Honourable senators, I rise today to speak to Bill C-29, An Act to provide for the establishment of a national council for reconciliation. I want to thank Senator Audette for sponsoring the bill and the Standing Senate Committee on Indigenous Peoples for being diligent and respectful in their work.

Colleagues, it is impossible to compress into one speech the history of First Nations when looking through the lens of conciliation. The necessity to be selective leads me to concentrate on narrow dimensions of First Nations’ lives, starting with pre-contact, to show their history of independence, and then showing the intentional devolving structure of self-determination of First Nations.

The rippling effects of the trauma and rupture to our lives caused by colonial policies and legislation have served to reinforce and legitimize racist stereotypes about First Nations. Our stories about residential schooling were told to challenge the stories that reinforced the naturalized kind of racism that permeates Canadian society. It is to make ourselves, as parliamentarians, accountable to foster, maintain and build relationships between non-Indigenous and Indigenous peoples.

I will conclude with an amendment.

Colleagues, in the book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, author Charles C. Mann states:

. . . researchers have made fascinating discoveries about the first fifteen thousand years of American history . .. that fit well in the book’s basic arguments: that Indian societies were bigger than had been previously believed; that they were older and more sophisticated than previously believed; and that they had greater impact on the environment than previously believed.

In the book entitled Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life, author James Daschuk states:

. . . prehistoric populations on the Canadian plains, rather than small, nomadic, band-level societies, were large, sophisticated, “tribally” organized communities made up of as of many as 1,000 individuals working communally to produce “an almost industrial level of resource exploitation.” These large groups provided enough labor to drive herds over large distances and then kill and process them, creating large surpluses of food that were traded (often for corn and other crops) or stockpiled for future use. Food surpluses gave communities time to pursue quests for more than just food, developing formal institutions within them . . . .

During the Little Ice Age between 1275 and 1300 A.D.:

. . . the choices made by communities were the difference between success and oblivion over the long term. In Greenland, rigid adherence to unsustainable European farming practices marked the beginning of the end for Norse settlement, while their indigenous neighbours shifted their subsistence strategies across the arctic, adapting to the harsh conditions and surviving in the long term.

Honourable senators, after 500 years of sustained contact and interaction, First Nation lives and First Nation government relations have been left in a deplorable, human-generated state of disarray and despair. Government policies and legislation deliberately undermined the viability of Aboriginal communities in order to serve the never-ending quest for assimilation of First Nations and the desire for land.

We were never inherently physically weak peoples as history makes us out to be. The impact of the arrival of epidemic diseases was worsened with the newly imposed reserve system.

As author James William Daschuk wrote:

The most significant factor under human control was the failure of the Canadian government to meet its treaty obligations and its decision to use food as a means to control the Indian population to meet its development agenda rather than as a response to a humanitarian crisis. . . . To the hungry indigenous population, this meant that officials quickly turned the food crisis into a means to control them to facilitate construction of the railway and opening of the country to agrarian settlement. . . . The Dakota, who did not depend on the bison and were not signatories to the treaties, were able to maintain relatively good conditions in their communities. This is evidence that the emerging TB epidemic was not an organic phenomenon but the outcome of prolonged malnutrition and failure of the dominion to meet its treaty commitments.

. . . By 1883, reports of tainted food and reserve deaths were common. In addition, government regulations that kept the distribution of provisions on reserves to a minimum required to sustain life exacerbated the TB problem and led to provisions rotting in storehouses even as the reserve population suffered from malnutrition. . . .

. . . With the infrastructure in place for large-scale settlement and the establishment of agrarian capitalism, the well-being of indigenous people in the west largely disappeared from the public agenda. Bands considered to have been hostile during the insurrection of 1885 were punished. Their food rations were cut off, and their weapons and horses were confiscated. Reserves became centres of incarceration as the infamous “pass system” was imposed to control movements of the treaty population. . . .

. . . Establishment of the residential school system, now widely recognized as a national disgrace, ensconced TB infection, malnutrition, and abuse in an institutional setting that endured for most of the twentieth century. . . . It is for all Canadians to recognize the collective burden imposed on its indigenous population by the state as it opened the country to our immigrant ancestors to recast the land to suit the needs of the global economy in the late nineteenth century.

