The Inconvenient Indian (31 page)

Still, apart from my alarmist apprehensions, there is no reason to believe that Native people in Alaska won’t prosper. All that is needed is a little traditional imagination, a modicum of generosity, and some political goodwill.

Along with a skid of lawyers and a truckload of accountants.

Canada, until 1993, consisted of ten provinces and two northern territories, the Yukon Territory and the Northwest Territories. In that year, Parliament passed the Nunavut Land Claims
Agreement (NLCA) and the Nunavut Act. Six years later, on April 1, 1999, the new territory of Nunavut came into being.

The initial step in this process was, of course, the abrogation of all Aboriginal rights. “In consideration of the rights and benefits provided to Inuit …” the agreement read, “Inuit hereby: cede, release and surrender to her Majesty The Queen in Right of Canada, all their aboriginal claims, rights, title and interests, if any, in and to lands and waters anywhere within Canada and adjacent offshore areas within the sovereignty or jurisdiction of Canada; and agree, on their behalf, and on behalf of their heirs, descendants and successors not to assert any cause of action, action for a declaration, claim or demand of whatever kind or nature which they ever had, now have or may hereafter have against her Majesty The Queen in Right of Canada or any province, the government of any territory or any person based on any aboriginal claims, rights, title or interests in and to lands and waters …”

Human beings were not involved in the formulation of the preceding sentence, but the views expressed do reflect the attitudes of management.

Jean Chrétien, the prime minister du jour, used the occasion to take a bow. “Canada,” he said, “is showing the world, once again, how we embrace many peoples and many cultures.”

Nunavut, which means “Our Land” in Inuktitut, was the end game of a land claim that the Inuit began in 1976. The Inuit could have argued for a homeland within the existing Northwest Territories, but they correctly concluded that, if that happened, they would find themselves at a substantial disadvantage as a minority within a much larger non-Native, non-Inuit population. They could have insisted on the establishment of an exclusively
Inuit enclave, but instead, they lobbied for a new territory that would include Inuit and non-Inuit citizens and that would have the same standing within Canada as the other two territories.

Nunavut is a 2-million-square-kilometre chunk of Canadian arctic carved out of the eastern portion of the Northwest Territories, and whenever I look at a map of the area with its raggedy, puzzle-piece geography, I’m reminded, more than anything else, of a Rorschach test. Under the terms of the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement, the Inuit received over 350,000 square kilometres of land within the new territory, along with over a billion dollars in cash to be paid over a fourteen-year period.

I’m tempted to compare the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement with the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act to see who got the better deal. Under ANCSA, Alaska Natives received about half the land that the Inuit negotiated, while both groups came away with the same amount of cash. The difference that stands out between the two agreements is the status of the land. Inuit land is divided into two types. Of the 350,000 square kilometres that the Inuit received, 315,000 square kilometres is Crown land held in trust for the Inuit by the Canadian government, while 35,000 square kilometres, about 10 percent of the total, is fee-simple land managed by the Inuit under the corporate aegis of Nunavut Tunngavik Incorporated. In Alaska, all the land that Alaska Natives received under their agreement is fee simple.

But such comparisons are of little value. The situation of Alaska Natives is considerably different from that of the Inuit in Nunavut. In Alaska, Native people make up approximately 14 percent of the state’s population. In Nunavut, the Inuit make up 85 percent of that territory’s inhabitants. In Alaska, Native
people have access to state government primarily through the ballot box. In Nunavut, at least for the time being, the Inuit
are
the government.

Since the Inuit are Nunavut’s primary constituency and since Inuktitut is the main language, you might expect to find Inuktitut-speaking Inuit professionals in the majority of government positions in the territory. You might expect that Inuktitut would be taught in the schools with English and/or French offered as a secondary language to help insure bilingualism. In fact, this was the general sentiment of the Bathurst Mandate that the Government of Nunavut released in 2000. The Mandate set forth a series of ambitious objectives that the territory hoped to meet by 2020. One of the objectives was that Nunavut be “a fully functional bilingual society, in Inuktitut and English, respectful and committed to the needs and rights of French speakers,” while a second objective committed the territory to “a representative workforce in all sectors.”

