Conservative Governments have been good for Indigenous Rights and Reconciliation

I remember the day that Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized for Canada’s role in operating the Indian Residential School System. The sky was overcast and ready to cry and the trees were leaning in.

We were on our way to Sundance and were now parked on the gravel shoulder of highway number 6 listening to his speech live on the car radio in the middle of Manitoba’s boreal forest.

I am travelling with a Residential School Survivor who isn’t much older than I am. I didn’t know that. Not  until I returned home to Grand Rapids and started working with Survivors at the Misipawistik Wechetowin Healing Program. I didn’t know that it happened to people in my generation.

I can tell you that my travel companion was tough and did not like Stephen Harper. It seemed that not many Indigenous peoples were fans of Stephen Harper and his Conservative Government.

Nevertheless, here we sat on the side of the highway one hundred kilometres from where we were coming from and over 400 kilometres from where we were going waiting to hear him speak. We rolled down the windows and smoked. I didn’t smoke much until I started working with Survivors but I was smoking a lot then, sometimes you needed a smoke to talk, sometimes you needed one to listen.

There were few other vehicles on the highway that morning somewhere near Devil’s Lake where the bush is thick and the only thing on the radio is CBC. The grey sky lowed and hugged the tops of the tamarack and pine.

The silence lifted that lone voice in the wilderness up to the sky with the smoke of our tobacco. It was clear that no matter what we had thought of this man the sincerity in his voice and his apology that morning was true. When his voice broke, my tough friend whispered, “he’s going to cry”.

It mattered and I will never forget that day. It is one of my “Do you remember where you were when you heard?” moments. In the days and years since people and history will say whatever and parse words but I remember where I was and what I felt when I heard Prime Minister Stephen Harper Apologize in the House of Commons to the Survivors of the Indian Residential Schools System.

It should be regarded as one of the high points in Canadian Indigenous reconciliation, but it isn’t and it is this bizzarro world called Canada in which the Conservative government’s Indigenous record is ignored or forgotten.

It is though the Conservatives can only be judged on John A. McDonald’s record despite the fact that Liberals have been running the country for the majority of its modern history and bear the responsibility for maintaining the Indian Residential School System during their time in power.

Taking a historical analysis of post war Canada shows that a Conservative government has been good for Indigenous rights and reconciliation.

The Conservatives did not get into power after World War II until 1957 after 22 years of Liberal rule. In 1960, Prime Minister John Diefenbaker granted First Nations the right to vote. Until then a First Nations person would have to enfranchise or give up their Indigenous Rights in order to vote. Diefenbaker’s defense of equality for Indigenous Peoples was something he expressed as a young lawyer defending First Nations and Metis people back home in Saskatchewan. His actions noted in the groundbreaking autobiography Halfbreed by Metis author Maria Campbell. “He would represent anyone rich or poor, red or white. If they had a case and no money he would help,” wrote Campbell about Diefenbaker adding. “He helped us and the important thing was he did so when no one else would.”

Nine years later in 1969, Pierre Elliot Trudeau and the Liberals ruling with a majority government tried a bureaucratic Genocide called the White Paper that would have enfranchised all First Nations people with a stroke of a pen.

The Conservatives would not have a chance to form a truly ruling government for decades, ignoring the brief and impotent reign of Joe Clark.  Brian Mulroney brought them back into majority rule and in 1991 Mulroney’s government launched the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples with a goal to a take an exhaustive and critical look at the relationship between Canada and Indigenous Peoples. The RCAP report is a defining document in Canada and serves as academic and legal foundation throughout the country and around the world.

In 1985, Mulroney's government passed Bill C-31 which would remove the gender bias in the Indian Act which removed First Nations status from any woman who married a non-First Nations man. This could be an Indigenous man included Metis, Inuit or a First Nations Man who had already lost his status. It was one of the most heinous means of bureaucratic genocide and it was upheld for almost a century before a majority Conservative government changed the law.

In one of Mulroney’s last official Acts he signed the Nunuvut Land Agreement on May 25, 1993 creating the largest Indigenous controlled territory in North America. The Nunuvut Territory would become official under a Liberal government but this was when it was made. It is a day, I would imagine, that some Inuit remember “where they were the day that they heard”.

On June 12, 2008, it was a Conservative Prime Minister who gave me the grandchild of a Residential survivor and a Survivor a moment of healing and reconciliation. It was that same Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper who 10 days earlier on June 2, 2008 launched the Truth and Reconciliation Commission an act that to this day defines who we are as a country.

I am not going to defend all the actions or policies of the past Conservative Governments but I do think it is important to look at these facts in their real time and historical context. The belief that a Conservative government is always bad for Indigenous rights and reconciliation is not accurate.

 

-30-