KEYNOTE SPEECH BY TAIAIAKE ALFRED
FIRST NATIONS CHIEFS OF POLICE ASSOCIATION
ANNUAL GENERAL ASSEMBLY
VICTORIA, BC, JUNE 10, 2008
Sago. It is really good to be here today. I am very proud to be invited to speak to people who are doing work in the community. People who are committed to making life better for the people in the community. A lot of times I talk to groups of people who are involved in politics and academia. They do not have a strong sense of what it is like in Native communities, on the ground level. They do not know what the realities are, or what the challenges and opportunities are.
I am not an expert on policing. My only experience with policing was three months as an MP, in a Camp in Okinawa with the Marine Corps, a long time ago. That is when I was working on the ground level. Then I worked in Kahnawake. One of the things that I was really happy to be involved with, and I put a lot of effort into, was the initial design of the justice structure that they now have in Kahnawake. I have a sense of the way things were, and where we came from as a community, in terms of how we were policed and how the justice system related to our community. I saw how that relationship broke down and why it broke down. I also saw how our community tried to adapt to take charge of our own policing and our own justice, and to begin to advance our own notions of what policing and justice were in our community. I had a limited exposure to that. I worked on that for about two or three years, and then moved on to work on other things.
One thing I am an expert on is growing up as a Native, living in a Native community, and relating to the non-Native society and non-Native institutions. Another thing that I spent a lot of time thinking about, as a Native person, is why things are the way they are in our communities. The first book that I wrote was actually my own answer to that question. I am 43. I grew up in the late 60’s and came of age in the 70’s and the early 80’s. The community of Kahnawake, and to a certain extent I guess it was like that all across the country, was in an era of turmoil, transition, change and of people shrugging off the direct controls of the Department of Indian Affairs and the R.C.M.P., and beginning to do things on their own. When I came of age, and I came to realize what our community was all about, I found out that it was all about conflict. It was really about rejection of the way things were and the authorities that governed us. It was a situation where everything was being questioned, including our own tradition and our own sense of ourself. When I came to become an adult, and I came to try to understand myself as an Ongwehonweh and as a Native person, the first questions that came to my mind were “Why is it that our people are always fighting? Why is it that our people are always fighting amongst themselves? Why are they always fighting with other people? Why is that there is always this conflict between the Police agencies and my friends, and the people that I know, who are not bad people, but yet they are always in conflict and always in jail”?
My perspective on institutions and authority, and Police being one of those, comes from that perspective. From a community person growing up in the midst of this turmoil, and then trying to understand why it is that this is in place. The bulk of the work that I have done, as a scholar, has been to try to answer that question. I think I have a pretty good sense of an answer right now. I am not going to say that I have all the answers. I do not think anyone really does ever have all the answers, but I have been at it for quite some now. I have travelled all over this country and talked to people of all ages and genders. I have talked to Natives, non-Natives, different Nations and First Nations.
It seems to me that there is a unified perspective on what the challenge is that Native communities are facing, coming out of the historical era of direct control and colonialism. I want to convey that to you, because I believe that is the context that we are all working in. Whether we work in education, cultural issues, policing, child protection, or anything like that, it is easy to get drawn into our specialized knowledges and to begin to look at the problem from our own specialized perspective. In a sense, we have to do that. We have to be specialized in order to be good at what we do. But, at the same time, it is always a danger to get too drawn into that and to forget the big picture. It is an obvious point that is made, I think rhetorically a lot of times, especially for people like us who are immersed daily in the work that we do. It is easy to lose the bigger picture. That bigger picture is quite consistent among First Nations people, and in the experience of First Nations, when you look across the country. If I had four days, I could lay out a whole analysis and a whole explanation with details and examples. But, I only have half an hour, so I am going to have to boil it down theoretically, say it in kind of a blunt way, and put the explanation right in front of you. We can have a discussion later if anybody does not quite get it or does not quite agree.
