Concluding Remarks: Personal Reflections

I would like to thank the authors for their valuable contributions to this special issue, as well as Sylvie Poirier and Clint Westman for inviting me to write these concluding remarks. The articles, taken together, offer much valuable insight on the troubled state of relations between Canada and those Indigenous Peoples, who are in the process of or have completed negotiations on what are known as land claims, both in the regions discussed here, and in Canada more generally. In fine, the contributions show that one party, Canada, uses its power to ensure that the results conform to its objectives and not those of the less powerful Indigenous parties. That is, when looked at from governments' central objectives, so-called negotiations are largely a sham. For, rhetoric notwithstanding, final agreements must always conform to their preconditions: in this, the rule is that might makes right.

In this regard, I am sorry to say that things have not changed significantly since the 1970s – an assertion I can make based on my first-hand experience working for the Dene-Métis Negotiations Secretariat in the Northwest Territories, largely as research director, for about a decade beginning in 1978 and, through that, having a direct engagement with the matters I discuss in these papers.¹

It is a realisation that leads me here to consider what it tells us about Canada – that after all that has transpired, it remains where it was 40 years ago – and then ask what it suggests about how we proceed as anthropologists engaged in the negotiation process. I will begin by enumerating the four preconditions the state imposes on Indigenous Peoples in order to reach an agreement. I will then turn to an assessment of where, based on these findings, we might go from here.

Cede and Surrender

Canada's first non-negotiable demand is that all final agreements include language in which the Indigenous party stipulates that any political (and other) rights they possess as nations by virtue of the fact that they were here before colonisation are subordinated to the rule of Canada. In exchange, agreements guarantee them specified rights, but these are never sufficiently robust to stop Canada from overriding them when governments perceive themselves to be acting in the national (and/or provincial) interest.

This demand runs counter to the position long held by virtually all Indigenous parties that the goal of negotiations is the creation of a treaty partnership whereby the parties work cooperatively for the benefit of all. Often glossed as a nation-to-nation relationship, this is a phrase now frequently mouthed but certainly not honoured by Canada's political leadership, regardless of party. Still, for the most part, Indigenous parties negotiate in the belief, as with the Regroupement Petapan discussed in the essay by Sukrän Tipi and Hélène Boivin, that their agreement will be "based on recognition of rights rather than their extinction and/or abandonment."²

However, the truth is that, to date, this has never been the case. All final agreements contain language subordinating Indigenous polities to the rule of Canada. And while the signatures on the page may indicate that such agreements were "voluntary," in point of fact, by and large, Indigenous parties do not sign up except when coerced to do so, often from fears of imminent unwanted development and/or encroachment through overlap. In fact, in my mind, the only thing that has changed in 40 years is the language the federal government requires to signal agreement to extinguish. In the 1970s, as Colin Scott points out in his essay, the phrase was "cede and surrender." Now, perhaps as a way to ameliorate the cognised impact symbolically, less stark language is used – language that entails the subordination of Indigenous authority in substantive areas of jurisdiction rather than its extinguishment.

Standing to Negotiate

The second non-negotiable demand is that the Indigenous party prove to the federal government's satisfaction that it has the standing to negotiate. To gain it, as the Tipi and Boivin eloquently demonstrate, federal (and provincial) negotiators insist Indigenous parties undertake extensive and costly studies detailing the history of...