Part 4 of this week’s blog: No More “Reconciliation Sticks”

Now that we have reconciled ourselves to the reality, as described in the last three parts of this blog, of bottom-line, extinguishment-policy reconciliation, all those orange T-shirts look different. You can bet they mean something different to the wearer, depending on whether they are Indigenous or not.

Still, maybe we go to Capital “R” Reconciliation events at the city venue, to show up for the spirit of it. When our hearing is not muddied by the emotional speeches, we hear the MP say, “we can continue to witness, to learn, and do everything we can to address the past.” That’s his closing line: no particulars, and definitely nothing about addressing the present.

            The School District rep cries and says, “we’re learning how to teach children.” She says there are “powerful examples of how our communities have not done things in a good way,” but doesn’t describe any of them.

The City Councillor says, referring to one of the distinguished visiting Chiefs, “Hey there’s Jimmy. It always makes me happy to see Jimmy visiting us.”

The awkwardness of these emotional people making hollow statements is easily explained by the superficial nature of the assignation. There is confusion around what is expected from a government official who is well aware that his tax revenue comes from the unceded, non-treaty Indigenous lands his city is occupying, and if any native whomever tries to exercise his rights there he will be snapped up and incarcerated as per reconciliation rules (business as usual), but he is supposed to say something that sounds like he cares.

Canada has produced exalted and venerated leaders in obscuring this problem, ensuring that the “reconciliation” of Aboriginal titles, and societies, will be enforced and will usher in the time of “no more Indian question,” with a big smile and a small cheque and some native motif pinned to their suit jacket. But most politicians are not so smooth, so it’s bizarre to watch.

Right next to the “reconciliation” event is the business-as-usual land developer scraping away the river foreshore to build condos, and police patrolling to protect the desecration of the traditional, local, unsurrendered supemarket, pharmacy, and fishery access point.

Because “reconciliation” doesn’t actually mean anything other than what the courts and the legislators and extractive industries and police actually do.

They reinforce the supremacy of the colonial economy – socially, militarily, legally; every way – and chastise land defenders, traditionalists, cultural people, to reconcile themselves to it.

Acceptance, resignation, and reconciliation is required of Indigenous Peoples.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s role in enforcement

The TRC issued its report in 2015. They may have accomplished a few things that Canada wanted “out of the way” before it ratified the UNDRIP.

Without getting personal about the Commissioners – they were just people selected on the likelihood of doing what they were told – the Report of the TRC is a blinding misrepresentation of the situation in Canada. Surely work was done, meetings were held, and people benefitted by their involvement in the course of Commission events; but other work was done as well.

Let’s nip back along a shady trail. In 2007, Canada voted against the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) during the General Assembly’s ratification process. It was one of only four member states to do so, out of a total 192 states. It is reliably rumoured that Canada threatened several African countries with cessation of aid funding if they voted in favour of the DRIP.

            Loudly explaining themselves to anyone who would listen, Canada spoke (and issued all manner of written statements) about how Aboriginal rights in Canada are already constitutionalized and superior to the UNDRIP articles.

            Slight further digression: Canada pays various reputable Indigenous individuals to tour the world: Pakistan, Mexico, Australia, several west African countries, among many others, to promote the Band Council system; the Tribal Council system; and also to tell outright lies. “The Assembly of First Nations has a place in Parliament and they are part of the Canadian government,” I heard from an Indigenous South African delegate at the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. He had been told as much by an Indigenous presenter from Canada.

So when Canada later ratified the DRIP in 2016, they took the chance to make a grand appearance at the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in New York City, with Ministers Carolyn Bennett and Jody Wilson Raybould meeting and greeting. It was odd, then, that when Minister Wilson Raybould returned to Ottawa, she soon was despatched to address the Assembly of First Nations and tell them that implementing the UNDRIP was “not practicable.”

            Five years later, we got the Canadianized legislation of the UNDRIP.

Canada was slow, and incomplete with importing the 1948 Geneva Convention, too. When they incorporated a few articles of that Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide into the Criminal Code, in the 1960s, the “forcible removal of children from the group to another group” was not written as such.

            The “reconciliation of aboriginal rights with the broader society” has been under way long before Chief Justice Antonio Lamer came up with this new and improved, and ambiguous, term. Canadians will handle human rights their own way, and they might need to adjust the dictionary.

See here, one of the very first things out of Senator Murray Sinclair’s mouth, when he delivered the opening statement of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s report, was that Canada has committed “cultural genocide.” But that doesn’t exist.

