More Evidence That Things Need to Change

 If there's anything that proponents of Canada's current approach to aboriginal affairs have to say about the notion of change, it's that they don't like it.

Yet an increasing number of thinkers have begun to urge a new approach to the issue -- and it's one that the proponents of the current approach will almost certainly despise.

Yet the clear evidence that changes are desperately needed continues to mount. Not only is there the spectre of lingering and grinding aboriginal poverty, but more and more aboriginal Canadians are moving off-reserve and into cities. It's only natural that they would do this, as that is where most of the opportunities for them seem to lay.

“The fastest growing population is the young aboriginal population and we need those young people to be educated and in the workforce,” says Calvin Helin. “Not for reasons of a moral imperative, but for the very prosperity and competitiveness of Canada as a nation.”

This isn't a bad thing or a good thing, unless one depends upon the views of any particular paradigm on aboriginal affairs. Those who would prefer to see strong on-reserve communities must be concerned about this development. Those who prefer to see aboriginals assimilate likely welcome it.

If those who wish to see strong on-reserve cultural communities wish to see those communities thrive they will need a way to provide opportunities to youths who decide to stay on-reserve. But the currently dominant model for aboriginal affairs in Canada -- simply pumping more and more funds into reserves -- has clearly failed to provide such opportunities.

A change is urgently needed.

A key may be found in Tom Flanagan's theories. According to Flanagan, the key to aleviating aboriginal poverty is to allow aboriginal bands to make use of the resources they already have.

"Canada's first nations are potentially wealthy landlords, with land reserves totalling nearly three million hectares," Flanagan recently wrote in the Globe and Mail. "Dozens of reserves are near major cities such as Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary and Montreal, as well as rapidly growing smaller towns such as Kamloops, Kelowna and Courtenay-Comox. This land base represents an economic asset that could make a major contribution to raising first nations' standard of living."

Flanagan notes that passing legislation allowing aboriginal bands to assume property rights over their land on a voluntary basis would repair key inadequacies in the current state of aboriginal property rights.

Flanagan also argues that it would settle the debate over the best course for aboriginal Canadians.

"The political left in Canada believes in aboriginal self-government, while the political right emphasizes the integration of native peoples into the mainstream," Flanagan writes. "In this case, left and right can come together: First nations will be able to get underlying title to their land, an important part of self-government; and they will also find it easier to adopt individual property rights for their landholdings, which will facilitate their participation in the Canadian economy."

This, of course, will not be a panacea for aboriginal poverty. Decades of government investment in fighting poverty will remain necessary, but at least the prospect of self-spurred economic development on Canadian aboriginal reserves will provide some light at the end of the tunnel.

In the meantime, there are some other key reforms that will be necessary.

The movement of aboriginal youths into cities has left many of them feeling unrepresented, according to a recent poll.

Off-reserve aboriginals are supposed to be represented by the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples. Yet 40% of off-reserve aboriginals couldn't identify the organization as representing them.

Helin suggests that aboriginals don't recognize CAP as their representation because they get no opportunity to elect them.

“There’s a lot of resentment that there isn’t any representation, and I think that clearly came out in the study,” he says. “Once there is equal representation, and everybody has the chance to elect the national chief of the AFN, for example, people I think will have a much greater sense of ownership.”

Democratic reform is the other side of aboriginal self-government that aboriginal bands will need to address. Those who insist the hereditary nature of political leadership is an aboriginal tradition that must be preserved will need to recognize that this decision will ultimately be up to aboriginals, but should be up to all aboriginals -- not just their chiefs.

One thing is certain: the status quo on aboriginal affairs doesn't work, and there is no reason to expect that will change any time soon.

The evidence for the need for change is apparent: now all we need is for our political leaders -- both aboriginal and non-aboriginal -- to recognize it.

Break the Cycle When They're Young

Vancouver a key piece of Canada's aboriginal puzzle

As the weather in most of Canada turns colder over the coming days and weeks, many homeless aboriginals will begin migrating west, to the BC coast.

They will share similar stories: the economic hardship of living on reservations, abysmal family conditions and substance abuse problems, and the strains of living under various other social ills.

Some living in Vancouver's Eastside may be tempted to view the influx of aboriginals as a problem. But for Canada there is actually an opportunity to be found among the social desolation these people have experienced.

Organizations like the Urban Native Youth Association deal with many of these issues first-hand. They're often the organizations these aboriginals turn to when the promise of newfound prosperity fails to materialize. “It’s the bright lights they talk about. But they come here and find out there’s not really many bright lights, or they’re not shining in our community,” explains UNYA executive director Lynda Gray. In Vancouver, aboriginals account for 30% of the city's homeless population. In the downtown Eastside, they account for 10% of the population, period.

The conditions there are symbolic of the suffering of aboriginals across Canada. Indeed, nearly every First Nation in Canada is represented among the downtown Eastside's population.

“It’s really a sign, a symptom of a larger problem of how native people exist within this community,” says Gray. “It’s the most blatant and obvious sign of damaged spirits.”

Canadians remain hopeful that the damaged spirits of Canada's aboriginals can be healed. But decades of ideologically-motivated aboriginal policies have failed to accomplish this important task.

