Canadians (32 page)

In
Reflections of a Siamese Twin,
John Ralston Saul writes that from the middle of the sixteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth Natives were held to be equal to European immigrants and that neither the French nor the English could have done without their assistance and cooperation. To him, Natives make up a “triangular reality” that is Canada.

Meech Lake not only contained nothing for Aboriginal Canadians, it increased provincial powers. And Aboriginals believed they had every reason to fear such a shift.

Between June 12 and June 21, 1990, New Democratic member Elijah Harper had said “No, Mr. Speaker” eight different times to deny the unanimity required to table the accord for ratification. On June 22, with only Manitoba and Newfoundland outstanding, there would be one final chance before the houses rose for the weekend for both provinces to come on board. Failure to do so, politicians and most of the media were saying, would mean the end of Canada. The pressure on Harper in Manitoba and on Wells in St. John's was almost unbearable.

The national media, naturally, flew off to both provincial capitals for the showdown. Manitoba was expected to go first, and if the accord fell in its legislature, whatever happened in the Newfoundland House of Assembly would be academic. If Harper buckled and Manitoba approved the accord the pressures of the entire country would fall on Wells, who was balking and insisting on hearing first from his people.

I was dispatched to Winnipeg. But so, it seemed, was everyone else. Not only was the national media taking over most of the hotel space around the legislature, the Prime Minister's Office had sent an entire team of legal arm-twisters to try to talk some sense into Harper. The shy, ponytailed Native must not be allowed to destroy the country over some minor point—Aboriginal inclusion in the Constitution—that could easily be cleared up at a later date.

Trouble was, no one could find him. Native leaders from across the country and Harper's own extended family had also descended on the capital, and they had ensconced Harper in a place where no one could reach him.

That's where Billy Diamond came in. I called Billy in Waskaganish and he put in a call to Ovide Mercredi, who was then with the Assembly of First Nations. Mercredi in turn contacted Phil Fontaine, the Manitoba leader in the AFN and a close friend of Harper's. I was lying on the carefully made bed of my hotel room, wondering what I might write about with absolutely no access to the main story, when the telephone rang.

It was Phil Fontaine.

“Meet us here,” he said, giving me directions to a downtown corner.

I was met by two Native leaders and a white lawyer. We shook hands and they walked me to a hotel several blocks away from the legislature. We got in the elevator and rose to a high floor with a huge, multi-roomed suite in one corner.

There, sitting in a chair by the window, holding an eagle feather in his hand while reading quietly from a black Bible, was Elijah Harper.

“You can stay the night,” I was told. “No one's going to get any sleep around here.”

It was a remarkable experience. The man who—some were saying— held the very future of his country in his hands was holding the feather of a bird, periodically spinning it. He sat quietly, though the large room was anything but quiet. There were leaders like Fontaine and Chief Gary Potts of the Bear Island band in northern Ontario, cousins and brothers of Harper, Crees down from Red Sucker Lake, national leaders, lawyers, friends, and the curious.

The only ones missing were the federal negotiators, who kept calling and demanding a meeting they never got, and the mainstream media, with one lucky exception.

There was room-service food and coffee. Elijah Harper, who spoke so softly it was sometimes difficult to hear him, was interested in talking about anything but the pressures and the accord, and so we talked about residential schools and hockey and his own fascinating life.

Harper, like Billy Diamond, was born on a trapline in the winter of 1949. He was the second of thirteen children Allen and Ethel Harper of Red Sucker Lake would have, so many children that Elijah was raised by his grandparents, good and quiet people who clung to the “heathen ways” of the Cree traditional teachings.

At age eight, again like Billy Diamond, he was sent off to residential school; but for him it didn't much take. He lasted eight unhappy years and then returned to Red Sucker Lake to take up what he believed would be his life calling: trapping.

Like so many who'd gone through the experience of residential school, he found he was straddling two worlds, the footing unsteady in both. Like the others, he believed, wrongly, that he was alone. It is the mark of his generation to feel that way and only later to discover that others, of similar experience, are much the same. They have a special bond.

