A Review of Dr. Wanda Wuttunee’s Still Ruffling Feathers – Let Us Put our Minds Together, University of Manitoba Press, 2025
————————-
Introduction
In 1969, by way of a White Paper, Canada proposed that the Indian Act be abolished, reserves phased out, and Aboriginals brought into a state of legal equality with other Canadians.
It wasn’t just the Canadian people through their government that was proposing this.
One prominent, brave Aboriginal also thought this, and in 1971 he wrote a book, Ruffled Feathers, cogently arguing that this should happen.
The late William Wuttunee, (died 2015), was born in 1928 into a family of thirteen on the Red Pheasant Reserve near Battleford, Saskatchewan. He was the son of James Wuttunee, a Cree chief, who sent him to a residential school for two years. He was the former chief of the National Indian Council of Canada, (a predecessor of the Assembly of First Nations).
He was the first Aboriginal to practice law in Western Canada. As a sole practitioner he caused the case of one of his clients to go the Supreme Court of Canada – the famous Klippert gay rights case . This was a tremendous achievement for a sole practitioner.
William Wuttunee supported the White Paperbecause, like Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, he supported racial integration in all aspects.
He believed a better life was to be had for Aboriginals without the crutches of the Indian Act and Indian reserves. He believed that Aboriginals were better off working and living in cities alongside the rest of the racial and ethnic mosaic that makes up modern day Canada, living in a state of legal equality with their fellow citizens.
He fought against what has now become the unchallengeable Aboriginal orthodoxy: the idea that there should be an Aboriginal “separate but equal “and “nation to nation” relationship with the nation of Canada, with, as the Assembly of First Nations now states, a focus on race-based “self-determination, lands, resources, culture and identity.” (“the Aboriginal orthodoxy”)
William Wuttunee correctly saw the Aboriginal orthodoxy as segregationist and separatist in nature and thus as inherently harmful to Aboriginals. He also correctly saw it as illiberal, as rights and political programs based on race always are.
Ruffled Feathers, now out of print, was vilified by Aboriginal elites in William Wuttunee’s day, and since then has been deliberately ignored by successive generations of Aboriginal elites and their non-Aboriginal allies and enablers.
In the context of today’s environment of shuttered free speech on Aboriginal matters and mandatory adherence to the Aboriginal orthodoxy, it can only be viewed as an amazing book- a brave book by a clear-seeing, clear-thinking, plain-speaking man- a man who never thought of himself as a residential school “Survivor”- a man who saw himself civically as a free-standing individual Canadian -a Canadian whose course of life should be neither defined by nor determined by his “race”.
It’s grimly understandable that the then, (1971), new, emerging Aboriginal elites, being enriched by unprecedented new and larger transfers of what Mr. Wuttunee called the “big business” of getting and spending the “white man’s money”, because of his harshly critical views of these elites and their “autocratic organizations”, their “nepotism and favoritism” and their “little red dictators”, that they banned him from reserves, stood silent in the face of death threats against him, and generally, shut him down and marginalized him.
He was a genuine, dishonored Aboriginal prophet – a disrespected “Elder”.
The 1969 White Paper proposals were too quickly dropped, a victim of the culturally-ascendant phenomenon of identity politics, where practitioners of it seem to care more about the special group they identify with than their country as a whole- a victim of the negative, self-centered excesses of our increasingly illiterate and self- entitled age- a childish age devoid of any real sense of history or historical continuity, in which Canada’s honourable founders and builders have been so shabbily treated that in effect our past has been basically cancelled.
This article by the writer and the following quotes from Ruffled Feathers reveal the Nelson Mandela-like nature of William Wuttunee’s realism and liberal, universalist humanism:
“The new breed of native cannot look at the past as a form of defeat, but only as a necessary period of transition. These people must look at today’s events and the past from a viewpoint that will keep them moving ever-forward into the mainstream of society. Indians had great leaders in the past, and there is no reason why they cannot continue to have great leaders in the future. If they continue only to cry about broken promises and broken treaties, they can never attain much for their people.”
“The desire (of natives) for an improvement in the standard of living must carry with it the equal desire to make a contribution to society by way of taxation. Indians cannot expect to participate in the dominant society without the resulting obligations of hard work and taxation. Indians can no longer blame the white man for their own failures. At one time they had valid arguments against Canadians for having left them to rot on reserves, but those times have disappeared.”