The Report, in its opening paragraphs, erases and redefines one of the only legal tools we Canadians have to grapple with what was not “cultural genocide” – whatever that is, it doesn’t have an accepted definition in international legal instruments – but “genocide,” according to the five definitions of the crime identified in the 1948 Geneva Convention.

Any one of these actions is genocide:

“Forcible removal of children from the group to another group.”

“Deliberately imposing conditions calculated to bring about the destruction of the group.”

“Killing members of the group.”

“Inflicting serious physical or mental harm on members of the group.”

“Forcible sterilization of members of the group.”

According to the TRC, when they describe these intentional actions, this is “cultural genocide” – which is not justiciable, because there is no Convention for the Prevention of Cultural Genocide, and anyway all of the crimes listed above are documented by the TRC in their report and justiciable under the Genocide Convention.

Why did the Commission do this? They were enforcing reconciliation.

            Reconciliation means resigning; it means making compatible; and a finding of genocide really does not fit this “superior to the DRIP,” advanced Canadian culture. The Commission had to enforce “the concept of reconciliation,” as well as the underlying, extra-legal policy of extinguishment. They did a remarkable job, using the word “reconciliation” fluidly between both meanings and even managing to leave the term undefined.

            The Anglican Church letter incorporated in the TRC Report straight-out asked them, “What is reconciliation”? It was not a rhetorical or philosophical question.

Why “must” Indigenous people commit to “mutual respect and recognition”?

This was, for all intents and purposes, ordered by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. But the TRC was not also offering a path to justice. They just wrote in their report that, in order for reconciliation to work, Aboriginal individuals and groups “must” give respect and recognition to the colonizer.

The Supreme Court of Canada’s Chief Justice, Beverly McLachlin, confirmed the current usage of “reconciliation” in Tsilhqot’in Nation, 2014:

“[83] What interests are potentially capable of justifying an incursion on Aboriginal title?  In Delgamuukw, this Court, per Lamer C.J., offered this:

“In the wake of Gladstone, the range of legislative objectives that can justify the infringement of aboriginal title is fairly broad. Most of these objectives can be traced to the reconciliation of the prior occupation of North America by aboriginal peoples with the assertion of Crown sovereignty, which entails the recognition that “distinctive aboriginal societies exist within, and are a part of, a broader social, political and economic community” (at para. 73). In my opinion, the development of agriculture, forestry, mining, and hydroelectric power, the general economic development of the interior of British Columbia, protection of the environment or endangered species, the building of infrastructure and the settlement of foreign populations to support those aims, are the kinds of objectives that are consistent with this purpose and, in principle, can justify the infringement of aboriginal title. Whether a particular measure or government act can be explained by reference to one of those objectives, however, is ultimately a question of fact that will have to be examined on a case-by-case basis. [Emphasis added; emphasis in original deleted; para 165]”

These justifiable infringements of reconciliation are enforced all the time, at Fairy Creek, Sun Peaks, Burnt Church, and Gitdimt’en.

No Canadian Commission has ever questioned the issue of the Canadian courts’ assumption of entitlement to all legal questions in Canada, and its bias: in favour of Canada; and the resulting lack of access to a fair trial for any Indigenous person who would want to rely on their own laws.

The police who broke up the pipeline-barricade camp at Gidimt’en in 2019 had a clear understanding of their role in reconciliation.

I wasn’t there in Wet’suwet’en territory, but I heard. The Emergency Response Team officers referred to their guns as “reconciliation sticks,” as they proceeded into the unsurrendered, sovereign Wet’suwet’en lands to enforce the Canadian occupation.

Perhaps they are more fluent in colonial law than the average Canadian who is distracted by the TRC’s promise of hearing fabulous Indigenous mythologies, traditions, and histories in youth arts and crafts sessions, or digitization projects, or new landmark signage. Those activities make up the majority of the “94 Calls to Action” articulated by Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).

Because the crown (look at any piece of Canadian money) refuses to respect Indigenous law and land, and Indigenous Peoples still aren’t going to give it all up, those mutually exclusive refusals have to be reconciled: if, suspiciously, almost always in favour of the “broader society,” and their several justifiable infringements – immigration, logging, mining, development, etc. According to the Canadian courts. No one has reported much on the thoughts of capable and juridically solvent Indigenous courts.

“Reconciliation” is not the tool of the colonized. “Reconciliation” needs to be enforced.

Thank you very much for reading. Takem i nsnukw’nukw’a.

Check in tomorrow for Part 5 – Reconciliation is Municipalization

and an Indigenous nationalist who fled persecution in Canada, to the USA, and were protected by an American court under the “political prisoners” exception to the extradition treaty.