To understand how we got to Attawapiskat, go back to the 1905 James Bay Treaty

Attawapiskat First Nation chief Teresa Spence is not engaged in “terrorism,” as one Postmedia writer notoriously suggested last week. Terrorists blow themselves up. Ms. Spence, by contrast, is sitting in a snow-covered teepee on Victoria Island in the Ottawa River. Let’s not play the game of using the T-word to describe everyone we simply don’t like.

On the other hand, Ms. Spence isn’t a true “hunger striker” either, since she reportedly is drinking fish broth and various herbal potions. We don’t know how many calories she’s taking in on a daily basis, so we can’t discount the possibility that she really will starve herself to death. But she is not a true Bobby Sands-style hunger striker. Terminology is important, whether you’re talking about death by Semtex, or starvation.

Finally, Ms. Spence is not an icon of “grass roots” native rage — as some suggest. She is a band chief, with an office and salary paid for by regular Canadian taxpayers. Attawapiskat may be tiny and poor, but it has its own development corporation, airport, local services and homegrown management scandals. The band takes in millions from a local diamond mine. True “grass roots” organizations can only dream of such resources.

But even if Ms. Spence is not a terrorist, nor a true hunger striker, nor a genuine grass roots activist, I would argue that we still need to pay attention: The very real plight of Attawapiskat First Nation encapsulates everything that has gone wrong with aboriginal policy for generations.

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“Idle No More,” the independent movement that Ms. Spence has helped to promote, calls on Canada to “live the spirit and intent of the treaty relationship.” In the case of Attawapiskat, and the rest of Ontario’s Cree First Nations, the treaty in question would be the 1905 James Bay Treaty, also known as Treaty No. 9. The Attawapiskat Band of Cree — a versatile group of caribou- and goose-hunters, trappers, and fishers whose traditional roaming grounds extended beyond the Attawapiskat River, over a large swathe of James Bay’s northwestern shores and river systems — were brought under the treaty in 1930.

The century-old accounts of the government’s Treaty commissioners — Duncan Scott, Samuel Stewart and Daniel MacMartin — make for fascinating reading. In June, 1905, these men set out by canoe into the vast 90,000-square mile expanse of provincial lands drained by the Albany and Moose river systems, methodically traveling to isolated First Nations tribes one by one, such as Lac Seul, Osnaburg, Fort Albany and Moose Factory. Relying on local traders and missionaries who were fluent in Cree and Ojibway tongues, the commissioners methodically recorded the names of the 1,617 Indians they met, their discussions and rituals, and the amount of money they gave them to seal the Treaty.

(To a modern reader, it’s shocking how much these commissioners accomplished in a matter of mere months with a few canoes and a pot of cash. If this treaty-making exercise were performed today, by contrast, it would involve years and years of webcasted “stakeholders” sessions — all of which would come to naught when the Assembly of First Nations or some other group decided to boycott the proceedings on some pretext or other.)

The travel was exhausting, especially on portage. This is a region that remains remote and obscure even to this day. But the commissioners were dumbstruck by the beauty of the terrain. They also were impressed by the Indians they met, and their extraordinary facility with (what we would now call) outdoorsmanship: “It is considered worthy of record to remark on the vigorous and manly qualities displayed by these Indians throughout the negotiations. Although undoubtedly at times they suffer from lack of food owing to the circumstances under which they live, yet they appeared contented, and enjoy a certain degree of comfort.”

It’s important to emphasize that these Treaty commissioners were not anthropologists or do-gooders. Notwithstanding their respect for the Cree, they came with a very specific mission: to set the stage for white commercial development in these territories.

For instance, the commissioners reported a meeting in Fort Hope, on the shore of Lake Eabamet, with a certain well-regarded chief named Moonias. At one point, a local Indian named Yesno (“who received his name from his imperfect knowledge of the English language, which consisted altogether in the use of the words ‘yes’ and ‘no’”) told the commissioners that the terms of the Treaty should ensure that natives in the area receive “cattle and implements, seed-grain and tools.”

