Mr. King says previous federal Liberal governments, beginning with Pierre Trudeau’s Liberal government and the 1969 White Paper, created what he calls “termination” policies and attitudes towards Canada’s aboriginal peoples, but he says today’s federal government is trying to get rid of the legal treaty-based land base by allowing allotments on reserves to be sold off which will eventually force reserves to collapse.
Mr. King says he believes the federal government is trying to break up reserves across the country in part because legal treaty-based lands are in the way of corporate private-sector land development for oil extraction and the movement of energy from one sector to another.
“I think the current government is pushing harder than any other Canadian government has ever done to destroy that native land base,” Mr. King said in an interview with The Hill Times in Ottawa, who described the relationship between the federal government and Canada’s First Nations as “at an all-time low.”
Mr. King’s book is a remarkable narrative of native history and native policy in North America. Considered one of Canada’s premier native public intellectuals, Mr. King is an activist, and a bestselling author of five novels, including Medicine River; Green Grass Running Water; Truth and Bright Water, and the 2003 Massey Lectures, The Truth About Stories, has been praised for his latest book.
Author Joseph Boyden says The Inconvenient Indian is destined to become “a classic of historical narrative,” and Wade Davis says “not since Eduardo Galeano’s astonishing trilogy Memory of Fire” has he read an account of the Amerindian experience “as full of wit, compassion, irony, and pathos.”
This Q&A has been edited for length and style.
You’ve been thinking about writing this book for 50 years. Why did you write it?
“For the money. [Laughs]. No, as I say in the book, it’s a conversation I’ve been having with myself for maybe, not quite 50 years, that might have been an exaggeration, but for quite a while and with others over the years.
“I got seriously involved in native affairs in the mid-’60s and I’ve been involved ever since, in various ways. I’ve been everything from an activist to a teacher. I’m not sure what you’d call me now, these days. I guess a retired something-or-other. I’m mostly known for my fiction. I’ve only done two non-fiction books, The Truth About Stories: The Massey Lectures, and then this one.
“And one of the reasons I did this book was, as I worked in native affairs, and as I’ve taught in native history and native literature, one of the things that was always lacking was a good book that looked at the over-arching concerns that took in the U.S. and Canada because the minute that you begin to split those two countries up, you only get half the picture of native affairs, native policy, native history, and it didn’t strike me as a very good combination. There are a great many books that look at particular aspects of native policy, or of native history, or the history of tribes, and they’re great. So, in those, you can see the trees, but you don’t see the forest, particularly.
“I wanted to show the forest and show some individual trees, just to give it context and continuity. So that was my goal and I wanted to write the book in a way that didn’t sound like an academic tomb of some sort. I wanted to write it for that famous average person on the street who could it pick up and come to at least a level one understanding of native history and native policy in North America and see how the two countries tie into one another because that line that we like to draw between the U.S. and Canada really is the mythical line in many ways. If you’re a native person, you’ve got to smile about that line. There are so many tribes that live along the border that are divided by that. They really don’t pay any attention to it.”
Your style of writing is really nice. It’s conversational, but also substantive and powerful. Is that hard to do?
“It’s the only way I know to write, especially non-fiction. The minute I try to sound important and learned, it’s awful, it’s just awful. When I started writing the Massey Lectures way back in 2002, the first draft of those lectures were just dreadful, pedantic, they’d just make your teeth fall out. My partner, Helen Hoy, who’s also a professor, said, ‘Look, stop trying to show people how smart you are. You’re not. Just do what you do best and that’s your role as a storyteller.’ And so that’s what I decided to do with this. I decided to learn the lesson that I learned from the Massey Lectures and I decided to tell this as a story and people like hearing stories. Nobody likes to be talked to, and nobody likes somebody to show off with their versatility in language, particularly, but everybody likes a good story.”
Joseph Boyden, Wade Davis, Dionne Brand and Shawn Atleo are all raving about your book.
