All societies need to make use of force, both to preserve internal order and to protect themselves from external enemies. A liberal society does this by creating a powerful state, but then constraining that power under a rule of law. The state’s power is based on a social contract between autonomous individuals who agree to give up their rights to do as they please in return for the state’s protection. It is legitimated both by the common acceptance of the law, and, if it is a liberal democracy, through popular elections. Liberal rights are meaningless if they cannot be enforced by a state, which, by Max Weber’s famous definition, is a legitimate monopoly of force over a defined territory…Ultimate power, in other words, continues to be the province of national states, which means that control of this power at this level remains critical.” -Francis Fukuyama – Liberalism and its Discontents (italics added)
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Our elites, led by the Trudeau government, continue to advance the idea of Canada as a deliberate, properly intended race state.
The Trudeau government’s benignly racist, state-weakening, gravely harmful UNDRIP laws and policies, (collectively “the UNDRIP Action Plan”), are largely based on the premise that Indigenous peoples in Canada, in 2024, still have distinct pre-contact cultures that justify their right to exist as separate, race-based, group entities within the Canadian nation state, living legally and civically parallel to the rest of Canadian society, and only optionally on their part being subject to the general laws of Canada.
For example, under the heading “Cultural, religious and linguistic rights”, the UNDRIP Action Plan sets out the Trudeau government’s goal of establishing a Canada where:
“-Indigenous peoples fully enjoy and exercise their distinct rights to maintain, control, develop, protect and transmit their cultural heritage, indigenous knowledge, languages, food systems, sciences and technologies, without discrimination, and
-Indigenous peoples are thriving, including through connection to culture and community, the use of their languages and the expression of their spiritual heritage.”
The UNDRIP Action Plan prescribes that these and other “distinct rights” are to be preserved, exercised and even enhanced by treating “Indigenous peoples”, in their various collective/group/tribal political manifestations, as independent, self-governing, state-like, Indigenous “nations”- de facto race-based Indigenous nation-states – existing within the nation-state of Canada.
The basic premise underlying this part of the UNDRIP Action Plan – that authentic, pre-contact Indigenous cultures still exist and have a right to be preserved and enhanced by Canada- is false and untenable.
These Indigenous de facto nation-states, as is the case now, are to be financed by and dependent upon the Canadian nation-state and the Canadian taxpayer. A status of permanent dependency on “outsiders” is an automatic disqualifier for nation or nation-state status.
The last vestiges of authentic, distinct, pre-contact Indigenous culture disappeared about 150 years ago. As Assembly of First Nations co-founder William Wuttunee wrote in 1971 in his book Ruffled Feathers:
” Real Indian culture is just about dead on the reserves.”
There can be no going back to any part of the pre-contact past of Indigenous peoples, nor would Indigenous peoples want to.
As Iroquois Sachem Ely S. Parker wryly noted:
”Do you know or can you believe that sometimes the idea obtrudes…whether it has been well that I have sought civilization with its bothersome concomitants and whether it would not be better even now…to return to the darkness and most sacred wilds (if any such can be found) of our country and there to vegetate and expire silently, happily and forgotten as do the birds of the air and the beasts of the field. The thought is a happy one but perhaps impracticable.
Russian political philosopher Alexander Herzen wrote:
“History does not turn back. All reinstatements, all restorations, have always been masquerades.”
When trade with Europeans first started in the early 1600’s Indigenous peoples started the long, irreversible process of appropriating European goods and technologies, capitalistic practices, Christianity, and Western ways and means generally, with the consequence that, by the late 19th century, with the virtual extinction of the buffalo and the beaver, their paleolithic pre-contact cultures became extinct.
All that remains of them now are what William Wuttunee, in Ruffled Feathers, described as “touristy” and “museum pieces of buckskin and feathers”- ceremonial remnants justly celebrated on special occasions and, less innocently, used by their leaders as “brand” symbolism in their endless political campaigns for more money and power.
The UNDRIP Action Plan is pure masquerade.
Indigenous peoples cannot turn back and escape from the ultra-modern, high-tech, globalist, cultural-levelling world that has systematically and universally enveloped and entrapped us all.