“The Indian will never regain this country from the white man. They can, however, effectively participate with the white man in its full development. Indians can work with the white men in partnership to develop a country which will provide for each of our children a legacy of great value. It is not necessary to separate from the white man, either physically or spiritually. The long period of separation of the two races has now ended.”
“Let us then unite in spirit, so that we can look forward to a peaceful old age in which we can see our children participating in the creation of a new society. Many Indians have already taken the new road ahead, to live in the land of the white man. They have paved the way for their brothers and sisters, on which they must learn to walk without fear. “(all italics added)
For expressing these ideas and aspirations for his people – essentially those of New Testament Christianity and Nelson Mandela’s idea of racial equality under the law – as stated, he was proscribed and shunned.
Tragically for Canada’s Aboriginal peoples, his ideas continue to be effectively shunned today, even by his own daughter, “Wakchan” Wanda Wuttuee, (“Wanda”) in her new book, Still Ruffling Feathers – Let Us Put Our Minds Together, a collection of essays, one of which was written by her, and the rest by other Aboriginal academics and one band chief, all purporting to “fearlessly engage” with Mr. Wuttunee’s ideas in the context of the present times.
(Wanda properly calls her father “Bill’” in the book, and, for easier reading, I will appropriate this liberty going forward.)
Wanda
Rather than “fearlessly engage” with her father’s ideas, in Still Ruffling Feathers Wanda effectively slights them because, while she fairly sets them out in her book, as evidenced by the above passages from Ruffled Feathers that she quotes, neither she, as editor of and contributor to her book, nor all but one of the other contributors, truly engage with Bill’s ideas at all.
Wanda clearly loved and admired her father, but she clearly disagrees with his core idea of Aboriginal racial equality under the law. Her whole career as an Aboriginal academic specializing in state-supported Aboriginal capitalism is a testament to her embrace of the separatist, “separate but equal” Aboriginal orthodoxy.
It’s the same with the other contributors, not one of whom, except for contributor Robert Falcon Ouellette, even tried to “fearlessly engage” with Bill’s fundamental idea of racial equality under the law.
Instead of offering the “diversity of opinions” and “lively debate” promised by Wanda, they sidestep his desegregationist, universalist ideas and double down on their Aboriginal orthodoxy instead.
The overall impression left on the reader is that, in Still Ruffling Feathers, because of this intentional avoidance of true engagement with Bill’s ideas, with the exception of Mr. Ouellette, Bill himself was personally and intellectually slighted, condescended to and treated overall as interesting and admirable-in-many-ways, but now justly regarded as an irrelevant relic of a less enlightened Aboriginal past.
To be fair, Wanda is an exception to this general slighting in the one sense that, as stated, she treats him warmly and respectfully. She set out his ideas fully and fairly in the Introduction and in her chapter, Reflections on a Legacy.
The problem is that she never says what she thinks about his ideas. She doesn’t engage with them. She just describes them and timidly lets them lie inertly on the pages, like she’s afraid to take a clear position on them.
As evidenced by her career path and by her choice of contributing writers, it’s safe to say that she disagrees with her father’s ideas.
But she totally fails the reader by not clearly stating her reasons for this and clearly saying why he was wrong.
Wanda is a retired Indigenous Studies University professor. In a book about ideas, which Still Ruffling Feathers professes to be, contributors, especially ones who are University professors, have a responsibility to give cogent and coherent reasons for their ideas.
Except for Mr. Ouellette, they all fail to do so. This is the central failure on their part and on the part of the book.
In addition, there are factual questions and omissions in Wanda’s contributions to Still Ruffling Feathers which impair the trust that a writer/editor of a book about ideas must earn from her reader to be persuasive.
Despite the book saying that Wanda is of the “Red Pheasant Cree Nation, Saskatchewan”, she indicates in the book that she grew up in Calgary and only went to the Red Pheasant reserve in the summer to visit relatives. She writes of her “Cree heritage” but really, her “heritage” is more a mixture of Cree and Calgary.
Thus, it is mildly disconcerting to read her saying that “there is no perfect solutions for where we as Indigenous Peoples fit, where we fit…”. (emphasis on “we”)
This is even more disconcerting when one learns that Bill’s first wife, who was Wanda’s mother and the mother of four of her siblings, was a white, Ukrainian- French woman.