The basic explanation is that we have never really resolved the problem of colonization and its three major facets. The problem of colonization is not one of a historical era. It is not one of red coats, muskets and felt hats, or anything like that. It is not even one of priests in residential schools. It is all that, plus a live process. The process of colonization is on-going. It is on-going, because the objectives of the larger society, as they relate to indigenous people, has not really changed. Intellectually, they cannot understand it. They do not feel that things have changed all that much from the very first days of contact when the non-Native society came looking for land and looking to take down their societies, their authorities, their laws and their governments. The non-Native society came looking to transform their culture, and their way of being in the world, to that which reflected, or at least was complimentary, to that of the new society that was emerging. So in a sense, colonialism is a live process, because land is still being lost or issues of land are not resolved. Authorities, laws and governments are not respected. When questions of culture come up, it is still the question of Native peoples accommodating or adapting to the new cultural ideal of the Canadian society, as opposed to having their cultural values, norms and way of life fundamentally respected.
Again, I am saying it in a blunt way. I could have taken a long time to explain all of those processes, but I think that all of you probably have a grasp of what I am talking about, even if it is not a situation that you are thinking about every day. If you think about the history of this country, you can think of a narrative or a story that is told in the public discourse, in the media, in movies, in television and in the school systems, of one of conquest, or of the Native people being a problem. That phrase, “the Indian problem”, has been used historically. I think it is still a very powerful question and powerful issue today. The “Indian problem”. The “Indian problem” was that, at first, the Indians were in the way. When the non-Native people came from Europe, they were looking for land to build their societies. They were escaping persecution. They were escaping whatever situation it was in Europe that drove them here. There were a lot of different reasons that people came from Europe. But they came here, nonetheless, and the problem was that Native people owned all the land. The Native people owned the land. That situation had to change, because, otherwise, there could not be the establishment of the vision and the dream that the people from Europe had in this territory. All kinds of legal principles were imagined, developed and implemented in order to achieve this in a legal sense. It was also done in a physical sense. The removal was done in a lot of different ways. It was done through financial incentives and so forth.
But if you think about it, the first relationship, in spite of some of the rhetoric that we see on both sides, romanticizes it a bit. The reality is that Native and non-Native relations were problematic from the beginning. The Natives were in the way. Think about it today in relation to issues like Caledonia. Whether you want to focus on Caledonia and Six Nations today, or whether you want to focus on conflicts that have gone on in the last generation or two, it is always the Native people are in the way. People can say “Well, you know, things were different back then, 200 hundred years ago, and things are different now”. But, in reality, how different are they? There is always the continual development, the so called progress of Canadian and North American society, and there is always the impediment posed by indigenous people. It is still the reality today, even though the land base of the Native people has been shrunk. Whatever is left is still open for development, in the view of the Canadian society. So there is still that problem. We can analyse and argue about it from legal terms and technical terms, but this principle that I am putting forward, is that the perception and the understanding of the Native people themselves, is just as important as anything else. Native people understand it this way.
Same thing when it comes to governance. When it comes to governance, there is a parallel process here. There is the issue of the supremacy of Canadian law, and the supremacy of the identity in the political community of Canada, as opposed to that of the Haudenosaunee, Anishnabe or Treaty people. There is the question of what that relationship is. Indigenous people understand that relationship in historical terms, based on Treaties, a Nation to Nation relationship and the inherent sovereignty of indigenous people. A lot of times it sounds like rhetoric, but, in reality, what it means is that Native people are asking for equality of treatment on a collective level to that of the Canadian society. That has never been the case in this situation. I should not say never, because if you do look at it historically, there are examples of the Native view being recognized and respected. Initially, in the relationship, Native people were given that equality of treatment and sovereignty and Nationhood were recognized. But as soon as the military capacity of the European society moved against that initial principle of the Treaty relationship of Nation to Nation that was there, that Nation to Nation relationship was jettisoned in favour of the one that we know now as the Indian Act relationship, which is basically one of wardship. In its positive terms, it was one of wardship. In its negative terms, there are things from wardship, all the way to extinguishment. When it comes to governance, we also have that problem of the Native people being in the way. It was not enough that the Native people lost 99% of their land. The fact is that there was still governance, Treaties and legal impediments to the development of the vision of the society that the European peoples brought with them. That issue had to be addressed. The way that it was addressed was not through reconciliation and co-operation, but through termination and under-mining.
Culture. I think the height of an example is something that we are living with today, which is going to be a big deal in the media tomorrow. It is going to be a big deal, politically, for the next week or two. That is the apology that the Prime Minister is offering, on behalf of the country, in relation to residential schools and that whole experience. I do not need to explain that. A lot of people probably have a personal and family experience with that. I think Canadian society understands now, how residential schools were part of a programmatic approach to the under-mining of indigenous people’s culture.
