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Feature

Land claims: the searcl

ast month lawyers
for the Gitksan
Wet’suwet’en Tribal
Council stood up in
B.C. Supreme Court
and warned that
Canada’s longest
land claims trial
could be halted with-
in 30 days because the tribal council is
broke.

More money, if any can be found, must
come from the Conservative government in
Ottawa, which also happens to be the tribal
council’s opponent in the epic 217-day trial.
“According to tribal council lawyer Stuart
Rush, Ottawa has paid out only 20 per cent
of the $1.5 million it promised last year to
take the trial to completion.

The financial strangulation of the Gitk-
san case is just one of many signs that the
newly-elected Conservatives may be intent
on slowing and even reversing the glacial
advance toward solution of the Indian
rights question.

If so, that spells trouble for Native organ-
izations as the Tories settle into a new term, a
sign that the crisis over claims is going to get
worse before it gets better.

Yet doing nothing is not an option for the
Conservatives, who must be painfully
aware that the land claims controversy
stands in the way of any long-term eco-
nomic development for the province.

Multinational corporations, whether they
be companies like Alcan, which wants to
dam more rivers to produce power for
export, or forest corporations seeking
broader timber rights and more access to
old forest, have long been urging aot

_of comprehensive claims.

With the Yukon settlement near oh
tion, a new spot will open up for a B.C.
Native organization at the claims table,
where Ottawa permits only six groups to
bargain at one time.

And in the courts, where Native organiza-
tions have sought justice in the absence of
meaningful negotiations, there is a lengthen-
ing queue of fishing rights cases, injunction
applications, applications to end blockades
and a welter of other aboriginal rights bat-
tles covering matters as diverse as marine
development and bingo licensing.

Something has got to be done, but the
Tory options are limited. ~

The Conservatives face two major obsta- -

cles in their desire to settle claims: the deficit
and the Socreds. The incessant drum-
beating against ~ increased government
spending is drying up the money needed to
negotiate and settle claims.

The Socreds, meanwhile, are insisting
that there is no need for negotiations
because aboriginal rights and title do not
exist. If Ottawa wants land to settle Native
claims, Bill Vander Zalm says, it will have to
buy the land from the province.

The Tory initiatives of the last four years,
which included the Coolican report on
comprehensive claims, have run out of
steam. The surprise of the new Conservative
cabinet was rookie MP Kim Campbell’s
appointment of minister of state for Indian
Affairs. her job will be near-impossible: to

bring the provincial government on side to ©

settle Native claims while spending as little
money as possble.

While Campbell wrestles with her new
portfolio, the Conservatives are fighting to
avoid court decisions which could com-
promise future policy.

The Gitksan Wet’suwet’en trial is just
one example of the problems that lie ahead
for Native organizations which seek to find
justice through the courts.

The Conservatives hold all the cards in
this game and they are playing them skill-
fully. Paradoxically, it is the federal

16 « Pacific Tribune, May 1, 1989

government which must fund both sides in
this legal battle under the “trust relation-
ship” established between Native people
and Ottawa by theIndian Act.

While tribal groups hold bingos and raf-
fles to raise funds, lawyers for the two
governments have a blank cheque to pro-
long trials for as long as possible. The Gitk-
san Wet’suwet’en case, which was scheduled
to last 13 months now could run for more
than 24.

Chief Justice Allan McEachern, who has
been sitting six days a week and extra hours
each day to speed the pace of this marathon
trial, in effect turned to the Gitksan Wet’-
suwet’en’s opponents and demanded that
they cough up the money to keep the Native
groups going.

Progress in the trial is of the “utmost
importance and urgency,” the Chief Justice
told the parties, and a financial collapse
would be “intolerable.”

The Gitksan Wet’suwet’en impasse is just
one among many recent Tory attacks on
tribal groups seeking redress. They include:

@ The bizarre refusal of Indian Affairs
minister Pierre Cadieux to meet with young
Native protesters on hunger strike against
his policy of limiting post-secondary educa-
tion funding;

@ The continued refusal of the govern-
ment to end low-level war plane testing over
ancestral lands of the Innu in Labrador
while rejecting the Innu’s claim to unextin-
guished title to the land;

@ The painfully-slow pace of govern-
ment negotiations with the Nisga’a Tribal
Council, which is seeking a “framework
agreement” to lay the basis for comprehen-
sive claim negotiations which already are
more than a decade old;

@ The refusal of Indian Affairs to pro-
vide any legal funding to the poverty-
stricken South Island Tribal Council on
Vancouver Island, which seeks to test the
validity of the treaties its chiefs concluded
with Governor James Douglas more than
100 years ago; and

@ The open and covert support of
government agencies like the fisheries
department for groups like the Pacific
Fishermen’s Defence Alliance, which are
engaged in costly legal actions which seek to
wipe out aboriginal fishing rights once and
for all.