“I paid them all. [Laughs].”
Did you expect it to be this good?
“When you’re writing something like this, anything I write, in part, I write it for myself. I try to make it as good as I possibly can. If I can’t impress myself with what I write, I don’t figure I can impress anybody else. If I’m not crying in parts where it’s really sad, or laughing where it’s funny, I’m not doing my job as a writer—is what my feeling is.
“So, I thought the book was well-written by the time I finished it. I’ll be honest, I generally do; otherwise, I wouldn’t put them out if I thought it was a piece of junk. I’d stick it back in the drawer. But you never know what other people are going to think about that and you can’t anticipate what they’re going to say about the book, or how the book is going to do. My third novel, Truth in Bright Water, I still think is my best piece of fiction, but it never developed the audience that Green Grass, Running Water did, or Medicine River.
“My job, as a writer, is to produce the very best book I can. That’s my job. Once that’s done, I have no more control. It’s like your children: you raise your kids, you send them out into the world, and you don’t know what they’re going to do. You sort of hold your breath and hope that things are going to turn out for the best, but you’ve got no control over that. I can’t tell reviewers how to review it, I can’t tell readers to go out and buy the book or read the book. That happens in wonderful and mysterious ways.”
Do you think kids should be reading this book in schools across Canada?
“I’d like to see it in the schools. I think it would go a long way to at least giving young people a background in native history and native policy.
“Quite frankly, I wish politicians on the Hill would read it, but they didn’t read the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, so I don’t know that they’d read this. I know many of them don’t want to read this.”
Why not?
“Well, I don’t think it’s very kind to some of the current-day policies or the policies of the immediate past. I think I’m very clear that termination, as an attitude and as a policy, which was developed in the 1950s in the U.S., is something that Canada has taken on over the years, starting in 1969 with Trudeau and Chrétien with the 1969 White Paper, which is the termination document, right to the present day, with the Harper government which is very ‘terminationist’ in its policies towards native people.
“As a matter of fact, the Conservatives have really mounted an all-out offensive on native lands base and I know why, but the why isn’t the important thing. The important thing is that it’s happening and if native people are going to survive, it’s got to be stopped.”
They’re doing this just through the omnibus bills?
“Yes, they’re doing it through a series of bills. But there has been an unwritten policy for years in Canada of starving native reserves. If you look at many of the native reserves, they don’t have good water supply, they don’t have good housing. That’s not happenstance. That really is successive governments, Liberal and Conservative, for that matter, that are looking to starve native people off those reserves. It goes unmarked, for the most part.
“What gets sparked in the papers and what pisses me off about the media, quite frankly, is that not many people are practising long-form journalism anymore and that’s partly because it’s tough.
“When I was writing the book, one of the questions I had was, I know that there are trust funds in Ottawa that are reserved for native people where, let’s say, if you’ve got mining a company on a native reserve, the money that is generated for that band goes into a trust fund in Ottawa and then the money is supposed to come back out.
“Well, I wanted to track that money because the government says, ‘We give millions of dollars to native people,’ and my question was, ‘Where do the millions of dollars come from? Does most of that come from the trust funds?’ The government makes it sound like it comes from public money, but I don’t believe that’s true. I believe much of that money comes from the trust funds.
“So where does the money come from? Where does it go? How much are we talking about? And I couldn’t get an answer, I couldn’t find out.
“It was one of the walls that went up and it was very frustrating. The questions you have to ask are: How much money comes in from that land base? Where does it go, and what happens to it? How much comes out? And when it comes out, where does it go?
“Whenever somebody talks about incompetence of whatever, I look at Ottawa and have to laugh. The sponsorship scandal; politicians sitting in rooms taking bags of money; Senators who live in Mexico and don’t bother to come back up. It seems like it’s business as usual which is kind of sad, but when Theresa Spence’s salary is published everybody gets all hot and bothered by that, as if that’s the issue.”