What I am saying in relaying all of this historical information, or I should say reminding people of all of this historical perspective, is that indigenous people are living with a process of colonization, as non-Native people are. If we forget that, we do it at our peril. A lot of the behaviours that we associate with criminality, and social pathologies in indigenous communities, cannot be explained in any other way except politically, because of the dispossession of these people, and because of the refusal of the indigenous communities to accommodate their own conquest. That is a situation that is beyond the capacity of a Policeman, Professor or Social Worker to address. But, it is not a problem that we can ignore and go on to do our work in any way that is convenient to us. The convenient way to approach this is to ignore the colonial problem and to accommodate the structures that have been set up by the colonial society, in order to manage these various problems, or address them in ways that the larger society deems appropriate and most effective. But, as indigenous people, as First Nations leaders, as First Nations Police Chief, and as people who are making decisions about what is best for indigenous communities and how best to help our people, I think we have the added responsibility to think through this beyond what is a question of efficacy.
It is the same thing in the field of education. There are much easier ways to approach the problem then to focus on the historical roots and the multi-generational trauma, and to begin to look at the question from that perspective. There are pathways set out for all of us to follow, as leaders in our community, whether it is in policing, education, social work or any other field. Governmental pathways that satisfy everybody, and that do their best to satisfy everybody. But, as indigenous leaders, there is the added responsibility to look at the problem as an indigenous person. As an indigenous person, what is your responsibility then? If you are going to look at it from an indigenous perspective, it seems that as a leader, whether it is a political leader, a Police Chief or someone who is involved in political activism in the community, you are faced with a stark choice. That is not your creation and there is nothing that you can really do about it. The choice, and the dilemma of Native leadership today, in any of these fields, is really one of accepting conflict with the outside authorities, and having more peace in your community, or accepting peace with the outside authorities, and having more conflict in your community. It is a funny thing, once you realize it. But, I challenge anybody to dispute that, no matter what field you are working in. That is the way that the politics of indigenous communities have been set up today.
In Kahnawake, they made the choice, initially, to accept more peace in the community and to confront the outside authorities legally, politically and financially, in order to accomplish their objectives as indigenous people, and to adhere, as closely as they could, to the values in the community, as they were expressed to that common culture. That involved the re-assertion of Nationhood. The re-assertion of traditional Haudenosaunee culture and simple attitudes about controlling their own community and decision making. They accepted the conflicts that went along with that. I cannot really speak about whether or not that is the attitude, or the approach, that is being taken by that Police Force. But, I can say, as a person who lived in that community for a long time, that it is a very different tone and a very different attitude that the people have towards their Police Force, the Kahnawake Peacekeepers, then the attitude they had towards the Police that used to patrol our communities, even though they were Mohawks themselves. That was the Quebec Police and the Amerindian Police Force before them.
So something was done. It was effective. The thing was that that organization, and the people who headed up that community, made that decision. They made the decision to confront the outside authority and to do what they needed to do, in order to defend and protect the values of that community, versus the values that were being imposed on them by the outside authorities. Not to take a confrontational approach, per se, because that is a whole other ball game. I am using Kahnawake as an example of the kind of challenges that face just about every community that is moving towards self-government in the field of policing and otherwise. The challenges that that community faces are the same as any community that is looking to be a part of the restoration of that community, and not simply the management of a colonial problem. That is the clearest way I could put it. The Police Force and the Band Council at that time, whatever authority was operating in the community in that era of re-generation in the late 70’s and 80’s, chose to be a part of the restoration of those people as First Nations people, and chose to accept the inherent conflict that came with the outside authority.
I have said that two or three times now. But, in today’s day and age, I do not think that that gets talked about very much, because we are building on the successes of the previous generation, so to speak. The fact that there is a First Nations Chiefs of Police Association. The fact that there is the development of a great enhancement of capacity, not only in the area of policing, but in education, in health and in a lot of different fields in many communities. It is highly uneven. It is not the same every where. In some cases, there is still very far to go. But, there is development of a great capacity. A lot of us get drawn into the attitude, or the idea, that because there has been this great enhancement, that somehow the government’s attitude towards the community has fundamentally shifted. But it has not. I think that the government’s attitude towards indigenous communities remains the same as that colonial framework that I outlined above. All the successes that we have had have been because of the sacrifice and the hard work of the community and of the people who are involved in governing that community. Think about your own home community, and whether anything has developed from the perspective of the community itself, or whether things have developed, or progressed, because the government agencies offered that success. Or has it been because of a resistance on the part of the government, and more assertion on the part of the community, and then a negotiation of an accommodation that has resulted in what we now know as progress. In every instance, when you look at indigenous communities across North America, it is that pattern. It is that pattern of assertion, blow back, assertion again, and then a negotiation of a level of change.
