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How did we get to Attawapiskat? Go back to the 1905 James Bay Treaty | Full Comment | National Post
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.
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.)
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).