Catherine Owens Only

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13 The Fourth World

A Global Movement

NE OF THE RECURRING THEMES in our struggle has been the attempt to find justice on the international stage when it has been denied at home. This is not merely a matter of seeking sympathetic listeners abroad. It is deeply imbedded in our legal and political fight. I have spoken about the advances of the Calder and

Delgamuukw decisions by the Supreme Court of Canada, and in chapter 17 we will look some more at the recent Tsilhqot’in decision. All three have clearly shown that we have far more rights, even within the Canadian system, than the governments were prepared to acknowledge —a large part of our struggle is simply to have governments obey their own laws in regard to Indigenous peoples. But the judges themselves have recognized that there is a limit to the justice they can dispense. On the fundamental question of Crown title and sovereignty, vis-a- vis Indigenous sovereignty, the Court itself is in conflict of interest.

This conflict stems from the fact that the judicial branch, along with the executive and legislative branch, is part of the Crown. If you ask the Court to judge the legality of the Crown assuming sovereignty over and title to Canadian territory on the basis of the travels and sightings of a few passersby in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Court, as one of the three branches of the Crown, cannot. It is as if you are asking the Court to determine if it has the right to exist or to judge the very sovereignty under which it was established.

This is not merely theoretical; it has been addressed by Commonwealth courts. In the Mabo decision (Mabo v. Queensland (No. 2) 1992) in Australia, a case similar to Delgamuukw, the Indigenous peoples had questioned the colonial doctrines in terms of acquisition of sovereignty. The High Court of Australia found: “The acquisition of territory by a sovereign state for the first time is an act of state which cannot be challenged, controlled or interfered with by the courts of that state.”40 They said the issue had to be addressed at the international level.

It is for this reason that Indigenous peoples have looked to the international level—and must continue to do so—as an essential part of our struggle for recognition of our land title and sovereign rights. Indigenous peoples have sought this recognition for more than a century. And over the past ten years, we have made important advances.

Historically, one of the most important attempts at an international hearing was made by a Six Nations Iroquois, Deskaheh, a hereditary chief of the Cayugas. In 1923 he travelled to Geneva on a Haudenosaunee passport to address the League of Nations. Deskaheh demanded that the Europeans respect Iroquois sovereignty as set forth in the Two Row Wampum Treaty they had originally made with the Dutch in New York. He then formally requested League of

Manuel, Arthur, and Grand Chief Ronald M. Derrickson. Unsettling Canada : A National Wake-Up Call, Between the Lines, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/humber/detail.action?docID=4789771. Created from humber on 2021-04-17 02:36:12.

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Nations intervention in the Six Nations land dispute with the Canadian government. His speech to the League was initially received sympathetically. The newly created world body had a mandate to recognize and support the self-government rights of all nations. But Canada, through its British representation, was deeply alarmed by the international support for Deskaheh. It was only through intense British lobbying that the League’s formal support was denied to the Haudenosaunee nation.

Deskaheh went home empty-handed. But the Canadian government was not going to let his challenge go unpunished. The following year, the RCMP dissolved the traditional government of the Six Nations, confiscated important documents and wampums, and declared an immediate election to overturn the traditional government, which was replaced by a Department of Indian Affairs band council. Deskaheh died less than two years after addressing the League. Before he did, he summed up the Canadian and American Indian policy as follows: “Over in Ottawa, they call that policy Indian Advancement. Over in Washington, they call it Assimilation. We who would be the helpless victims say it is tyranny. If this must go on to the bitter end, we would rather that you come with your guns and poison gases and get rid of us that way. Do it openly and above board.”41

In 1927, in response to international challenges and growing legal challenges in Canada to Ottawa’s colonialist policies, the federal government brought in the Indian Act amendments that made Indian organizing on the land issue illegal. It was thus our parents’ generation who took up the issue of international recognition, after the restrictions were lifted in the 1950s.

While activists of our parents’ generation were trying to build unity at home, they were also building new relationships with Indigenous peoples around the world. They understood that they were part of what my father called “the Fourth World,” Indigenous nations trapped within states in the First, Second, and Third Worlds who had been kept isolated and voiceless for too long. (This concept was an important one for our movement, and my father used it as the title for his 1974 book, The Fourth World: An Indian Reality.42) The first step, they decided, was to build an organization that would give Indigenous peoples visibility and voice on the international stage.

