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Cecil Chabot is a PhD candidate at the University of Ottawa and a member of the International Centre for Northern Governance and Development at the University of Saskatchewan.
Northern Ontario First Nations are preparing 30-day eviction notices for mining companies operating in a mineral-rich zone known the Ring of Fire. Will their action win support among the 64 per cent of Canadians who think “aboriginal peoples receive too much support from Canadian taxpayers”?
According to Ipsos Reid president Darrell Bricker, that negative sentiment is a sign of Canadians’ frustration with the “ongoing inability to get started in modern society that exists within the aboriginal communities.”
When Kashechewan and Attawapiskat make the news, other Canadians get a glimpse of the young and expanding aboriginal populations who live on the front line of that frustration. But few of us have sustained contact with these communities. As a result, “Canadians seem as oblivious to the plight of aboriginal people as they are to their own vulnerability should aboriginal anger boil over into insurrection,” says defence expert Douglas Bland. His 2010 novel Uprising is about just such an insurrection.
Can protest or insurrection accomplish anything? Some years ago, the Quebec magazine L’Actualité published an article on the prosperity gap that persists between Cree in Ontario and Quebec. The Quebec Cree seem to have figured out how “to get started in modern society” — and it began with protests.
When the provincial government announced plans to launch the massive James Bay hydroelectric project, the Cree protested and secured a court injunction, forcing Quebec to negotiate what became the 1975 James Bay Northern Quebec Agreement. Chief Billy Diamond commented: “It has been a tough fight, but . . . (our people) realize that they must share their resources.”
Hydro-Québec completed its megaproject, and with the compensation they received in return the Cree set about the task of building the infrastructure and capacity necessary to participate in the very modernization that had threatened their lands and livelihoods. Taking a page from Quebec nationalists and standing up as “masters in their own house,” the Quebec Cree avoided being reduced to a socioeconomic liability.
What can be learned from this?
First, we must stop looking at aboriginal Canadians as socioeconomic liabilities or aboriginal rights as a threat to Canadian prosperity. As the head of BMO’s aboriginal banking unit has pointed out, Canada needs the “capacity, creativity and skills” of its aboriginal citizens.
For the rest of this article, please go to the Toronto Star website: http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorialopinion/article/1239169–why-not-extend-aboriginal-rights-to-aboriginal-peoples