This horrified the commissioners, who evidently wished to guard against unfulfilled expectations: “As the undersigned wished to guard carefully against any misconception or against making any promises which were not written in the treaty itself, it was explained that none of these issues were to be made, as the band could not hope to depend upon agriculture as a means of subsistence; that hunting and fishing, in which occupations they were not to be interfered with, should for very many years prove lucrative sources of revenue. The Indians were informed that by signing the treaty they pledged themselves not to interfere with white men who might come into the country surveying, prospecting, hunting, or in other occupations; that they must respect the laws of the land in every particular, and that their reserves were set apart for them in order that they might have a tract in which they could not be molested, and where no white man would have any claims without the consent of their tribe and of the government. After this very full discussion, the treaty was signed, and payment was commenced.”

What I am quoting here is the commissioners’ Nov. 6, 1905 report, not the actual text of the James Bay Treaty (which is brief). But it expresses the real nub of the intended treaty relationship: The natives would continue hunting and fishing for sustenance and trade, and receive annual payments from the government (four dollars, to be exact), while white men would have the right to put down their train tracks, mines, forestry operations and settlements. Some reserve lands were stipulated in a schedule to the treaty (“not to exceed in all one square mile for each family of five”), but the exact location of such lands was not then considered as important as it is now. That’s because the local Cree were semi-nomadic, and came and went with the hunt. (At Lake Abitibi, for instance, the commissioners reported: “We did not expect to find many Indians in attendance, as they usually leave for their hunting grounds about the first week in July.”)

And here we get to the massive problem that has taken shape in communities such as Attawapiskat, which were not originally intended to become static settlements that survive entirely as government-funded welfare states (with the pathologies that attend all government-funded welfare states, including unemployment, anomie and substance abuse).

Cree men such as Moonias and Yesno, were they still around, would be absolutely appalled by this state of affairs. They apparently believed they were negotiating Treaty terms that would permit them to continue to provide for themselves as rugged hunter-gatherers (and possibly farmers). The notion that the white man eventually would put them up in permanently subsidized year-round housing that allowed them to abandon hunting and fishing — the very heart of their culture — would have seemed alien and unexpected.

That move from semi-nomadic to settled life, which was seen in part as a humane gesture aimed at bringing natives into modern civilization, is the real “cultural genocide” we keep hearing about. It’s not a Stephen Harper plot. It’s something that happened mostly before Harper was born.

One of the more interesting scenes described by the James Bay Treaty commissioners involved the Moose Factory Cree (“the most comfortably dressed and best nourished of the Indians we had so far met with”). At that meeting, an Indian named John Dick “remarked that one great advantage the Indians hoped to derive from the treaty was the establishment of schools wherein their children might receive an education.”

First Nations did indeed get their schools — but even here, John Dick would be disappointed.

In 1953, Attawapiskat got its first school. And then in 1976, a new facility was built. But it was closed in 2000 because of contamination from a massive diesel fuel leak. (The students’ plight is Exhibit A for visiting journalists and opposition politicians.) Since then, students have been crammed into portable units, while Attawapiskat band council spent more than a decade (successfully) bugging the federal government to build them a new school. The whole sorry episode is a metaphor for the humiliating and petty nature of modern native-government relations.

Yet the altogether worst aspect of the James Bay Treaty is that, like other treaties, it ensured that reserve land “shall be held and administered by His Majesty, for the benefit of the Indians,” and that “in no wise [sic] shall the said Indians, or any of them, be entitled to sell or otherwise alienate any of the lands allotted to them as reserves.” This was basically Soviet-style communism, avant la lettre. To this day, this system of communal land ownership ensures that reserve-resident natives are the only people in Canada who are systematically denied the right to buy, sell, lease and mortgage their land.

This is the single most awful thing we ever did to the Indians: bring them into a settled, capitalist society, and then deny them the basic tools to generate capital. Yet, perversely, it is the one aspect of native policy that is consistently championed by left-wing native-rights advocates, who see in it a sentimental vindication of Marxism despite its European failures.

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Ms. Spence and her Idle No More supporters are absolutely correct to say that the James Bay Treaty made provisions for Indians to get land, cash payments, and even some measure of autonomy. But ramping up those perqs won’t do anything to change the fact that the whole basis of the treaty was destroyed as soon as traditional native hunting life came to an end.

This is the fundamental reason that the Idle No More message on treaties is irrelevant: The great challenge of native policy in the 21st century will be to integrate natives into the larger economy that is based in Canadian population centers.

Remote fly-in communities such as Attawapiskat, on the other hand, are doomed: You can’t turn he clock back to 1905, or even to 1930.

National Post
jkay@nationalpost.com
@jonkay