Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I'll be brief, five minutes.
I have some comments on the proposed bill by the MP. Amendments, as he should know and as all you MPs should know, do not benefit the first nations in any way, shape, or form. They benefit the bureaucracy by strengthening their paternalistic authority, and it reaches the goal of termination and assimilation as stated by John A. Macdonald, the original Prime Minister.
I would like to disregard amendment in that bill itself. Replacement is something that to a certain extent I probably would agree to. But prior to that happening, I think the MPs and Canada need to understand who we are, as has been stated. In doing so, they have to educate themselves the day before treaty, the day during treaty, and the day after.
The day before treaty we were sovereign nations with our own political, fiscal, judicial, and social agendas. If you look at the international interpretation of nationhood, we have our own form of government, population, land, culture, and most importantly, we have our language. The intent is that we escalate and contemporize those agendas into what is being referred to nowadays as self-government. But self-government alone will not be sufficient. Self-government within the federal policy is short-term. At the end of the day, it will just be delegated authority, more or less status quo. Self-government can only happen if we are allowed, through legislation agreed to by the first nations and Canada, to have access to the resources that we have surrounding our reserves and inside our homelands.
Self-sufficiency, the fiscal agenda, is what should fund self-government in order for us to govern our own people. Self-government relies on the funding that we generate, and in the same manner, the judicial agenda. Self-adjudication relies on funding that we should be able to generate from the resources that we have, again in our ancestral lands and in our homelands. Self-determination is an agenda that is identified in treaty. A resurgence of indigenous nationhood on one hand, the application of the fiduciary on the other, and then implementation of treaty. I think that is something that Chief Head stated in the past in meetings with senior officials within Parliament, and also with the Prime Minister and with the Governor General of Canada. I'm not sure if that's been filtered down to the MPs who should be receiving that kind of information.
Again, I go back to the word “replacement”. Amendments, as I said, I'm not in favour of, but if we are going to dismantle something, I say we should not concentrate only on the Indian Act itself. Bring into it where the authority comes from, and who exercises that authority. Dissolve the Indian Act, and at the same time dismantle the department and do away with the Minister of Indian Affairs, and replace them with something similar to the Privy Council.
Ladies and gentlemen, in closing, there is that constitutional authority, subsection 91.24. Most people look at it as application of the fiduciary. We in Shoal Lake and Red Earth interpret that section as recognizing the royal proclamation of 1763 where it states tracts of land will be reserved for Indians or tribes or nations. That is affirmed in section 25 of the Constitution, and section 35 is there for the protection. We need to move a couple of steps further just from protection and our constitutional authority. We need to implement a treaty, and there needs to be a mechanism of enforcement so we don't have MPs interfering. They should be doing work for the Euro Canadians, as we used to call them. We don't have problems with how the MPs deal with Euro Canadians, but we need a system that will deal specifically with our issues.
Ladies and gentlemen, I thank you for your time. I am sure I took five minutes or so.