First Nations members taking part in an Idle No More protest shut down Portage Avenue at the Perimeter Highway in Winnipeg, Wednesday, January 2, 2013. THE CANADIAN PRESS/John Woods

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Some people might think that Canada’s aboriginal spring was about fake hunger strikes, mawkish speeches and hokey ceremony, all put in its place by a firm hand from the federal government — Stephen Harper as hard-assed Indian agent, wising up the tribes.

The same types who see it that way probably thought the Beatles were a passing fad. Real news never disappears; it just goes underground until it comes back to the surface and makes the walls shake.

And shake they will if unconfirmed reports out of Saskatchewan prove accurate. Senior Idle No More sources have told iPolitics that bands are in turmoil over a debate about whether to sign this year’s contribution agreements with the federal government. The issue is an appendix of conditions attached to the documents.

“One of the council members took the whole appendix home and read it all. There were a lot of conditions never seen before. Some signed and some didn’t,” said Christine Dieter, a First Nations woman in southern Saskatchewan.

The appendix allegedly requires the bands to support federal omnibus legislation and proposed resource developments as a condition of accessing their funding. Some bands have already signed the funding agreements out of necessity, noting that they did so under duress, and at least two others allegedly did not. “As of April 1, 2013,” one source said, “they will have no funds because they did not sign the agreement.”

The two First Nations bands identified as not signing are the Peepeekisis Cree Nation and the Onion Lake Cree Nation. Contribution agreements give the breakdown of the funding dollars a band receives and make up the operating budget for many bands.

Meanwhile, this week on Millbrook Reserve in rural Nova Scotia, the revolution that is reshaping native affairs in Canada took another step forward, quietly and without many noticing.

Two Mi’kmaq leaders of the Idle No More movement ended a 10-day hunger strike. No one in the world of big-time journalism was much interested. Fish broth fatigue.

Since March 1, Shelley Young and Gene Sock had been fasting in the Porcupine Lodge to protest the pace and nature of treaty negotiations with the federal and provincial governments.

Six years after Stephen Harper walked away from the Kelowna Accord, and just a few months after his vilification of Chief Theresa Spence, his government is on a collision course with Canada’s aboriginals.

The pair were worried that existing treaties and indigenous rights might be gutted by framework negotiations that have been dragging on since 2007. They demanded that local chiefs involve grassroots communities in the process. They gave up their water-only diet after the chiefs agreed they would put the negotiations on hold until they won the informed consent of their own people to continue.

Six years after Stephen Harper walked away from the Kelowna Accord, and just a few months after his vilification of Chief Theresa Spence, his government is on a collision course with Canada’s aboriginals. Despite his public relations victory over Chief Spence, his native policy is in tatters:

Two of the key people Harper once depended on to guide him through the issues on the table with Canada’s First Nations, Senator Patrick Brazeau and former political mentor Tom Flanagan, are in disgrace.

The high level meetings that were supposed to jump-start the new relationship are still just a gleam in a bureaucrat’s eye.

The Harper government has taken the Metis to court to argue that Ottawa is not responsible for them after a lower court ruled that it was.

The Harper government fought a case in the federal Court of Appeal to sustain the current system of child welfare underfunding on reserves.

The Harper government has been taken to court for refusing to provide documents by its own Truth and Reconciliation Commission looking into the residential school tragedy.

No wonder Ottawa won’t allow James Ananya, the UN’s special rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, to make an official visit to Canada. Mr. Harper has been ignoring Ananya’s request since February 2012.

The level of trust between aboriginals and Ottawa has never been lower. Sometime soon, the submerged iceberg of this shunned issue may take the hull out of the ship of state. The irresistible force may be the Northern Gateway pipeline project and the immovable object may be native protection of the environment.

Former prime minister Paul Martin is worried about the rapidly deteriorating relationship between the federal government and Canada’s aboriginals.

“The great tragedy of Kelowna is that the fundamental problem has only gotten worse as Harper has gone back to the old way of doing things that has been failing since the 1920s … There is great tension now because the Harper government has reversed wheels on the issue.”

Almost everyone remembers Kelowna for major, practical and just measures that were designed to lift up Canada’s aboriginal peoples to a standard of living substantially closer to the one enjoyed by non-natives, and to honour treaties.

The immediate goal was to properly fund health, education and infrastructure and let native Canadians in on the resource development taking place on their lands.

Martin supported eighteen months of negotiations and then made the investment: $10 billion over ten years and hard performance measurements after the first five. His finance minister, Ralph Goodale, had the money in the envelope when the Martin government was defeated.

But the aspect of Kelowna that bears remembering is not just putting a fair deal for Canada’s aboriginals at the top of the national to-do list — and, remarkably, doing it with the agreement of all stakeholders.

What made the Martin approach a game-changer is that First Nations, urban Indians, Metis and Inuit were asked two fundamental questions for the very first time: What are the problems and what are the solutions?

“That represented a departure from the usual approach — bureaucratic analysis and unilateral federal action,” says Martin. “Two hundred years of history has shown us that that doesn’t work.”

Not only does Martin believe that the Harper government is following an antiquated and derisive aboriginal policy, he thinks it’s doing so hypocritically. He says that the current prime minister, who sent Deloitte&Touche into Attawapiskat, is creating the false impression that there is a crisis of accountability and transparency in the First Nations world.

“First, for this federal government to be chastising native communities over accountability is enough to make your head spin,” he says. “The fact is, there are outstanding aboriginal leaders and in the vast majority of cases they are both accountable and transparent.”

Martin sees public opinion as the key stumbling block in the way of a just settlement of Canada’s aboriginal crisis. In the six lost years since Kelowna was rejected by the Conservatives, the public imagination has not rallied behind Canada’s native peoples. The former prime minister and ardent native advocate thinks that Idle No More may hold the answer at a time when it seems Ottawa does not.

“Idle No More’s brilliance is that it has used a key native concern — environmental protection of navigable water that crosses native land — to bring in a lot of non-aboriginal people to the cause,” said Martin. “Unfortunately, aboriginal issues are not central to Canadians. There is outrage for the social injustices facing that community but the average Canadian doesn’t realize how outrageously underfunded native schools are. But the environment is a subject that engages all Canadians so many have become actively involved in Idle No More.”

Whatever you hear on TV, all’s not quiet on the western front.

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.

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

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