas.

And when almost half of that population is aged 24 and under, advocates say it’s time for government policy to reflect this new demographic shift. “We’ve been seeing this trend for a while but urban aboriginals have been largely left out of government agreements. That’s going to older people who are living on reserves,” Lynda Gray, executive director of the Urban Native Youth Association in Vancouver, stated. Big cities with large aboriginal populations will inevitably place added pressures on already overstressed service agencies. “The government is not putting money where the most need is.”

With 40,310 aboriginals now living within its boundaries, Vancouver has the third-highest aboriginal population of any Canadian city, after Winnipeg and Edmonton.

But when it comes to accessing native youth programs in the city, Gray says the buck stops at the UNYA. “We’re the only provider,” she said. “My guess is that at least half [of native youth in Vancouver] have no access to relevant services.” The lack of services – coupled with the lower standards of housing, education and health in the aboriginal community – is taking its toll on the city’s native population.

“The system hasn’t done a good job protecting them,” said Evan Adams, the province’s aboriginal health advisor. “Young aboriginal people are at risk of not completing Grade 12, of being underemployed and disenfranchised.” That leads to abnormally high rates of stress, mental health issues and addiction, according to Adams. “People have to realize that these are systemic social issues.”

The 2006 Census B.C. concluded with these numbers in relation to the Aboriginal population. 1) B.C. is home to the second largest aboriginal population in Canada with 196,075 people. Ontario is first. 2) The aboriginal population in B.C. grew by 15 per cent between 2001 and 2006, three times the rate of the non-aboriginal population. 3) 60 per cent of aboriginals live in urban areas, 26 per cent live on reserves. 4) With 40,310 native people, Vancouver has the third largest urban native population in the country. 5) The median age of the aboriginal population in B.C. is 28. The median age of the non-aboriginal population is 41. 6) 46 per cent of aboriginals in Canada are 24 or under. 7) Six per cent of aboriginals live in crowded homes. 21 per cent live in dwellings in need of major repairs Canada’s aboriginal population is growing by leaps and bounds, according to the latest census information and has topped the million mark for the first time in the latest census, with slightly more than half the country’s 1.2 million aboriginals living off reserve. Fifty-four per cent who consider themselves North American Indian, Metis or Inuit live in or near urban areas, according to the 2006 national survey. That’s up from 50 per cent in the census taken a decade previous, say figures released Tuesday by Statistics Canada. But analysts say what appears to be a gradual urbanization of Canada’s aboriginal population does not mean reserves are emptying. On the contrary, there has been net migration back to First Nations over the last 40 years. And while many people enjoy good housing and jobs in cities, some of Canada’s roughest streets are disproportionately home to aboriginals. Overwhelmed and under-funded agencies say it’s a growing struggle to offer services ranging from job training and affordable rent to a bowl of soup. “Locally our friendship centre is facing incredible funding pressures,” says Susan Tatoosh, executive director of the Vancouver Aboriginal Friendship Centre in the city’s notorious Downtown Eastside. “We have over 1,000 people dropping in on a monthly basis. We keep stats. We have a constant turnover of staff, mainly because of burnout and leaving for better wages elsewhere.”

Winnipeg leads the way with the largest native population of 68,380 or 10 per cent of its total. Edmonton is second with 52,100 or five per cent of its total, and Vancouver has 40,310 or two per cent. Other cities with high proportions of native residents were Prince Albert, Sask., where native people account for 34 per cent of the population, along with Saskatoon and Regina with nine per cent each, says Statistics Canada.

Overall, the aboriginal share of Canada’s population – 3.8 per cent – ranks second in the world to New Zealand. The Maori people account for 15 per cent of New Zealand’s total, while indigenous people represent a two-per-cent share in the U.S. and Australia. An estimated 698,025 people identified themselves as North American Indian in the 2006 census – a number lower than the 763,555 people counted in the government’s official Indian Registry as of Dec. 31, 2006. This is in part because 22 First Nations, including Canada’s largest Mohawk communities, shunned the census process.

Those reserves report births and deaths regularly through the federal Indian Registry and are generally suspicious of how census data might be used. The most recent census finds that the proportion of status Indians living on reserve has held steady at about 45 per cent. The Indian Registry, by contrast, tells a different story. It says there were 615 bands in Canada as of Dec. 31, 2006 with 763,555 members. Most of that total – 404,117 – lived on reserves, while 335,109 lived off reserve and 24,329 were on Crown land. The discrepancy between the registry and the census is explained in part by the First Nations who refused to take part in the national survey.