Yuval Noah Harari wrote in Sapiens:
“Today almost all humans share the same geopolitical system (the entire planet is divided into internationally recognized states); the same economic system (capitalist market forces shape even the remotest corners of the globe); the same legal system (human rights and international law are valid everywhere, at least theoretically); and the same scientific system (experts in Iran, Israel, Australia, and Argentina have exactly the same views about the structure of atoms or the treatment of tuberculosis…
…We still talk a lot about “authentic” cultures, but if by “authentic” we mean something that developed independently, and that consists of ancient local traditions free of external influences, then there are no authentic cultures left on earth. Over the last few centuries, all cultures were changed almost beyond recognition by a flood of global influences.”
Historian and geopolitical theorist Robert Kaplan, in his latest book The Loom of Time – Between Empire and Anarchy, From the Mediterranean to China, writes that the cultural shock caused by modernism and globalism– by the annihilation of traditional tribal/village ways of life caused by them – resulted in those affected, as an emotionally compensating reaction, to “reinvent their primordial selves in more abstract and extreme forms in order to cope with impersonal settings.”
Kaplan explains that the anonymity and the loss of pride and cultural identity on the part of tribal societies resulting from urbanization and other globalist influences and forces, leads to the psychological need for a compensating, “emotional grounding”, which manifests itself in intense, albeit entirely fictionally based, assertions of political, ethnic, religious or racial exceptionalism. It further results in strident demands based on that fiction-based exceptionalism for favored treatment by the state.
Ironically, the more modern, urban and globally integrated the former pre-contact tribal/village becomes, the greater its “primordial” tribal and racial sentiments become and the greater and more baseless become its claims to be favored by the state.
Pre-contact tribal/village cultures were completely static and fatalistic. There was no belief in “progress”, human or political rights, money, wealth and job creation through capitalism. There was no belief in the right to such material and/or intangible things as housing, education, medical care, constitutions, courts, lawyers and judges, (see the Vuntut Gwitchin discussion below), welfare, lobby groups, policing and clean water. These are all modern Western concepts, things and practices that were inconceivable to pre-contact cultures.
There was no liberal conception in pre-contact cultures of “rights” per se, of any kind. “Rights” are intangibles only capable of being created and enforced by the long-standing and sophisticated institutions of an established, legitimate, political state.
Even the concept of the state itself, or the nation-state, is a purely Western one. There was no conception in pre-contact cultures of the state or the nation-state.
The more that former pre-contact, tribal/village cultural entities demand these Western Enlightenment “things”, and the more they appropriate and emulate modern, Western practices and lifestyles to get them, then the more they demonstrate the complete disappearance of their old pre-contact cultures and the complete replacement of them by modern, Western mindsets, ideas, assumptions and actual lifestyles.
Kaplan writes:
“Cultural consciousness is enhanced rather than submerged by modernization, because of the ability of modern states and societies to offer jobs, status, and other spoils for which individuals of different ethnic, religious and sectarian identities compete. Through education, modernization also makes people more aware of their collective pasts and their differences with other peoples. Such phenomena have been the forerunners to the identity politics of the post-modern era.”
This is what has happened in Canada.
Modernity, urbanization and globalism have destroyed pre-contact Indigenous cultures and, as an ironic, counter-intuitive consequence, have led to abstract and entirely illiberal, fantasy-based claims of Indigenous cultural authenticity and “difference”.
The more obvious it is that an authentic pre-contact Indigenous cultures has vanished, the more its current Indigenous leaders claim that it is alive and thriving! It’s truly an ironic “Emperor has no clothes” phenomenon.
Unprecedented, illiberal and radical Indigenous political/legal demands are now being routinely made – demands rooted in Western capitalism, political theory and materialism– for purely race-based “inherent rights” in addition to their rights arising from Canadian law, demands for quasi- separatist, Quebec-like, political “nation-to-nation” de facto nation-state status, demands for legal veto powers overall all federal and provincial laws possibly affecting their “aboriginal rights”, demands for all sorts of legal reparations, demands for ownership stakes in resource projects as a condition to agreeing not to attempt to legally block them, and demands for co-management with the Crowns of Canada of all public lands and natural resources –all demands inconceivable to pre-contact, static, communistic and fatalistic tribal/village cultures- all demands which only people possessing a totally Western capitalist/cultural mindset could ever possess and could ever make.
