Land Sales and Sellouts: Indigenous Protesters Question Their Band Councils’ Democratic Legitimacy

Oct. 9, 2020

If you want to help activists at 1492 Landback Lane pay for bail and defend themselves from police oppression, you can contribute to the legal aid fund for the Haudenosaunee land defenders.

Since the political awakening of Idle No More in 2012, a multifaceted Indigenous social movement has been shaking Canadians from their complacency and indifference about the marginalization and suffering of Indigenous people in our country and around the world. Political actions have continued throughout the past decade and into the new year, and have enlightened many settler Canadians about the legacy of genocide baked into our cultures.

But settler Canadians are not the only targets of this powerful Indigenous justice movement, and are likely unaware of its most sensitive points of conflict. These are the conflicts around the legitimacy of existing Indigenous governance institutions.

“We Handle This Among Our Own People”

Those were the words of Tsuut’ina Chief Roy Whitney after a young man’s powerful public act of defiance at the opening ceremony of the south section of Calgary’s huge ring road highway.

Seth Cardinal Dodginghorse took the podium for a passionate speech, which described growing up in a home among the lands on which the ring road’s new Tsuut’ina Trail highway section now stands. He described a Band Council and provincial government that never consulted with the Tsuut’ina families who lived there before swapping the land. He then cut off his two braids with a knife and scattered his hair on the asphalt.

The federal and provincial government spokespeople who followed Dodginghorse’s speech were embarrassed and awkward, but Tsuut’ina Band Council Chief Whitney was indignant and condescending. Standing at the podium where Dodginghorse made his protest, Whitney openly berated the young man for not having gone through official channels during the consultation project to voice his opposition. In his anger, he appeared less concerned about shortcomings in his own government’s consultations than irate over Dodginghorse airing the Tsuut’ina community’s dirty laundry in front of settlers.

Who Has the Right to Sell and Swap Land?

Most of us at The Canada Files are settler Canadians, and so we know that the best way we can contribute to the Indigenous struggle for freedom and justice is alliance, amplification, and solidarity. But that also means that we are not familiar with the political and social tensions within and among Indigenous communities and people. When a settler Canadian of good will seeks solidarity with Indigenous Canadians, we remain disconnected from the complexity of Indigenous solidarity itself.

Indigenous people trying to rebuild their societies after centuries of genocide face a variety of conflicts with settler Canadians. However, there are also important conflicts occurring within Indigenous communities as well. The biggest conflict of this sort is over the accountability of Indigenous governments and institutional leaders to the people they supposedly represent. Indigenous communities themselves are in conflict over the democratic legitimacy of leaders and institutions in their own societies.   

The question of land sovereignty and control is fundamental to the future of Indigenous democratic institutions. Dispossession has always been the primary weapon used against Indigenous people by the French, British and Canadian states. Indigenous people used to live on all the land where settler Canadians now live, and we kicked them out, stuffed them into isolated reserves, and let them rot without proper infrastructure.

What land remains under Indigenous title is precious to these communities, since the relationship with the land has for millennia been the engine of Indigenous life, as well as the foundation and expression of their spirituality and religion. Popular Indigenous opposition to further dispossession is the keystone of Indigenous political assertion. Dispossession from land was the first and primary way that settler colonization dehumanized and disenfranchised Indigenous people.

Band Councils Barter But the People Live

Given this history, land title, land ownership, land use, and one’s everyday relationship with the land where one  lives are all powerful issues to motivate political action. So when an Indigenous government arranges to swap some of their land with a municipal government, as the Tsuut’ina did, leaders must be extremely careful to build consent throughout their community. As Seth Cardinal Dodginghorse showed, it is very easy to fail in that task.

But the elected Indigenous governments of Canada, the Band Councils, also contain an essential weakness: they are fundamentally illegitimate forms of government. This is because Band Councils were never actual Indigenous forms of government, even though they are the local governments of Indigenous Canadian communities. Band Councils were imposed by the power of the federal government: the Indian Act describes what they are and how they work, none of which has anything to do with the many different political and democratic institutions in actual Indigenous societies.

The original, MacDonald-era Indian Act states that the primary responsibilities of the Band Councils are “the repression of intemperance and profligacy.” Wonderful to see racist stereotypes of Indigenous men as drunks and Indigenous women as prostitutes written into Canadian law.

Band Councils have very little actual authority or power as local governments. While elected by their communities, Band Councils act only as representatives to the federal government, and answer entirely to the orders and plans of Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada. Their democratic machinery is empty, producing only an illusion of freedom that many Indigenous see through. But their appearance provides enough hollow pageantry for most settler Canadians to think their decisions carry authenticity.

