LaFontaine-Baldwin Symposium
2002 Lecture

Mr. Georges Erasmus

Creating and sustaining a national community is an ongoing act of imagination, fuelled by stories of who we are. The narratives of how Canada came to be are only now beginning to acknowledge the fundamental contributions that Aboriginal people have made to the formation of Canada as we know it. We were major participants in the trade and commerce that supported settlement. We were partners in the treaty-making that opened access to lands and resources. We were in the front lines protecting Canadian borders in 1812-14. And we volunteered in extraordinary numbers in World War I and World War II to defend democratic values overseas. We are convinced that we also bring something of value as Aboriginal peoples to meeting the political and economic challenges that Canada faces in this new century.

If that contribution is to be fully realized, we need to engage in conversations that go beyond policy debates with governments. We need to talk "people to people" as well as "nation to nation".

I propose to try shifting the terms of discourse along three lines: from Aboriginal rights to relationship between peoples; from crying needs to vigorous capacity; from individual citizenship to nations within the nation state.

Aboriginal Rights: Relationship Between Peoples

Aboriginal rights seriously entered the vocabulary of Canadian law and public policy in 1973, when a Supreme Court judgement acknowledged that the Nisga’a of British Columbia had Aboriginal title to their traditional lands, based on their use and occupancy of those lands from time immemorial. The Nisga’a had never entered into treaties with the British colonial government or Canada. Members of the Court were divided on whether enactments of federal and provincial law had extinguished Nisga’a title. Resolution of the Nisga’a land question would not be achieved until the signing of a treaty in1998.

Aboriginal and treaty rights gained protection in the Canadian Constitution of 1982 with the provision that "The existing aboriginal and treaty rights of the aboriginal peoples of Canada are hereby recognized and affirmed". A series of Supreme court decisions has given some definition of how these rights are to be interpreted under Canadian law, but there has never been a negotiated agreement between Aboriginal nations and Canada on the nature of these rights. Each court decision addresses a portion of the larger issue, raising a host of new questions. The Marshall decision of 1999 affirming Mi’kmaq rights under a 1760 treaty to earn a moderate living from the Atlantic fishery did not put an end to disputes about how resources are to be shared.

Gaining recognition of Aboriginal rights in the courts and entrenchment in the Constitution have been critical to restoring Aboriginal peoples as active agents in directing our collective lives. Where land claims settlements have proceeded, they have opened possibilities for social, cultural, political and economic renewal. But there have been some unfortunate side effects of the rights agenda. An American Indian law professor has written that "Like other minority groups in our society, tribal Indians must demonstrate a convergence of their interests with dominant group interests in promoting their rights." This is difficult because "the rights they claim seem so alien and opposed to the dominant society’s legal, political, and cultural traditions".

Aboriginal rights have been delineated in the context of long, contentious court cases in which Aboriginal interests have been pitted against Canadian state parties who are purportedly representing the public interest. Legal scholars and constitutional experts, standing within the Canadian legal system, interpret what Aboriginal people want and what obligations rest with Canadian governments to accede to those claims.

Litigation is no way to build a community! It is not the way preferred by Aboriginal peoples. We have a history of treaty-making that stretches back long before Columbus. Drawing on those traditions, through two centuries of expanding settlement, the Mi’kmaq, Mohawk, Ojibwa, Saulteaux, Cree, Dene and other Aboriginal nations sat down in councils and entered treaty negotiations to discuss how to establish good relations with newcomers. This is how Canada came to be a "peaceable kingdom", not one born of violence and conquest. A non-Aboriginal scholar working with the Royal Commission, who had spent years of his life researching treaty history, declared: "These are my treaties too. They legitimize my place in this land."