The Aboriginal orthodoxy insists on Canadians seeing everything through a racial lens. Alright then, seeing Wanda that way, despite her possessing that little square of plastic called an Indian Status Card, she should be regarded as more urban Metis with multiple heritages.
Normally such things shouldn’t matter, but in a Canadian book by a daughter about her father’s life and how he influenced her, and how his life journey was centered on the Aboriginal -non-Aboriginal race reality that obsesses and governs Canada, it was wrong for Wanda to in effect erase one-half of her racial heritage – the white “settler” half.
Any intellectual or moral force Still Ruffling Feathers might have is greatly impaired by this material omission.
Wanda writes that Bill was “forced to attend” a residential school. This is not true. Parents had to apply in writing for their children to attend a residential school. Bill’s father enrolled him in the school. No one except the odd truant or orphan was ever “forced to attend” one. This is one of the big lies of the Aboriginal orthodoxy, which Still Ruffling Feathers irresponsibly perpetuates.
Wanda writes about the Klippert gay rights case: “Dad became the first Indigenous lawyer to appear before the Supreme Court of Canada.” To his enormous credit, Bill was instrumental in the Klippert case being appealed to the Supreme Court, and he’s a hero for this, but he did not argue the case in Ottawa. It was argued by Mr. Brian Crane, who also wrote and filed the written argument in advance. His sole name appears as counsel in the written decision. As of this writing Mr. Crane was and (amazingly) still is with the Ottawa Gowlings law firm.
“Makookins Xakiji” (Chief) Lee Crowchild
Lee Crowchild, of the Tsuut’ina reserve near Calgary, contributes a chapter to the book. He is said to be “a lifelong learner of the Tsuut’ina’ cultural worldview”. No details of this worldview are provided in the book, but based on the content of his chapter, it clearly involves complaining from his present perch of wealth and power about events that happened long ago and making a lot of money through capitalist ventures.
Chief Crowchild acknowledges that Bill had a “great mind” and that his words “contained stinging truths that still apply to today’s “First Nations” discourse.” He acknowledges that Bill’s “sweeping vision for a First Nations future is still relevant today.” He acknowledges that education was and is the way to address the reserve “ugliness” of poverty and alcohol that “remains so today”. He acknowledges that the 1969 White Paper “made sense” to “White Canada”, as it made sense to Bill.
Then, for most of the rest of his chapter, he fails to take these admissions to their logical conclusion- which is to change the system as Bill urged.
His chapter is filled with Aboriginal orthodoxy victimhood talk – the very kind of thinking and talking that Bill Wuttunee said would doom Aboriginals to continued social failure.
Clearly, Chief Crowchild, who agrees with Bill’s facts, disagrees with Bill’s solution of abolishing reserves and the Indian Act, and even more clearly, he lacks the will and possibly the ability to articulate why Bill’s solution was wrong.
He asserts that “the emergence of Red Power (was) a breath of fresh air that promoted the idea of Indians being much more than trinkets to Canada”. “Trinkets”? How false, irresponsible and insulting to generations of non-Aboriginal Canadians. No one ever thought that or anything like it.
He shallowly blames “colonization”, “residential schools”, the “Sixties Scoop” and “sexual and drug abuse” for Aboriginal social failure – for what he called the social “ugliness” on reserves- abjuring Bill’s statement that “Indians can no longer blame the white man for their own failures”.
The wrongly named “Sixties Scoop”, where seriously at-risk children were removed from their homes by Children’s Aid agencies due to dangerous domestic dysfunction, and, as related by retired Manitoba Judge Brian Giesbrecht, sexual and alcohol abuse generally, are both a result of the reserve system and Aboriginal social failure on reserves, not a cause of it.
The tragedy here is that Aboriginal elites like Chief Crowchild, Wanda and most of the other writers in Still Ruffling Feathers want to keep the reserve system in one form or another. They cling to this social “ugliness” blanket that is hurting, degrading and dragging down their people.
Chief Crowchild utters the usual uninformed, Aboriginal orthodoxy misrepresentations of the “Doctrine of Discovery” and, seemingly ignorant of the constant, bloody warfare amongst Indian tribes throughout history, blames Europeans and Canadians for teaching Indians racial prejudice.
