****January 2012 Focus - Focus Magazine

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“I do for your investments what health clubs do for your body” “ IT’S CLEAR FROM THE HISTORICAL RECORD that the intent of the treaties was that First Nations would always be full participants in designing a future for Canada together with the Crown.”—National Chief Shawn Ah-in-chut Atleo www.davidnicholsontoday.com 250-380-7505 david@queensbury.com Purple Garden Chinese Restaurant Voted for best “All You Can Eat” restaurant in 2009 and 2010 Best in City 138-1551 Cedar Hill X Rd (Behind McDonald’s on Shelbourne St) 250-477-8866 www.purplegarden.ca Chancellor in 2009, the first indigenous individual in the province to attain such a position. He is also not afraid to call a spade a spade. In a recent editorial in the Globe and Mail, Atleo bluntly stated: “Our collective failure to address the long and lamentable list of challenges affecting First Nations means First Nations lurch from crisis to crisis with governments’ responses motivated, to paraphrase Canada’s former auditor-general, more by headlines than by actually achieving change.” Atleo doesn’t mince words in person, either. Of working with the federal government, he says: “Sometimes it feels like pushing sand uphill. But this is a fight for our children,” he continues passionately. “We can’t afford to lose another generation.” A fundamental transformation Atleo has a novel but simple plan to change the status quo: hitting “the reset button” on the relationship between Canada and First Nations. “It’s critical, as the former Auditor- General pointed out, that the federal government makes a significant shift in how we work together. It’s time for it to stop imposing solutions on First Nations, go back to original principles and start working with us as real partners.” When Atleo talks about hitting the reset button, he means it quite literally. “We should return to the beginning, to the kind of relationship between First Nations and the Crown that was forged in the earliest days of Canada, in the treaties that were struck when Canada was first settled,” he says. The spirit and intent of those treaties have never been properly implemented: if they had been, things would look very different today. When Canada was formed as a country, explains Atleo, First Nations were, of course, already here. They had aboriginal rights and title in their territories, and where treaties were struck, rights under those agreements. Those treaty rights were reciprocal rights in a two-way partnership between equals, and that was how First Nations interpreted them. “If you want an example of that, you just have to look at the War of 1812 in which First Nations fought shoulder to shoulder with Canadians. We were allies in a treaty relationship with Canada. We were all treaty people—the people of Canada had signed up to those treaties just as much as First Nations people had, so we fought together to protect all of our rights.” In other words, treaty rights were always intended to be a two-way street, a sharing of the wealth of the land and its resources and providing mutual support for rights, culture and heritage. “It’s clear from the historical record that the intent of the treaties was that First Nations would always be full participants in designing a future for Canada together with the Crown.” But it hasn’t been that way since. The concept’s been forgotten, says Atleo, or worse, willfully hidden by governments. Instead, a history has prevailed of ignoring First Nations’ inherent rights and unilateral control of their lives by governments. Far from working with First Nations as partners, governments step over their treaty and aboriginal rights as if they weren’t there. “That has led to a 100-year-old Indian Act that no one likes and no one can figure out how to get rid of, to endless conflict, and ultimately to the soul-destroying situation you see on reserves like Attawapiskat. It’s all based on ‘Ottawa knows best.’ It doesn’t make anything better. As the Auditor General pointed out, it’s made things worse. Unilateral decision-making and imposed solutions don’t work and never have.” Things are no better in BC. “Here, the land question remains a burning issue to resolve, but it needs to be done from a place that recognizes that First Nations have rights, and those rights must be reconciled.” As things stand, however, treaty offers are dictated by government policy developed behind closed doors, and there is little appetite on the part of government to recognize aboriginal rights. “That’s why you see Hulq’umin’um being forced to go to the Inter-America Commission to hear their land claim. Where else do they go if the federal government is acting as both judge and jury in their territory on these issues” The fact that the IAC decision will not bind Canada, or whether Hulq’umin’um will succeed in its claim, are almost irrelevant at this point: “I think the fact that the IAC even agreed that the case should be heard suggests there is something that desperately needs to be addressed here.” 34 January <strong>2012</strong> • FOCUS
www.focusonline.ca • January <strong>2012</strong> 35
Page 1 and 2: FOCUS Victoria’s monthly magazine
Page 3 and 4: contents January 2012 VOL. 24 NO. 3
Page 5 and 6: Focus presents: Iyengar Yoga ADVERT
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****January 2012 Focus - Focus Magazine

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