Separate and Unequal

To get to Peepeekisis, Saskatchewan, you head northeast out of Regina, a pleasant trip for about an hour and a half on a wide road with few cars, big sky, wide open spaces, and not much else. After dipping in and out of the gentle folds of the Qu’Appelle River Valley, you make a left turn off provincial highway 10—at which point you bump into a Canadian cliché. Just past the green sign announcing Peepeekisis and its neighbouring First Nations—Okanese, Star Blanket, and Little Black Bear—the road disintegrates. What had been a substantial coating of gravel turns into potholes and the kind of dirt that the slightest rain transforms into mud. Bad roads, you are reminded, go hand in hand with native reserves.

I have come to see Maurice Nokusis, who is waiting in the damp morning grass just outside the band office. Nokusis, forty-five years old with a thick moustache and an eagle emblazoned on his baseball hat, is a band councillor. He greets me with good humour—a journalist with notebook in hand represents, it seems, an opportunity—but when I ask him about the subject of my research, the recently proposed residential-schools settlement, Nokusis launches into an aggressive diatribe about First Nations’ grievances. “We aren’t even Canadian citizens,” he pronounces, pausing to check whether the assertion registers the requisite shock. “And the Indian Act is a prisoner-of-war act. The Indian,” he states as if nothing much more needs to be said to sum up two centuries of sordid history, “is always told what to do, where to dig a shithouse, what to sell. And they wonder why our people are dysfunctional.”

Examples of that dysfunction are abundant. Though some reserves are well run and prosperous, report after report details a host of issues at others: chronic alcoholism; a youth suicide rate five times that of non-aboriginals; abnormally high rates of aids, tuberculosis, and diabetes; substandard education; overcrowded housing that provides little shelter from the cold; and discoveries of E. coli in the water supply, as was the case at Kashechewan, near James Bay, in October 2005. In a recent interview on cbc Radio, Patrick Brazeau, National Chief of the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples, the group responsible for off-reserve natives in Canada, suggested that the problem might be the reserves themselves—the series of discontinuous, federally mandated and financed enclaves inhabited by native people across Canada—and proposed that perhaps they ought to be shut down. Echoing Maurice Nokusis, Brazeau declared, “The Indian Act is the single biggest factor in perpetuating aboriginal poverty in Canada.”

Most attempts to explain the gulf between native and non-native societies in Canada point to the past—to colonialism, paternalism, and racism. In this litany, the government-sanctioned, church-run Indian residential schools that existed for over a century up to the 1980s are a central demon, responsible for everything including tuberculosis outbreaks (early on) that killed large numbers of students; regular and severe corporal punishment (often for minor infractions or transgressions); slave labour, in some instances, and little if any genuine efforts to educate in others; cultural deprivation; and acts of sexual and psychological abuse. In 2005, then federal minister of justice Irwin Cotler described the sending of aboriginal children to residential schools as “the single most disgraceful, harmful, and racist act in our history.”

Yet my question to Maurice Nokusis about the residential-schools settlement got lost in a barrage of angry words, all about the present. When I pressed once more, he answered abruptly: “If people feel that a dollar will solve things, they’re wrong.”

Nevertheless, dollars will be coming to Peepeekisis, and soon. Late in 2005, in a process initiated by the Martin Liberals and later re-approved by the incoming Harper Conservatives, the federal government set aside $1.9 billion to settle claims of former students of Indian residential schools against Canadian churches and, by extension, the government itself. The deal, crafted under the guiding hand of former Supreme Court Justice Frank Iacobucci, is complex. It consolidates some 13,000 individual lawsuits and nineteen class actions into a single class-action suit filed by the Assembly of First Nations and prescribes a financial remedy not just for those who were physically or sexually abused, but for all former students. Simply having attended one of the dozens of residential schools has been deemed worthy of compensation. The formula offers a fixed amount for each year of schooling ($10,000 for the first year, $3,000 for every year after that) to nearly 80,000 survivors, with additional money available for those who demonstrate (via an “independent assessment process”) that they suffered some form of abuse. The package also includes $125 million for a common healing fund and more than $100 million to pay lawyers who laboured for up to ten years on individual claims only to see those files now closed.

Before cash disbursements can be made, courts in nine jurisdictions across Canada have to certify the class-action suit, and detailed notices must be sent to all those who comprise the class, giving them 150 days to opt out. Otherwise, all claimants will be bound by court order. But these legal proceedings are expected to go smoothly. In fact, on the premise that due to their advanced age they shouldn’t be required to wait, initial payments of $8,000 were sent to some elderly people as early as last June. These cheques can be cashed even if the settlement somehow gets derailed. Nonetheless, the vast majority of payments still have to be made, a matter that raises substantial questions.

By any measure this is an extraordinary settlement, an admission of guilt on an epic scale toward a specific group of a country’s citizens. But will the settlement close the door with some finality on a shameful history? Can such a complicated and sizable settlement be executed in a manner that is fair and efficient? What will this redistribution of wealth mean to the people and the communities where the money ends up? And where does the settlement fit in the perennially thorny relationship between Canada and the descendants of its original people?

To look for answers I travelled to Saskatchewan, the epicentre, one might say, of the tortured relationship between aboriginal peoples and the waves of settlers and immigrants who came to farm and build towns and railways, and continue to come to this day. There are, of course, other flashpoints across the national map: the Mohawk territories of southern Quebec, the Cree and Ojibwa lands across the north, the Blackfoot reserves in Alberta, the British Columbia coastal villages. Over the past year, skirmishes between Six Nations protesters, the Ontario provincial government, and local developers over disputed lands have grown increasingly acrimonious. But Saskatchewan stands as obviously as any place for the harshness and relentlessness of history’s wheel.

Here the rolling grasslands once supported vast herds of buffalo, and the Néhiyawak, or Plains Cree, disassembled their teepees on short notice to gallop off on the hunt. The land and the herds were aboriginal lifeblood before the arrival of the white settlers turned Saskatchewan into the domain of the North West Mounted Police (framed in mythology on horseback and sporting their crisp red coats) and the place of wars with Big Bear and Louis Riel.