In a quiet hotel room in downtown Ottawa, Georges Erasmus is quietly recalling what may have been the lowest point in his 50-year struggle for Indigenous rights.
It was 1996, and the Dene leader had just finished co-chairing the ground-breaking Royal Commission on Indigenous Peoples (RCAP). The time has come to present Prime Minister Jean Chretien with a vision for vital change.
When the conference ended, Erasmus felt the most disappointed he had ever been in his professional life.
“That guy couldn’t care less,” Erasmus told CBC Indigenous.
“The fact of the matter is that it was tragic. It was clear that nothing was going to happen. I think it would have been better if this critical milestone report had been received by someone outside of the city.” .”
This episode is recounted in Erasmus’ new memoirs. Hotta! sufficient!co-authored with Toronto-based author Wayne K. Spear, was published this month.
Erasmus, 76, says there is no single highlight of his illustrious career that stands out above the rest, but when asked about the meeting he admitted that RCAP might be the lowest on the shelf. .
Erasmus said he was “so stunned” by the reception.
“Chretien was in the Dark Ages, using terms that hadn’t been used for probably 40 years, and we were on a spaceship,” Erasmus says in the book.
But the overall story, which tells how Erasmus reluctantly became one of the most prominent indigenous leaders of his generation, has more peaks than valleys.
radical youth
Born in 1948 in the North West in the Tuuchoki community, now known as Bechoki, Erasmus entered school at the age of six, speaking only Tuuchoki and French.
The man who would later impress many with his thoughtful political style failed Grade 1.
“I was immediately angry,” Erasmus wrote.
“I’m still mad!”
Although Erasmus quickly learned English, that sentiment may accurately describe the tone of his early work as a community organizer and member of the Indian Brotherhood of the NWT.
Dene chiefs founded the Brotherhood in 1969, amid widespread resistance to Pierre Trudeau’s White Paper plan to assimilate Indigenous peoples into mainstream society.
The Red Power movement was sweeping North America, and radicalism was widespread, especially among young people, Erasmus said.
“It was a time when people were ready to be even more radical than previous generations,” he says.
He was elected president of the Brotherhood in 1976, during the public inquiry into the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline project led by Judge Thomas Berger.
The Dean residents of the Northwest Territories primarily viewed pipelines as a threat and expressed their aspirations in a 1975 political manifesto, the Dean Manifesto. Although it stopped short of pursuing full independence, the declaration called for recognition of the Deen state.
According to the book, this activity was deemed so extreme that Canada’s spy agency, then part of the RCMP, immediately accused it of “subversive political activity” and “Marxist insurrection.” They say they are going to investigate Dean.
“Convinced that Indian Brotherhood staff were writing the Berger Report, the RCMP raided their premises in search of evidence,” the book says.
Berger’s report recommended a 10-year moratorium on pipeline construction to resolve land ownership in the area.
as head of state
After leading the Dene Nation, Erasmus was elected president of the Assembly of First Nations in 1985, inheriting a heavily indebted national organization plagued by a “culture of nepotism” and allegations of corruption.
The first thing the new head of state did was change the locks and order an external audit to unify the divided parliament.
He became known for his calm and diplomatic style as head of state, and was nicknamed the “11th Prime Minister.”
But in 1988, after winning a second term, he issued a fierce warning of “violent political action” by future generations if Ottawa did not immediately address Indigenous peoples’ legitimate grievances. He spoke in a completely different tone.
In 1990, his prediction came true when a Kanien’kehaka (Mohican) blockade of a golf course that had invaded a burial site led to a shootout with police and a 78-day armed conflict near Oka, Que. .
“With Oka, it was like punching a hole in a boil,” he says.
A year later, in the wake of the clashes at Kanasatake, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney established RCAP, with Mr Erasmus to serve as co-chairman after completing his second term in the AFN. For Erasmus, if Oka highlighted serious problems in Crown-Indigenous relations, RCAP had the solution.
“So what do they do? They ignored it. They laughed at the recommendation that they needed to spend about $2 billion more a year over a period of time,” he says.
“And what we said is that in 20 years, in a generation, those benefits will come back.”
The rise and fall of Aboriginal healing foundations
From there, Erasmus details the rise and fall of the $350 million Aboriginal Healing Foundation, which he helped found in 1998.
However, the Foundation quickly learned that it could not heal the trauma of residential schools overnight or even over a decade, and petitioned the government to extend its mandate and ease strict restrictions on how the Foundation invests its funds. did.
Unable to convince Stephen Harper’s Conservative government, the organization ceased operations in 2014, in what Mr Erasmus called a “sad, foolish and tragic waste of an opportunity”.
In 2004, Mr. Erasmus became chief negotiator for the Decho indigenous autonomy process, a position he held for 12 years, but has now returned to the role after a gap of about eight years, and his story is still unfolding. be.
With this book, Erasmus hopes to reach younger generations and inform Canadians about the huge injustices that Indigenous peoples face in their fight for civil rights and Indigenous rights.
“If five per cent of Canadians are aware of that, that’s a lot,” he says.
