Mr. Speaker, it is a great honour, as always, to rise in the House to speak on behalf of the people of Timmins—James Bay, particularly on this important New Democrat motion about restoring the nation-to-nation relationship with first nation people. I will be sharing my time with the member for Louis-Saint-Laurent.
It is very important that the debate comes this week, when we have numerous issues showing us the fundamental failure of Canadians to live up to that relationship, such as at Neskantaga, where we have a horrific suicide crisis. I have seen the suicide crisis in James Bay and the damage that it does psychologically, physically and spiritually to people. I note that Neskantaga in English means Fort Hope. It seems so ironic that a community so devastated is a place called Fort Hope.
This week, nine premiers came forward and asked the Conservative government for an inquiry into the hundreds of murdered and missing women and the government continued to turn a deaf ear. In its eyes, perhaps there is one set of victims it will listen to, but it continues to stonewall the hundreds of missing first nations young women across the country.
This week the government continues its court case against Cindy Blackstock. It spied on a woman who was speaking out on the issue of education and child rights for first nation children. This is at a time when there are now more children being held in foster care and being taken away from their families than at the height of the residential schools. This shows us the broken relationship that we need to restore.
I want to speak today about Treaty 9, because that is the region I represent, the height of land in northern Ontario. I know in the media, when we had the Attiwapiskat housing crisis, there was the sense of “We won, they lost”. That seems to be the general public view of the treaty, that it was some kind of surrender, or giving up.
However, until we understand the story of the treaty, we do not really understand why the relationship with first nation people has gone so wrong. We would not understand why people like Grand Chief Stan Louttit and Chief Theresa Spence speak so much about Treaty 9. Their grandfathers signed that treaty. This is not ancient history. This is the beginning of what went wrong in the modern 20th century.
If we look at the Indian affairs website on Treaty 9, it is amazing. The very first line on the history of Treaty 9 begins with the opening statement, “We ask you to help us”, as though the first nations were hoping that the Indian affairs bureaucrats were going to come up and make everything right.
What was being spoken about in the late 1800s was the incursion by the white settlers into first nations lands, stripping the lands of their basic resources and the attempt by the people to define some rules on the ground. They were not calling on Indian affairs to come up and take their land and put them on a reserve. They were saying that their fundamental rights, which they never extinguished, were under attack. They were under attack by CP Rail. They were under attack by the white settlers who were trying to flood the communities with alcohol, while taking away the basic hunting rights.
What was interesting also was the issue of resource development. In December 1901, the Hudson Bay Company Osnaburgh House, forwarded a petition saying “For the past two or three years exploration for minerals has been carried on in the country contiguous to Lake St. Joseph”. They asked to meet with His Majesty's officials to discuss what was happening in terms of mineral exploration "as white men are already building upon land which we desire to retain".
In 1903, the Geological Survey of Canada was turned away by the chief of the Crane Band, who said it had no right to come and explore without the express consent of first nations.
Back in 1872, near Jackfish Lake, Chief Blackstone shut down gold development, saying they had no right to be there.
Fast forward to the 21st century when we saw KI, in northwestern Ontario, kick out a junior mining company that refused to consult the Wahgoshig First Nation in my area. The company said that it was not their job to look for Indian arrowheads, that is was a mining exploration company. The refusal to consult today has resulted in the first nations taking the same actions that their ancestors took over a hundred years ago.
When the treaty commissioners came forward, it was never about the surrender of land, it was about ensuring that the land was going to be used in a fair and equitable manner, which was not happening.
It is interesting that Indian Affairs, in its history, blames Ontario. It states:
It was Ontario which had licensed the surveyors and mining exploration parties the Indian people were complaining about to federal officials. And, as the Cree and Ojibwa were later to discover, it was Ontario which had already given out timber licenses to lands they wished to reserve for themselves. If the incursion of whites was the gun pointed at the head of the Indian people, Ontario's finger was on the trigger.
That is the official history from the Indian Affairs point of view.
Certainly we know that across the Prairies, Ontario and Quebec, the provinces treated the first nations people as non-existent. They were a federal responsibility. Hence, they did not exist, and the provinces could do whatever they wanted. However, in the case of Treaty No. 9, the issue was that they were trying to get some certainty with respect to the land. Ontario took the hard line. It said that it would not allow a reserve to have any kind of hydro development potential, period. The first nations were going to get the land that was absolutely worthless. The fact is, it did not tell the people in Treaty No. 9.
When the commissioners came forward in 1905-06 across the upper lakes, they made oral promises to the people, because this was not a written culture. Duncan Scott, the treaty commissioner, knew that no negotiation was going to take place, because Ontario said that if it did not get everything it wanted, it did not care what the first nations did. It was just going to apply. It was going in with a gun to the heads of the first nations.
It is interesting that when the people landed in Fort Hope, where today we have the huge suicide epidemic, Chief Moonias stood up and said to the people that the white guys were not giving them money for nothing. If they were offering money, they were taking something substantial away from them. That is what he was warning the people, and the commissioners had to give the people a story. They said that the people were going to get medical coverage and schools. The issue of schooling was very important to people on the James Bay coast. The Cree communities knew that they needed education as a way to address the fact that their communities were in crisis. They knew that the world was changing.
Daniel MacMartin's diary has only recently come to light. He was with the commissioners as they went across northern Ontario in 1905 and 1906. Daniel MacMartin said that the commissioners had to sweeten the deal verbally, but they did not put any of it in writing. What the people were told they were signing was completely different from what they actually signed onto. Later, of course, government leaders said that they had surrendered the land. It was all there on the page in black and white, but that was not the verbal commitment made.
That was the record of the so-called honour of the Crown for the following 100 years. I have seen it myself. I saw it in Barriere Lake, where the Liberal government signed an agreement with the community, and as soon as the agreement was signed, they walked away. I saw it in Kashechewan First Nation, where we sat down with the then Liberal government. We had an agreement to rebuild the community, and we sat down to look at the paper to have the whole commitment they had made verbally. I remember saying to the chief that none of the promises were on the paper, and we were told that they could trust the honour of the Crown. We know what happened to that. So much for the agreement with Kashechewan, but it took the present Conservative government to rip up that agreement. That was the so-called honour of the Crown.
Daniel MacMartin said that the people were misled. The commissioners had to mislead them to get them to sign off.
It is fascinating, and really deeply disturbing, that it was Duncan Scott who led the Treaty No. 9 negotiations. The people who were coming to him said that they understood that their way of life was under threat. They said that they would make an agreement if he promised that their children would get an education. Duncan Scott had a plan for their education all right; it was the residential schools. Duncan Scott said that the residential schools had to be mandatory, because it was to “get rid of the Indian problem... to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed”. This was about a genocidal policy. However it is said, it was about the destruction of the first nations people. They went into those communities, misrepresented themselves and punished those communities with the residential schools, which nearly broke them.
One hundred years later, history is calling on us. It is knocking on the door of this House of Commons saying that it is time to restore that broken relationship, show that there is honour in the Crown and ensure that the first nations people are treated with the rights and dignities they have as the original first nations people, who never extinguished their rights in this country.