In the early 1970s, my father, as leader of the National Indian Brotherhood, was offered a place on a government trip to New Zealand and Australia led by Indian Affairs Minister Jean Chrétien. There, he was able to meet with Maori and Aborigine leaders. He later travelled to Scandinavia to meet with the Sami people. These contacts would eventually have an impact in his personal life. He established lifelong friendships with Sami people and eventually met a Sami woman, Maria Sofia Aikio, who travelled with him for some time. They went on to have a son, Ara Manuel, who is now part of the international wing of our family.

My father also visited Central and South America to meet with Indigenous peoples, and he even made it to Africa to meet with small Indigenous peoples and with world leaders like Julius Nyerere in Tanzania. As a result of these contacts, representatives of Indigenous Maori (New Zealand), Aborigine (Australia), Muisca (Colombia), Inuit (Greenland), Sami (Norway) peoples and my father from the National Indian Brotherhood met in Guyana in 1974 to plan the founding meeting of the World Council of Indigenous Peoples for the following year in Port Alberni, British Columbia. Angmalortok Olsen, an Inuit representative from Greenland,

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described this Guyana meeting in itself as a major achievement. “It dawned upon us that even though we sit in the far corner of the world, there is a movement through the whole world of ideas and of peoples and it seems to us that maybe we could do our little bit to humanize the present world as it is.”43

The WCIP founding meeting, in 1975, was hosted by the Nuu-chah-nulth people on Vancouver Island with Indigenous representatives from North, Central, and South America, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand—a total of 260 participants including members of the world press. By all accounts, it was a historic event, with Indigenous peoples from around the world, often in their traditional dress, meeting one another for the first time. It was so new that the first item of business was to seek agreement on the proper name for the organization and for their collective existence. The identifying terms Indian and Aboriginal were both discussed; in the end, an old and respected Indigenous leader from Colombia who had just listened to the debate for days got up and said, “Indian and Aboriginal were colonial terms. We are people indigenous to our territories, so Indigenous is the term that should be used.”

The conference agreed, but then participants had to decide who, exactly, were Indigenous peoples. They settled on this definition: “Indigenous peoples are peoples living in countries which have a population composed of differing ethnic or racial groups who are descendants of the earliest populations living in the area and who do not as a group control the national government of the countries within which they live.”

This naming exercise is not as simple as it seemed. You will have noticed that in this book, I occasionally use the term Indian. It is a term that Indigenous peoples often use among themselves in a sort of self-derogatory way, and that is still commonly used at the grassroots level. For me it has a special significance, because it reminds me that decolonization has not yet come to our peoples and our lands. But Indigenous was adopted by our people at the world conference, and Oren Lyons, a chief and faithkeeper of the Onondaga Nation for whom I have great respect, told me that it was in 1977, after it was approved at the World Council meeting, that they brought the term Indigenous to Geneva and asked that it become the term used at the United Nations, as it now is in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

The next item on the conference agenda was, naturally enough, the land issue. Even though this resolution was put together forty years ago, it could have been written yesterday. That is how consistent Indigenous peoples have been, not only over the past forty years but also over the past two hundred years. On the land issue they said:

The WCIP believes that the traditional land rights of Indigenous peoples worldwide have been overpowered by the domination of Colonial powers. They no longer have the supreme and absolute power over their territories, resources or lives and have been forced to accept the Colonizer’s imposed concepts of Indigenous Rights.

In order to rectify this injustice, the WCIP has recommended the following: 1. that the International community recognize Indigenous sovereignty and entitlement to traditional lands. 2. that the UN recognize the treaties that Indigenous Nations around the world have signed as binding under International Law.

3. that the International community and the UN honour its responsibility to the Indigenous Nations of the world by establishing the necessary mechanisms and instruments to protect their rights to self-determination with their lands and resources.44

With that baseline statement of rights established, the Conference elected my father, George Manuel, Arthur, and Grand Chief Ronald M. Derrickson. Unsettling Canada : A National Wake-Up Call, Between the Lines, 2015. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/humber/detail.action?docID=4789771. Created from humber on 2021-04-17 02:36:12.

