SYNOPSIS

No treaties were made with indigenous nations residing in those territories where now there is a Canadian province called British Columbia. Instead, a breathtaking policy of criminalization, assimilation and land rights and sovereignty extinguishment has been vigorously carried out against them. Present day governments continue that approach, now 150 years old, in processes which have recently been re-named and cosmetically improved but remain unconstitutional and are prohibited by the 1948 Genocide Convention, which terms as genocide, inter alia, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.

Neither Britain nor Canada nor the settlers of British Columbia themselves have ever honourably addressed the peoples whose lands and resources form British Columbia. The indigenous nations in what is now called British Columbia have never joined Canada but had citizenship imposed on them. The province of BC has never fulfilled Canada’s constitutional requirements of purchasing lands from the indigenous owners before settling.

Why do the people of BC seek the dissolution of some thirty distinct indigenous nations? Why do they cry, “One law for all Canadians,” in answer to indigenous efforts to exercise their right of self-determination?

BC's economy is 80% derived from extraction of natural resources from lands and waters that have never been ceded, sold or surrendered to them by their indigenous owners.  What’s more: recognition of this fact has given rise to what is called “the uncertainty principle” currently impeding foreign investment, as judicious investors fear doing business with governments or others whose claims to ownership may ultimately be proved illegitimate.

The ongoing colonization of British Columbia relies on the settler population’s indifference to the indigenous peoples’ plights and rights. The Colonial Present documents the colonizer’s manufacture of a new mythology to dehumanize the native peoples and strip them of their rightful place. The interests of resource industries have dominated accounts of indigenous peoples throughout the mainstream media, the academic presses and the courts. They have substantially corrupted and impoverished the non-native understanding of indigenous peoples on whose homelands they live and work, and to which they seem to feel entitled. On the strength of these standardized lies, new British Columbians coming from all over the world comply with the destruction of distinct nations with lands, languages, cultures and peoples.

The indigenous nations and individuals have suffered excruciating losses. But the highest expression of official BC aspirations for reconciliation is only that they should release title to their homelands, accept a small financial, land and program funding settlement, and submit to the British Columbia Treaty Commission agenda reducing them, in legal terms, to incorporated associations exercising management capacities barely distinguishable from those of BC municipalities, while by fee simple title, their lands and rich resources are ceded to the Queen.

This book is an exploration of how such a stunning string of events has happened, and British Columbians continuing attempts to rationalize them.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: A Poor to Middling Conspiracy

The legal bankruptcy in which early Governors operated, with which they fathered the province of British Columbia, has never been remedied. They never made treaties, nor provision for the indigenous nations to join them. Today, the province remains in conflict with the foundations of Canada’s Constitution as well as the most basic international mechanisms for human rights, peace and justice. A sort of legal and cultural schizophrenia has become entrenched in a place where genocidal acts are carried out next to re-creations of indigenous artwork, and traditional cultural visions are fashionably co-opted. The development of legal, institutional and cultural constructs unique to BC has forced entire indigenous nations to the brink of destruction.

Gee Eh? Genocide Awareness Perhaps most British Columbians do not identify with the genocidal effect of their government, courts and industry. British Columbia's policy has always been -- before and ever since it became clear that the native peoples were not simply going to die out and disappear as they had calculated --to get title to the land by any and all means necessary. They have exploited many such means. Present day examples of each of the five acts which individually constitute genocide, according to the 1948 Convention on prevention and punishment of this crime, serve as an entry point for discussing the situation in the province. There is little room for misunderstanding those actions in light of the many and deeply consequential Supreme Court of Canada rulings in favour of existing aboriginal title and rights in BC. A state of war against these indigenous nations is in its 21st decade.

$10 billion - or - the cash of the matter British Columbians seem to feel that their obligations to indigenous nations, arising from BC’s assumption of the entirety of their homelands, are being serviced by welfare payments to the individual citizens of those nations. Federal politicians have proclaimed loudly and often, over the last decade, that $10 billion is spent annually on Indian Affairs program funding and the general public can be relied upon to  graphically voice their objections to such a high price tag for maintaining "Canada's First Nations". But they have very little grasp of the truth of the situation. Statistically, indigenous and Inuit people live in conditions that feature suicide, high school drop-outs, teen pregnancy, diabetes and HIV, poverty, malnutrition, illiteracy, drug abuse and addiction, homelessness and incarceration at rates that outstrip the national averages at ten to seventy times. Quite evidently, welfare is not meeting their needs. It is far from an equitable settlement for the crimes the indigenous nations have suffered -- if in fact it  were only a fiscal remedy that they sought -- which it is not. The economy of British Columbia relies on denying native title and rights of self-determination. This effective subsidy by denial and criminalization was recognized as such by the World Trade Organization in 2000.