You say you prefer the old name “Department of Indian Affairs” even though the ministry is now “Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada” because you say the old name is less disingenuous. What do you mean?
“It just strikes me that what they’re trying to do is simply say, ‘Indians are just a small portion. Northern Development is what we’re really after and we’ll just stick Indian Affairs in there along with it.’ It feels like a tag-on when in actual fact when you talk about northern development, you have to talk about native bands because a lot that country up in that neck of the woods is native land.”
What do you think of the current federal government and its relationship with Canada’s First Nations, aboriginal peoples?
“Well, I’m not a politician and I don’t have access to sitting in on the discussions that Shawn Atleo may have or may not have with Stephen Harper, but looking at it from the outside, as an observer, I think probably it’s been as low as it’s been in a good 50 or 60 years. I think the current government is pushing harder than any other Canadian government has ever done to destroy that native land base. I would say it’s an all-time low, quite frankly.”
What do you think of the Idle No More movement?
“Well, the Idle No More movement is one of many such movements that have come along. If you think of the fault line that runs through the planet, where you have all these little volcanoes that appear every so often along that line, native affairs is kind of a fault line through Canada. Idle No More is not a surprise. What is a surprise is there haven’t been more of these [protests] over the years and what really is a surprise is that they haven’t been more vigorous than they’ve been.
“I expect that if the policies of the Conservative government continue, that you’re going to see more and more of these kinds of things and they may even increase in intensity. For many of us, reserves are key to maintaining native identity, maintaining native culture. We lose the land base and that really could be the end of those things and then what we’ll become is just museum pieces. Right now, North America loves dead Indians. They love that sense that they have of who we are.”
How can this be turned around? How can it be improved? What needs to be done?
“Here’s where I become naughty, but the first thing that I think has to happen is you’ve got to change the government. The Conservatives certainly seem hell-bent on destroying the native estate. I don’t think you can begin anything unless you either have a change in policy, a change in attitude among the Conservatives, which I’d certainly welcome, or a change in government. Do I think that a change in government’s going to change a big deal? Do I think the Liberals are going to be any better than the Conservatives were? I don’t know. I don’t have much hope for that, to be honest with you. Would the NDP be any better than the Liberals or the Conservatives?
“Well, they’ve never formed a national government. I suppose giving them a kick at the can might be an interesting test between principle and expediency, and then aside from that, you just have to look at Canada’s relationship with native people and try to re-forge a new relationship. The old relationship insisted that natives assimilate, that we become small ‘c’ capitalists; that we understand that being native wasn’t the thing we wanted to do.
“That’s what North Americans tried to convince us for years, that we don’t want to be natives because there’s no future in that, particularly; ‘What are you going to do as a native?’ Well, the same thing that you do as a white. But it’s always been that our cultures were not as good as European cultures, our languages weren’t as good, our thinking patterns weren’t as good, so why would we want to hold onto those when we have this marvelous thing we could take on? And, quite frankly, when I look around North America and look at the state in which people and politics finds itself, I say, ‘Come on guys, you’ve got to be kidding me.’ It doesn’t look like someplace I want to be, particularly. I’d rather be someplace else and that someplace else is native North America.
“I’m not suggesting natives have a better philosophy or that we understand the world any better than Europeans do, but I do think we understand it differently and I don’t see any reason why we should take on something we don’t want to be, or be forced into that which is what North America does and has tried to do almost since contact; residential schools being the prime example of that.
“If you thought about using residential schools as the model for public education, there would be people in the streets with guns. Can you imagine that? That the government comes in and removes your children and you’re in Ottawa and they move them out to B.C. because they don’t want them to be near you and they put them into schools where the mortality rate was only 20 per cent, rather than 30 and 50 per cent? How long do you think that would last? How long do you think people would put up with that? And, yet, in North America, we’ve put up with that for hundreds of years.”
Original Article
Source: hilltimes.com
Author: KATE MALLOY
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