Yet, in spite of the population advantage, the strength and range of Inuktitut, and the commitment the territorial government has to education and training, there seems little hope that either of these objectives will be reached. The high school graduation rate for Inuit students hovers at around 25 percent, and few graduates go on to colleges and universities. Article 23 of the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement calls for Inuit participation in the territory’s public-service sector “to match the proportions of Inuit in the population,” but that hasn’t happened. Most estimates of Inuit in government positions are around 45 percent, with the majority of those jobs at the lower levels of administrative support. While Inuktitut is taught in the schools, it is only taught until grade three/four. Instruction beyond that is in English.
In his 2008 discussion paper, “
Aajiiqatigiingniq
,” York University professor Ian Martin looks at the “long-term threat to Inuit language from English” and warns that abruptly dropping Inuktitut in favour of English in elementary school risks the consequence that Inuit students will develop neither language to its full potential.

Equally worrisome is the role of the federal government. Financial support for teaching French in Nunavut is around $4 million a year, while support for teaching Inuktitut comes in at the $1 million mark. Ottawa may be philosophically inclined to multiculturalism, but it has yet to provide the Inuit with the necessary funds and assistance to establish and maintain an Inuktitut bilingual language program that starts at kindergarten and runs through to grade twelve.

Interestingly enough, the concerns that currently face the Inuit are the same concerns that the 1960 Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism considered when it recommended that French be encouraged and supported, that French-speaking Canadians have adequate educational opportunities, and that they have access to their fair share of jobs in the country’s public service. These recommendations were echoed in the Official Languages Act of 1969 and embedded as constitutional guarantees in the 1982 Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

I was going to say that it’s too bad the Inuit aren’t French, but using that logic, they would be even better off if they were English.

The Nunavut Legislative Assembly currently consists of nineteen members, including a Premier and a Speaker of the Assembly, the majority of whom are Inuit, and I’m confident of the government’s commitment to Native language, bilingualism, education,
and jobs. Unfortunately, the problem isn’t commitment. The problem is time. And resources. Each year that these matters go unresolved intensifies the situation and invites consequences over which the Inuit may have little control.

If an object lesson is needed, Nunavut might want to consider the history of Manitoba. When that province came into Confederation in 1870, the population was overwhelmingly French-speaking Métis. The Manitoba Act set out French and English as the two official languages, guaranteed public funding for Catholic schools, and established a Métis land base. But within a dozen years, intense settlement had changed the demographics of the province dramatically, and the Métis found themselves a minority. Predictably, subsequent provincial legislatures began clawing back or ignoring the guarantees contained in the Manitoba Act, and the Métis spent the next hundred years in court trying to get those promises honoured.

I’m not suggesting that Nunavut should be a territory where Inuit culture and philosophy frame governmental and social interaction, where residents are expected to be bilingual with Inuktitut as the primary language and English or French as the second, but neither do I see any reason why it shouldn’t.

Nunavut. The Quebec of the North.

Both the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act and the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement are flawed accords. Some of the flaws were apparent even before the agreements were signed. Others have appeared after the fact. Now that the “honeymoon” is over, perhaps it’s time for Alaska Natives and the Inuit to ask the question: how are the needs of our people served by these documents? There is nothing to stop Alaska Natives from returning to the
Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, and there is no reason that the Inuit in Nunavut can’t revisit the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement. After all, both Ottawa and Washington have been rewriting treaties and amending agreements to suit themselves for the last two centuries.

In the meantime, old attitudes continue to bluster about with each new storm. Certainly, as I’ve travelled around the continent, and around the world for that matter, there’s always been someone willing to sit me down and set me straight on the matter of Native history. You people, I’ll be told, really have to stop complaining. What happened can’t be undone. None of us is responsible for the sins of our ancestors. Times have changed. Attitudes have changed. Get over it.

You can’t judge the past by the present.