Where we are at right now, not only has to do with policing. In fact, it is across the board. It is a general tone with Aboriginal politics and First Nations politics across the country. We are resting on the laurels of that latest phase of assertion. We might identify it as the mid-1990’s. We had a series of conflicts. We had the threat of a Nation wide indigenous up-rising, so to speak, in the media. You had Oka. You had the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. You had this series of court cases. You had all kinds of things happening, where the recognition was that Native peoples were not going to accept the status quo and, therefore, things had to change in certain areas. Besides that, there was more educational achievement. The capacity of First Nations people to govern themselves was increasing. Therefore, you had these gradual increases in capacity and the recognition of our governing authorities.
But it seems that we have hit a situation where the people who have become integrated in that system of governing, whether it is in politics, education, law, social work or policing, have come to identify with the system that they have become part of. I am not pointing fingers here. I am sure that represents some of you. It sure represents some of my colleagues and myself, too, in my work history. I am part of a large institution. The University of Victoria. It has its own imperatives and priorities. Not all of them support the values of the indigenous resurgence that I am talking about here. It is very easy for anyone to get drawn into it. All I will say is that we need to really think about it. I will offer that we really need to think about what we do in this larger context, because it is a specific strategy of all governments. Even if you work for the government. It is not an articulated, explicit policy, at this point, because it does not have to be. But co-optation, and the integration of the indigenous peoples into that network and that system of governing, leads to the gradual assimilation of the values of that system into those people. They, in effect, govern themselves by that system, as opposed to that alternative indigenous system which they originally were fighting for. That is a very insidious, but yet undeniable process.
I had been involved in politics for awhile and I saw that happening in the realm of land claims and self-government negotiations. I had come from this period in Kahanwake history where it was all about assertions, rejections of authority and all 110% Mohawk. Then I hear people talking about rationalizing the government’s agenda. Rationalizing their position and using Canadian law, Aboriginal rights law and ideas about the government coming in from the outside. It is not necessarily a bad thing. But, if it is done in an environment where we are forgetting what the priorities and the real imperatives are, and the important things that are coming from our own cultural teachings and our own community perspectives, then it is a very bad thing, because that becomes our culture. That institutional culture becomes our culture. The rest becomes window dressing. It has happened in land claims and it has happened in self-government. I spent many years talking about that and dealing with that. But it has not happened across the board. It does not have to be a permanent thing, even if it does become a dominant thing. We are people that can make choices. We are people that can still govern ourselves as individuals, as families and as communities. It is simply a matter of looking at, again, what are the values that we are trying to bring into our work. If we try to bring those values that our community says they want to live by, and says that they want to see restored in their lives as people and as a collective, then we have to make the choice to advance those and to deal with whatever blow back we get from the government institutions. It is simply a fact that too many of us are caught up in the rationalization of ourselves and our jobs, by that larger explanation of what it is that we do. I hope that I am not insulting anyone. Even if it is you that I am talking about. I hope that you are not insulted, but that you are looking at it as a chance to have a good think about yourself, and a good argument with somebody who is bringing some different ideas to the discussion.
The last book that I wrote is kind of a personal investigation of just how deeply I, and people like me, were caught up in this complex that I was just talking about. This complex of co-optation. The syndrome of co-optation where we start rationalizing, thinking and advancing. In effect, we become a weapon of that colonial enterprise, as opposed to a weapon of that community resurgence which is so vitally important.
This is an analysis that I am giving you. I believe in it one hundred percent. It comes from my mind, my experience and my heart. In a sense, it could be looked at as just that. An analysis and a critique. But, when it comes down to it, I honestly believe, because of the experience of my own family and the people in the communities that I have come to know and love, that there is really no way to heal all of the trauma that our people are going through, whether it is social, psychological or even health related, without taking the approach of looking at ourselves as Ongwehonweh people and re-defining ourselves, and attempting to live our lives differently, according to our own teachings. That is an honest statement of why it is that I am critical of the kind of structure that has been set up to govern us in this country. It is a question of efficacy. Ironically, all of the social, legal and political structures that have been set up to do good for our people are failing. They are not working. In spite of the fact that we are becoming richer, that we are becoming more middle class, that we are getting better houses, that there are more of us in universities and school, the more important indicators of health and happiness, the kind of lives our people are living and the fulfillment of those lives, are going the other way. That is the real motivation for wanting to make a difference in the community. I think that whether you are a Policeman or a Professor, that should be the real motivation that you should bring to your work, if I may say so.
