An unserviced, one-room home in Attawapiskat in 2011. When did covering the audit become more important than covering Third World living conditions on reserves? THE CANADIAN PRESS/FRANK GUNN

Michael Harris is a writer, journalist, and documentary filmmaker. He was awarded a Doctor of Laws for his “unceasing pursuit of justice for the less fortunate among us.” His eight books include Justice Denied, Unholy Orders, Rare ambition, Lament for an Ocean, and Con Game. His work has sparked four commissions of inquiry, and three of his books have been made into movies. He is currently working on a book about the Harper majority government to be published in the autumn of 2014 by Penguin Canada.

In the game of cowboys and Indians that’s been played by Stephen Harper and a fasting aboriginal woman, the cowboys, as usual, are winning — in the short term.

In the movies, they win because they have carbines and six-guns. The Indians have the bow and arrow, no saddles, and superb horsemanship.

The cowboys also have the cavalry. It arrives when the savages are closing in on the circled wagons studded with flaming arrows. The cavalry draws its sabres and charges just as the beleaguered white men are getting ready to shoot their womenfolk. You know why.

In politics, as in the movies, the cowboys win because they have nearly all the weapons. There is power of the purse, the legislative process, the legal use of force and, of course, the ability to reward and punish. With all that power, some act with constraint and consideration, others not so much. The current prime minister is like a surly waiter who also owns the joint — you eat what he slaps down in front of you, or you don’t eat at all.

Strangely, the rest of the country seems to have submitted to this take-it-or-leave-it approach to governance. Perhaps because they know they have everything to lose, Canada’s Aboriginal Peoples have bristled. Bill C-45 is not their idea of democracy or renewal. What’s more, they are saying so with considerably stiffer backbones than the nation’s editorial boards.

It is interesting to note that not a single Conservative MP has bothered to do what two former prime ministers and a gaggle of Opposition members have — pay a visit to Chief Theresa Spence. Not one. She won’t bite them — she’s not eating. She won’t torture them over a slow fire until they sign a treaty. They are neither the prime minister nor the Governor-General, so they wouldn’t be submitting to the chief’s demands by dropping by.

The reason they won’t visit is obvious but still worth noting, since many of these Conservative MPs have aboriginal constituents in their ridings. As robotic troopers in Harper’s wall-eyed platoons, they gave up their free will when they enlisted. They are now obedient nobodies with no ideas of their own — not even the most gossamer notion of civility. Rin Tin Tin had more freedom of expression at Fort Apache. Remember when he and Rusty watched the cavalry columns move out? At least Rinty got to bark.

But what about the media? Surely the press, steeped in the tradition of standing up against injustice and tyranny, wouldn’t allow the state to turn its big guns on a single, middle-aged aboriginal woman from a Third World reserve right here in Canada, said to have a Grade Seven or Grade Eight education?

Sadly, crusading has never been the rage in newsrooms. It is less so now, thanks to a corporate death grip on vast swaths of this profession. As Lewis Lapham put it, “The big media identify themselves with wealth and privilege and the wisdom in office. They preserve the myths that society deems precious … By telling their audience what they assume they already know, the news media reflect what the society wants to believe about itself.”

Here is what a lot of people want to believe about the Aboriginal Spring in Canada. They hold fast to the idea that the only thing behind native unrest is a bottomless lust for public subsidies. They want to believe that Canada has been just and generous to this misfit people who stubbornly won’t assimilate. They cling to the notion that, left to their own devices, aboriginals are unable to govern themselves and will quickly fall into corruption.

And so, a sizeable posse in the media obliged in the current circumstances. Armed with a leaked “audit” of Chief Theresa Spence’s Attawapiskat band, an audit that went back to 2006 (even though Spence had only been chief since 2010), she was lassoed and dragged behind a horse for all to see.

The Attawapiskat angle was so much more tabloid-friendly than history. It was character assassination by dull razor blade. There was no documentation for the expenditure of millions of dollars in public monies. There was no due diligence. She drove a fancy car. She gave her boyfriend a job. And by the way, the boyfriend once went bankrupt. When Indians weren’t sniffing glue, getting stoned or sobering up in the drunk tank, they were taking the public for a ride.

Here is a sampling of some comments from a Toronto newspaper after stories appeared about natives blocking VIA rail:

“These people piss me off almost as much as Quebecers.”

“Send the next train down on the tracks and if they don’t want to move then let Darwin’s natural selection deal with them.”

“Do these folks do anything legal? Smuggle, blockade, illegal smokes, gun running?”

“These people are dirtbags and aren’t providing to society. We’ve given them so much over the last century and they still whine for more. Time to fully cut them off once and for all.”

Ignorance and the search for certainty seem to enjoy each other’s company. Chief Theresa Spence and the Idle No More movement have been well and truly Harpered. There is not much doubt about who leaked the audit — the same people who squealed when the auditor-general’s interim report on G8/20 spending was “illegally leaked” for “pure” political reasons as Tony Clement fumed during the last federal election.

Significant media have assisted the government in its smearing of aboriginals. There has been a clamour in editorials for accountability and transparency — yes, from a representative of the poorest one per cent in the country.

But if a lack of paperwork is a crime, then what can be said of the government’s fifty-million dollar downpayment on Tony Clement’s re-election in Muskoka?

Didn’t the government itself say that it didn’t have time to pass legislation to authorize significant parts of the G8/20 spending? And where was the due diligence in selecting a new fighter jet that will cost $30 billion more to acquire and operate than the Harper government admitted? And was it really worth $45,000 of public money to send the PM to a Yankees game? Just missing paperwork, nothing more.

Ever notice how many journalists are working both sides of the canal these days — journalists in the Senate, journalists writing the PM’s speeches, journalists in the public relations companies? Former journalists, that is.

Poor reporting bears much of the responsibility for the laughable importance assigned to the court intrigue over who will meet who, when, and in what order. The big meeting, featuring a token appearance by the prime minister, followed by a ceremonial meeting, which may be preceded by a second meeting, with the mercurial Governor General — it’s a non-story.

The real story is whether Stephen Harper does something about 250 years of gross social injustice and usurpation. The symptoms of those two facts are well known — poverty, addiction, violent crime, stunted education and poor health care.

And then there is the housing crisis. At the end of 2011, the Assembly of First Nations was reporting that Canada’s reserves needed 85,000 new houses. The federal government is building houses at the rate of just over 2,000 per year.

Getting beyond the symptoms, the bedrock truth is that prosperity is built on property rights and Canada has to put the settlement of comprehensive land claims near the top of the national agenda. It has to get serious about revenue-sharing on resource development. It has to do something about treaty obligations.

I suspect Stephen Harper is just interested in breaking Chief Spence’s hunger strike by whatever eleventh-hour deal he can achieve and then walk away from. Still, he can create a lot of good faith today by promising to rescind the legislation aboriginals, and a lot of other people, find offensive in Bill C-45.

Then there’s the long term. The only hope for truth and reconciliation is to provide aboriginals with a base which they, not the government, own. With $650 billion in resource developments pending, now is the time.

Otherwise, nothing will ever change for Canada’s 630 bands — unless you count a higher inmate population in our federal prisons.

After all, up until now, the only way aboriginals have ever gotten attention in Canada is by putting native bodies between white men and their money.

Readers can reach the author at [email protected]. Click here to view other columns by Michael Harris.

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