Buckskin Bolshevism

The Assemblt of First Nations Elects a New Grand Chief

Buckskin Bolshevism: The Assembly of First Nations elects a new Grand Chief

Cindy Woodhouse

The Assembly of First Nations (AFN), a national lobby organization for the several hundred First Nations chiefs across Canada, just elected their new Grand Chief, Cindy Woodhouse.The election was prompted by the removal of former Grand Chief RoseAnn Archibald under a cloud of harassment allegations. Woodhouse helped to oust Archibald. 

Woodhouse, 40, is the daughter of a former chief and band councilor and had been working as a Regional Grand Chief for the AFN. As such, Woodhouse personifies the neo-tribal elite. She is reported to have been a strong supporter of Perry Bellegarde,, who was the AFN Grand Chief from 2014-21, and to also have close ties with the Liberal Party of Canada.

When Bellegarde won the position of Grand Chief, his acceptance speech featured the inflammatory declaration that “Canada is Indian land.” As their prime lobbyist, Bellegarde flattered the chiefs in their political conceit of primary possession. In her own acceptance speech, Woodhouse went further,

“Every square inch of every piece of land in this country and across Turtle Island (North America) is Indian land,” proclaimed Woodhouse with a tone of earnestness befitting the sentiment. In aboriginal nationalism, revanchism is a mainstay. Getting land back is a statement of restoring the nation and since Woodhouse expanded the aspirational reclamation to the entire continent, it is worth adding that getting living space is a statement of preserving the nation.

The claim that all of Canada is Indian land in one way or another is a racialist claim. The claim implies that, at least, non-indigenous Canadians have a moral indebtedness to Indians for having the good sense to have been here before the rest of the world showed up. Most likely what Woodhouse seeks by the claim is political indebtedness, which can be addressed with financial transfers.. 

“If Canada is not with us … there’s a point where, if you don’t listen to our people, you don’t listen to our chiefs, you don't answer them - then there’s problems,” added Woodhouse.tiptoing around the pitfalls of her dichotomy on that occasion. Woodhouse was more fulsome to reporters on the following day.

Asked how she responded to chiefs who favored a ‘more adversarial approach’ to the Canadian government. Woodhouse conceded that, "Yes, sometimes we have to kick down doors.”

“Canada, you cannot forget First Nations. You take our money from our land, you have to make sure that you work with us to get that out the door to our communities ... .And so to Canada, we’re coming for you.”

Woodhouse draws on the politics of resentment and  grievance and is choosing to do so using the language of violent uprising, a dubious choice after Oct. 7.It’s not just the language of revolt, it is also the self-regard as the Oppressed Revenant righteous in their use of force.

Maybe Woodhouse was saying these things as a sop to militant chiefs and the cohort of activist academics watching at home but they weren;t the only ones hearing what she was saying. What of the thousands more scuffling in the  underclass who might hear Woodhouse’s words as a revolutionary license? Who might think that if Canada had only duly paid its rent, their lives would be better now? Who might see fit to collect on that debt as they see fit? After all, Canada committed genocide against indigenous children and is committing genocide against Indigenous women, what mercies does such a state deserve?

Woodhouse understands the volatility of the politics she is trafficking. As a career activist, Woodhousee knows she can draw on the repertoire of past confrontations such as Oka and Caledonia to scare the federal government into line. 

In her acceptance speech, Woodhouse mentioned someone living on the streets of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside as an example of what “our people are dealing with every day in every town and community across this country.” Growing up as the daughter of a chief, she said, she saw how people came to their door every day looking for help to feed their families.

It appears she didn’t see that desperation then as an indication of the failure of the reserve system any more than she recognized that several decades more of that same failure has resulted in a nation-wide diaspora of homeless Indigenous people, many of whom are veritable refugees of the reserve system. It’s not a system Woodhouse wishes to end. The chiefs want the reserve system to continue and she is there to lobby for more funding to continue the system. Thus a homeless native on the streets of Vancouver becomes a prop to harangue the federal government for further funding.

For all her efforts at exacerbating and exploiting external friction with Canada, Woodhouse couldn’t dodge the internal fractures of the AFN. One Indigenous commenter pointed out the not-so-democratic math of Woodhouse’s election. Only around 270 chiefs voted for her out of a turnout of just two-thirds of the chiefs represented by the AFN and there are about a million First Nations people across Canada. The poor soul down and out in downtown Vancouver can’t vote for the Grand Chief. 