Dane toh. Nia:weh koa.
QUESTION & ANSWER
It has been my experience that when you try and explain the indigenous perspective to a non-indigenous person, there seems to be an assumption that indigenous people were somehow conquered. This seems to be the biggest roadblock when we are trying to get them to understand our paradigm. What is your view on how you combat that? Or do you believe that we are in fact conquered people?
My view on it is that it is a twist on the word “conquest”. I do not think you can be conquered, until you conquer yourself, or you allow yourself to be conquered. When most people use it, and when it is being used in the media, I think what they mean is that European societies came over here, and because of a superiority of technology or industry or, in the worst case scenario, a belief of racial superiority, we were subdued. So, the white society ended up on top. We ended up on the reserve and they got the land. That is what is meant by conquest. In that sense, that is not the historical narrative that is true.
It was a lot more complicated than that. It had a lot more to do with collapsing populations as a result of diseases, than any type of superiority on the non-Native society’s part. Nonetheless, there was a conquest. It had more to do with the psychological, social and cultural collapse of our societies. You can only withstand an assault for so long. If you think about it, how long have our people put up with it? Especially, if you take the people that had the first contact. It has been hundreds of years that they have been in this kind of contest. In a lot of cases, and for many, many years, open warfare between the non-Native and the Native did occur. We are now in the current era, where there is a fragile living together, but not on happy terms. You can sustain yourself, psychologically, at a position of war, for only so long.
So people adapt. I think that a lot of people adapted by pacifying themselves. It is that pacification, and the creation of a culture that accepts that position relative to the non-Native society, that is the real conquest. The fact that our populations collapsed because of diseases. The fact that there was a massive immigration beginning in the 1800’s. It was then that the population demographic shifted from one which favoured Natives to where it was relatively equal, and then to one where it was just off the charts in favour of the non-Native society. You cannot really confront that in physical or political terms, so people had to accommodate that. I think that for a long time, our people had a cultural foundation to deal with that. They had their language. They had their spirituality. They had their community. That was enough. If you think back to our grandmothers, grandfathers and great-grandparents, there was enough there to hold them together as a community. But over the past couple of generations, there has been language loss and so forth. Language loss is at the core of the dispossession of our people from the land and the connections that have been lost there. You see the shrinking of that cultural foundation to almost nothing. Where someone of my generation, and the younger generation, can stand on a foundation that is this big, our grandparents stood on one that was much bigger. You cannot really sustain that in an attitude of contention.
The whole idea of accommodation, co-operation and reconciliation. All these ideas are, basically, giving a moral equality to the Canadian society, in exchange for this fragile peace. That is the “conquest”. That is my twist on the word “conquest”. But, in the conventional usage of it, historically speaking, it is not accurate.
With respect to the residential school payments, and our people actively going out and seeking their piece of the pie, are we giving an implied forgiveness to the federal government? Are we sending a message that material compensation can address those issues? That once the money is paid, or the material is given, the issue is dead and we will move on? It is alarming if you are saying that we may have been caught up in the process without thinking long term.
It is a tough one to even comment on because everybody’s experience is so different and so personal. I believe you are right. I am critical of the whole approach that has been taken. Not in that it addresses the individual harms that were perpetrated against those individuals, which need to be addressed. That is the good part of it. The bureaucratization of it is, some could say, a necessary by-product. It is not nice, but it is a necessary thing. If you are giving out money, it has to be disbursed somehow.