But the registry is also a more static reflection of birth, marriage and death, says Jane Badets of Statistics Canada. The census is a five-year snapshot of where aboriginal people primarily live, she added. The Indian Registry along with census data are the prime sources of population data that help determine federal funds for native housing, education and health needs. Those agreements were historically negotiated between First Nations and the Crown.

There’s a political twist to any suggestion that an increasing number of First Nations people are living off reserve. The federal Conservatives have increased focus on off-reserve needs, most visibly by aligning themselves politically with the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples. The Congress purports to represent off-reserve people across Canada, but its membership is disputed by rival groups like the Assembly of First Nations that are more closely identified with reserves. The Congress was notably the only native political group to openly endorse the Tories in the last federal election. Some critics of Conservative aboriginal policy note efforts to increase individual housing and other rights as piecemeal undermining of collective native rights.

In any case, observers stress that the gradual growth of native urban populations does not mean a mass exodus from reserves. In fact, since the mid-1960s more people have returned to First Nations and there’s been a good deal of “churn” back and forth, says Dan Beavon, director of strategic research for Indian Affairs. Much of the urban aboriginal growth can be traced to second-and third-generation population increases of existing native enclaves.

But bigger factors include “out-marriage” of aboriginal people with non-natives, along with a spike in cultural pride, Beavon says. People in cities have shown a greater tendency to cite native ancestry or identity from one census to the next, he explained. The latest census shows 1.7 million people reported having at least some aboriginal ancestry, up from 1.3 million in 2001 and 1.1 million in 1996. Higher birth rates also play a role, especially on reserves. And there’s the simple fact that more First Nations now fall within city boundaries because of amalgamation, Beavon says. For example, at least 20 First Nations border the sprawling Vancouver area, he says. “Reserves and cities are not mutually exclusive.”

Aboriginal people flock to cities for the same education and job opportunities as non-natives. “This is not a uniquely Canadian phenomenon,” says Fred Caron, assistant deputy minister in the federal office for Metis and non-status Indians. “It’s worldwide. No matter what region you go to, there are more indigenous people living in cities in every region of the world – and facing a lot of the same issues.” Decent housing, a job and schooling for their kids are the main hurdles for people making the huge cultural shift from remote reserves, Caron said in an interview. “Those three things, if they line up right, point to success – especially education.”

In the meanest parts of Vancouver, Winnipeg and Saskatoon the extent to which native people have fallen through social cracks is painfully obvious. Yet critics say federal and provincial governments aren’t doing nearly enough to help these relatively young and growing urban communities to succeed. Caron points to the federal Urban Aboriginal Strategy, a $14 million-a-year effort to co-ordinate an array of native training, transition and support services in 12 cities. He says Ottawa has forged partnerships and drawn funding from provincial, local and private interests. “It’s a small strategy. It hasn’t got a lot of money attached to it,” he conceded. But there are success stories, such as the BladeRunners program that trains young native workers for jobs in Vancouver’s construction trade.

Peter Dinsdale, executive director of the National Association of Friendship Centres, says there’s a growing need for the most basic services in cities, programs for children, young parents and their families, food banks, drug and alcohol counselling. Dinsdale says that 117 friendship centres across the country tracked 1.3 million services offered to clients last year – up from 757,000 in 2002-03. “It’s growing exponentially.” And no one, he says, wants to take on the responsibility or the cost. “There’s this huge jurisdictional war going on between the provinces and the federal government as to who has responsibility for urban aboriginal people. As a result, very little is getting done.”

For the first time, more than one million Canadians identified themselves as aboriginal. The census counted 1,172,790 Indian, Metis and Inuit people. About 1.7 million Canadians reported having at least some aboriginal ancestry. Statistics Canada defines “aboriginal ancestry” as the ethnic or cultural origin of a person’s ancestors, usually more distant than a grandparent. The aboriginal population increased 45 per cent between 1996 and 2006. The growth can be attributed to a number of factors: higher birth rates than the non-aboriginal population, more people identifying themselves as aboriginal, census enumerators got better co-operation from some reserves this time.

