The Political Response of Aboriginal Peoples

In fact, in the twentieth century aboriginal resistance to the various crusades by Indian Affairs and its missionary allies to remake native communities increasingly took a political form. Efforts to organize politically began before World War I in British Columbia, where a long-festering dispute over land drove the diverse First Nations to combine politically. The next phase occurred after the war, when an army veteran, Lieutenant F.O. Loft, attempted to organize the League of Indians of Canada. Loft’s initiative did not endure, but during the 1920s the organizational torch passed to the prairies, where the League of Western Indians kept it lit. Also during the interwar period, fledgling provincial associations began to emerge, as in establishment of the Indian Association of Alberta in 1939. Slowly after World War II these tendencies would coalesce in the formation of national bodies to speak on behalf of aboriginal peoples. The first enduring effort was the National Indian Council (NIC), which took shape in 1961. In 1968 the NIC subdivided amicably into the National Indian Brotherhood (NIB), a body of status Indians, and the Canadian Metis Society, a vehicle for the political aspirations of Metis and non-status groups. Eventually the NIB would refashion itself in the 1980s as the Assembly of First Nations (AFN), and, as Olive P. Dickason explains, the Canadian Metis Society would evolve into the Native Council of Canada in 1970, the Metis National Council after the constitutional scrum of the early 1980s, and the Metis Nation of Canada in the 1990s. Among the Inuit, the Inuit Tapirisat of Canada had been founded in 1971. For aboriginal peoples throughout the country, the twentieth century was a time of political organization.

These political bodies, though they differed on specific issues, were motivated by a common desire to throw off the paternalistic policies of the federal government and assert native control over their own affairs. For status Indians in particular, the principal obstacles to their successful development were the Indian Act and the Department of Indian Affairs that administered it. The act treated First Nations people legally as wards, or minors, with the department occupying the role in law of adult trustee over their affairs. This legal doctrine of Indian infantilism was most starkly revealed in the Indian Act’s provisions that reserve lands could not be pledged as collateral for loans and that an Indian’s will was not legally valid unless and until approved by the department. However, the paternalism pervaded Indian Affairs administration. For Metis and non-status Indians, the principal complaint for most of the twentieth century was that the federal government refused to accept any responsibility for them. The result for these groups was that they were marginalized and forgotten, particularly in prairie Canada where attitudes towards them were hardly charitable. For Inuit groups in Quebec and the Northwest Territories, the major problems were similarly related to Ottawa’s neglect, although in their case the highest court in 1939 imposed jurisdiction for Inuit on the federal government against Ottawa’s will. All aboriginal peoples had numerous complaints and valid reasons for organizing politically.

Since the 1960s two tendencies have dominated in the political relations between native peoples and the government. On the one hand, native peoples have been motivated by concern about everyday problems such as inadequate housing and health care or schooling for their children that did not give them a fighting chance of succeeding in the modern world. These grassroots concerns frequently resulted in political campaigns to gain control over policy in areas that mattered greatly to them. The best example of this process was Indian control of Indian education, which the National Indian Brotherhood demanded in the early 1970s and Ottawa conceded in 1973.

On the other hand, however, native peoples’ practical concerns have frequently been forced to take a back seat to issues that non-natives put on the public agenda. A gross example of this tendency was a federal-government white paper in 1969, which proposed the elimination of “Indians” as a separate legal category, supposedly in the interests of eradicating the ghettoization that was holding them back. It took a strenuous campaign by a united front of national and provincial status Indian groups to get the white paper shelved. However, from the late 1970s to the 1990s the concern among non-native political leaders about constitutional renewal has forced aboriginal leaders to play the constitutional game, too. Beginning in 1977 with efforts to defuse the separatist threat of the first Parti Québécois government, and continuing through the 1980s and into the 1990s with the battles over repatriation of the British North America Act in 1981–82, the Meech Lake Accord from 1987 to 1990, and the Charlottetown Accord in 1992, the powerful current of Canadian politics has drawn aboriginal leaders to emphasize constitutional issues. In particular, the leadership since the early 1980s has stressed the desirability of getting a definition of the aboriginal right of self-government embedded in the constitution and implemented in practice. The pursuit of aboriginal self-government has absorbed enormous amounts of time and energy on the part of aboriginal political leaders while deflecting attention and resources away from more mundane needs such as reserve housing, clean water, better schools, and improved health care.

The other preoccupation of aboriginal political leaders since the early 1970s has been the land question. Beginning in 1974 the government of Canada created a two-stage land-claims resolution process. One part concerned what the government called “specific claims,” which were allegations that some treaty or other lawful obligation had not been discharged by the crown. The other category, comprehensive claims, concerned claims to land based on aboriginal title in regions where this form of customary proprietorship had not been eradicated by treaty. British Columbia, the two territories, and portions of northern Quebec and Labrador have been the major arenas for the contentions over comprehensive claims. Gradually in the 1990s some progress began to be visible in this area, but at the end of the decade there are still many comprehensive claims outstanding – as, indeed, is also true of specific claims – while non-native opposition to redressing these issues rises and falls and the ability of the public coffers to provide compensation for past wrongs and neglect shrinks. The land question, like aboriginal self-government, is contentious and potentially explosive in the late 1990s.