The story of the residential schools in Canada is one of shame and of sexual and psychological abuse. Billy Diamond, who would say he had one of the better residential school experiences at Moose Factory, told me that “I lost my foundation years as a child. I was forced to develop into manhood without parental guidance. I lost everything as a Cree child for thirteen years and those years were filled with loneliness and isolation, with punishment and torture and forcible confinement.” And he, remember, was one of the lucky ones.

It is, therefore, somewhat just that these same schools would educate a generation of smart, worldly, uncowed Native leaders who would one day lead the fight for retribution. Almost all the young Aboriginals who would become pivotal to advances made in the last quarter of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first came out of this experience: Nellie Cournoyer of the Inuvialuit, Georges Erasmus of the Dene Nation, Jim Antoine of the Northwest Territories, Fontaine, Mercredi, Diamond, Harper…. The list is long, and impressive. Many, like Phil Fontaine, had a hideous, abusive experience, but all took what they could use from the books and teachers to move on to legal careers and leadership roles.

At the end of 2006 an estimated 80,000 former residential school students became eligible for compensation that averaged $24,000. The
12,000 to 20,000 who suffered more extreme abuse, both physical and sexual, could collect an additional $5,000 to $275,000. The settlements showed that one lesson learned at these schools was to fight back.

Elijah Harper had quit his horrendous residential school experience and decided to live as a trapper. But school, without his even realizing it, had opened his eyes to other possibilities, and he grew so upset with conditions back on the reserve that he decided to head back to school with a new attitude and new ambition. He would get an education, and then he would return to Red Sucker Lake and work to improve things for the small band.

He took courses and was eventually accepted by the University of Manitoba, where he linked up with another angry young Native, Ovide Mercredi. Their ever-widening circle would include the likes of Phil Fontaine and Moses Okimaw, who would also end up in Winnipeg in the third week of June 1990.

Together, this group formed a Native association and was soon engaged in battle with the university itself. The engineering students ran a satirical newspaper that in one week published nothing but photographs taken of drunken Natives in downtown Winnipeg—and the association immediately demanded an apology. The young Natives got it, but fell short when they set out to impeach the university president for allowing it to happen. Still, they were a force to be reckoned with, and would remain so for years.

One winter in the late 1960s the group ran into a blizzard driving home from the University of Brandon, where they'd gone to organize a similar organization for its Aboriginal students. Cars and trucks were in ditches. The others wanted to quit, but Mercredi and Harper refused and took turns running out in front of the headlights so that the driver could stay on the pavement. The police and stranded truckers yelled at them to give up, but they believed that if they just kept plugging away eventually the storm would lift. They ran for thirty kilometres before it did lift, but they made it when no one else had managed.

The sheer stubbornness of that bond would pay off twenty-two years later when they hit another bad patch.

Three years before they gathered in Winnipeg, the Meech Lake Accord had been passed in secret by eleven first ministers who couldn't spare a thought for Aboriginals and their standing in the Constitution. Native leaders—First Nations, Inuit, and Métis—had fought against this omission for three years without success. A parliamentary committee looking into the accord had recommended that it be opened for their inclusion. Various politicians, including all three Manitoba party leaders, had called for a change to accommodate Aboriginals, but nothing had been done.

The official contention of the Prime Minister's Office and its legal minions was that the accord held no “egregious” errors and could not, and must not, be opened under any account. The door was slammed.

The same gang that had gone up against the University of Manitoba in the 1960s was now going up against the federal government. But they were no longer kids. Mercredi was a lawyer and deputy chief of the Assembly of First Nations. Moses Okimaw was a lawyer. Phil Fontaine was the head chief of the province of Manitoba. But only Elijah had the clout to actually do anything about it.