The UNDRIP Action Plan makes the reserve the locus of Indigenous “self-government.”
Kaplan, referring to the endlessly squabbling religious and ethnic tribes and groups that comprise the many failed states of the Middle East and Africa, reminds us that legitimate nation-states are more than communities created by mere politics. Rather, they are natural, “practical communities…entities of geographic and historical association”.
They are not, as are tiny Canadian First Nations reserves, mere artificial, nineteenth century, politically created, impractical “functions of acts of will”.
Kaplan writes that legitimate nation-states have hierarchical, coherent governing structures and rules-based orders developed organically over centuries. They are capable of providing and maintaining law and order. They are supported by independent institutions and, as he writes, “organized bureaucratic systems interacting with each other on an impersonal, secular basis.” They have a functioning economy and a large, educated population to maintain it.
None of these basic state characteristics are present in any sufficient degree on First Nations reserves or self-governing territories.
Canadian First Nations reserves were randomly created by strokes of pens.
The legal and social isolation that characterizes them has tragically resulted in generations of Indigenous Canadians, as shown by all indicators of social well-being, becoming under-educated, civically infantile products of reserve dependency, despair, anomie and dysfunction, and complete strangers to the civic traditions of liberal democracy.
First Nations reserves, like the Arab tribes and Islamic fundamentalist groups referred to by Kaplan:
… “have imported the fruits of science without as societies ever producing them themselves… They have experienced the West only as “things” …They have possessed the techniques of Europe without intuiting the centuries-long cultural processes that had made the West what it was…”
They are “modern” only in the material sense. Because of the Indian Act and the reserve system, they remain backward, tending to illiberalism, in terms of their political culture and governing practices.
The proposed Indigenous de facto nation-states to be created by the UNDRIP Action Plan will be, in Kaplan’s phrase, just as inherently illiberal and “institutionally-flimsy” as First Nations reserves are today.
And again, Kaplan reminds us that in this type of situation:
“…where institutions are weak then personalities …who milk and misgovern…perforce dominate…”
This is certainly the case with respect to Canadian reserves, characterized by a governance system prone to family-based self-dealing. (Kaplan refers to them as “republics of cousins.”)
There’s no reason to think it will be any different under the UNDRIP Action Plan “independent, self-governing nation” model. In fact, it’s sure to get worse, because, as Kaplan says, tribalism and its illiberal effects are exacerbated when politically immature people achieve self-rule.
In Ruffled Feathers William Wuttunee referred to reserve governments as “autocratic organizations” led by “little red dictators” engaging in “nepotism and favoritism”.
It’s not because of a healthy state of participatory democracy that Chief Clarence Louis has been Chief of the Osoyoos Indian Band for 40 continuous years. It’s because of the illiberal, “strong man rule” nature of First Nations reserve governance.
Indigenous lawyer and businessman Calvin Helin, in his seminal book Dances With Dependency- Out of Poverty Through Self- Reliance, compares this illiberal First Nations reserve governance reality as being akin to “banana republics”. He referred to Chiefs and Councils as “colonizers of their own disempowered people”.
As Indigenous scholar Rob Louis said in this regard:
“What realistic chance do band members have against chief and council who control their money and resources? For many band members in Canada, the battle is not just with the Crown, it is also with their own leadership…Perhaps reconciliation within Indigenous communities needs to take place before reconciliation can happen with Canada.”
Until recently, vulnerable and powerless Indigenous Canadians had the federal and provincial governments, the court system, human rights commissions and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedom to act as their collective Leviathan -the functioning, legitimate state that Kaplan says “protects politically immature peoples from themselves and from their neighbour” – that traditionally monopolizes the use of coercive power to maintain law and order and to protect vulnerable individuals from being exploited and discriminated against.
No more.
Accepting the legal arguments of Indigenous elites, the Supreme Court of Canada, in its Vuntut Gwitchin decision, purportedly in order to preserve Indigenous “cultural difference”, ruled that in the event of an irreconcilable conflict, a First Nations Band’s “collective rights”, resting on its right to protect (mythical) “Indigenous difference”, will now prevail over an Indigenous individual’s rights as guaranteed by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Thus, the Charter can now be effectively ignored by Band Councils, and 1.8 million Indigenous Canadians are potentially deprived of guaranteed Charter of Rights and Freedoms protection on their home reserves.