He allocates two pages of his essay to extol the huge commercial and real estate developments taking place on his reserve – including a gambling casino and a Costco. He fails to mention that Aboriginals pay no income tax on the millions of dollars of reserve-based income derived from these sophisticated, capitalistic, colonization-enabled ventures, contrary to Bill’s belief that to responsibly participate in modern Canada Aboriginals should pay taxes.
The existence of these ventures proves, in addition to the fact that Aboriginals, by paying no income tax on reserve-based income, are getting a free ride on the backs of non-Aboriginal taxpayers, how integrated Aboriginals are in Canada and how assimilated their elites are – how, as Bill said, authentic pre-contact Aboriginal culture is “just about dead” on the reserves, and how, in this latter regard, talk of a unique “Aboriginal culture” in the midst of all this colonialism-based, capitalist getting and spending, is just so much empty performative and promotional talk.
Like Wanda, he cops out on engaging Bill’s core idea of racial equality under the law.
He writes that Bill’s idea of abolishing the Indian Act would require a national debate, and says, “I do not believe either side, Native or non-Native, is ready to do that”.
This is another copout.
In fact, “non-Native” Canada would love to have such a debate, but Aboriginal elites, including all but one of the self-interested Aboriginal orthodoxy – clinging writers in Still Ruffling Feathers, refuse to allow such a debate to happen.
Demonstrating their intellectual insecurity and their fear of losing the good deal Aboriginal elites now have with the rest of Canada, they brand anyone who wants to start such a discussion or debate as a morally offensive, racist enemy, and, as they did to Bill Wuttunee, and as they did to former Senator Lynn Beyak, (who had the temerity to say that some good came from residential schools), and as they now doing to Dr. Frances Widdowson, who is accused of “denialism” for merely asking for proof that there were 215 children murdered at the Kamloops residential school, they attack and, as Bill said, “muzzle” and throw “verbal tomahawks” at that person.
As Bill wrote, which is still the case today, “Present-day Indian leaders acutely dislike anyone who will stand up to them.”
If Chief Crowchild was serious about debating, why didn’t he himself start one by seriously engaging in his chapterwith Bill’s ideas? Why doesn’t he tell us why and how Bill was wrong?
He writes that both the “Red Power” movement started in the 1970’s in opposition to Bill’s ideas and the 1969 White Paper started a “cultural renaissance”.
No, it didn’t.
This is but one example of many showing that the social “ugliness” Chief Crowchild acknowledged, and the social “rot” Bill described as existing on reserves, are uglier and rottener than ever.
But “Red Power” did give birth to the good deal referred to above: a reserve and race-based form of tax-free, state-subsidized Aboriginal capitalism, a multi-billion-dollar Aboriginal reparations industry, and “Indigenous Studies” faculties in our universities. These are all key manifestations of the Aboriginal orthodoxy that keep ordinary Aboriginals down while personally benefiting Aboriginal elites – including all the contributors to Still Ruffling Feathers.
Today’s Aboriginal elites are so personally benefited by this new Red Power status quo that their self-interest has rendered them incapable of acting in the true best interests of their people by adopting Bill’s desegregationist, universalist ideas which, instead of the Aboriginal orthodoxy keeping them down, would raise them up.
Dr. “Thohahoken” Michael Doxtator
Dr. Doxtator is a Mohawk Associate Professor and head of “Saagajiwe Indigenous Studios at the Creative School” at Toronto Metropolitan University.
His chapter, William Wuttunee- Ruffling Feathers in “Indian” Time and Space, illustrates the total integration of Aboriginal academics into modern Western culture, who exhibit a purely Western worldview and exist only as products of Western “colonial” institutions and culture. “Indigenous Studies”, with its socially useless and unrealistic academic output, its highly politicized and ideological bent, and its low scholarship standards, is an offshoot of this.
The study of authentic Aboriginal culture would normally be within the ambit of Anthropology. Indigenous Studies has nothing to do with that.
Instead, Indigenous Studies departments focus on the post-contact events and circumstances relating to the interaction between Euro-Canadians and Aboriginal peoples up to the present, emphasizing the political, economic and legal aspects of this post-contact interaction.