The reported Metis population – those of mixed Indian and European ancestry – has almost doubled since the 1996 census. Those who identified themselves as Indian increased by 29 per cent, while the Inuit population went up 26 per cent. About four per cent of Canada’s total population is aboriginal. That’s the second highest total in the world, second only to New Zealand where the Maori make up 15 per cent of that country’s population. Fifty-one per cent of the status Indian population lives off reserve, up from 50 per cent in 1996. More than half of the country’s aboriginal people (54 per cent) live in urban areas. For those who don’t live on reserves, the urban figure climbs to 72 per cent. The aboriginal population in Canada is considerably younger than the non-native citizenry, with a median age of 27 compared to 40. Almost half (48 per cent) of the aboriginal population is under the age of 25

There has been a decline in the use and knowledge of Inuktitut, the major language of the Inuit, and less than three per cent of Metis under the age of 45 can speak an aboriginal language. But there are indications some First Nations groups are trying to retain their ancestral tongues: 12 per cent of those who spoke Cree in 2006 learned it as a second language. 29 per cent of First Nations people said they could carry on a conversation in an aboriginal language. There were 60 aboriginal languages recorded by census enumerators, with Cree spoken by more First Nation people than any other language.

The greatest increase in population was among the Metis population, which grew by 91 per cent during that period. 81 per cent of First Nations are considered status Indians because they are registered under the Indian Act. 50,485 identified themselves as Inuit. 389,785 identified themselves as Metis. 698,025 identified themselves as North American Indian. 1,172,790 of Canadians identified themselves as aboriginal and 1.7 million indicated they had some aboriginal ancestry in their family background.

By Morgan O’Neal

Ten years ago Frank Paul was just another aboriginal regular at the downtown drunk tank, unique only in that he was a Mi’qmac from the Big Cove First Nation in New Brunswick as far away from home as he could get without leaving the country altogether. He was deep in his cups and long out of work by the time he died on a frigid November night in 1998 and he had been in and out of that same tank on a regular enough basis to have become well-known to officers working the dreary Eastside beat. Paul was among many people helped by Barry Conroy who at the time worked with Saferide, a program run by the Vancouver Recovery Club that transports people suffering from the effects of alcohol and drugs to detox centres and shelters. He testified to Paul’s personality before the present public inquiry on November 16. “He was what I would call a gentleman,” Conroy said of the Mi’kmaq man. Paul, according to Conroy, was “polite,” and though he was usually drunk on rice wine, there was “dignity” in the way he struggled to raise himself from the pavement to get into the Saferide van.

In the past decade the Vancouver police (not to mention the RCMP) have been the focus of much public outrage for an abnormal number of botched investigations, brutal racist arrest tactics, and false and dishonest statements for which officers at the highest level of crisis management in the Force have arrogantly refused to take responsibility. The tragic case of Frank Paul is only one very blatant example of the systematic almost psychotic culture of denial under which the VPD operates. Originally, the police told Paul’s family that he had died in a car accident. Others were told he was killed by a hit-and-run driver. “So we never asked anything more,” Paul’s cousin Pauline Simon said, four years after Frank died. “That’s been the belief for years.” But many local observers were suspicious from the beginning and the word on the street was always closer to the facts. Frank Paul had died either in custody or left in an alley to breathe his last by one of Vancouver’s Finest. The “internal” investigation that followed upon the death of Paul resulted in a two-day suspension for seasoned Sergeant, Russell Sanderson, and one day for rookie Constable, David Instant. Police Complaint Commissioner Don Morrison shrugged off queries from the Paul family and others interested in justice and truth. The police never retracted their tall tale, nor have they apologized for the lies and fabrications designed to cover their butts.

Unfortunately, the recent inquiry into Frank Paul’s death will not find fault with the Force but only make recommendations on changes to policies and procedures. Crown lawyers who reviewed the case in June 2004 determined charges unwarranted. Two officers were “disciplined” and the department considered the case closed. But a corrections officer working the night Paul died claimed the internal police investigation was a sham, and took his concerns?to the new Police Complaints Commissioner, Dirk Ryneveld, who recommended a public inquiry into Paul’s death. This recommendation was at first rejected by the provincial government but that decision was reversed last February after CBC News reported on the corrections officer’s claim. Finally, after nearly a decade of cover-up and denial the long awaited inquiry began and one weak apology emerged from Constable Instant for the brutal neglect of Citizen Paul. The truth, long suspected, was that he had been dumped from a paddy wagon into a dank and dark alley and left to die on a near-freezing winter night. It took nine years and a subpoena to get Instant to speak at all; the truth only now escaped his lips when he owned up to his part in this thoughtless killing.