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Manuel, as chair, and the great U.S. leader and thinker Sam Deloria as secretary general. It was also agreed that the WCIP would take over the National Indian Brotherhood’s observer status at the United Nations, which the NIB had acquired in 1975.

During the late 1970s and through the 1980s, the WCIP played an important role in establishing and cementing relationships among Indigenous nations around the world and in presenting the Indigenous point of view at the United Nations. Its influence waned in the 1990s, because of state pressures and internal divisions, and some of its functions have been replaced by more direct access for Indigenous peoples to the United Nations. But there is still a real need for such an organization to bring together Indigenous peoples in our own organization between international meetings to set our own agenda and develop and implement common strategies in the decolonization struggle.

For Indigenous peoples, the international bodies also present an essential link to the world. I know Canadians consider that they have one of the most benevolent governments in the world, and it has indeed shown benevolence in many instances, but never toward Indigenous peoples. When our issues are on the table, the government is ready to defy international law and even its own national laws. When Indigenous peoples have pushed Canada to live up to its ideals and its rhetoric, the retribution has always been swift. If the complainer has been receiving funding support, it is cut off and redirected to those who can be convinced to play the government’s game. Many of those who stand fast find their names dishonoured; those who dare to try to protect their land quickly face armed assaults and mass arrests. A number of times over the past twenty-five years, this has been preceded by shootouts in our forests.

The criminalization that we saw of the Secwepemc people in our attempt to guard Aboriginal title and rights at Skwelkwek’welt was far from an isolated case. During the decades of the 1990s and 2000s, there were more than two hundred arrests of Indigenous people across Canada in land disputes, with charges ranging from criminal contempt to mischief to intimidation and obstruction of a peace officer. In Oka and Gustafsen Lake these disputes escalated into shootouts.

Indigenous peoples have found little sympathy and even less justice in Canada, so the applications we were able to make to international bodies like the Geneva-based UN Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD) and the UN Human Rights Committee take on an even greater importance.

At CERD and other world bodies we can present evidence of Canada’s failure to uphold international human rights standards when it comes to Indigenous peoples. Canada is then forced to respond to our assertions. In our submissions, we have been able to chronicle the criminalization of protest as well as the RCMP’s use of land mines at Gustafsen Lake at a time when Canada was championing the treaty to ban land mines from the world. We also gave evidence on the very disconcerting number of Indigenous deaths in police custody, many of them unexplained and never thoroughly investigated.

We put forward evidence showing how Indigenous activists are often subject to surveillance, their privacy invaded and their conversations and actions illegally recorded. Indigenous leaders and activists who stand up for their rights are often subject to bitter attacks on their honour and reputation. One example of this was the slander against me personally by a

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federal member of Parliament who described me as an “economic terrorist” for promoting our proprietary interests in our lands. The UN Human Rights Committee gives us a forum to show the world the face of Canada that is often kept hidden even from its own people, that of the bitter colonial state fighting on all fronts to preserve its dominance over Indigenous peoples.

An important new international institution was created in 2002—the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues as one of three UN bodies that are mandated to deal specifically with Indigenous peoples’ issues. The others are the Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

The establishment of the Permanent Forum was an important breakthrough for Indigenous peoples. It moved us a step forward from our previous status of an Indigenous Working Group. The next advance on the road to full recognition of our nationhood has to be at least observer state status at the United Nations.

The main limitation of the Permanent Forum is that the states with whom we are fighting for recognition of our rights still have a heavy influence. But it does give us a focal point for pushing our cause forward at the international level. Most of this work is done by the Global Indigenous Caucus, which meets before and during the annual meetings to take common positions. For Indigenous peoples from Canada, it is also essential that we are there to counter the steady stream of falsehood that Canada delivers to obscure its blatant colonialism over the Indigenous nations within its borders.

The inaugural session of the Permanent Forum in 2002 was opened by Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who proclaimed that the world’s Indigenous peoples now had “a home at the United Nations.” Delegates came forward with issues related to land rights, human rights, economic and social development, education and culture, the environment, women’s rights, and Indigenous children and youth. The Permanent Forum has taken on one of these broad themes each year, as well as finding a space for Indigenous peoples in existing UN initiatives such as the Millennium Development Goals.