As Bill wrote, these post-contact events and circumstances caused authentic Aboriginal culture to eventually disappear, with only its performative aspects remaining.
Bill called these remaining aspects merely “touristy”, evidencing only an artificial “buckskin and feather culture” involving “endlessly hopping around near a bunch of teepees”. (Ouch! It’s no wonder they saw him as a threat.)
(The Aboriginal nicknames in the book attributed to the contributors to Ruffling Feathers Again, used mainly to better promote the Aboriginal orthodoxy, are modern additions, amongst many, to these performative and promotional remains of authentic Aboriginal culture that Bill saw and described.)
Contrary to Bill’s view of his people as individuals who were incidentally Aboriginal, Indigenous Studies departments want Aboriginals seen and treated as anonymous, almost abstract, discriminated-against and justly aggrieved members of a homogenous racial group – as Aboriginal orthodoxy academic cannon fodder – with their individuality downplayed as much as possible.
As Bill wrote: “Aboriginal leaders have no regard for the civil rights of an ordinary individual”.
This remains the case today, as evidenced by Aboriginal elites, including Aboriginal academics, having successfully convinced the Supreme Court of Canada that Aboriginal reserves, Aboriginal title areas and other such “self-governing” Aboriginal “nations” and territories should be and are now exempt from the mandatory application of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
There are no scholarly “studies”, (the word itself denoting a purely Western-civilization concept), in the usual neutral, scholarly, dispassionate, traditional sense, emanating from Indigenous Studies departments.
Rather, the post-contact events and circumstances referred to above are willfully viewed through a pre-existing, pre-biased, so-called “Indigenous lens”, and what is “studied” is then invariably judged as one nefarious form of colonialist wrongdoing or another, always requiring remediation and Canadian taxpayer-provided compensation.
Indigenous Studies departments- the Ministry of Information for what Bill called “the Indian Industry”- ensure that the categories of alleged colonial wrongdoing are never closed, so that new demands for remediation and compensation are always available and justified.
In the view of Aboriginal academics, (and Aboriginal chiefs), Euro-Canadians can never be forgiven for their supposed wrongdoings and those of their ancestors.
Despite apologies given and billions paid, Canadians are not to be released from their bondage of guilt. The eternal stain of settler colonialism can never be erased.
Indigenous Studies departments, whose talented members devote their considerable powers of reason to these utterly unreasonable ideas and illiberal ends, exist now to ensure that this situation of harmful – even unpatriotic- ideological warfare against their own country – the country that supplies them their daily bread– never stops.
They seem to believe that the successful promotion of the Aboriginal orthodoxy- and the preservation of their privileged and well-off positions- is best achieved this nation-hurting way: which Bill described as engaging in “the rat race of condemning Canadian society”.
Indigenous Studies academics are fully integrated Canadians, who all receive a generous share of all that our modern, materialistic society has to offer, but they act to prevent the same for their people, the latter of whom are left in a racially segregated state of poverty, despair and civic childhood.
Even their victimhood narratives and ideological aims – “social justice” and “progress” for Aboriginals – are entirely Western in origin and content, being rooted in 19th century Protestant evangelism, which in the 20th century transformed into its numerous secular iterations, of which the “Red Power” Aboriginal orthodoxy is one.
By contrast in this regard, pre-contact Aboriginal culture was static, and had no concept of material progress or “social justice”.
Aboriginal academics keep no proper distance between them and their subject matter, so they become consumed by it and disappear into it, thus becoming part of the problem themselves.
They are hostile to dissenters like Bill and, as evidenced by Still Ruffling Feathers, give them no real regard.
For instance, Dr. Michael Doxtator slights Bill as being only “a product of his time and space”, (“space”?), as if his New Testament/Western Enlightenment, universalist ideas have no relevance to today.
In authentic Aboriginal culture the manner of speaking was simple, clear and brief, which Bill’s prose reflected.
In contrast, Mohawk (“of the Turtle Clan”) Dr. Doxtator’s writing style is pseudo-theoretical, long-winded and post-modernist – a manifestation of Western academia in decline.
For example, he muses condescendingly about:
“…whether the social-psychology lens of symbolic interactionism and critical discourse” could be useful in “psychoanalyzing Wuttunee”.
