The Fifth World - An Indigenous Off-Reserve Reality

By Ron George, Tsaskiy

Forthcoming

A Wet’suwet’en family’s loss of Indianness over four generations, and the Canada‐wide Non‐Status and off‐reserve bid for restitution. Since the Red Curtain dropped in the 19th century, enclosing Indian Reserves behind apartness legislation, those Indigenous people who went outside the wall never got back in. Displaced, they organized for survival. Ron George helped lead that movement for over twenty years. 

Today, reinstated individuals have Indian Status cards and they can apply for “Indigenous Services” from the state that stole their land, but they can’t go home. The colony expands with impunity over Indigenous heart‐ lands, and Indian Reserves stay the same: too small, too poor, too much paralyzed by the Indian Act. 

If Grand Chief George Manuel’s 1974 vision of “The Fourth World’ is the Original Peoples governing on their lands, the Fifth World of Ron George’s experience is that of their vast majority: legislated away, forcibly displaced, and suffering denial. Where will that 70% of Indigenous individuals practice the dubious “Aboriginal rights” of Canada’s invention? This is the story of their situation.

The Wet’suwet’en nation sued the federal and provincial governments for ownership and jurisdiction in our own territory. Our court case came down through the Supreme Court of Canada in 1997. They found that our title had not been extinguished in British Columbia, and that’s a burden on Canada, to settle all outstanding claims.

    Well, Canada doesn’t listen to its own Supreme Court. They make up laws as they go. They make up laws to accommodate corporations. In our case, today, the laws they make up consist of how to get pipelines through Wet’suwet’en land. They do it illegally.

    Us hereditary chiefs have been excluded from decision making on our Yin Tah and from consultations concerning our lands – on lands the Supreme Court of Canada recognized was ours – ours, the Hereditary Chiefs’. Not the Indian Band chief’s. 

    In 1880, Canada established a policy to enact the elected system and that’s when our problems began – that’s when hereditary chiefs began to be marginalized. We are still marginalized.

    In 1880, they were going to push us aside, and now in 2016 the federal and provincial government agreed that the LNG pipeline project could go through our land. They did not get permission from us. They found people who could be bought; they can always find people who can be bought. Their objective is to satisfy the needs of the corporate world and all the people who make money off our land without paying for it. 

The Indian Act is a model of assimilation; it’s a model of appropriation of lands; and it’s a model of how to kill people off and kill off their way of life. It’s right there for everyone to see – and still we have Canadian professors saying it isn’t genocide. Well I don’t know what their idea of genocide is, but it’s certainly not their definition. Genocide is what happened to us. They deliberately altered our way of life.

    They developed the Indian Act system and gave everyone numbers. Then they immediately instituted the enfranchisement process, that would take away the Indian Status that the Indian Act gave. Why did they do this? Because if the people were not Status Indians, the government would not have to pay money to support them. They have to support the Indian Reserves because it’s written into the British North America Act. 

    The only reason they have Indian Reserves is so they can control us. Supporting the Indian Reserves is the only part of their laws concerning us that they actually follow.

I was brought up by my uncles from the Father Clan, Tsaybaysa’s clan. My grandfather was the same clan as we are, Gitimden. He arranged in the Feast Hall that his sons from the Grouse Clan and Killer Whale Clan would train his grandchildren in the Gitimden Clan. They would teach us all the boundaries of everyone’s territories. How to respect the land, how to respect the wildlife. We were trained, boots-on-the-ground training, walking our territory from the time we were knee-high. We had to do this, because my grandfather refused to move on to an Indian Reserve.

    Back when they started registering us, he refused to go. He was a hereditary chief living on his territory. He asked the Indian Agent, “Why would I move on to an Indian Reserve when I have all this here? All around me is my supermarket, I get everything I need from the Creator. If you can reproduce that on the Reserve, come back and talk to me and maybe I’ll go.” The Indian Agent came back later and said, “Thomas, I can’t provide that on the Reserve. So I’m going to take your Indian Status away from you.” And that’s how we became Non-Status Indians: defending our sovereignty. 

My grandfather had his Indian Status taken away from him – which he never wanted in the first place – because he was defending his sovereignty. He defended it all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada, in the Delgamuukw / Gisdayway case, and we won. So you would think that would be the end of it. You would think we finally won what we were looking for.

    Unfortunately, Canada doesn’t act that way. They take every opportunity to avoid the truth and avoid doing the right thing. They never seize the opportunity to be honest. And we’re the ones who have suffered, the hereditary chiefs.

    So now they have an agreement to run a liquified and natural gas pipeline through our territory. 

These deals are made by people who don’t belong to us, they don’t belong to our Clan: it’s not their territory. 

The government convinced the Broman Lake Indian Band, a little Indian Reserve, to change its name to Wet’suwet’en First Nation. That’s how devious they are. Now everyone thinks that this Band represents our people, because of the name. The government attached some of our Clan’s territories to this new Wet’suwet’en First Nation – without talking to us about it. And that’s how easy it was to get those people to agree to it. 

    They negotiate with the provincial governments and make agreements like the Forest and Range Agreements. There’s a map on the government’s website showing that our Clan’s territories belong to the Band. That’s illegal and everybody knows it.

    Where are we going to go? To the police? The same police that arrested our hereditary chiefs? They are not going to do anything – they never have and they never will.

    Why didn’t we fight this in the courts at the time? Because the government made it illegal for us to hire a lawyer in 1927. They didn’t repeal that until 1951. In that space of time, they got all our land; they got all the people they needed to support them. 

We finance everything we do out of our own pockets. This is the right way to do it, if you’ve got the money. But we can’t compete with the kind of money the Department of Indian Affairs is providing to their corporate supporters on our lands. 

    I can’t be called a First Nations person because I don’t live on a Reserve. It’s that simple. That’s how our Clan’s hereditary chiefs lost all control over our territories. Our grandchildren have to live a thousand miles away from our territories, we’re forcibly relocated. They’ve altered our way of life, stopped us from making a living on our lands, and we’ve lost our ability to transmit our culture and teachings to our next generations. That’s genocide.

Tsaskiy, Ron George July 1, 2019, Líl’wat