As much as those who continue to push those discredited ideological policies may refuse to admit it, a change in approach is desperately needed. Vancouver's lower Eastside could serve as an invaluable policy laboratory.

Dissent to the discredited ideological coonsensus on the matter of aboriginal poverty and its accompanying ills tends to overwhelmingly favour breaking a perceived cycle of dependence by aboriginal people on government largesse.

As laudable a goal as this actually is, it cannot reasonably be accomplished until the task of abolishing the social ills that pervade amongst Canadian aboriginals -- both on- and off-reserve -- is well underway.

Dances With Dependency author Calvin Helin offers a solution that may surprise many of his critics -- healthy doses of community outreach. Moreover, Helin insists that this outreach needs to be focused on reaching children in order to break the spell that generations of dependency has cast over their culture.

“We need to be able to show kids that they have an opportunity to make their lives better and it can be something different from what they have experienced so far,” Helin insists. “Sometimes it may not be possible to reach the generation of their parents, so we need to get to the children ... In the Eastside there are a lot of kids who have both parents in jail or don’t get a meal in the morning, so we’ve got to reach them.”

Gray seems to agree with this particular sentiment, and notes that the promotion of aboriginal culture can help break these old cycles of dependence.

“I would say 90 to 99 per cent of aboriginals who are leading healthy, strong lives [are doing so] because they have a strong sense of self, primarily through culture,” Gray says.

Naturally, any outreach program should be rooted in Aboriginal culture, but there may be a need to reassess the current paradigms of the promotion of Aboriginal culture. Naturally, this assessment can really only be done by Aboriginals, and by Aboriginals alone.

But those who want to change the manner in which Aboriginal affairs policies are formulated need to understand that the best time to try to break these old cycles of dependency, by whatever means it is done, is when Aboriginals are young. It will continue to require a healthy government investment in Aboriginal education, health care, and poverty-fighting initiatives.

Breaking the cycle of government dependence -- actually not the same as convincing them to embrace "self-reliance", per se -- will be a long-term, not a short-term, project. And it will depend heavily on the success of poverty-fighting measures, which may depend upon successful policy experimentation in a real-life laboratory like Vancouver's downtown Eastside.

It wouldn't necessarily be a popular initiative -- treating human beings, particularly human beings as belleagured as Canada's aboriginal people, as if they were labrats (even in a benign policy experiment) rarely is.

But Canadians cannot afford to continue tolerating failed Aboriginal policy. The old way forward -- which has actually led us backward -- has failed. A new way forward is desperately needed.

Same Old Attitude = Same Old Problem

Old problems need new solutions -- politicians shouldn't be criticized for listening

When the Conservative party recently announced the formation of its Aboriginal Caucus -- led by MP Rod Bruinooge and also featuring MPs Leona Aglukkaq, Shelly Glover and Rob Clarke as well as Senators Patrick Brazeau and Gerry St Germain -- Canada's opposition parties found a convenient way of distracting people from the fact that the Tories can boast more aboriginals in their caucus than any other party.

They pointed to a speech delivered to the caucus by Calvin Helin and accused the caucus of heresy in regard to aboriginal affairs.

Helin is the author of Dances With Dependency. In the book he argues that the old system of political clientelism and paternalism has shoehorned Canada's First Nations into a position of poverty-perpetuating economic dependency. He also identifies a severe democratic deficit in many First Nations, as the leadership of organizations like the Assembly of First Nations and Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs are elected not by the citizens of First Nations, but rather by chiefs.

Helin argues that many of these chiefs are tending not to the needs and interests of their constituents, but rather to their own institutional interests, and he insists that they need to be changed.

Among the Conservative aboriginal caucus, Patrick Brazeau formerly served as the National Chief of the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples.

Perhaps the most revelatory comments about the entire issue came from Liberal MP Anita Neville, who simply wrote off Helin's speech as "nonsense".

"I'd rather them hear from the [native] leadership and not someone who is critical of the leadership," Neville said.

Of course, if Helin were simply another white man perpetually looking down his nose at aboriginals -- a comment often made about Tom Flanagan, and sometimes not without merit -- that very much would be one thing. But Helin is a member of BC's Tsimshian First Nation. His father Barry is a hereditary chief of the Gitlaan tribe, and his mother Verna is a member of the royal House of 'Wiiseeks of the Ginaxangiik tribe.

In other words, Calvin Helin would actually stand to personally benefit from maintaining the current political structure of First Nations governance. When such an individual is calling for change, our federal politicians should listen.

That individuals like Neville would suggest that politicians should only listen to First Nations leaders and ignore their critics is not only extremely foolish, it's also tacitly undemocratic.

Opposition leaders sputter in outrage when the government appears to be ignoring dissent. To institutionally exclude dissenters from the debate is to do much worse than ignore them.

Rod Bruinooge, Patrick Brazeau and the rest of the Conservative Aboriginal Caucus are listening. Considering that decades of Liberal party-backed clientelist and paternalist aboriginal policies have left aboriginals mired in poverty, individuals like Neville could stand to listen, too -- or at the very least hold their tongues while others do.