If the AFN isn’t representative of ordinary FN band members and barely representative of the chiefs and is just a lobby group with no jurisdiction outside of itself, what is the point of the AFN? Niigaan Sinclair suggested that Woodhouse’s election took the AFN “back to the future” when it was a crony of the Liberal Party of Canada (presumably that was before Archibald’s short term as Grand Chief).

The AFN does face an existential crisis; their ideology of aboriginal sovereignty ultimately hoists them on their own petard. If each First Nation is supposed to be a self-determining nation, why would any of these ‘nations’ want a lobby group having any say in their respective states? It becomes like the UN telling the USA what to do.. Ultimately, given increasing financial constraints, a lot of people will start asking if the money spent on keeping the AFN in conferences and costumes would be better spent elsewhere. Because the AFN has operated under a paradigm of aboriginal sovereignty since their inception and every nationalist aspiration, no matter how half-baked, needs a land base, reserves are that land base which is why there is absolutely no wish on their part to even consider rationalizing some of the remote reserves.

When Woodhouse casually tosses out Bolshevist crumbs for the thousands of band members languishing in remote penury, she is belying her contempt for them. ‘Get angry at Canada, you fools.’ To left-leaning media and academia increasingly obsessed with oikophobia and governments paralyzed by Okaphobia, Woodhouse can facetiously fulminate against Canada  When she speaks in the language of violent revolutionaries, it’s a refrain that choir has been waiting for.  Getting paid to say bad things about Canada is easy money and grievance is golden, nowadays.

If the billions spent on the reserve system over the past few decades hasn’t improved conditions and those conditions have actually worsened, it is because the reserve system is so structurally flawed that no amount of money will fix the system.

That conclusion was realized in the late 60s. However insincere the Pierre Elliot Trudeau government may have been with introducing the 1969 White Paper, the statement did present a rational perspective of the reserve system while also pointing out how the reserve system was a fundamental and philosophical contradiction of what was inferred as the Just Society.

The White Paper contemplated a rational welfare state. “No Canadian should be excluded from participation in community life and none should expect to withdraw and still enjoy the benefits that flow to those who participate.” 

The authors of the White Paper argued that a life of unproductivity was psychologically and socially hazardous. These were people who believed in the dignity of work at a time when it was inconceivable to run serial deficits for any reason, let alone for social spending

The White Paper identified a key structural defect in the reserve system: it was the path of separateness and because of that separateness, there could be no equality of outcomes. Worse was the signal this policy of separateness sent: ‘Discrimination breeds discrimination by example.’ 

But, if eloquent in its appeal to realizing human equality in civil society, the White Paper was less clear on what to do and rather awkwardly suggested a kind of sovereignty association. It appeared reserves would become something between a province and a municipality.

In the event, though, the White Paper was strongly rebuked by aboriginal activists at the time who were perhaps overly enthused by Third World liberation movements. PET famously - and vindictively - retorted, ‘We’ll let them stay in their ghettos for as long as they want.’

And so they remain. Only the authors of the White Paper weren’t wrong about the.social costs of perpetuating the reserve system. You can see the  proof of that in the streets of every town and community across Turtle Island.

The AFN didn’t exist in 1969 but it owes much of its ideological basis to the activists who rejected the White Paper and rather than consider any ending to the path of separateness, sought instead to ramify that separateness to the level of sovereign autonomies. That is more or less where all parties remain on the issue of Canada-Indigenous relations, especially since the Younger Trudeau proclaimed that Canada would seek to renew a ‘nation-to-nation relationship’ with Aboriginal people.

It isn’t the case that the actors do not realize the abject failure of the “policy of treating Indian people as a race apart,” it is that that is the only policy they will allow themselves to consider. If assimilation is forbidden, what is left except dignifying segregation with pretensions of nationhood? The actors realize pursuing that path has resulted and will result in frustration, anger and despair but they accept the human costs if it results in statehood.

It never will, though. It is criminally delusional to suppose a remote reserve like Shamattawa, for instance, will ever be remotely capable of being a sovereign state. But if the only option on the table is doing more of the same, then fantasizing that heaven awaits at the end of the road to hell is all anyone can do. The inevitable disillusionment and anger can be managed for now by blaming and threatening Canada