What do Conservatives say about Indigenous Policy?

Tribalism and UNDRIP are a death sentence for the marginalized

Image from the Hill Times

By Colin Alexander

In mid-April Conservatives attended the Canada Strong and Free Network conference in Ottawa. Understandably, they were jubilant about the party’s election prospects. Also understandably, they didn’t speak to the daunting task of turning things around. They left outstanding this two-part question at the heart of Canada’s biggest moral challenge—the challenge both for the national identity and, arguably, for the nation’s finances:

Should Canada enable next Indigenous generations for the high-tech economy? Or should they expect to live according to some presumably modified traditional lifestyle?

My problem is that even many ostensible conservatives buy into the Indigenous iconography of a pre-industrial Garden of Eden—and so-called reconciliation under the UN’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). It’s enough that misplaced romanticism condones the transfer of untold billions of dollars without accounting for where it goes. 

The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples’ 1995 report on suicide, Choosing Life, stated the challenge: “Aboriginal youth described both exclusion from the dominant society and alienation from the now-idealized but once-real ‘life on the land’ that is stereotypically associated with aboriginality. The terrible emptiness of feeling strung between two cultures and psychologically at home in neither has been described in fiction and in art, as well as in testimony. … This inward-looking subculture may reinforce hopelessness and self-hate, and their exits may appear to be the oblivion of drugs and alcohol—or death.”

So how can we resolve this conflict? In the March 1953 edition of The Beaver, Northern Affairs Minister Jean Lesage wrote of the challenges: “The objective of Government policy … is to give the Eskimos the same rights, privileges, opportunities, and responsibilities as all other Canadians. In short, to enable them to share fully the national life of Canada. … The task … is to help him adjust his life and his thoughts to all that the encroachment of this new life must mean.”

With this thinking later as premier of Quebec, Lesage ushered in the Quiet Revolution. He believed French Canadians could develop as a modern people without losing their identity. Similarly, people of many ethnicities carry forward those aspects of their culture that they still find relevant. Many Asian Canadians have overcome terrible discrimination and marginalization to surpass their white counterparts. So I ask: Who dares to espouse the eugenics of Hitler’s Germany to say that race determines outcomes—and whether for better or for worse?

Not Peter Pitseolak! In the 1960s he wrote in his memoirs, in Inuktitut, that he expected his grandchildren could become full-fledged medical doctors. There are, actually, just two Inuit doctors. Born on the trapline and then living in a residential hostel, the renowned thoracic surgeon Noah Carpenter graduated from high school in Inuvik in 1963. And recently qualified heart surgeon Donna May Kimmaliardjuk was educated in southern Canada.

Some prominent Indigenous have always promoted the enabling of next generations as equal citizens—meaning, yes, integration. Upon signing Treaty Six in 1876, Chief Poundmaker said, “When I commence to settle on the lands to make a living for myself and my children, I beg of you to assist me in every way possible. ... The children yet unborn, I wish you to treat them in like manner as they advance in civilization like the white man.”

Chief Dan George updated this unfulfilled plea in his 1967 Lament for Confederation speech: “I shall grab the instruments of the white man’s success—his education, his skills, and with these tools I shall build my race into the proudest segment of your society. So shall I shatter the barriers of our isolation.”

So what are the needs on the ground? When I was the advisor on education for Ontario’s Royal Commission on the Northern Environment, we asked people in remote settlements what they expected of schooling. Universally, they said they wanted full-fledged mainstream education. And they believed it was compatible with learning traditional skills. Canada hasn’t delivered on that. Of course, university-educated game management officers and wildlife biologists achieve both objectives.

Countering the values that built Canada and the visions of Chiefs Poundmaker and Dan George, current orthodoxy has it that the Indigenous should embrace tribal collectives and community capitalism. But it’s not in the culture to replicate a Hutterite colony. Tribalism requires subservience to the collective. That kills ambition, innovation and work ethic. It means abdication of personal responsibility and ongoing dependency. And second-class citizenship. UNDRIP has wording almost identical to this mission statement of Hendrik Verwoerd, architect of apartheid in South Africa: “The policy of separate development is the basis of the happiness, security and stability which are maintained by means of a homeland, a language and a government peculiar to each people.”

Canada’s incipient UNDRIP model is enriching the elite, replicating George Orwell’s novel 1984, based on the former Soviet Union. But it can never deliver equality of opportunity to the equivalent of Orwell’s proletariat. After fifty years of planning, and implementation of self-governance in Nunavut in 1999, there are no home-grown doctors, dentists, engineers or accountants.

Recently, Nunavut took control over natural resource development despite having no Inuit capacity to do that. The Baffinland iron mine has a 200-year life expectation and a 2,500-strong labor force—for lack of skills, only some 15 percent Inuit. But 10,000 youth will reach adulthood during the next decade.

Instead then of UNDRIP, what about the UN’s Convention on the Rights of the Child? It requires, without regard to ethnicity, enabling the child to the maximum extent possible. There are many templates around the world for doing that, notably in Asia. Provision of adequate housing and delivery of intensive education has enabled Third World peoples for the First in a single generation.

Few Canadians have any conception of how bad things are in violence-wracked remote settlements—what Farley Mowat called unguarded concentration camps in the 1974 preface to his book People of the Deer—and in urban slums. The incidence is horrendous, and worsening, of addictions, sexual abuse, teenage pregnancy, unemployment, homelessness, suicide and incarceration. It’s eluded notice, however, that those who are educated and skilled, and engaged in or preparing for rewarding employment, seldom get into trouble. Pushing back against integration except for themselves, however, the Indigenous elite never advocate for the education and skills-training, sports and recreation, and opportunity for a rewarding career that they had in their own childhood and youth. When anyone actually asks them, marginalized Indigenous youth—and their parents—say they want enabling for the Canadian mainstream. They yearn for the vision of Chief Dan George.

In sum, UNDRIP connotes ongoing marginalization and dependency for next generations. That’s unconscionable for them and unsustainable for taxpayers—with that presumably being a priority for Conservatives. Current policies are guaranteed to continue failing as surely as did communism in the former Soviet Union, and for the same reason: they don’t respect the individual. 

(Colin Alexander was publisher of the Yellowknife News of the North. His most recent book is Justice on Trial: Jordan Peterson’s case and others show we need to fix the broken system).

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Thanks for reading. For more from this author, read Canada’s Apartheid Manifesto: UNDRIP’s a death sentence for Indigenous youth

BREAKING NEWS:

1. A new long-form essay by Dr. M - Fulcrum and Pivot: The New Left Remaking of Toronto School Policy

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