Violence, suicides and social ills: Welcome to our native reserves

CALGARY, TORONTO -- The gangs have names such as Indian Posse and Redd Alert.

Their members tap recruits as young as 10 to peddle crack cocaine.
Beatings and drive-by shootings have become their calling cards as
RCMP from the Hobbema detachment issue almost daily news releases
about violence at a cluster of reserves south of Edmonton.

"We think it was always simmering there somewhat because we would get
complaints, but it never boiled over," RCMP Constable Darrel Bruno said.

"Then, all of a sudden, people got more and more aggressive toward
each other with regard to these gangs."

Hobbema is the community at the hub of four native reserves --
Samson, Montana, Ermineskin and Louis Bull -- where a staggering list
of social ills plagues the 12,000 people who live on them.

The unemployment rate is more than 80 per cent. Drug and alcohol
abuse is rampant. The suicide rate is high. Child-welfare caseloads
have swelled 59 per cent between 2000 and 2004.

The RCMP caseload jumped 68 per cent. Constable Bruno, a 22-year
veteran of the force, said young people in Hobbema are influenced by
peer pressure and end up in gangs in place of the family. He came to
Hobbema 7 1/2 years ago, but he spent his childhood on the Samson reserve.

"Back then," he said of his youth, "I remember it being relatively
quiet. I remember the elders had a lot of respect. When they spoke,
you listened. That's gone by the wayside now."

This is the bumpy road that Canada's natives are travelling. There is
another road that wasn't taken that offered a vastly different
future. It still has a certain allure for Canadians who observe the
dismal conditions in native communities and wonder whether radical
change isn't needed.

In 1969, the newly elected government of Pierre Trudeau proposed such
a radical break in a slim policy statement that proposed undoing the
link between the Crown and Canada's native peoples that had existed
for more than 200 years. Ottawa wanted to end the separate status of
natives, abolish treaties and allow the sale of reserves.

Under the policy in this unofficial white paper, natives would have
become full citizens of Canada without federal government guarantees
to protect their lands or identity or to sustain their standard of
living. The federal Department of Indian Affairs would be dismantled
within five years and, after that, the provinces would be expected to
treat natives as non-natives.

One prominent leader called the policy "cultural genocide" but Jean
Chretien, who was then the minister of Indian Affairs, defended it.
"Canada cannot seek the just society and keep discriminatory
legislation on its books," he said.

Native leaders were surprised and angered by the proposals because
they didn't reflect the previous year's consultations. (In fact, an
original document advocating the sort of native involvement on
display today at a first ministers meeting in Kelowna, B.C., was
heavily rewritten by a senior policy adviser in the Prime Minister's
Office.) Mr. Chretien fought for the white paper despite the evidence
that native leaders hated it. In July, 1969, he met 30 leaders of the
Union of Ontario Indians in Toronto and listened to their complaints
about his department.

As he left the two-hour meeting, he exploded.

"They don't like the department and I proposed to phase out the
department and then they want to keep it," he said.

A few days later, he pleaded his case for a radical break from the
past in an article in The Globe and Mail. "Many will criticize but
few will defend the present system," the future prime minister said.
"The persistent control of other peoples' lives is ruinous to them
and futile for government."

Assimilation wasn't a new idea.

Indeed, people around Hobbema say that the government's desire for
"equality" is to blame for many of the problems they are facing.

They point to the legacy of residential schools, set up by the
federal government in partnership with religious organizations, which
were designed to assimilate aboriginal children into "white" society.

About 100,000 children attended these schools over the past century
or so -- about 100 schools were operating at any one time.

Among them were the parents of the troublemakers around Hobbema who
were yanked from their homes and in many cases suffered physical,
mental and even sexual abuse, before most residential schools were
closed in the mid-1970s.

That system stole an important component of family values --
parenting, according to the elders.

"A lot of people that did come back lost that sense of belonging,
sense of identity, loss of culture, language," Constable Bruno said.
"A lot of them feel that is part of the problems we're dealing with
now. Then, when people understand that, they have a better
understanding of what we're dealing with here."

Yesterday, the federal government offered $2-billion in reparations
to former students and their children. At the same time, Hobbema's
32-member detachment learned that it would get nine more officers.

Last year, the detachment handled an average of 292 cases an officer.
That compared with an Alberta average of 116 cases an officer and the
national caseload of 66 cases an officer. Last year, the Hobbema RCMP
received 899 complaints of assault, up from 490 in 2000. Last year it
handled 105 drug charges, up from 36 in 2000.

About half of the band members who live around Hobbema are under 18
and the vast majority are under 30, with a lot of time on their hands.

But Hobbema needs more than more cash and cops to cure what ails it,
according to Mel Buffalo, a member of Samson Cree Nation.