The first physical sign of a substandard institutional system is the increase in sickness and illness of a population. Health as a measure of human experience cannot be considered in isolation from the social, political and economic forces that shape the experiences of First Nations through colonization and colonialism.

Colleagues, the colossal denial of human rights and centuries‑long assault were for the purpose of obtaining First Nations’ lands. In the book Seeing Red, by Mark Cronlund Anderson and Carmen L. Robertson, the authors state:

The idea that Aboriginals desired to cede their lands, imperialism notwithstanding, clearly makes no sense at all unless one embraces a colonial ideology that endorses imperial land theft. Why would anyone freely give up huge regions of traditional territory in return for a degraded status on small areas of marginal land? . . .

Honourable senators, the majority of stories — 92% to 96% of stories — in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, or TRC, are based on the stories of First Nations from effects of the history above. We must acknowledge that the experiences of Inuit and Métis are different from First Nations, and therefore their solutions and the acts of reconciliation required will be different. The stories of trauma experienced by the Métis, the Sixties Scoop survivors, children in care, non-status Indians and those off-reserve remain largely unknown. They also require unique solutions and acts of reconciliation.

Yet Canada continues to conflate all of the Indigenous peoples into one heavily stereotyped monolith. There are numerous traps in discussing Aboriginal peoples as if they were a relatively homogeneous entity with a common set of problems, with a uniform set of solutions. The pan-Indigenous approach championed by Bill C-29 has the ability to do a disservice to all Indigenous peoples. We shall see the outcome.

Colleagues, context is critical in legislation. We are responsible for asking ourselves, as parliamentarians, if we are going to be complacent in undertaking reconciliation for Métis and Inuit peoples through the same lens as that of First Nations.

In the book Unequal Relations: A Critical Introduction to Race, Ethnic, and Aboriginal Dynamics in Canada by Augie Fleras, the author states:

The term “aboriginal” itself refers to the first or original or Indigenous occupants of this country. This status as first among equals provides First Nations with the credentials to press claims against the Canadian state for entitlement on the basis of inherent jurisdiction . . . . The term “first” can also be used in less flattering ways. Aboriginal peoples are “first” in those social areas that count least (unemployment, under-education, suicide, and morbidity rates) but last in realms that matter most. . . . They are also “first” in terms of total publicity — much of it reflecting a popular view of aboriginal peoples as “problem people” who “have problems” or “create problems” that cost or provoke. Some of this media exposure is sympathetic, but much reflects degrees of indifference or ignorance. Most coverage is inadequate to provide anything but a fleeting glimpse into changing realities. The circulation of misinformation is unfortunate.

The author continues:

The complex and difficult issues associated with the reconstruction process should never be underestimated. Aboriginal demands are organized around the principle of nationhood rather than social integration, and there is much to be gained by seeing Indigenous efforts toward reconstitution of the elements of their nationality through restoration of aboriginal communities and cultural values as well as self-determination and territorial reappropriation . . . .

As noted by Dave Courchene, a former president of the Manitoba Indian Brotherhood, in 1970:

One hundred years of submission and servitude, of protectionism and paternalism have created psychological barriers for Indian people that are far more difficult to break down and conquer than the problems of economic and social poverty. . . .

Honourable senators, in conclusion, I would like to raise that there is an inaccuracy in the preamble of this bill that we would do well to rectify. Specifically, the opening line states:

Whereas, since time immemorial, Indigenous peoples have thrived on and managed and governed their Indigenous lands . . . .

We know that a pan-Indigenous approach to this wording implies that all three are incorporated into this statement. In reality, it was only the First Nations and Inuit peoples who have lived on these lands since time immemorial, since Métis were conceived between First Nations women and European men.

We can’t start this bill off with an untruth. As such, I am requesting that we correct this inaccuracy by changing the term “Indigenous peoples” to more accurately state, “First Nations and Inuit peoples.”