Without the 1990 Oka Crisis, relations between the First Nations and later arrivals might have changed, but only with some other catalyst. As the decade wore on, it became clear that Oka was not unique. In 1995, months of an armed standoff at British Columbia’s Gustafson Lake and the deadly climax to a confrontation at Ipperwash, Ontario, between provincial police and Natives occupying the former military camp were reminders of the violence that could erupt between impoverished and impatient communities and a Canadian majority whose sympathies often seemed shallow and short-lived.
Oka’s chief legacy was the $60 million Royal Comission on Aboriginal Peoples, which reported at the end of 1996. Canadians acquired five volumes of information and advice on issues the country had buried for generations in the backwoods and in urban slums. Co-chaired by Mr. Justice Rene Dussault and former Grand Chief George Erasmus, the commission provided Canadians with an uncompromised Native perspective, insisting that First Nations be given the powers and resources to manage their own lives. Without land, the commissioners warned, there could be no basis for Native life.
Conscious that the commission’s principles would transform Canada and cost billions without a guarantee of success, Ottawa moved slowly. One step was a formal apology for the earlier policy of educating Native children in harshly disciplined, underFunded residential schools, together with a $350 million “healing fund.” Until 1994, British Columbia had none of the treaty settlements common in other parts of Canada. When the province’s ndp government announced that it would negotiate treaties to secure a Native land base. First Nations promptly claimed 70 per cent of the province’s territory. Canada’s Supreme Court accelerated the process when it ruled that Delgamuukh, a member of the Gitskan-Wet’suwet’en Nation, had a claim to his ancestral lands. In July 1998, Ottawa and Victoria initialled a 500-page agreement that established Nisga’a ownership over 2,000 square kilometres (1,250 square miles) of the Nass Valley and surrounding territory, and recognized the band as a third order of government, with municipal-level powers. Furious that governments with low public support in the province could make such sweeping decisions, both the Reform and the B. C. Liberal parties pledged to overthrow the treaty if elected. Neighbouring bands claimed that they had been shut out by the Nisga’a claims, while other B. C. bands pledged to get even better settlements for their people. On the other side of Canada, a Supreme Court decision threw long-established fishing and logging arrangements into question by restoring old treaties that gave a Mi’kmaq native the right to make “a moderate living” from traditional resources. The aftermath included painful encounters between Mi’kmaq activists and local fishers, fearful of losing their livelihood. A Liberal minister who threatened to expose Native corruption lost his job and his seat in Parliament.
With the proclamation of Nunavut on 1 April, 1999, 25,000 people—21,000 of them Inuit—won control over half the Northwest Territories, or a third of Canada. Nunavut’s Tunnagavit, an Inuit-owned development corporation, was empowered to spend the $1.6 billion that Ottawa paid the Inuit to settle land claims. The remainder of the Northwest Territories, with 40,000 people, evenly divided between Natives and whites, continued to govern themselves from Yellowknife. Exuberance in celebrating Canada’s youngest government briefly averted attention from average incomes of only $11,000 a year, 25 per cent unemployment, high living costs, severe drug and alcohol addiction problems, and the resulting family breakdown. Some insisted that traditions of consensual government by local elders would solve problems that highly trained experts from the south had failed to alleviate. Others were bluntly sceptical that folkloric ways would overcome the impact of television and underemployment in small isolated communities dominated by a few families. Only the future would tell.
Meanwhile, across Canada, close to a million Native, Inuit, Metis, and non-status Indians seek futures that all Canadians help to provide. Thousands of young Natives have made unprecedented strides in post-secondary education and now provide their
One of the major historic developments of the 1990s was the changing status of Canada’s Natives. Having denied aboriginal land claims for a century, courts, public opinion, and an NDP government forced British Columbia to change. At New Aiyanish on August 4,1998, federal Indian Affairs minister Jane Stewart, Nisga’a chief Joseph Gosnell, and BC premier Glen Clark culminated a century of negotiations with an historic treaty. Opponents still pledged to kill the deal.
Communities with lawyers, teachers, health professionals, social workers and accountants. Like their counterparts in post-war Canada, they embody the hope of a better future for their people and their country.
World History