Elijah Harper had gone home without his degree. He had worked and then become chief of his band. He'd been one of the Canadian chiefs who had travelled to London to ask the Queen to ensure that Aboriginals be treated fairly if the Constitution was repatriated, as the Trudeau government intended to do. The Queen did nothing.

In 1981 Harper became the first treaty Indian to be elected to the provincial legislature. He was elected again in 1982 and served briefly in Howard Pawley's cabinet. That same year he received a formal invitation to attend the Parliament Hill ceremony when the Queen came to Ottawa to sign the Constitution Act into law. He refused to go.

It was not an illustrious political career for Elijah Harper. He got in trouble instantly when, on election night, a man with no patience for Harper's noisy victory party tried to put his fist through the new member's nose. He got in financial trouble. He was arrested for failing to take a Breathalyzer test. His marriage faltered. His four children suffered. His party was tossed out of office, though he held his own seat.

But then, around the beginning of the Meech Lake discussions, Harper began to pull himself together. He quit drinking and started planning how he might somehow stymie this runaway train called Meech. Georges Erasmus, then also with the AFN, says that Harper had been talking about this very moment for the past two years, though no one thought it would ever prove as controversial and as dramatic.

The moment Harper saw the full details of the final Ottawa deal he called his old friend Gordon Mackintosh, now a lawyer but once clerk of the legislature. A procedural expert, Mackintosh helped refine Harper's motion to block the deal. They discovered, much to their delight, that the Gary Filmon government had incorrectly introduced the Meech Lake motion, meaning they'd have to reintroduce it until the chamber unanimously agreed to consider it or until time ran out, whichever came first.

For all those days in June that Elijah Harper kept saying “No, Mr. Speaker,” he held an eagle feather in his right hand. It became the symbol of his defiance, a feather that could appear in the backdrop of an editorial cartoon and instantly remind readers that, somewhere out in Manitoba, one lone “Indian” just might have the power to derail the whole thing.

The feather had been found by Elijah's older brother Saul, a trapper who quietly follows the traditional ways. Saul believed he was being told to walk out to a clearing not far from his home in Red Sucker Lake. When he got there the eagle feather was lying in the very centre of the clearing. He gave the feather to his younger brother Darryl, who took it down to Winnipeg, where he gave it to Elijah for strength to get through this difficult month.

In the middle of this pivotal final week, the Red Sucker Lake band went back to the clearing where Saul had found the feather. There they held hands and formed a circle while asking the Maker to give Elijah strength.

“Look,” Chief John Harper, a cousin, cried, pointing to the sky. High above, circling slowly in the drafts, was an eagle.

“The eagle is on Elijah's side,” Chief John Harper told the gathering. “He's going to win.”

While we were sitting in the hotel suite talking, Darryl Harper began flipping through the Bible that Elijah had been reading and opened it to the Book of Isaiah, chapter 40. He read the section quietly to himself, then aloud to everyone gathered there.

Though youths grow weary and tired,

And vigorous young men stumble badly,

Yet those who wait for the Lord will gain new strength; They will mount up with wings like eagles,

They will run and not get tired,

They will walk and not become weary.

Later that long night, when Elijah Harper finally decided to try to get a little sleep before the day of decision, he took the eagle feather, placed it over these words, then closed the Bible.

The following day, at 12:24 p.m. Manitoba time, the feather was once again in his right hand as the motion was made and Elijah Harper killed the Meech Lake Accord with a single word.

“No.”

LESS THAN THREE WEEKS LATER, on June 11, 1990, more than a hundred Sûreté du Québec officers, armed with assault rifles, concussion grenades, and tear gas, took up positions around a Native blockade near Oka, Quebec, a village until then known for the excellent local cheeses sold by the Oblate brothers' religious order.

The blockade—mostly downed trees and bulldozed dirt—had stood since March without incident. It had been set up by the Mohawks of Kanesatake, a reserve bordering the picturesque tourist village just to the west of the city of Montreal. The Mohawks were against the expansion of the local golf course, which they said was going to turn Native sacred burial ground into tees and greens and cart paths.