Blog

Ray Hamm

fall 2020

If you needed a decision, a direction, from Roseau River First Nation, would you ask chief and council, or would you ask the custom council? Or, maybe you would ask the elders. And suppose there were different responses, what would you do?

We recently had supper with friends from BC; he is retired from his career of working with indigenous people on community development. He knows some of the people involved in the current Wet’suwet’en situation. The differences between different leaders and different governing systems is one of the significant factors.

A history of the Ojibway people written in the middle 1800’s says that the most damaging thing the colonial powers did to the peoples in the land was to change their systems of governance. One of the current elders at Roseau said the same thing. About 35 years ago I happened to be on a Mohawk reserve in Ontario and the internal tension between different systems was certainly there.

The bitter fruits of that imposition and confusion are still with us today. And there is a lot of money and many jobs tied up in this.

Approximately three hundred and fifty years ago, a king in England decided he could give exclusive commercial rights to Rupert’s Land (all the land that drained into Hudson Bay) to the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC). Somehow HBC came to “own” the land and then Canada bought Rupert’s Land from HBC. The indigenous people never saw any money.

When Lord Selkirk made a treaty with the indigenous people in 1817, it was getting permission for settlers to live in specified areas in the indigenous territories.

Then, again somehow, in Treaty One in 1871, in southern Manitoba, Canada could give land to the indigenous people – in reality give them back a little of the land they had in the first place. And there was to be ongoing consultation. Instead, the Indian Act was imposed n 1876. Our own government records provide ample documentation of how the treaty was imposed on the people and of how even then the terms of the treaty were not fully honoured. The civilized settlers, apparently more ‘Christian’ than the indigenous people, have not done well with treaties.

Since Rupert’s Land only extended to the Rocky Mountains, treaties or lack of treaties in BC is a whole different story.

The early treaties, after initial contacts between settlers and indigenous peoples, were for cooperation and trade, maybe prisoner exchanges. Then came the military alliance treaties involving the indigenous people in the English French conflict in this new land. And then came the treaties where the civilized governments gave back some land. One could understand why ‘treaty’ might be a dirty word in their cultures.

All this needs to be untangled but the environment and the climate can not wait for that process to finish before action is needed. All of us, all races, want a stable and sustainable future for the children of tomorrow. Separate. parallel discussions and negotiations need to be created.

In the annual Year at a Glance issue, 2020, the Economist suggests that one of the questions that the children 50 years from now will be asking is how was it possible that so little was done in these years, in our time, to stabilize the climate.