Hymie Rubenstein, editor of REAL Indigenous Report, is a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.According to the CBC, the Assembly of First Nations (AFN), Canada’s largest, most influential, and best taxpayer-funded indigenous advocacy organization, has just claimed that it is still waiting for uncensored access to the government’s historic intelligence dossier about the AFN and its predecessor, the National Indian Brotherhood (NIB), six months after a CBC News investigation revealed the RCMP’s now-defunct spy agency infiltrated the groups in the 1970s.Released under access to information law, some 6,000 pages of formerly secret “Red Power” and “racial intelligence” files reveal how Mounties targeted indigenous political leaders and activist groups through what was called a “Native extremism” surveillance programme.Following the revelations, the AFN, which represents all indigenous First Nations chiefs in Canada, asked the public safety minister for those documents but has still been denied, National AFN Chief Cindy Woodhouse Nepinak revealed on September 22.“That’s very worrisome and First Nations are wondering: What is this? Who were they tracking? And where are the documents?” Chief Nepinak told reporters on Parliament Hill.Despite the age of the files, the federal government heavily redacted and withheld the papers, citing potential harm to Canada’s national security as the reason for this restriction. In total, nearly 300 pages were withheld from material collected about the AFN’s assembly’s NIB..In fact, Library and Archives Canada, in Ottawa, revealed that up to 100,000 pages of records were sequestered in its archives. What the files that were released reveal is that the RCMP’s Cold War-era Security Service was monitoring indigenous political activism as early as 1968. They scrutinized it because they feared outside political and other influence, including interference from communist regimes.What the revealed material shows is that the RCMP formed their “Native extremism” countersubversion programme in 1973 as the Red Power activist movement was surging both in Canada and the United States.There is more than a heavy dose of hypocrisy in the AFN’s complaint: compared to indigenous-based secrecy, the AFN’s concerns look like the pot calling the kettle black.This is because Aboriginal leaders and activists have not only repeatedly kept information confidential. They have also failed to substantiate allegations of wrongdoing against them, especially when truthful disclosure could undermine their economic or political objectives.This has included: failing to allow the excavation of the reputed graves at the Kamloops Indian Residential School; refusing to release certain Truth and Reconciliation Commission records gathered by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and currently stored by the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation; secretly negotiating with various governments in their “land back” efforts; banning outsiders from visiting and reporting on living conditions on their Indian Reserves; and promoting the fallacious facts behind the annual National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, more generally called Orange Shirt Day..Today, September 30, is Orange Shirt Day, an indigenous-led grassroots movement inspired by Phyllis Webstad, a former student at an ordinary public school whose orange shirt was allegedly taken from her in exchange for the clothing worn at the boarding school where she lived for a year while attending the public school.Many people, indigenous and non-indigenous alike, wear orange on September 30 to symbolize that “Every Child Matters,” a phrase some cynics have decoded as “Only indigenous children matter.”According to meticulous research conducted by Nina Green: “Phyllis Webstad needs to level with Canadians, and tell them (1) whether it really was nuns who greeted her at the school, forced her to shower, took her orange shirt away, and cut her hair, or whether it was lay staff members, and perhaps indigenous lay staff members, (2) that her school year with a teacher she liked in Williams Lake was a happy one, (3) that her parents had both abandoned her, and that she had no one to care for her on the reserve apart from an aging grandmother, and (4) that childhood on the reserve, as experienced by her aunt, was horrific, as opposed to her own year at St. Joseph’s, which was not horrific at all.”Meanwhile, just last week, I was told that I would have to initiate a formal freedom of information request to peruse certain Indian Residential Records housed by Library and Archives Canada, records the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation at the University of Manitoba must surely have access to. So, I have the same questions for the AFN: “Where are the indigenous-held documents?” and why aren’t you releasing them?Hymie Rubenstein, editor of REAL Indigenous Report, is a retired professor of anthropology at the University of Manitoba and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