The fundamental question that you are pointing at is “What is it doing for Canadian society and what is it doing for indigenous people, as a whole”? My view is that it is obscuring a lot, because if you look at the residential school experience, it happened to tens of thousands of young indigenous people who then grew up. A lot of whom, sadly, carried on the legacy of the residential school treatment to their families. Then it expanded, exponentially, to a situation where it has been a contributing factor to the creation of a lot of the social problems that we have in our communities today. If it was understood this way, and addressed this way, and if the apology was about that, and if there were measures taken to address that in a meaningful way, then I do not think anyone would have anything to complain about. But, if it is identified as a problem in relation to the churches and in relation to those individuals, and that by paying them money we can somehow make up for the problem, then it is a vast misunderstanding of the problem. If it is being done, in a conscious way, to cap the problem at that individual and not address the waves of multi-generational effects that have come and are still there in the community, then I think it is a bad thing. It is a very bad thing. It is really up to us if we let it be that. So the Prime Minister is going to level an apology tomorrow. I think the reaction of the residential school survivors, and then the rest of us, will tell whether or not it is satisfactory. Whether or not it something that is part of our history now, or whether or not it is something that still needs to be addressed.
I do not have much confidence in the Prime Minister’s apology, even though I have not seen it yet. I can pretty much guarantee that it is going to deal with the effects on those individuals and not with the lingering effects in the communities, which are a lot more expensive and a lot more devastating, collectively, to our people.
But it is hard to go public and comment on all of this, just because of the sensitivities. There are a lot of people who look forward to this, because it heals something individually within them. Who am I to deny them that? Who are we to deny them that? I think that the responsibility of the leadership is to say “That is that, but it is not enough”. You have to look at it in the bigger picture.
I am thinking about the turmoil with the Police and the community in Kahnawake and how that started. I am guessing that the community drove it by incidents of some sort. I am interested in the technical aspect. How did this evolve? I am trying to be proactive thinking about some of the issues in our community.
When I wrote my first book, I had to actually do some research. I talked to Andrew Delisle Sr., and people from Kahnawake who were involved in the Band Council at the time. I was only fourteen when this stuff started happening, but as far as I understand it, the Band Council had taken steps to accept these new initiatives that were coming forth. People from Quebec might have a longer history with policing than I do, but there were efforts to indigenize the policing on the reserves in Quebec. I remember that my Dad was in the Amerindian Police Force. They were trained by the Quebec Police and they were given authorization. Their source of authority was from the Quebec Police Act. It was actually Kahnawake owned policing. That did not last too long. It only lasted a year or two because of the fundamental problem of the authority to actually set direction. Whose laws were you going to enforce? That is what it all came down to.
In Kahnawake, Mohawk nationalism is very strong about how you want to use the land, what your borders are, questions of membership and so forth. These became irritants. There was a disagreement between Quebec law, federal law and then the emerging Mohawk law. They came to a head. The spark was when the Band Council wanted to shut down a quarry that was in operation. They told the Police to shut down the quarry. To lock it up and to evict the owners. It was owned by a non-Native person. Quebec law authorized it because they had a permit, so the Police could not go and actually close down the quarry. That was kind of the spark that drove home the point. We may have our own Police, but whose laws are they enforcing? I actually can remember people at community meetings talking this way. What is the point of having our own Police, if they are enforcing Quebec law and federal law? What they did was get rid of that Police agreement. They got rid of those Police. For a period of at least six months to a year, there was that kind of community spirit that you hear about sometimes. Where people actually govern themselves and police themselves. They then formed the Kahnawake Peacekeepers. They, gradually, over a period of fifteen years, became more and more professionalized, to the point where they signed an agreement, just a few years ago, with the federal and provincial governments to recognize the Kahnawake Peacekeepers. By that point, the Kahnawake Peacekeeprs had become a thoroughly professional Force, with training at the R.C.M.P. in Regina and all the various Police training institutes in Quebec. But, they never had the official recognition or the funding. So the community took it upon itself to take funds from other jurisdictions to fund that Police Force for fifteen years, before it was recognized and thus received funding. That is why I use it as an example of a community driven process to control itself.
I think it is important to also mention the imperatives on the part of the community at the time. You need to think about the things that they were involved in, and the kind of economic and other activities going on in that community. Having their own Police was very important, especially into the 1980’s, when there were conflicts between federal and provincial laws. There were also conflicts between provincial political policies, especially the economic policies, and the policies in Kahnawake. So having their own Police Force was a good thing that the community really wanted and needed. That is an important part of the equation. They were not satisfied with the outside policing agencies. It was a good thing that the community desparately wanted and was willing to sacrifice in order to get. It think that is an important thing to realize in any movement, whether it is in policing or otherwise. For all of our talk about nationalism and wanting to control our own authorities, the people really have to be willing to support it, as well. There were all kinds of conflicts and all kinds of sacrifices that had to be made, on the part of the people, in order to support that institution, as it developed into the Force that it is today.