Studying Indifference

British Columbians harbor truisms of why native land claims are unimportant and even unnecessary, and remain markedly unaware of the particulars of those outstanding claims and the people who make them. Indifference is taught and practised throughout grade schools, universities, and in all popular media streams, leading to the complete failure of investigation and understanding in all social forums.  Prevailing racist attitudes are in fact supported by leading academics and opinion makers. Children in BC are largely unaware that there are people where they live who have a prior claim to the land, who speak another language, who historically flourished in their own unique nation. Graduates of high school and indeed universities will, instead of history, learn a sort of historio-mythology which allows them to dismiss indigenous peoples. They will be able to elaborately and incorrectly place the indigenous as belonging to the past. Many creative tools to deny the indigenous nations' proper present legal claims are deployed; tools published by their professors.

On Reserve

In the 1960's and 70's, while other British colonies were attaining independence, in British Columbia the Indians were taking control of their own Indian Agencies and administration of life on their unconscionably small Reserve lands. The originating moments of the Indian Reserve system, from the 1858 gold rush and the first wave of settlers, were followed immediately by half a century of vigorous political, but non-violent, protest. That era is separated from the present day mostly by a thirty year period where legal pursuits by Status Indians were literally outlawed. Their dispossession was ensured over a one hundred year period when registered land ownership by a Status Indian was prohibited.

The innumerable Indian protests at being limited to "Reserves;" the Reserve Commissioners’ correspondence with the Colonial Secretary; the early court presentations by dozens of Chiefs unified by total desperation; the testimonial letters to newspapers and the grave inter-tribal Memorials to weak political promises; the roadblocks, court cases and international petitions all show a multi-generational legacy of resistance. At least half of indigenous people in BC do not live on Reserves today, because of their crushing poverty, lack of housing, and family politics gone sour under an imposed system. The elected Chiefs and Councils on Reserves, who are often on government pay, are answerable to the federal government more than their own constituents: they are agents in right of Canada.

Assimilation and Criminalization

Any explicit recognition of indigenous identity poses a threat to the assimilation goals of the majority BC electorate and their government. The government subsidizes careers and achievements of many aboriginal people who mask and then advocate assimilation. While their people are either bankrupt, landless or both, the indigenous salesmen are commissioned provincial heroes. The alternative to assimilation is, effectively, to be a criminal. Some of these "criminals" have been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Resistance to the colonizer has informed the most dynamic, vivid and expensive strands of the indigenous story since contact, although little of it has been generously recorded. Children must survive against the insidious social agents of the land race, and so "normal people don't talk about St’át’imc stuff," they say. That is how it was put by one of their ten year olds.

Extinguishment ... with Consent

An examination of the BC Treaty Commission, facilitator of the “modern day treaty process” since 1992, reveals predetermined outcomes which include that indigenous peoples completing negotiations will extinguish their land titles and waive their right to self determination. In exchange for “self government” as prescribed by Canada, and a worryingly small parcel of what Canada views as British Columbia's lands. Testimony from a number of individuals who have experienced the realization of a modern day treaty in British Columbia is not ambiguous as to the results and how they were achieved. The elaborate self- extinguishment process has replaced the governments’ unilateral enforcement of it, and, although Final Agreements reached under the existing duress can hardly be described as consensual, they are celebrated by BC and Canada as the pinnacle of reconciliation between the original and the new peoples.

Immigration or Escapement

The early colonizing people were leaving the devil they knew for the one they didn't. The founders of Canada and BC were drifters, unwanted surplus labour, orphans, criminals, troublesome but wealthy sons, drug runners and bootleggers, independent opportunists, former Governors of the Falkland Islands or British Honduras, and occasionally would-be farmers. “A worse set of cut-throats and all- time scoundrels than those who flocked to Yale from all parts of the world never assembled anywhere.” They were all driven by desperation or greed, and were ushered in under the umbrella of Imperial Britain. They made up songs about their disdain for the colony’s laws and their lust for stolen treasure. They made towns which were described as “modern sodoms;” they re-sold smallpox infested blankets once the first native customers died. They plied a trade with Indians in whiskey mixed with ink, chewing tobacco, and nitric acid. At the behest of Britain and its laws, the colony was meant to treat honourably with the indigenous peoples, and first of all buy any land they wished to settle on. Unfortunately, the citizenry had little personal knowledge of being treated honourably or of the concept of the rule of law. The new entrepreneurs and settlers stood to gain everything they came for by denying the indigenous, and they did so. The use of instruments of governance and law has, for 150 years, been precluded by the interests and consequent world view of the very people who were supposed to enforce those rules. The decision to annihilate the indigenous is being made by individuals who, today and yesterday, lost their own homelands to the same imperial, industrial cause they champion now in someone else’s territory.