He wonders if:
“…discourse word-count analysis, birth order, interpersonal relations, and intergenerational transmission of trauma could elicit evidence to understand Wuttunee’s thinking.”
Seeming to resolve his inner conflicts in this regard, he seems to conclude that his review of Bill as a man and Ruffled Feathers as a book will focus on “the liberal deliberative discourse that seems inherent to Wuttunee’s world” – an “exegesis of liberal canon” which, related to Bill, purportedly describes:
“Wuttunee’s world, in which the existence of “Indian Reserves” situated liberal doctrines of justice like fairness, toleration and individual liberty as the final solution for subjugation and valorization of socialization….The liberal doctrine harmonizes uneasily with psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg’s bell-jar socialization of “Indians” within the dominant Canadian political hegemony…Wuttunee’s central thesis navigates within the “Indian” reality of subjugation that leads to a quality life as socialized Canadians… Thus, the subtext for Ruffled Feathers is dialogical engagement between the colonial thesis and decolonial antithesis -a dialectical engagement that centers the content of liberalism.”
This is obscure, brain-hurting, academese brought to a state of high Western artifice.
He seems to be trying to say in the above-quoted passage that Bill believed that the lives of Aboriginals would be improved if they got off the reserves and integrated – legally and socially – with the rest of Canadians, but that he, Dr. Doxtator, between his jargon-laden lines, is saying that this would be a form of “white privilege, hegemonic liberal racism” that would somehow constitute “subjugation” of Aboriginals.
Dr. Doxtator misrepresents Bill.
Bill believed that integration of Aboriginals into the greater Canadian society would liberate them from their reserve-based, culturally degraded state, and give rise to the manifestation of the best and brightest of pre-reserve Aboriginal culture, which culture Bill extolled, and would give rise to circumstances where Aboriginals could be the best individuals and citizens they could be, all the while proudly retaining their core Aboriginality.
Instead of writing the post-modern academese that permeates his chapter, one wonders why Dr. Doxtator doesn’t “analyze” Bill’s ideas, which arestated in plain and simple words in Ruffled Feathers, instead of, faintly echoing Stalin’s method of dealing with Soviet dissidents, treating him like a mentally questionable person who needs “analysis”.
The sly cheap shot against Bill to the effect that Ruffled Feathers advocated the “final solution for subjugation” of Aboriginal peoples, is especially appalling.
Bill believed that shedding reserves and the Indian act would liberate Indians from their already existing “subjugation” -what Chief Crowchild referred to as their “ugly” social conditions. This is Bill’s core concept that Dr. Doxtator is either totally missing or is unable or afraid to truly engage with.
Reference to the Holocaust as having anything to do with Canadian history or social policies, even if only artfully implied by innuendo, is usually the last refuge of intellectual scoundrels.
It’s a wonder that a daughter could let an article so disrespectful to her father into her book.
David Newhouse
Professor Newhouse is an Onondaga from the Six Nations of the Grand River. He is a professor of Indigenous Studies at Trent University.
The Onondaga, like Dr. Doxtator’s Mohawks, did not live on the land that is now Canada at the time of European contact. The Mohawks lived near present day Albany New York, and the other nations of the Six Nations lived further west in New York State and Pennsylvania. They were invited to settle in Quebec and Ontario by colonial authorities, mostly after the American Revolutionary War.
Both their settler history and status are much like that of Mizrahi Jews, who migrated, fled or were expelled from Muslim-majority countries throughout Africa and Asia, primarily as a consequence of the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948.
Thus, like most of the people who later immigrated to Canada, they were “settlers” in Canada.
Dr. Doxtator and Professor Newhouse are descendants of settlers, so again, given the tendency of Aboriginal elites to prioritize rights in favor of Canadians whose ancestors were “here first”, the rights of Drs. Newhouse and Doxtator should rank behind the rights of the descendants of British and French settlers, and what they allege about “Indigenous culture” should be discounted accordingly as well.
Professor Newhouse, in merely bare assertion terms, writes:
“Our culture is now an asset rather than a liability. Self-determination and self-governance are the foundation of modern Indigenous society.”
He never defines Aboriginal “culture”. And, considering such tragic indicia of social failure as the current decreased Aboriginal life expectancy, (above), and states of emergency being declared on reserves, which are clear evidence of the increase of the social “rot” described by Bill in 1971 and of the present social “ugliness” acknowledged by Chief Crowchild, he never explains how it is an “asset”.
