RUBENSTEIN: Indigenous people say reconciliation fine but clean water the priority

Hymie Rubenstein, editor of REAL Indigenous Report, is a retired professor of anthropology at the University of ManitobaNine years of both symbolic and financial reconciliation have not led to “any tangible improvements in the quality of life for Indigenous people,” claims a recent Privy Council report cited by Blacklock’s Reporter.In-house, focus-group research found that indigenous people questioned the point of various forms of federal government reconciliation efforts, when many Indian Reserves continue to have undrinkable tap water.This assertion ignores the legal issue, that the many historical land surrender treaties willingly signed by both sides between 1701 and 1921 contained no Crown promises of potable water or housing on the newly established reserves. Still, it is still necessary to examine the results of current reconciliation efforts. Doing so quickly reveals that safe water and proper housing have been provided for decades, albeit often below ever constantly changing demand levels.When questioned whether they felt reconciliation was a priority for the federal government, many respondents replied in the affirmative but “most did not feel the prioritization of this issue had led to any tangible improvements in the quality of life for Indigenous peoples,” said a pollsters’ report based on findings from indigenous focus groups in prairie cities.“It was widely thought that while it was important for the Government of Canada to be highlighting Indigenous issues and histories, these efforts needed to be accompanied by clear and measurable action to better the lives of Indigenous peoples,” said the report Continuous Qualitative Data Collection of Canadians’ Views. “Several mentioned clean drinking water as an example.”Respondents also cited high food costs, inaccessible health care, homelessness, and poor infrastructure.They could have well cited all the other differential adversities and pathologies faced by indigenous people, both on and off-reserve. These include the following tragic and destructive socio-economic features compared to other recognized ethnic and racial groups in Canada:the highest rates of criminal behaviour and incarceration; the highest non-working adult population; the lowest incomes; the highest unemployment, poverty, and welfare dependency; the highest infant mortality and lowest life expectancy; the largest disease and illness rates; the highest school dropout; the most child apprehension, fosterage, and adoption levels; the highest levels of mental illness and suicide; the largest rates of sexual abuse; the highest single motherhood levels; the highest rates of alcoholism and drug addiction; and the biggest murdered and missing women levels.In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) — which was set up in 2008 to document the effects of residential schools on indigenous peoples — defined reconciliation as the process of “establishing and maintaining a mutually respectful relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples in this country.” The TRC claimed that for reconciliation to happen in Canada, “there has to be awareness of the past, an acknowledgement of the harm that has been inflicted, atonement for the causes, and action to change behaviour.”This one-way statement says nothing about indigenous people also needing to reconcile with non-indigenous Canadians because reciprocity was a bedrock feature of the historical treaties.Unsurprisingly, then, among indigenous peoples, the term “reconciliation” was widely used after the TRC’s report as a hope that governments accept and address the alleged multiple incidents and forms of abuse carried out at residential schools. This perspective, and the initial optimism implied, have been diminished by criticisms and questions about how reconciliation efforts have (or have not) been carried out and what precisely reconciliation means in this context.This is exactly what the focus group research pointed out.Still, it is difficult to see how additional reconciliation in the form of monetary transfers could reduce many of these adversities and pathologies.A conspicuous example is sexual abuse. A 2013 APTN investigation identified dozens of sexual abuse victims across Indian Reserves in Treaty 3 territory, a 55,000 square mile area in northwestern Ontario and southeastern Manitoba, in what survivors describe as a silent epidemic that has gone unaddressed for generations.Regrettably, the APTN couldn’t find a single policy report specifically aimed at addressing on reserve sexual abuse at the Grand Council of Treaty 3 in northwestern Ontario.The only mention of sexual abuse on-reserve in the territory is data found in the annual reports of the Treaty Three Police Service that APTN examined.Between 2017 and 2022, there were 485 sexual assaults reported in 23 communities, primarily investigated by frontline officers, that had a combined on-reserve population of 8,685 as of December 2022, according to the federal government.In 2022 alone, there were 93 reports of sexual assault, representing more than 1,000 assaults per 100,000 people. The national average is 90 per 100,000.The same pattern of intra-indigenous sexual exploitation has been reported across Canada, pointing to a need to reconcile inter-aboriginal relations instead of always blaming colonialism and the Indian Residential Schools for this and other tragedies.Likewise, the selective opinions of a sample of indigenous informants about water provision, food costs, health care, housing, and infrastructure on the reserves need to be interrogated because they are contradicted by other hard statistical evidence.According to a 2024 Fraser Institute report titled An Avalanche of Money: The Federal Government’s Policies toward First Nations, Tom Flanagan reports that:• Since 2015, the federal government has significantly increased annual spending on indigenous peoples by almost tripling it from 2015 to 2025, growing (in nominal dollars) from roughly $11 billion to more than $32 billion.