Sec. 35 rights are not to be given to just anybody

OTTAWA—Back in the older days of the 1980s, Indigenous leaders fought with the support of the United Nations to enshrine Indigenous rights into Canada’s Constitution as Sec. 35, the source of so many all-night debates by Indigenous Peoples. Some question if the very insertion of Indigenous rights within the larger Canadian jurisprudence is not just giving away the farm as why should Canada have legal oversight over our rights? Others argue that, of course, the clause has to be here, where else could it be? Sec. 35 acknowledges Indigenous Peoples were here first, have rights that nobody can erase, and—this is where things get a bit fuzzy—what are those rights? But let’s skip right over that because courts across Canada are debating the innards of this box of rights. What is not fuzzy, and not unclear at all, is this: Indigenous rights are for Indigenous Peoples. It’s not like any Tom, Dick, or Mary can show up at 10 Wellington in Gatineau to visit Indian Affairs and pick up some rights. It’s not like signing in and grabbing a badge. For the first 150 years of Canada, nobody white would ever want to be Indigenous. Short life expectancy, racism, kept on reserves with threat of jail, services sometimes withheld by irate Indian agents as a means of control, nobody wanted to be us. Parents didn’t want their kids to marry Indigenous Peoples: CBC found in 2015 that 37 per cent of settler Canadians would be uncomfortable if their children were dating an Indigenous person. There’s a famous white American anti-racism speaker Jane Elliott, who stood on a stage years ago. She asked, “I want every white person in this room who would be happy to be treated as our society treats Black citizens, please stand." Nobody stood up because they knew how American society treats Black people. If I were to ask that question just 10 years ago, “white Canadians please stand up if you’d like to be treated like our society treats Indigenous Peoples," nobody would have stood up. Because Canadians knew how Indigenous Peoples have been treated. Some of them treated Indigenous Peoples badly, so they knew. Flash forward a few years, and if I asked this question now there may actually be a few settlers in the room who stand up. The cruel irony of this turn of events is that some of these people truly don’t understand the trauma and loss that Indigenous Peoples have endured for the last seven generations, but only the superficiality of regalia and Indigenous hunting rights. It’s hard enough to have to deal with pretendians, white people pretending to be Indigenous. After all that we’ve been through, all that trauma and pain and resistance, only to have some Karen-meme-like white person waltz in and claim it. One can almost tell a pretendian by their pushy assertiveness, their demanding ways of claiming space and identity. Somebody at 10 Wellington gave some white people who claimed to be Indigenous the badge, and now we have pretendian communities. One of these communities used to be completely white, then claimed to be Métis, but without the language or culture, and then in a miraculous kind of virgin-birth moment, decided for themselves to be Inuit, again without the language and culture. Like all it takes is to throw on an amauti and that’s it. What a farce. The way you can tell that it’s a pretendian community is that it has no historical treaties or agreements with neighbouring Indigenous communities. No Indigenous community exists today without the traditional protocols with each other, not now or ever. Rose LeMay is Tlingit from the West Coast and the CEO of the Indigenous Reconciliation Group. She writes twice a month about Indigenous inclusion and reconciliation. In Tlingit worldview, the stories are the knowledge system, sometimes told through myth and sometimes contradicting the myths told by others. But always with at least some truth. The Hill Times

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Sec. 35 rights are not to be given to just anybody

Indigenous rights are for Indigenous Peoples.

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