He never addresses the fact that it is the Canadian taxpayer through the Canadian state – “the white man’s money”- which funds Aboriginal culture, such as it is, and which funds Aboriginal, purported “self-determination and self-governance”.
He writes abstract generalities that resist rational analysis, such as:
“We can survive as Indigenous Peoples through a creative interpretation of our cultures.”
An example he gives of this is Indigenous young people having “taken the lead in creating Indigenous digital communities” through Facebook and Instagram.
This is actually an example of the complete integration – even assimilation – of young Aboriginal Canadians into modern, urban, high tech Canadian/global culture, with only the above-discussed, calculated, purpose-driven, performative aspects of once-unique Aboriginal culture remaining, those purposes being generally centered around the accumulation and retention of money, position and power by Aboriginal elites.
Culture is not an “asset” or something that is “creatively interpreted”. This is abstract academese. Culture is how people individually and communally live and imagine their lives. It’s how people live in the gritty here and now. It’s ordinary, powerless, Aboriginal reserve residents living daily in various iterations of social “rot”- in daily states of dysfunction, anomie and despair.
And, like the others, Professor Newhouse never says how and why Bill was wrong. He refuses or is unable to engage with Bill’s core Nelson Mandela idea of all Canadians of all races living in integrated fashion in a state of legal equality under the same set of laws.
Dr. Peter Kulchyski (“Bush Doctor”)
Dr. Kulchyski is a professor of Indigenous Studies. With his unexplained nickname it is unclear whether he is a person with a doctorate in some aspect of Indigenous Studies or is a medical doctor.
He too talks about “new and creative paths being formed for Indigenous cultural survival” but cites no cogent facts in support of this vague assertion.
He compliments Bill’s book for “confronting the daily poverty that Indigenous people face in a forthright way, something often ignored by those focused on culture who do not attend to how the bodies that carry culture are to live.”
This insightful observation applies to all the other writers in Still Ruffling Feathers except Robert Falcon Ouellette. Full of showy care, they attend to Aboriginal culture in an abstract, unspecified, aspirational way, mainly as a disembodied concept – an “asset” to be attained in future -while ignoring real, “rottener” and “uglier” presently- lived Aboriginal reserve and urban “mean streets” culture.
And they dismiss the only realistic way to change them- Bill’s way of ending the Indian Act and the reserve system.
He unfairly criticizes Bill for “underestimating the increasing significance Indigenous and treaty rights would have as vehicles for achieving Indigenous goals.”
No one in 1971 could have predicted the unexpected, revolutionary changes in our constitutional laws in favor of Aboriginal peoples that were and continue to be foisted on Canadians by our radical Supreme Court after the enactment of section 35 in 1982.
In this regard however Bill did name and predict the growth of the “Indian Industry”, of which chiefs and Indigenous Studies academics are a key part of.
Dr. Kulchyski criticizes Bill for proposing capitalist solutions for Aboriginal social ills. Yet he stands silent in the face of the fact that all the other contributors to Ruffling Feathers Again expressly or impliedly endorse state-subsidized capitalist solutions to these ills.
Dr. Kulchyski says he a “Marxist and an anti-capitalist”. Marxism – a perverse, cruel and inhuman-in-practice, secular iteration of the 19th century Protestant Evangelical “social justice” movement (see above)- is an ideology, and Dr. Kulchyski thus being an ideologue -an intellectual type that can never be totally realistic – must be forgiven for this.
The brilliant humanist Clive James writes wrote that “ideologues argue from a sense of history, while lacking a sense of fact”, which statement sadly applies to all the seemingly history-challenged ideologues who contributed to Ruffling Feather Again, save Mr. Ouellette.
To his credit Dr. Kulchyski admits that “the corruption Bill rails against does exist…much of the evidence that he cites is powerful and deserves attention”. But in a spectacular bit of whataboutism, he basically says that corruption is endemic to capitalism itself, so “what do you expect? Aboriginals learned from their masters.”