It’s a splendid slogan. It permits us to set aside the missteps of history and offers a covenant with the future, allowing us to be held blameless for the decisions we make today. Ignorance. That’s our defence. Our grandparents didn’t know any better. We didn’t know any better. If we knew then what we know now, we wouldn’t have done what we did.

You can’t judge the past by the present. One of history’s grand maxims. It’s convenient, and it’s specious.

This needs to be said. In the history of Indian-White relations, it is clear that politicians, reformers, the clergy, the military, in fact the whole lot, knew the potential for destruction that their policies and actions could have on Native communities. They were betting that something good would come out of the devastation. And they were able to make these decisions with easy confidence, because they weren’t betting with
their
money. They
weren’t betting with
their
communities. They weren’t betting with
their
children.

Ignorance has never been the problem. The problem was and continues to be unexamined confidence in western civilization and the unwarranted certainty of Christianity. And arrogance. Perhaps it is unfair to judge the past by the present, but it is also necessary.

If nothing else, an examination of the past—and of the present, for that matter—can be instructive. It shows us that there is little shelter and little gain for Native peoples in doing nothing. So long as we possess one element of sovereignty, so long as we possess one parcel of land, North America will come for us, and the question we have to face is how badly we wish to continue to pursue the concepts of sovereignty and self-determination. How important is it for us to maintain protected communal homelands? Are our traditions and languages worth the cost of carrying on the fight? Certainly the easier and more expedient option is simply to step away from who we are and who we wish to be, sell what we have for cash, and sink into the stewpot of North America.

With the rest of the bones.

No matter how you frame Native history, the one inescapable constant is that Native people in North America have lost much. We’ve given away a great deal, we’ve had a great deal taken from us, and, if we are not careful, we will continue to lose parts of ourselves—as Indians, as Cree, as Blackfoot, as Navajo, as Inuit—with each generation. But this need not happen. Native cultures aren’t static. They’re dynamic, adaptive, and flexible, and for many of us, the modern variations of older tribal traditions continue to provide order, satisfaction, identity, and value in our lives.
More than that, in the five hundred years of European occupation, Native cultures have already proven themselves to be remarkably tenacious and resilient.

Okay.

That was heroic and uncomfortably inspirational, wasn’t it? Poignant, even. You can almost hear the trumpets and the violins. And that kind of romance is not what we need. It serves no one, and the cost to maintain it is too high.

So, let’s agree that Indians are not special. We’re not … mystical. I’m fine with that. Yes, a great many Native people have a long-standing relationship with the natural world. But that relationship is equally available to non-Natives, should they choose to embrace it. The fact of Native existence is that we live modern lives informed by traditional values and contemporary realities and that we wish to live those lives on our terms.

I’m sorry that I won’t be around when the next millennium rolls into town. Just to see how we managed. Just to hear the stories. If the last five hundred years are any indication, what the Native people of North America do with the future should be very curious indeed.

The Inconvenient Indian
has been a work-in-progress for most of my adult life. Its origin dates back to at least the early 1970s, when I worked at the University of Utah’s American West Center where Floyd O’Neil rode herd on a motley crew of graduate reprobates that included myself as well as Greg Thompson, Laura Bayer, John Alley, Geno Defa, David Lewis, and Kathryn MacKay. Native history was the topic of research and conversation at the Center, and we spent our time reading oral histories and treaties, drawing maps, working with tribes in the Southwest, and engaging in running pranks that involved potatoes. Floyd introduced me to the discipline of history. More than that, he was a mentor and a friend who, along with Edward Lueders and William Mulder, professors in the English Department, helped to drag me through the rigours of a Ph.D. Floyd also introduced me to many of the historians and scholars whose work is a part of this book: Richard White, Alvin Josephy, Francis Paul Prucha, Patricia Limerick, David Edmunds (Cherokee), Brigham Madsen, Gerald Vizenor (Anishinaabe), S. Lyman Tyler,
Terry Wilson (Potawatomie), Richard Hart, Louis Owens (Choctaw-Cherokee), Robert Berkhofer, and Arrell Morgan Gibson.