I know that there are people in Kahnwake today who complain about the Peacekeepers, because it is now integrated. Those people who complain are involved in cigarette smuggling and so forth. But, it is an institution that is still valued, because people still have a memory of the situation that they dealt with before.
When you look at the resurgence of indigenous governance, there always seems to be the issue, or the obstacle, of financing the resurgence. What are your thoughts on that?
That is the biggest question that you could face. I mean it is easy to talk like a radical and it is easy to talk like a nationalist, until you have to start issuing pay cheques or paying the hydro bills or paying for your internet. Then the reality sets in. The idealism of a nationalist, and the idealism of indigenous resurgence, always has to be balanced by the realities of your capacity to govern yourself. That is something that we talk about when we talk to students who are coming through the program, and we are trying to train them to be leaders.
But having said that, that is exactly the thing that I am talking about. Not to put that first and foremost. It is important to have the ideals and values and to try to find a way to make them work, as opposed to saying “What are my parameters, based on how much money I have, and what kind of values I can fit in”? It is a whole different mindset. You may meet somewhere in the middle sometimes, but, in reality, I think the way you constrain yourself is very important. We constrain ourselves from this side, in terms of this attitude and this approach to indigenous governance. We constrain ourselves with the ideals, the values and the principles of indigenous governance. We try to be pragmatic when we can, but it is all about compromise. Politics is all about compromise. When and where do you compromise, and what for? Those are the key questions that any leader has to look at.
The cigarette trade was a huge economic employer in Kahnawake in the 1980’s and 1990’s. People were relatively economically independent because of it. They were not dependent on outside authorities for the provision of services. It is a very simple equation. It gets right to the heart of your question. You cannot really have a Nation that is dependent, financially, on another Nation. You can have one in theory, but not in reality. That is just one aspect of it. Kahnawake has a prouder history than the cigarette trade. It was independent employment in the iron working trade. For many years, people were able to support their families through engagement in the iron working trade. That was a form of economic independence as well. It meant a lot of sacrifice on the part of men¸ women and families, to see that kind of dynamic in the community, where men would be absent, for the most part. They would be home for a day or two. Sometimes, only a day or two a month. They would be in New York and Detroit and those places. But, they would bring back the income that allowed their families to survive. That is not being dependent on those outside authorities to fund their community.
We have lost that sense of independence and that understanding that independence is really a by-product of self sufficiency. It is in all our traditional teachings. It is in all of our Elders’ words. But no matter how much you study it, you cannot really find a different equation. You cannot find a different equation, other than economic self sufficiency equals independence. If you are dependent on funding to put food in your mouth in your community, it is going to be a watered down form of independence. I really believe that is an iron law. The level of self sufficiency you have gives you the capacity to assert an independence.
In the day and age that we live in, it is very difficult to conceputalize a situation where communities can go back to a traditional lifestyle where they are self sufficient as either hunters, gatherers or agricultural people. It is still possible in some cases. But even in those cases, most people would not want to do it. They have been off the farm and they have seen the way other people live. It is hard to go back. I teach our students to think about their own opportunities to be self sufficient for themselves and their family, and to look at what is there. Higher education is there. Skills training is there. It is a matter of how you use that and how you engage with that. If you could become self sufficient as a family, and if a whole bunch of families in a community can become self sufficient, and by that I mean not depending on the Department of Indian Affairs to fund you and your community, you have a lot more range of action than people who are dependent on it, either through welfare or through wholesale funding of their institutions. It is an important point that you are bringing forward. Ten or fifteen years ago, we were all about the rhetoric about nationalism, and that question kind of got put off to the side or buried. But now it is at the forefront. It is one of those things that people have to realize. The unfortunate thing, from the perspective that I have, is that a lot of people approach economic development in that kind of co-optive way, which is what is out there and how can I get involved, as opposed to how can I create some economic freedom for myself. There is the easy way, and then there is the harder way.
The successes in the community have all been as a result of people having the ability to fund their own schools, their own institutions and to feed themselves. Without that, all this is talk.
Then I would be giving a talk on how to better serve indigenous communities as Police agencies structured like anywhere else, because then there is really no capacity for autonomous self government. There is the argument to be made that that is due to us. That we are due funding. I do not think that holds much water, even among Natives, these days.
