GRIEF, RAGE & HOPE

Before any of us non-aboriginals (me included) gets too critical of the mess on many of Canada's First Nations reserves, it's worth saying that a lot of non-aboriginal communities would be just as dysfunctional if they were forced to use the same broken governance model imposed by the Indian Act.

Of the 617 reserves in Canada, at any one time one-quarter are being administered by federal bureaucrats or outside auditors. That probably means one-half should be under administration if not for federal reluctance to appear heavy handed by intervening so many places at once.

The millions of taxpayer dollars Ottawa ships to each reserve every year are supposed to be accounted for with a proper audit before the next yar's payments begin. On half or more Canada's reserves, this almost never happens. There are few, if any, consequences for non-compliance.

Take the northern Ontario Cree reserve of Attawapiskat. Canadians know from a comprehensive audit of the band's books that 81% of the band's transactions lacked adequate documentation for the auditors to determine whether they were legitimate or not. Yet Attawapiskat is not one of the reserves under outside administration. Imagine how messed up a band has to be to have Ottawa appoint a financial overseer.

While much of this chaos is due to incompetent management on reserves, it is also the result of the way Ottawa is forced to deal with bands (and vice versa). Under the Indian Act, the federal government must make its annual payments for health, education, welfare and community programs not to individual aboriginals but to chiefs and councils to disperse.

Imagine if all of our salaries in non-aboriginal communities, all of the decisions about what houses we live in and when they are repaired, who has jobs and who does not, whether our kids get their tuition for college paid or not, were controlled by our mayors and city councils. The opportunities for corruption and favouritism would be the same as on reserves.

In this top-down unaccountable world, it's miraculous that scores of band councils manage to do their jobs properly and fairly. Yet they do.

But it is not just the Indian Act - which also prohibits most private property on reserves - that stands in the way. Multiple misguided court decisions have also fed the belief among some aboriginals that treaty rights are unlimited and that their often tiny communities are really sovereign nations that have the right to demand nation-to-nation relations with Ottawa.

The 1990s Supreme Court of Chief Justice Antonio Lamer was particularly renowned for devising aboriginal rights out of thin air.

Two decisions - 1997's Delgamuukw decision and 1999's Marshall decision - were particularly detached from reality.

In Marshall, the court granted aboriginals the right to hunt and fish out of season for profit. The majority was forced after their ruling to admit they got the history of treaties in the Maritimes backwards. Contrary to the majority's assertion, First Nations knew in the 1760s that they were signing away their rights in return for British protection and trade. Yet the judges refused to overturn the right they granted.

Similarly, in the Delgamuukw decision, the Supreme Court overturned nearly four years of scholarly work done by B.C.'s highest court that showed aboriginal title in the province had been extinguished in the 19th century. Instead, our highest court ruled that in land claims, native oral history should be given the same or greater weight as academic research, government records and land titles. Essentially, if aboriginals say a parcel of land was theirs traditionally, governments and lower courts must accept it as so.

This fanciful reasoning - based primarily on liberal guilt rather than legal precedence - has merely encouraged the most radical aboriginal activists, lawyers and professors of native studies to cling to myths that make solutions to aboriginal problems next to impossible.

Undoubtedly, there is room for compromise on both sides, but until aboriginals accept that their communities are villages and towns, not nations, and accept ownership of many of their own problems, progress will be impossible.