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From Toronto Star

Idle No More movement brings Canadian history into focus

Treaties are a permanent reminder that indigenous people were not conquered, but were brought into the agreement as partners.

C.W. Jefferys' drawing of a Hudson's Bay Company trading post.

By: Bruce Erickson Published on Sat Jan 26 2013

In the 1650s, a young Pierre-Esprit Radisson, one of the future founders of the Hudson's Bay Company, is travelling up the Ottawa River, canoeing past the site of Chief Teresa Spence's recent six-week hunger strike. Radisson is paddling with a group of Iroquois, with whom he has a rocky partnership. Stumbling while pushing his canoe up a set of rapids, he blames his teenage Iroquois paddling partner, who simultaneously blames Radisson. A fight ensues, leaving both bloody and exhausted, but still no further up the rapids. Necessity takes over and the two put aside their fight and try to catch up to the rest of the group.

Radisson was paddling through land regularly travelled by Iroquois, Huron and Ojibway groups, but rarely by any Europeans. He was searching for partners and allies with whom to trade furs and goods. As he realized so many times on his trip, his ability to communicate and compromise with those he was travelling with was the key to his success. So, even with bloody wounds, he got back in the canoe with his sparing companion and paddled onwards.

The historian Richard White points to interactions like Radisson's in the region around the Great Lakes in the 17th and 18th century as an example of the complicated struggle for power in the North American interior. Commonly thought of as the steady westward advance of European control from the eastern seas to the Pacific Ocean, White argues that for much of two centuries, relationships between indigenous peoples and Europeans were characterized by the fact that neither group could assert overall control - resulting in what he calls "The Middle Ground."

French traders were desperate to take furs from the interior with the least amount of interaction and cost; Huron, Algonquin and Ojibway groups, among others, looked to build military alliances and trade agreements. Aboriginal groups demanded compromise and co-operation from the European traders in their region. The shape of the fur trade - based upon a familial model between two communities as opposed to a strict business relationship - reflected the aboriginal demands for co-operation as much as it did the French desire for profit.

White points to the events known as "Pontiac's rebellion" to illustrate the force of these demands. In 1763, a co-ordinated attack of indigenous groups on the English forts of the Upper Great lakes region - from Niagara to Sudbury - unsettled the new reign of the British in the interior. Far from being an attempt to rid the region of Europeans, White argues that this uprising was an attempt by Pontiac and those who agreed with him to reassert the terms of alliance in the region. Pontiac wanted a partner, not a ruler - a co-ordinated strike was just the medium in which the message was delivered.

I have been remembering Pontiac's story a lot as I watch the rise of the Idle No More movement. Pontiac's initiative against the British was inspired by changes in colonial power along the St. Lawrence and the Great Lakes region. Having won the European claim to much of the North American interior through the Seven Years War, England set out to govern the interior trading posts by their own rules instead of those that had been negotiated over the past century between French and indigenous groups. Suddenly cut out of the decision-making process, out of the terms of alliance, indigenous peoples broke the alliance in order to remake it with their input.

Idle No More comes at a similar time when the terms of the relationship between First Nations and the Canadian state are being redefined. Indigenous groups, from the Assembly of First Nations chiefs down to the grassroots supporters of Idle No More and Chief Spence, are reminding the government that this is, in fact, an alliance. The Royal Proclamation of 1763 that ushered in the mandate to negotiate with aboriginal people for use of the land they occupied was born of Pontiac's efforts. The proclamation, which over the years has been ignored, bent and deliberately misunderstood throughout the country, was a recognition that the peace of the colony depended upon securing consent for its presence.

Although criticized for having no specific demands, the Idle No More movement asks us to remember our history. It asks us to understand that treaties were not signed out of the goodness of the heart, but out of a sense of partnership and the need to compromise. Chief Spence's hunger strike, temporary blockades of vital transportation routes, and round dances in our streets and public spaces are different versions of Pontiac's message: cutting aboriginal people out of the decision-making process around land use is an unacceptable change to the already strained alliance that this country was built on.

As flawed as they are, treaties are a permanent reminder that indigenous people were not conquered, but were brought into the agreement as partners, as invested nations. As a non-aboriginal who is a part of those treaties by virtue of living on Canadian soil, I would not want to lose that reminder of the debt and partnership that I have with aboriginal people.

Bruce Erickson is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at York University. His book, Canoe Nation, will be published by UBC press in the spring.