• Class actions have been settled without litigation, with estimated liabilities reaching $76 billion in 2023, while specific claims have been settled at a rate four times higher than the previous government, leading to a significant transfer of land and money to Indian bands.• From 2016 to 2021, the gap in Statistics Canada’s Community Well-Being index, which measures the socio-economic well-being of communities across the county, between aboriginal and other Canadian communities was reduced only from 19 to 16 points. This reduction was due chiefly to an increase in the Canada Child Benefit (CCB), introduced in 2016. Indigenous people benefit relatively more from this new programme because they have lower incomes and more children than other Canadians.• Indigenous Own Source Revenue derived from business activities is increasing less rapidly than government transfers, making First Nations more financially dependent on the federal government.Flanagan concludes that these reconciliation efforts have made indigenous peoples “less financially independent and more dependent on government transfers.”Elaborating on this conclusion requires asking whether the numerous pathologies and adversities listed above would have been greatly reduced if the descendants of Canada’s first peoples had not been offered over 200 years of treaty-making, accompanied by the creation of federal offices, laws, programmes, and practices exclusively devoted to their perceived needs and verbal requests. Or have the billions in unique government benefits annually given to those qualifying as “Status Indians” under the paternalist Indian Act and the billions more given in various provincial and municipal grants, subsidies, and benefits made indigenous people worse off than they would otherwise be?The answer is a loud yes, according to the now reviled 1969 White Paper tabled in Parliament by then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and his Minister of Indian Affairs, Jean Chrétien, calling for the end of the special legal relationship between aboriginal peoples and the Canadian state because:"Special treatment has made of the Indians a community disadvantaged and apart…. To be an Indian must be to be free -- free to develop Indian cultures in an environment of legal, social and economic equality with other Canadians.…"The policies proposed recognize the simple reality that the separate legal status of Indians and the policies which have flowed from it have kept the Indian people apart from and behind other Canadians. The Indian people have not been full citizens of the communities and provinces in which they live and have not enjoyed the equality and benefits that such participation offers.…For many Indian people, one road does exist, the only road that has existed since Confederation and before, the road of different status, which has led to a blind alley of deprivation and frustration. This road, because it is a separate road, cannot lead to full participation, to equality in practice as well as in theory." To this end, the White Paper proposed the elimination of indigenous status, the dissolution of the Department of Indian Affairs, the repeal of the Indian Act, the conversion of reserve land into privately owned property, and the gradual termination of existing treaties. None of the White Paper’s recommendations were enacted because of the resulting firestorm of opposition from native elites.Central to the White Paper was the notion that special indigenous treatment was the root cause of all the pathologies exhibited from first contact to the present, a view that the aboriginal elite refused to accept based on a belief that aboriginal reserve segregation rooted in the confluence of “First Nations” identity and special status was far more important than the well-being and life chances of autonomous indigenous people free of government control and infantilizing patronage.The apartheid-like Indian Act, though repeatedly modified over the years, remains the law of the land for indigenous people, as do the treaty-based reserves now spuriously called “First Nations” — an ostentatious, ahistorical term with no legal standing — along with enshrinement of indigenous status in sections 25 and 35 of Canada’s 1982 constitution.With endless dependency, rampant sexual abuse, and all the other destructive adversities and pathologies, the seemingly inevitable outcome of a transparently fraudulent reconciliation, is that indigenous people will never realize their deservedly equal place in Canadian society. Hymie Rubenstein, editor of REAL Indigenous Report, is a retired professor of anthropology, University of Manitoba, and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.

RUBENSTEIN: Indigenous people say reconciliation fine but clean water the priority

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