The Vuntut Gwitchin situation illustrates the patent absurdity and illiberal nature of the Indigenous de facto nation-state pretensions of the UNDRIP Action Plan.
Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation (VGFN) is described by the Supreme Court in its decision as a “self-governing nation” in the Yukon comprised of about 560 “citizens”, only 260 of whom live in the “main community” of Old Crow, “the seat of government.” The other 300 odd “citizens” live away, mainly in Whitehorse, 800 kilometres from Old Crow. There is no road into Old Crow. One cannot graduate from high school in Old Crow, and there no adequate medical facilities there.
Cindy Dickson, a VGFN citizen living in Whitehorse, claimed that a VGFN law that said that a “citizen” had to reside in Old Crow in order to qualify to run for VGFN Council, violated her Charter rights not to be discriminated against based on her residency.
She brought her case in the Canadian court system.
She lost her case, but given the Supreme Court’s assertion of the existence of “Indigenous legal orders” and an anti-discrimination provision in the 1993 VGFN Constitution, and given the existence of another provision in the Constitution giving her the right to challenge a VGFN law in the VGFN court, the Court sent her away with the comforting words:
“Ms. Dickson may elect hereafter to pursue a similar claim under the VGFN Constitution.”
One slight problem: there is no VGFN court, no VGFN courthouse, no VGFN judges or lawyers, no VGFN system for the administration of justice whatsoever, through which Cindy Dickson could pursue her claim. How could there be? VGFN is a mere tribal village with a population of 250 people!
VGFN has and never could have any of the state characteristics listed above.
The Supreme Court knew this and irresponsibly pretended that it was not so, preferring empty words for Ms. Dickson over the sad, illiberal truth that while she may have rights in the abstract, because of the total absence of state institutions in Vuntut Gwitchin through which she could pursue the vindication of her rights, she had no concrete remedy.
The larger sad, illiberal truth is that her First Nation, like all First Nations now, have been recklessly made Charter-free zones by the Supreme Court of Canada.
The Vuntut Gwitchin decision, together with the UNDRIP Action Plan, the latter which turns over all aspects of First Nations reserve governance to politically immature “independent, self-governing” Indigenous elites, means that victims of corrupt or discriminatory First Nations reserve leadership practices all across Canada are now defenceless and will have no one, and no Canadian state institution -no protective Leviathan- to turn to for protection and relief.
The joint efforts of the Supreme Court and the federal government’s UNDRIP Action Plan have made individual Indigenous Canadians, in terms of having the guaranteed protection of the rule of law, effectively “stateless” on their new, de facto nation-state home reserves.
Robert Kaplan writes a great deal about the multi-ethnic, multi-racial empire: the most common form of governance in world history, where the strong hand of the emperor – the Leviathan- kept order and protected vulnerable local minorities from the depredations of local majorities.
With the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires the strong, coercive power of the sovereign in those territories was lost. Power transferred to mono-ethnic, mono-racial and mono-religious groups which had no liberal traditions and thus no regard for the rights of their minorities. The eventual result in Europe was the genocide of the Jews. The result in the Middle East has been over 100 years of anarchic tribal and religious warfare. The only legitimate nation state there is Israel.
Canada, by a benign process of migration, settlement and development, “conquered”, in an honorable and conscientious manner, the Indigenous peoples of what is now Canada.
Since Confederation Canada has been the Leviathan which protected powerless and vulnerable Indigenous Canadians from the worst, Hobbesian effects of the illiberal, strongman system of rule characteristic of First Nations reserves.
To its shame, with the UNDRIP Action Plan and the Vuntut Gwitchin decision, Canada has abandoned its beneficent, protective Leviathan role in this regard. By doing so it has betrayed the vast majority of powerless and vulnerable Indigenous Canadians and left them defenceless against injustice.
The Loom of Time echoes Frances Fukuyama’s warning that rights are meaningless unless they are created by and can be enforced by a powerful state.
The UNDRIP Action Plan can never create viable and strong Indigenous states or nation-states.
All it will do is seriously weaken the Canadian state, causing harm to all Canadians, and deprive the vast majority of vulnerable, powerless Indigenous Canadians of the protective rule of law.
Peter Best
June 12th, 2024