The Role of Law

As it concerns indigenous nations, law in British Columbia has always been only cosmetic: appearances are kept up by the use of white wigs, black robes and tall chairs, but the charade is otherwise farcical. From the time of hunting Indians in gunships or in loose posses with American sheriff’s badges at the front, to the most recent attempts at getting Indian land - the failed Recognition and Reconciliation legislation-- BC has been allergic to law. Complicit courts have simply made up convenient rulings - wildly, as it suited, replacing Constitutional instructions with their own obviously biased judgments. The steady work of defining aboriginal rights out of meaningful existence continues incrementally, one aboriginal rights court action at a time.

The colonial courts have frozen indigenous rights to development at 1842. Since the courts’ requirements to prove aboriginal title have grown to fortress-like proportions, and government policy has prevented any of the qualifying activities that prove title, it looks as though the assessment of terra incognita applies better to indigenous homelands now than ever before. It may be that no one will ever see aboriginal title land in British Columbia. Royal Commissions of Inquiry into the condition of aboriginal peoples have effected nothing more than delay and denial, and in many cases simply formalized government indifference.

The Rule of Ignorance

"Freedom of the Press" in British Columbia can be better stated as, "a law unto themselves." The cycle of bias among those who control news publications with their advertising dollars reliably corrupts the written records in a resource- extraction-based culture. Will forestry, hydroelectric or mining companies place an ad in a journal which reports thoroughly on the Indian land question? No – and thereby the media blackout of aboriginal title issues is accomplished. The wholesale promotion of reporters and journalists who distort and disqualify aboriginal title issues to positions such as Director of the Vancouver International Writers' festival or to host a TV talk show is easily documented. Writers and editors operate with veritable impunity in their hate literature. A regular column titled "Aboriginal Concerns" is one example. Articles such as “Are Indians Human?” and “Indians Are A Health Problem,” reflected the nadir of colonial philosophy. As a result of uniform media incitement against the indigenous, British Columbians are presently unable to properly assess their own moral or legal situation as perpetrators of the worst abuses of human rights.

Testing the New Mythologists

First Nations today are asked to perform the unlikely task of “separating business from politics,” and thereby to “move forward” with the rest of the global economy. The myth that indigenous societies have improved under colonial occupation is perpetuated by scholars, politicians and judges, and popular writers take extraordinary license blurring fact and fiction. Elaborate legislative schemes to eradicate aboriginal rights have evolved throughout the colony’s history and collusion between the province and the federal government in so cutting off the indigenous future is understood -- by British Columbians --to be a great step forward, reminiscent of the so-called white man's burden to bring civilization to the savages. Successful politicians have careers marked by episodes of Indian fighting and lawyers for the Indians pander to the quick-cash extinguishment schemes in constant development by governments.

Who Are We Now?

British Columbians take pride in giving flavor to Canadian culture by showing off ill- gotten indigenous trinkets, stolen booty and icons, as well as promoting old photos of the natural landscape. The other half of the time they are wreaking destruction on those same people and places. But actions could be taken to realize true reconciliation between British Columbians and indigenous peoples today. Many leaders, native and non-native, have made plausible suggestions concerning what should be done. Instead, the non-native competitors for the land continue to ignore the fact that indigenous nations have the internationally recognized right to determine their course, to continue to be who they are and develop according to their own worldview.

Kerry Coast at the meeting of the UN Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (EMRIP), July 2013

KERRY COAST has lived her life in the lands of the Squamish, Líl’wat, St’át’imc, Secwepemc and Sto:lo. Coast produced The St’át’imc Runner newspaper and The BC Treaty Negotiating Times. She adapted five legends for the stage and produced them with the Úcwalmicw Players in Lillooet. She has done professional research in First Nations Education. Coast served as the representative of IHRAAM, an international NGO, at the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in New York in 2011-2013, and participated in the UN Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (EMRIP) in 2013.  She was part of an IHRAAM delegation meeting with Commissioner Tracey Robinson of the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights in Vancouver on August 9th, 2013 concerning a case registered with the IACHR.

Tracey Robinson, Commissioner on the Rights of Women from the Organization of American States' Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (third from left) meets with IHRAAM-IACHR petition instigator James Louie (left), Loni Edmonds (second from left) and Kerry Coast (right) at the Renaissance Inn, Vancouver on August 9th, 2013

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