Perhaps he has learned from his mistakes. He was a rookie then and working in the worst part of town, given a task beyond his adolescent mind. He had no experience with this type of situation and should not have been left alone to deal with it. We can only wonder. what has been going on in his head for the past decade; serious soul-searching, remorse and guilt would seem the only thoughts appropriate. The same cannot be hoped of former Sgt. Sanderson. He has no excuses and offers no apologies. The man in charge, who just refused to let the wasted 47-year-old Paul sleep it off in a heated cell, ordered Constable Instant, fresh from boot camp, to yard the motionless, supine man stinking of rice wine and urine the hell out of his jail. The oblivious Sanderson swears to this day that Paul wasn’t drunk: some disability must have made it difficult for him to stand. He saw no reason to seek medical aid despite the fact that the homeless man was comatose. The better to distance himself from responsibility for Paul’s death, Sanderson, protesting that he wasn’t liable for what happened, testified that he had “meant” to tell Instant to drive Paul to a safe place, but didn’t say it then. There was no need to apologize to his family.

This is incredulous testimony from a seasoned officer whose version of events contrasts with colleagues and the pathologist who found that Paul died of hypothermia from acute intoxication. An autopsy confirmed Paul had a blood alcohol level of .35 — more than four times the legal level of drunkenness. But that’s just part of the tragedy. A former VPD wagon driver told the inquiry that when a senior officer gives an order, the junior officer is expected to obey. Retired Constable Brian Porter agreed that the officer who dropped Frank Paul off nine years ago would have had to follow orders. This deflects responsibility toward Sergeant Sanderson, bur it was a tearful Constable David Instant that apologized to Mr. Paul’s family, saying simply that his superior had said “the man wasn’t drunk”. During his last day of testimony, Instant tearfully apologized for leaving Paul in the alley, saying he’ll wear the scars of what happened to the man for the rest of his life.

On the night of December 5, 1998, Instant drove the chronic alcoholic into the same Vancouver alley where he was found frozen to death only hours later. Porter testified he had picked Paul up the day before and dropped him at the detox centre where he was admitted. Steven Kelliher, the lawyer for Paul’s family, asked what a driver’s options would be if ordered to “breach” someone in custody: breaching is a now-banned practice where officers would take someone from one part of the city and move them to another. “It’s very difficult,” Porter testified. “If he’s been given an order per se, then being that junior, I don’t think he would have much option but to obey.”

In testimony which was clearly contradicted by Constable Instant, Sergeant Sanderson denied knowing Paul was homeless. “I advised Sgt. Sanderson he [Paul] was found laying on a vegetable rack at Dunlevy [Avenue] and Hastings [Street] and Sgt. Sanderson said,?‘He’s homeless that’s where he sleeps,’” Instant said. Sanderson insisted his only mistake was in giving “vague” instructions to Instant to drive Paul to “Broadway and Maple,” where Sanderson said he believed Paul might take shelter in a “basement apartment.” Lawyer Cameron Ward, representing the United Native Nations Society told the Georgia Straight that the postmortem examination didn’t indicate the time of Paul’s death.”It’s a question of fact whether or not he was alive either when he was dragged out of the jail into the wagon or when he was taken out of the wagon and put where he was found deceased,” Ward said.

The police video clearly shows a “motionless” Paul being dragged into the jail elevator at 8:25 p.m. His condition was seen by a number of individuals, including the sergeant on duty, who determined that Paul was not intoxicated. Five minutes later, at 8:30 p.m., a police wagon driver and a provincial jail guard dragged “a still rain-soaked, motionless Frank Paul from the elevator to the police wagon along the floor of the wagon bay area”. The wagon driver delivered another intoxicated person in the wagon to a detoxification centre before placing Paul in a nearby alley. His lifeless body was found at 2:41 a.m. on December 6, 1998, at that same location.

