Mohammed Azhar Ali Khan

The Aboriginal people brought a message to Ottawa this week – Canada is their land too, they are peace-loving but determined members of the Canadian family and keen to get justice and respect.



Many Canadians welcomed them and expressed the hope that their future will be rosier than their past.



It started in January, in the Whapmagoostui community in Quebec on the coast of Hudson Bay. Six Cree (an Aboriginal tribe) youth and an elder undertook to walk 1,500 kilometers to the nation’s capital to show that the Cree people cherish their language, culture and traditions even as they are embracing Canada.



In unimaginably cold winter weather, one can die or be paralyzed in minutes. But these seven Cree donned warm clothing and trudged through 1,500 kilometers of snow, ice, storms and slush. By the time they arrived in Ottawa this week, others had joined them – strangers fed and cheered them, the police provided escorts and politicians welcomed them on Parliament Hill.



In the capital they were welcomed by the Algonquins, another Aboriginal tribe whose ancestral land now forms Canada’s capital. They were lauded by Opposition parties while Aboriginal Affairs Minister Bernard Valcourt promised to speak to them.



“Your journey has shown us strength,” Matthew Coon Come, Grand Chief of the Grand Council of Crees, said. The welcoming party included Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence, who fasted for 44 days in December and January to spotlight the Aboriginal people’s plight in isolated communities. Her fast galvanized the Idle No More movement which spread nationwide and served notice that the Aboriginal people will push for their rights.



Chief Spence publicized the horror in her reserve – freezing, dilapidated housing, unsafe drinking water, lack of indoor toilets, black mould, inadequate waste treatment, despair, drug abuse, unemployment, suicides, domestic violence and the absence of hope. Canadian media visited her reserve and found conditions worse than in many Third World countries.



But the media often portray the Aboriginals as being lazy, irresponsible alcoholics when they have been the victims of history, bureaucratic neglect and racism. Polls suggest that 64 percent of Canadians feel the Aboriginal people receive too much support from the government and 66 percent feel that they are well treated.



The United Nations and Amnesty International have deplored the Aboriginals’ plight repeatedly, including in reports this year.



Correctional Investigator Howard Sapers’ report, tabled in Parliament this month, stated that the prison system perpetuates disadvantages for indigenous people and that the disproportionately high number of Aboriginal people in prison blights Canada’s human rights record.



First Nations (Aboriginals), Inuit (formerly called Eskimos) and Metis (mixed white, Aboriginals) constitute four percent of Canada’s 33 million population but make up 23 percent of those in jail. Indigenous women in 2010-2011 accounted for almost a third of federally incarcerated women, according to the report, entitled Spirit Matters: Aboriginal People and the Corrections and Conditional Release Act.



The Toronto Star reported University of Toronto doctoral candidate Akwasi Owusu-Bempah as saying that in Ontario Aboriginal boys make up 2.9 percent of young males, but in jails they constitute nearly 15 percent of young males. The proportion of black boys admitted to jail is four times higher, and Aboriginal girls’ jail admission is ten times higher than their population in Ontario. And so it goes in other walks of life.



The problem is historical. The Aboriginals had been in the land for thousands of years before white settlers arrived. The Aboriginals welcomed them, traded with them and guided them. Agreements were concluded between the European settlers and the Aboriginals, written and oral, mostly with the Crown.



But a lot of land was simply grabbed by force. The Aboriginals were pushed into small reserves where they enjoyed some rights but were mostly controlled by the government through the Indian Act of 1876 which stifled them and sought to destroy their way of life.



Between 1879 and 1996, tens of thousands of Aboriginal children were taken forcibly to residential schools to deny them knowledge of their culture. Many were abused, sexually and otherwise. Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized in 2008 for acts that aimed to “kill the Indian in the child.” Justice Murray Sinclair, Chairman of Canada’s truth and reconciliation commission, called this act against Aboriginal children “an act of genocide.”



The problem is compounded by the fact that Aboriginals consist of more than 600 bands, some Aboriginal chiefs pursue their own interests rather than those of their people, provincial and federal jurisdictions clash and Aboriginals are discriminated against in education, which rules out good jobs and advancement.



However, although the courts are sympathetic to the Aboriginal people, the Aboriginal people are losing patience and their numbers are growing, making them potentially a bigger force in the country. Some of their reserves hold underground resources that cannot be exploited without their consent.



It is likely that Aboriginals will have a better future than their ancestors, but they will have to keep struggling for their rights. Their welfare has not been a priority for most Canadian governments.

 

— Mohammed Azhar Ali Khan is a retired Canadian journalist, civil servant and refugee judge. He has received the Order of Canada, Order of Ontario and the Queen’s Diamond and Golden Jubilee Medals.