The first official Indigenous representative for North America was Wilton Littlechild, an Alberta Cree lawyer who went on to become a member of Parliament in Canada. He was also made the rapporteur of the session. I was honoured to be invited to speak at that first meeting, and I used my time to recall the organizing work of Indigenous peoples themselves in building the new international relationships, particularly our parents’ generation having brought Indigenous peoples together in the World Council of Indigenous Peoples. Afterward I was very touched when Elders from around the world came to speak to me about my father and his role in building international solidarity.

Over the years, I have played various roles in the Indigenous caucus, from regional to global co-chair, and I have watched it move slowly—as everything to do with the United Nations does—to push the debate forward as states become more educated about our issues.

By mid-decade, the Permanent Forum work was bolstered by one of the most important documents ever drafted on Indigenous rights: the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. This document had a particularly tortuous history; it was twenty years in the making, with experts, member states, and Indigenous representatives battling over every point. Even referring to us as Indigenous peoples was a battle with the state representatives who wanted

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us referred to as Indigenous populations. That term would have kept us outside of the protection of the UN’s basic human rights covenants, which offer special protection to all of the world’s “peoples.”

During this extended process, the longest negotiation of any human rights instrument in the UN’s history, there was a great deal of tension between UN member states and Indigenous peoples’ representatives, particularly over the issue of self-determination.

When observers speak of the reluctance of member states, they are really referring to four states in particular. Not surprisingly, they are the world’s main anglo colonizers, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. From the beginning, these states have fought the world at almost every turn. Yet despite their best efforts, the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples was passed by a large majority by the UN General Assembly in 2007. With some important gaps, which I will discuss below, it was a historic breakthrough. For those interested in the state of Indigenous rights today, the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples is an essential document that should be closely read.

The Declaration begins by noting that Indigenous peoples “have suffered from historic injustices as a result of, inter alia, their colonization and dispossession of their lands, territories and resources, thus preventing them from exercising, in particular, their right to development in accordance with their own needs and interests.”

The preamble acknowledges “that the Charter of the United Nations, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, as well as the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, affirm the fundamental importance of the right to self-determination of all peoples.” This opening links the right of Indigenous peoples to self-determination directly to the binding international treaties that recognize the right to self-determination of all peoples. After decades of debate the world community has now agreed that Indigenous peoples have the right to self-determination, which is spelled out unequivocally in Article 3 of the UNDRIP:

Indigenous peoples have the right to self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.

I am including the full Declaration in the appendix to this book. If you go through it, you will see that Canada is in flagrant violation of virtually all of the core provisions regarding Indigenous self-determination, Indigenous land rights, and the requirements for governments to acquire Indigenous peoples’ free, prior, and informed consent before initiating any developments on their land or any legislative and policy changes that affect us.

You will see that Canada’s current land claims policy violates virtually every clause in articles 26, 27, 28, and 32. By explicitly refusing at the outset of land claims negotiations to acknowledge that “Indigenous peoples have the right to the lands, territories and resources which they have traditionally owned, occupied or otherwise used or acquired” (article 26), Canada is in violation of the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Canada is the only country in the world to have twice voted against the UNDRIP, first in the UN Human Rights Council that adopted the draft declaration as one of its first substantive decisions. After that Canada actually managed to reopen the text and after trying again to weaken the Declaration section by section, went on to lead the quiet opposition to it on the

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General Assembly floor. To influence the world body, they went to developing countries trying to raise fears that Indigenous self-determination could break up their countries, and worked with the United States, Australia, and New Zealand to have the world body vote it down. At the time, we feared the Canadians might succeed, like the British had in blocking the originally strong League of Nations support for Deskaheh and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. But when the final vote came in September 2007, it was the rights deniers who found themselves in stark isolation.

Many developing countries, the Third World, had achieved decolonization through exercising the right to self-determination; they were not convinced by Canada to vote against it. The UN General Assembly supported the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples by a vote of 144 to 4, with 11 abstentions. The four countries voting against were, of course, Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. Two years later, Australia and New Zealand reversed their vote, and Canada and the United States grudgingly followed. Canada, though, tried to muddy the waters by announcing only its “qualified” support for the Declaration, suggesting it supported the Declaration only insofar as it did not actually require Canada to change any of its current laws or policies against Indigenous land rights, self- determination, and prior informed consent.

