“We have sent a letter to Buckingham Palace requesting that Queen Elizabeth send forth her representative, which is the Governor General of Canada. I will not be attending Friday’s meeting with the Prime Minister ...”

That, if you’re wondering, is the leader of the Attawapiskat First Nation, Theresa Spence. To be clear, whether Spence attends the meeting is of no importance whatever. A flair for self-promotion and the credulousness of the Canadian media may have landed her on the front pages for a few weeks; she may imagine herself, as such, to be in a position to dictate terms to the Queen, the governor general and the prime minister, not to mention her fellow chiefs (who were instructed not to attend in her absence).

But the mundane reality, with the continuing revelations of just how thoroughly she has mismanaged her tiny hamlet, is that her career in the race-hustling business is very nearly at an end. No one person has done more to damage the native cause with the general public, and no native leader who hopes to enlist the public’s support will want to have much to do with her.

But then, for all the attention she has aroused, Spence was never the issue. The broader grievances of native people are no less valid because of the machinations of one incompetent chief; neither is the Idle No More movement likely to diminish in intensity merely because its purported spiritual leader has been discredited. Whatever may emerge from the prime minister’s meeting with the chiefs Friday, we are going to be dealing with the forces unleashed in the past few weeks for some time to come. A prime minister not known for his finesse will have to discover new reservoirs of tact and sensitivity.

Needless to say, these have not been much in evidence to date. Any government that proposes any changes on this file, no matter how benign, is likely to run into suspicion and resistance from native Canadians — not unreasonably, given our history. But a government as given to bullying and secrecy as this one is perhaps least well-placed to carry out major reforms.

Indeed, on aboriginal issues, and on associated files such as pipelines, the prime minister may be running up against the limits of his usual head-butting approach. It is one thing to run roughshod over Parliament, but a section of native opinion has become so inflamed, and so emboldened, as to be more or less immovable. Divinely certain of the righteousness of their cause and undeterred by such niceties as the rule of law, they have the capacity to cause a great deal of disruption, not merely to the government’s agenda, but to the economic life of the country.

The collateral damage could well include the native establishment, notably Assembly of First Nations Chief Shawn Atleo, the people with whom Harper must work and the people most exposed in the current atmosphere of confrontation. As I’ve written before, it is Atleo and others like him, more than Harper, whom the more fundamentalist elements in Idle No More have in their sights, precisely for their willingness to co-operate with the government and its “genocidal” agenda.