Hobbema sits atop oil deposits that bring in millions of dollars.
Trust funds have been set up for the young people on the reserves. At
one time, when a person turned 18, they received a windfall of
$100,000, but revenues have fallen and so have the amounts paid out.

"Now it's $30,000 or $40,000," Mr. Buffalo said. "I've heard people
spend that in three or four days."

Hobbema doesn't need handouts that the government keeps pouring in,
Mr. Buffalo said, shaking his head at the flurry of pre-election
announcements of more funding for aboriginals.

Hobbema, he said, has a huge potential labour force for the province
and the country facing a skills shortage.

"[The government] needs to work with us side by side, hand in hand,
to create economic opportunities that would be long term, that will
be sustainable. I don't see that happening. I don't see people
working toward that kind of stuff," he said.

"You'd think with all the money there wouldn't be a problem," added
Mr. Buffalo, who is also president of the Indian Association of
Alberta. "But it just goes to show you that money doesn't solve the problem."

Harold Cardinal was just 24, and the youngest-ever president of the
Indian Association of Alberta, when the Chretien white paper was
issued. Initially, he was delighted at the prospect of the demise of
the much-hated Indian Affairs bureaucracy but he also accused Ottawa
of trying to "exterminate" aboriginals by abdicating treaties.

"This is the one thing that Canadians will have to accept and
recognize that we are full citizens but we also possess special
rights," he said. By the end of the year, he had published The Unjust
Society, a white-hot criticism of what he saw as a policy of
assimilation. He summed up the government's approach: "The only good
Indian is a non-Indian."

The bestselling book introduced non-native Canadians to life behind
what Mr. Cardinal called "the buckskin curtain." Equally important,
however, the battle cry against the white paper marked the beginning
of a new generation of sophisticated native leadership.

"It was a watershed moment for the aboriginal community," Phil
Fontaine, national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, said in an
interview. "That was a real catalyst."

A few years after the white paper appeared, the political and legal
landscape of aboriginal affairs had changed beyond recognition. Court
decisions established the "aboriginal rights" that Ottawa had sought
to deny, meetings between cabinet ministers and aboriginal leaders
became commonplace and by 1982, aboriginal and treaty rights were
enshrined in the Charter of Rights.

The white paper is little more than an historical artifact now with
its prescriptions thoroughly outmoded. But some of the assertions
from 36 years ago retain their power.

"The separate legal status of Indians and the policies which have
flowed from it have kept the Indian people apart from and behind
other Canadians," the document said. "Many Indians, both in isolated
communities and in cities, suffer from poverty."

Mr. Fontaine acknowledges the truth of these statements. There is, he
said, a desperate shortage of good housing in native communities and
more than 100 reserves live under a boil-water advisory. In addition,
suicides are much more prevalent on reserves, and incarceration rates
for aboriginals eclipse those of non-natives.

What would conditions be like if Mr. Chretien had succeeded in
pushing through his white paper? It's a bit of a parlour game and the
answers aren't straightforward. But Boyce Richardson, an Ottawa
writer and filmmaker who has chronicled native issues for decades,
said there is nothing in Canada's history to suggest that
assimilation would have worked. "The Indians are not going to go
away, they never have gone away," he said.

Natives left without treaty rights and the protection of the Indian
Act most certainly would have migrated to cities, likely with
disastrous consequences.

"It would have left a lot of people for a short period of time -- who
know whether it's 10 or 20 years? -- to make the adjustment from a
northern, rural lifestyle to an urban centre," said Murray Hamilton,
program co-ordinator at the Gabriel Dumont Centre at the University
of Saskatchewan.

"There's a very distinct possibility that some of the social-economic
situations that we're seeing now would have been accentuated."

There are signs that life is about to turn around in Hobbema.

This week, orientation sessions began with the 200 people between the
ages of 12 and 18 who signed up for the Community Cadet Corps
program. The program, which is being adopted from one successfully
launched in 1996 in Saskatchewan, teaches leadership skills and
requires community service and school attendance. Where it has been
adopted, crime rates have dropped and cadets have performed better in school.

It's the kind of program that gives Koren Lightning-Earle hope.

The 27-year-old law student left the Samson reserve last year to
study at the University of Alberta. But the trouble at Hobbema isn't
far from her mind.

"There are some programs running but we need more," she explained.
"The youth are bored, restless and are looking for something. As a
community we need to provide that something, whether its sports,
arts, cultural programs, more after-school programs, clubs, anything."

Ms. Lightning-Earle, who has friends and family members who have
killed themselves, said she had the benefit of supportive parents.
She also knew she had to finish high school in order to seize opportunities.

"I don't think I am better than anyone," she said. "I had the same
temptations that everyone has. Some days I made bad choices and some
days I made good choices, but I was fortunate that the good choices
outweighed the bad, that I ended up where I am today."

Now the people around Hobbema are insisting that it's time for
governments to make the right choices.