But the UNDRIP, overwhelmingly supported by the international community, cannot be so easily ignored. Today its provisions are recognized principles of international law and a unifying document for Indigenous peoples around the world. Within Canada, it is something that the Assembly of First Nations and the First Nations Summit, INET, the Defenders of the Land, and Idle No More can get behind and together demand that the Canadian government respect. It is what the world expects. It is what Canadians should expect.

Despite its imperfections, the UN Permanent Forum has allowed us to continue to push forward in our bid for justice. After the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the most important statement by the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues came in 2012 when it condemned and rejected the doctrine of discovery—the basis British and other European powers used to claim our lands and sovereignty over them.

I had been elected co-chair of the Global Indigenous Peoples Caucus that year, so I was given the honour of addressing the Forum on the doctrine of discovery. The text was put together by representatives of Indigenous peoples from around the world meeting over two days in New York. Each paragraph in these documents goes through an exhaustive discussion. If there is a dispute on any item, those who disagree are sent off to resolve it. If they cannot, the caucus won’t put the paragraph in the document. So it is truly a consensus statement.

In the 2012 text, we recommended “that the Permanent Forum acknowledge that the doctrine of discovery, both in theory and in on-going practice, constitutes the subjection of peoples to alien subjugation, domination and exploitation. It is the denial of fundamental inherent human rights, is contrary to the Charter of the United Nations and is an impediment to the promotion of world peace and cooperation.”

The Indigenous peoples of the world demanded that the Permanent Forum acknowledge and transmit to other UN agencies that:

The doctrine of discovery is an expression of racism, xenophobia and discrimination—that it represents a regime of

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systematic oppression and domination by one racial or religious group over another, and it is committed to the intention of maintaining that regime. As such, the continuing operation of the doctrine of discovery should be recognized as a crime against humanity and should be condemned as such.

In concrete terms, we asked the Permanent Forum to launch a study on the cascading effects of this doctrine on Indigenous health, physical, psychological, and social well-being, human and collective rights, lands, resources, medicines and titles to such lands, resources, medicines.

We also noted that the modern state extension of the doctrine of discovery could be clearly seen in the extinguishment policy pursued by Canada and other states.

“Extinguishment”, in the context of indigenous peoples’ rights to lands, territories and resources is inconsistent with the contemporary understanding in international law, specifically the peremptory norm of the absolute prohibition against racial discrimination. No other peoples in the world are pressured to have their rights “extinguished”.45

We ended our statement by recommending that permanent seats at the United Nations General Assembly be established for Indigenous peoples. This idea is in its infancy, but it is a vital one in ensuring that we take our place where we belong, among the nations of the world, to speak directly to the family of nations without the interference or outright suppression that we have endured from the member states. After the massive vote in favour of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, we know we would find friends there.

Like my father before me, I have been privileged to visit Indigenous peoples around the world, and I find them without exception committed to the principles set out in the Declaration. Their political commitment is bolstered by their spirituality, which has survived centuries of colonization. My friend Lix Lopez—a Mayan who first worked with my father at the WCIP and now lives in Canada, where he leads Mayan ceremonies—arranged a trip to Mayan territory in Guatemala for me. There I experienced the great pre-Columbian Mayan spirituality in the highlands of their country. I was fortunate enough to be present for the beginning of the thirteenth Baktun, the changeover of the Mayan calendar. In our political fight, where the spirit easily becomes dry and parched, it was a cool glass of water and another realization of what we are fighting for as we enter into this new era of the spirit.

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With Russell Diabo and two Sami activists, Alta, Norway, June 2013

My travels also sometimes help to bring me full circle. Recently in Alta, Norway, at a preparatory meeting for the 2014 World Conference of Indigenous Peoples, Wilton Littlechild introduced me as the son of George Manuel, one of the pioneers of the international movement. I was pleased to be able to tell Wilton that I was not George Manuel’s only son there. My Sami brother, Ara, was also present, and he too was invited up to the stage. Today we fight our father’s fight along with his fellow Sami activists like Maria Sofia Aikio and Niillas Somby, and our Indigenous brothers and sisters from around the world.

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