But the Tory stance is nothing compared
to the Socreds’ Vander Zalm, who last week
shouted above the din of jeering Musqueam
at the opening of the Endowment Lands
Park that future generations will think the
park’s creation was “the greatest idea ever,”
even if the Musqueam’s rights were ignored.

Vander Zalm’s intransigence may reflect
his reading of the polls. The wave of
national support for Native rights, which
peaked with the confrontations between the
Haida and the loggers on South Moresby,
now is ebbing.

According to one fishing industry
observer of the claims issue a recent
privately-commissioned poll of British
Columbians found only 55 per cent of those
surveyed disagreed with the provincial
government’s refusal to negotiate claims.

Only 45 per cent of those questioned
believe that Indians have been treated
unfairly in Canada and a slim majority dis-
agreed with that statement.

Conservative policy-making may be
stalled but the corporate drive to accelerate
exploitation of B.C.’s resources has not.
Wherever they turn, the forest companies,
the mining firms and the oil multinationals
confront an increasingly organized opposi-
tion of aboriginal groups, environmentalists
and the labour movement.

While all three movements bring differ-
ent concerns to the debate about economic
development of the nrovince, they are uni-

‘industry jobs

ted by their rejection of the current corpo-
rate program, which is producing yet more
environmental destruction, poverty and
unemployment.

But these three groups, like the Tories,
are finding the search for coherent policy is
painfully slow.

The first attempt at unity came in 1986 in
an important conference in Nanaimo which
brought together top Native and labour
leaders from around the province in an
effort to find common ground.

The joint statement adopted at the end of
the conference called for settlement of com-
prehensive claims and the recognition of
aboriginal people as “‘a distinct people with
the inherent right to self-government.” It
stated that “economic and political justice
can come only from a process of negotia-
tions that recognizes the right to self-
determination and transfers sufficient
resources to aboriginal people under their
jurisdiction.”

Then, in a clause of particular impor-
tance to the unions present, the statement
declared that claims “will benefit all British
Columbians, not transfer unemployment
from one group to another.” In the resource
industries, the conference concluded, com-
mon policies must reflect responsible man-
agement and protection of existing resource
“while expanding employ-
ment.”

The Nanaimo Declaration, as it became
known, became policy of the B.C. Federa-
tion of Labour at the subsequent conven-
tion, where Chief Joe Mathias, of the B.C.
Aboriginal Council, held delegates spel-
Ibound with a speech that laid bare what he
called the “legislative conspiracy” that
denied aboriginal people the vote or even
the right to hire a lawyer.

Regrettably, the educational work ended
there. With the exception of a brief collabo-
ration in support of the Nisga’a claim,
which was under attack by the Pacific
Fishermen’s Defence Alliance, neither abo-
riginal groups nor labour found the key to
continuing joint action.

Events forced a second attempt, how-
ever, in the aftermath of the confrontation
over mining in Strathcona Park. Here
environmentalists, native people and trade
unionists found themselves on the same side
of the bulldozer in opposition to Social
Credit environmental and development pol-
icies.

Leaders of the Nuu-Chah-Nulth Tribal
Council, who played a central role in the
Nanaimo process, once again issued the call
for a coalition or some form of united
action to link aboriginal rights with envir-
onmental concerns and the social and eco-
nomic policies of labour. The unifying goal
was a demand for defeat of Socred envir-
onmental policies. ©

The Tin-Wis conference, which was held
outside Tofino early in February, was the
first stage in that effort. Although fewer
unions were represented than had attended
the Nanaimo gathering, delegates from the
B.C. Federation of labour were joined by
representatives from the rank and file of
several key resource unions.

Another important feature was the par-
ticipation of political parties, including the
Green Party, the Communist Party and a
top-level group of new Democratic Party
caucus members and executive council
representatives.

In contrast to the Nanaimo conference,
which drew together top leadership, the
Tin-Wis gathering was a grassroots affair
which left room for participants to take
action whenever and wherever they could in
the spirit of the resolution adopted at the
conference’s end. (No conference is com-
plete anymore without an accord.)

By GEOFF
MEGGS

TRIBUNE PHOTOS — SEAN GRIFFIN

Members of the Lytton and Mt. Currie bani
annual meeting April 21, 1988 in opposite

The Tin-Wis Accord, however, has run
into difficulties in sections of both the envir-
onmental and labour movements because
of its commitment to “active support for the
recognition by all non-native governments
of aboriginal title and rights,” rights which
the accord says “have not been and cannot
be extinguished.”

The Tin-Wis process is forcing more Brit-
ish Columbians to ask what those rights are
and how they could be reflected in a final
settlement which really does benefit all

' without “transferring unemployment from
one group to another.” The poll results, if
accurate, show how much works needs to
‘be done in this area.

The Tin-Wis conference also posed the
question of just how these economic poli-