Round Dances and Broken Vows

A couple of years ago, near Christmas, Kelly and I went to the  Eaton Centre. It was packed with hot, sweaty people in a shopping frenzy. We wrote a pretty funny blog post about our experience and we vowed never to go to the Eaton Centre around Christmastime ever again.

Well, it seems that some vows are meant to be broken.  Christmas Day 2012 marked the third week of a hunger strike by Chief Theresa Spence of Attawapiskat First Nation on the shores of James Bay in Northern Ontario. Chief Spence has been asking for a meeting with the Prime Minister and the Governor-General (the Queen's Representative in Canada) to discuss First Nations treaty relationships with the Crown and Canada, but she has been ignored and rebuffed by them.

And so on December 30, her allies were asked to come out and show their support. Round dance, 2:00 pm, Eaton Centre. Hundreds of people showed up, held hands, and danced to the beat drummed for us by Indigenous youth and women who have formed the "Idle No More" movement for Indigenous Rights in Canada.

The round dancing as it comes to an end.

Kelly and I were there with them. Another Christmastime day at the Eaton Centre, packed with hot, sweaty people. But this time holding hands, clapping, and full of righteous anger.

A brief, still moment. Photo by Mike Chong.

Why? Attawapiskat is one of Canada's poorest reserves, and in 2011 was the focus of a huge media and activist campaign to bring attention to, among other issues, the horrendous shortage of adequate housing in this remote Northern community.

The government visited and promised some new housing. Canadians were told, over and over again, how much money it "spends" in Attawaspikat every year and the government accused the band and chief of squandering millions of dollars. In fact, the amount that the government implied it had sent North last year for housing --$90 million-- was a cumulative figure for this government's entire lifespan (since 2006) and it covered much more than housing. It also included per capita, staffing and infrastructure costs for education, health care, social services, community maintenance and many other services. 

If that still sounds like a lot of money to you, I invite you to consider the inequity between that funding and what non-Indigenous communities receive. On education alone, yearly per capita funding for non-Indigenous children is on average $2000 more than what Indigenous children receive. And I'm willing to bet that the last time you bought a bag of Dempster's bagels, a tub of Philadelphia cream cheese, and a carton of orange juice that it didn't cost you $26.00. That's what I had to pay in the Northern Store in the fly-in community of Fort Chipewyan 3 years ago.

It's important to note that none of this is money that Canada arbitrarily "spends" -- in most of Canada, it is part of agreements that the Crown (now the Government of Canada) made with First Nations in order to share the land that we all live on. It is a treaty agreement between nations. In areas like much of British Columbia where there are no treaties, the Government is meant to meet such obligations to First Nations on a nation-to-nation basis.

Agreements that we make with other nations, treaty or not, especially when they are the agreements upon which this country was formed, are the kinds of vows that shouldn't be broken. And this isn't just about Attawapiskat. It's about the entirety of the Canadian relationship with Indigenous peoples.  That's what Chief Spence is saying, that's what the Idle No More movement is saying, and that's what we are saying when we dance with them.

I don't think Chief Spence has any expectation that one meeting with the PM or the GG will solve this crisis. My guess is that she does think  it would be a concrete way for the Government and the Crown to indicate that it will live up to what it promised in the 2008 apology to survivors of Indian Residential Schools -- the "forging [of] a new relationship between aboriginal peoples and other Canadians, a relationship based on the knowledge of our shared history, a respect for each other and a desire to move forward together ...."

That's a meeting I'd like my Prime Minister and the representative of my Queen to have the courage to attend. That's a vow that I'd like to see them keep.

Morning in Fort Chipewyan, AB. September 2008.