Challenging Authority at 1492 Land Back Lane

The ongoing occupation of the Mckenzie Meadows housing development site in Caledonia is another front on which land defender activists are challenging the authority of Band Council institutions. The occupation, with the charismatic name of 1492 Land Back Lane, seeks to prevent Foxgate Developments from starting their project on a piece of Indigenous land staked in the 1784 Haldimand Proclamation.

The original Haudenosaunee territory of the Haldimand Proclamation extended over the Grand River Valley, which the British Crown purchased from the Mississauga to resettle Indigenous people ethnically cleansed from upstate New York during the American Revolution. It was a corridor of just over 3800 square km, from 50 km north of Orangeville to the shore of Lake Erie near Dunnville. Today, that land has been reduced to an 18.6 square km patch between Brantford and Caledonia, the modern Six Nations reserve.

The elected Band Council sold another section of Six Nations land to Foxgate Developments this year, which virtually immediately sparked the occupation. This dispute in the Haudenosaunee community lays bare the political fissure between the reserve’s elites who made the deal and the everyday citizens who are resisting their decision as land protectors. Land defenders at McKenzie Meadows have made it clear that they do not believe that their elected leaders act in the best interest of the community. The few public consultations in Six Nations over whether to sell the land to Foxgate were advertised to only about 100 people, out of a population of more than 25,000. Occupation leader Skylar Williams has said, “We’re tending to the land here in a way other than simply paving it over with asphalt.”

Elections for Band Council in Six Nations have habitually low turnout, with little campaigning by elected chiefs and representatives.

Haudenosaunee Activists Face Arrest and Intimidation

The colonial attitudes of the Band Council are obvious in their indifference to the constant arrests of land defender activists, as well as Indigenous journalists covering the occupation. They have done nothing to stop these arrests, or counter Haldimand County Council’s lobbying of the OPP to destroy the land defenders’ camp. Six Nations Band Council has also made active attempts to discredit land defenders and shut down the occupation camp.

There have been several relatively high-profile arrests. Courtney Skye, a Six Nations Mohawk and social policy researcher at Ryerson’s Yellowhead Institute was arrested in mid-September. Journalist Karl Dockstader had already been arrested at the start of September, even though he was not actually a land defender. He was instead staying at the protest site to cover the occupation, but was singled out as an Indigenous man.

The conditions on his bail include an order to stay away from the 1492 Landback Lane occupation site. Dockstader and his colleagues at the One Dish One Mic podcast, Canadaland, and AM 610 CKTB have criticized this action as an attempt to silence journalists sympathetic to the activists. After all this, Foxgate Development itself has claimed that they are completely unaware of any controversy surrounding the sale of Six Nations land, which is disingenuous at best.

New Politics Will Build New Institutions

Canada’s Indigenous uprising is ongoing, a peaceful revolution generated from the will of the people working together to overcome the oppression of colonial institutions. We progressives have come to understand how many of these institutions are baked into the Canadian state itself. The entire structure of Indigenous and Northern Affairs is built to disenfranchise Indigenous people from having a say in their governance, and to segregate Indigenous communities from wider Canadian cultures and polities. That institutional framework of colonial oppression also includes their elected governments.

All too frequently, elected Band Councils fall in line with colonial demands: land swaps and sales continue whenever settler governments and companies press for them. The fact that these councils were elected puts a democratic veneer on a new mode of dispossession. The brutal technocracy of Indian Agents, Canadian bureaucrats with absolute power over our reserves, has been disbanded for six decades. But the elected Band Councils now appear to be acting as little more than agents of the Canadian state.

The land defender and protest movements in Indigenous communities all over Canada offer a new mode of governance that escapes state capture. The movements are able to mobilize in significant numbers to occupy and protect land sold or bartered without the genuine consent of the community. There, they create their own free territories, governed by movement leaders in constant communication with their fellow land defenders.

Their organization appears to emerge from chaos, but is often planned meticulously, skills honed in the original Idle No More movement, and in the mass occupation of Standing Rock. From these sites of vital activism, new kinds of governance can emerge, which are often internet era reflections of ancient Indigenous political institutions. From their dynamic organization of protest, new bonds of community solidarity grow and strengthen, to become the cords binding a genuinely free Indigenous politics for the first time after centuries of genocide.

[Photo Credit: (Toronto Star / Google Images)]