Asked by Ward if he would have got medical help for a Caucasian instead of “an intoxicated, chronically alcoholic native man,” Russell Sanderson replied: “Anybody in a suit would get medically assessed,” Sanderson said. Instead, the comatose Paul was dragged like deadweight across the floor and back to the police wagon, soaking wet and dead drunk. Sanderson insisted that he was right to reject Paul, despite the report of world-renowned pathologist Dr. Rex Ferris, who found Paul died of acute alcohol intoxication and hypothermia. Ferris has also said Paul likely was hypothermic when Sanderson assessed him in the jail elevator. Sanderson vigorously denied a suggestion by Paul family lawyer Kelliher that ”Frank Paul was completely intoxicated and incapable of caring for himself, you didn’t want him in your jail and he couldn’t continue to use your jail as a hotel room.”

The truth is out, the facts are clear. A homeless alcoholic dumped in an alley would have been hypothermic before he died, according to the forensic pathologist who examined Paul’s body. Dr. Laurel Gray told the inquiry that hypothermia results because alcohol leads to rapid heat loss. The condition would have been accelerated because Paul was left out in the cold in soaking-wet clothes. Environment Canada records temperatures of 2 C that night. “He just basically lost a lot more heat than his body could generate,” Gray testified. “The conclusion that he died of hypothermia would be a valid one. We’re only looking at just a few degrees below the normal body-core temperature to become fatal, that the organs just can’t maintain life”. Gray said her examination revealed no irreversible damage to Paul’s liver, nor did he have cirrhosis. However, in the final stages of hypothermia, his brain, lungs, heart and kidneys would all have failed.

In his original report, Dirk Ryneveld noted that in choosing not to call for an inquest, the coroners service had relied on information provided by police “in what I now deem to have been an incomplete and therefore flawed investigation”. Two vital pieces of information were missing, one of which was a report made by pathologist Rex Ferris “that, among other things, indicates that Frank Paul may well have died in the police wagon itself”. Ryneveld noted that even if Paul was technically no longer in police custody when he died, “in my respectful view, the coroner still had a residual discretion to hold a coroner’s inquest pursuant to Section 18 of the Coroners Act.” Dana Urban, a former senior legal adviser to former commissioner Don Morrison, long ago suggested that “it is likely that his [Paul’s] fatal hypothermia developed over the course of many hours, and there seems no doubt that he was suffering from hypothermia when he was removed from the jail”. Urban said in his testimony: “He [Paul] died during or soon after his involvement with the Vancouver city police department.”

First Nations groups have blamed the B.C. government for not calling an inquiry into Paul’s death earlier. A decade has passed since they and the B.C. Civil Liberties Association began pushing for a public examination of this crime. Aboriginal leaders are hardly satisfied with the “apology” and feel Instant should have been charged. They also believe racism played a part in how Paul was treated. Clearly Sanderson bears the bulk of responsibility, yet admits no remorse even in his plump retirement. First Nations activist and organizer for the Indigenous Action Movement, Kat Norris told the Georgia Straight in an interview that the inquiry gave substance to persistent suspicions that there had been a cover-up. Norris pointed out that if police had reported that Paul had died while he was in police custody, the Coroners Service of B.C. would have had no recourse but to order an immediate inquest, a mandatory court proceeding with a jury that never took place in this case. Former RCMP officer, Vancouver mayor, and now Senator, Larry Campbell was chief coroner at that time. Norris noted that all that is known is that Paul died of hypothermia. “It’s important to know why they want to cover it up so badly. That changes things. It’s important for true justice to Frank and for anyone else who has died under suspicious circumstances while in police custody.

Sergeant Russell Sanderson refused to admit Paul, when Constable Instant brought him in, saying he’d been there only a few hours earlier and could not have had time to get drunk yet again. Sanderson ordered Instant to drive Paul to an intersection on the west side of Vancouver. But not knowing exactly where to leave Paul, Instant took him to an alley behind the detox centre on the east side after another senior cop told him that was the best place for the homeless man. Instant testified he propped Paul up against a wall and left, thinking he would soon get up and be on his way, perhaps finding shelter at one of two fast-food restaurants in the area. About six hours later, Paul was found dead on his back on a pile of gravel, some distance from the wall. A paramedic who arrived at the scene told the inquiry that the gravel underneath Paul’s body had shifted “like a snow angel” indicating he may have had a seizure before he died. Or he may have experienced an effect called “hide and die syndrome” (terminal burrowing behavior). People dying of hypothermia, according to Dr. Gray, “sometimes try to hide and may also attempt to remove some of their clothing because they feel hot.” A photo entered as an exhibit at the inquiry shows Frank Paul was found with his sweatshirt pulled up to his chest and his shoes off.