This feeble, flippant sidestep of the endemic reserve-mentality corruption problem that is even happening in Aboriginal academia itself, evidences Indigenous Studies departments’ complete lack of discomfort in their physical and intellectual separation from the real lives and the real needs of ordinary Aboriginal people, especially those who live on the “rot”-infused reserves and on Canada’s urban mean streets.
His conclusion that Ruffled Feathers was “a failed argument for a failed policy project” is rationally unsupported and unwarranted.
And again, like the others, he never says how and why Bill was wrong.
Dr. Robert Falcon Ouellette
Dr. Ouellette is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Ottawa. He is stated to be “the first Indigenous Knowledge Keeper (Chaplain) of the Canadian Armed Forces”
In his well-written essay, Learning to Straighten our Ruffled Feathers – an Education, he treats Bill with warmth and respect.
He says Bill was right!
Agreeing with Bill’s assertions about the negative attitude shown by Aboriginal elites towards non-Aboriginal Canadians- “the rat race of condemning Canadian society- (certainly exhibited in Still Ruffling Feathers), he writes that “there is a darkness within the modern expression of Indigenous popular culture.”
Bill wrote that this “darkness” towards non-Aboriginal Canadian society inevitably lead to greater reserve-based social problems.
Professor Ouellette agrees, writing in this regard:
(“Bill’s) prophesy has been largely borne out by the very high incarceration rates, lower levels of education, excessive involvement with children and family services, drug and alcohol abuse, and other social problems faced by Indigenous peoples. If you hate others, how can you be successful within their system and still be true to yourself?”
Professor Ouellette agrees with Bill’s hard-headed view that the “white man’s” education is the only legitimate path to Aboriginal success. He rejects the idea that an “Indian spiritual worldview” education, which would include “Indigenous Ways of Knowing” and “Knowledge Keepers “, has any pedagogical value.
He correctly says that Bill’s views have triumphed, as evidenced by the fact that Aboriginals have voted with their feet and made the move to the cities. He writes:
“Aboriginals have left behind the reserve, with its limitations, poverty, lands, and family ties, for the chance to find greater opportunities in the larger Canadian society. People moved to a better life and to build something for the future, to avoid dying in the past.” (italics added)
Bill wrote Ruffled Feathers to counter Harold Cardinal’s 1970 Red Power manifesto, The Unjust Society, which was influential in causing Trudeau Sr. to withdraw the 1969 White Paper.
Implicitly taking aim at the views of his co-contributors in Still Ruffling Feathers, Professor Ouellette writes:
” People have basically chosen Wuttunee’s vision over that of Cardinal. The issue is that the Chiefs, the administrators, and the consultants cannot recognize that defeat. The vision of Cardinal…is a romanticized siren call.” (italics added)
Add Aboriginal “academics” to the list of those who cannot recognize that defeat.
And bear in mind, in Greek myth the Sirens lured men to their doom.
Unfortunately, the admirable Professor Ouellette is unable or unwilling to take his thoughts to their logical conclusion, which would be to expressly state, like Bill did, that the Indian Act must be repealed and the reserves brought an end.
Perhaps this failure is a manifestation of a true statement he made earlier in his chapter, thinking of what happened to Bill and what he said about being “muzzled”:
“It is surprising how often those in positions of authority will shy away from debate due to fear of reprisals.”
This statement is certainly true for the rest of the writers in the disappointing Ruffling Feathers Again, all of whom, partly due to fear of reprisals and also, in my view, in fear of losing their privileged positions, shied away from truly engaging with Bill’s fundamental idea of legal equality under the law regardless of race.
The tragedy for Aboriginal peoples in this regard is that in doing so they place their own personal welfare over the best interests of Aboriginal peoples, which is always a key element in irresponsible and failed leadership.
To redeem themselves and to constructively help ordinary Aboriginal people get out of the permanent social “rot” they are stuck in, Aboriginal academics and band chiefs must climb down from their proud academic and band office towers, humbly accept that their embrace of the Aboriginal orthodoxy only means even more of such rot for Aboriginal peoples, admit defeat, and publicly embrace Bill’s desegregationist and universalist solution of ending the Indian Act and reserve system and, as Bill urged, go forward “united in spirit” with the rest of Canadians under the principle of legal equality for all regardless of race.
As Nelson Mandela said in his first Inauguration Address: “The time to build is upon us.”
Peter Best
Sudbury
November 4, 2025
