Will the nightmare ever end? Indigenous families across Canada have been lied to about their history for a long time. Some of their leaders have been exploiting their grief and feeding it with new allegations of cruelty to extract billions from taxpayers.
For too many Indigenous families, the consequence has been anger, anxiety, distrust of all politicians – their own included – and continued dependence on taxpayers.
When a child has a nightmare, caring parents soothe the child by explaining that nightmares are not real. Telling a child the nightmare is real is abuse. Good parents don’t do that.
But the abuse continues. Our governments treat Indigenous Canadians as children, and they do it badly. That it continues in 2024 is a national disgrace.
As one angry Indigenous woman shouted, “We are human beings!” Human beings don’t treat others the way Indigenous leaders and our governments continue to treat Canada’s first people.
What other group of Canadians is singled out for the “special treatment” that has been the lot of Indigenous people for generations? Since 1876, status Indians have endured the emotional, economic, and physical obstacles that the paternalistic Indian Act and the treaties that followed it imposed on them. They have been hived off on uneconomic Indian reserves, away from their non-indigenous fellow citizens. There, they have been denied property ownership, employment opportunities, the possibility of building creditworthiness, and the integration required for people to live together in peace and harmony.
Perhaps most damaging, they have been denied caring, responsible leadership.
After all these years, how is all that working so far?
Sure, Canadians are genuinely sorry for the wrongs of the past. There have been sincere apologies and compensation, the go-to responses to virtually every demand the Aboriginal Industry made. The “Aboriginal Industry” comprises chiefs, activists, consultants, lawyers, TRC commissioners, and judges. Yes, even judges!
The mainstream media has been an essential part of the industry for many years, especially since the announcement on May 27, 2021, regarding the alleged discovery of 215 Indigenous children said to have been buried in the grounds of a former residential school in Kamloops. The allegation remains unproven, but that doesn’t matter to the Aboriginal Industry who insist on continuing the nightmare. It is important to remember that that false Kamloops announcement, which was never corrected, is a key component of the nightmare.
The Aboriginal Industry is taking an obscene advantage of the guilty collective conscience it has engendered. Has there been any recognition on their part that ordinary Canadians want to hear words of forgiveness, hopeful expressions about a future when all Canadians will be equal, respected, and partaking fairly in our country’s bounty? There has not. However, more and more Canadians now realize that many Indigenous Canadians see their money, power, and influence monopolized by the Industry’s few.
Regular Indigenous Canadians deserve to be treated as human beings.
Aboriginal Industry leaders often demand respect. But ordinary Canadians find it harder and harder to respect people who refuse to forgive, instead demanding more and more.
But let’s not confine the blame only to the Aboriginal Industry. Successive governments, federal and provincial, have been consistently feeding this nightmare, especially since the failure of the 1970 White Paper on Aboriginal Peoples. Titled “Statement of the Government of Canada on Indian Policy.” The paper would have given status Indians a chance to join Canada as equal citizens. Pierre Trudeau’s government understood that the nearly 100-year-old apartheid system was working against common status-Indians and that the equality of Indigenous people was the best path to a better future for them.
But who stopped the implementation of the White Paper? Who prevented Indigenous equality? The Aboriginal Industry. Why would over 600 First Nations chiefs give up their power, money and influence? By far, the biggest benefactors of existing treaties have been the chiefs and First Nations councillors, not the ordinary Indigenous souls they falsely claim to represent.
And the judges of this country have ensured that the treaties are interpreted to continue the inequality that hurts Indigenous individuals but benefits their leaders generously.
In the 54 years since 1970, leaders have willfully betrayed two additional generations of Indigenous Canadians through Canada’s home-grown apartheid. Real people have been condemned to the dependence, subjugation, and hopelessness that the Indian Act and the treaties imposed.
That some describe the Act and the treaties as “sacred” is an abomination. The cry that “we are human beings” has been consistently ignored, as chiefs and their friends have reaped the fruits of the national guilt they have cultivated so well for so long.
Who will bring the nightmare to an end? A federal election is coming. Can Indigenous Canadians dare to hope that real change will follow? Can they hope that human equality, which should always have been their birthright, will finally become a Canadian reality?
James C. McCrae, former attorney general of Manitoba and Canadian citizenship judge.