Every day it is a struggle for us to try and find young people that are able to step forward and become Police Officers. Often times we read in the newspapers about the number of kids not completing school. The number seems to be higher than the kids that are actually in the graduate side of the house. What are your ideas or your thoughts on how it is going to turn around in the near future? Or what strategies can we use to assist our communities to make a difference and swing it back to where, at one time, there were lawyers and doctors and people like that? It seems to have levelled off to some degree.
I think it is very uneven. In some communities, it is expanding. Education is growing and people are getting more educated. In other communities, it is collapsing. We see that at the university level. We see, first of all, that the biggest disparity is between men and women. Ninety to ninety-five percent of our students are women. That goes across the board in North America. When you look at First Nations students in college and graduate school, and even in medical school, these days it has shifted over towards women. It is a general trend in society. More women are going to school than men. Classes are now more than fifty percent women. Among First Nations, it is sometimes ninety percent. Sometimes, all of our in-coming students are female.
That is an issue that I am not really able to answer, except to say that these kinds of issues, that I talked about, are affecting men in a way which causes them to self destruct, or to move towards patterns of destruction, as opposed to women. Their reaction is to move towards patterns of creation and self-creation. What they want to do is address it in a positive way. They struggle in order to gain a hold of it and to educate themselves and do something. A lot of it has to do with the responsibilities that they are taught. Whether they are taught culturally, or whether it is an inherent thing as a woman, they try to do something for their children or their next generation. That is what we are told by some of our students.
When we ask them “How come it is all women here? Where are your brothers and cousins and so forth”? They say “Well, you know, I just want to do something for my kids. I have to guarantee that they have a good future, so I am here to do that for them”. We hear that again and again.
The other thing is that there are a lot more opportunities for men in those communities in fields other than productive and healthy occupations. The things that pay off soon, immediately tends to be dominated by men. That is a problem that we need to deal with.
In answer to your question about whether people want to become First Nations Police Officers, or want to work in the justice system as a lawyer, or become teachers, I think that there has to be the possibility for the realization of some form of personal empowerment, where they are going to be doing something that gives them esteem and status, and makes them feel good about what they are doing. It makes them respectable and respected in the community. In those communities where there is that dynamic, where there are respected teachers and where the Police are respected, you find more and more people wanting to move in that direction. Where there is that hostile contention between the Police and the community, you do not find people wanting to come in there and be part of that.
I do not think the Kahnawake Peacekeepers have too much problem attracting people these days. I think that they have the respect in the community. But, I know that, in the past, it was very difficult to attract people to go into the R.C.M.P., or something like that, because of the hostile relationship. It is psychological, but it is also political. Again, it is a psychological thing with political roots.
On the educational front, it is one of the biggest disasters that we have in our First Nations communities. Elementary and secondary education. It is a problem that is probably right at the lowest end of the priority scale for First Nations leadership, on the collective level, nationally. If you think about it, it is one of the main problems that we have. If we are ever going to have the capacity to do anything, we have to have kids that have a basic education and a basic sense of themselves, to be able to move forward. A basic sense of themselves as Native people. Our failures at the elementary and secondary level of education are going to come back to haunt us, big time. What can we do in the mean time? I do not know. The strategy, where I work, is to work with those that are the exception. They are the ones that made it through, either through amazing powers of self discipline, or fortune, or strong families. They get pushed through. They make it to college, and then we work with them from there. It is actually a major problem that has been identified by First Nations educators. In fact, at the University of Victoria, we have a whole program that we have been trying for ten years. We got funded from the Millenium Foundation. It is looking at the problem at the community level and seeing how we can increase that graduation rate. How do we increase it to the point where we are going to have a steady stream of First Nations people coming into higher education or trades. Technical training, as opposed to abysmal rates of graduation. They do not have all the answers. A lot of it has to do with mentoring. There has to be a sense from that kid that they can identify with that person. I can identify with that Policeman, or that Professor, or that doctor, or that lawyer. Once that identification is made, and that person is connected with that kid, they realize that there are all kinds of obstacles in the way. It is not likely that the kid is going to make it, unless he or she has that kind of personal relationship with that person who is already up there. Sort of like holding their hand all the way. Educationally, that is the approach that seems to work. Unfortunately, it is not being taken to the extent that it should.
