Children who grow up on the reserve don't see much beyond what's right in front of them. It can be a simple, tough life that doesn't extend past immediate family, the cousins, aunties, uncles and grandparents who live down the road, and school. A lot of the time, it's a one-bedroom house without power, running water or the luxuries that other Canadian families enjoy.
That's where I came from, and if you're fortunate enough to be in a loving and supportive family like I was, you don't need much else. That is, until you go to a town where the other kids live. That's when you learn what you're missing: a safe, stable and modern house. New clothes every month. Cable television.
Most families earn those things through hard work and determination, as anyone should. Eventually, some of us earn those luxuries too, but when you're on the rez, you're born to lose. And when things don't look up, you never know who's fighting for you.
I didn't know what the Assembly of First Nations was until I was 11 years old. Although no kid should be expected to be totally politically astute, I was forced to learn. My Ojibwa dad drove from Central Ontario to Oka, near Montreal, to help the Mohawks in their dispute with Canada. Communities across the country began rallying behind those Mohawks. Then all the adults on our rez started teaching me and my brothers and cousins and friends about what exactly was going down.
That's when I learned who AFN Grand Chief Georges Erasmus was, and what he was doing to fight for those people and for the rest of Aboriginal Canada. But once the dust settled there, the immediacy of life on my own rez took over. I stopped paying much attention to national aboriginal politics until later in my teens.
Life stayed the same until housing improved in our community - a couple of dozen prefabricated homes were trucked in to ease overcrowding and move families out of Third World living conditions in a First World country. If the AFN pressured the government to do that, we never knew. The people who got those homes never saw it as a gift from the government or as a result of AFN advocacy. As far as we were concerned, our chief and council made it better. The people who were right in front of us. If they unjustly took the credit, we were none the wiser.
That's what the AFN has to wrestle with this week, when chiefs from 633 first nations across Canada choose a new grand chief. It has to strike the hearts and minds of the young people who are going to eventually take over this country. Right now, when you get to the core of most remote communities that are wallowing in desolation and self-destruction, the AFN is irrelevant. You can lobby politicians all you want. You might earn small victories with increases in funding and maybe new infrastructure like better water or housing, but as long as aboriginal people are unhealthier and dying younger than other Canadians, advocacy is just another word we've never heard of on the rez.
The AFN has long toed a fine line. There have been radical leaders, and there have been moderate ones. Both types have achieved varying degrees of success in advocacy. But at the end of the day, the AFN is accountable to the federal government, so we will never have that true sense of leadership and identity. Indian and Northern Affairs Canada funds the AFN, so our national chief's reach is as long as the leash the government gives it.
That's not to say there haven't been great leaps in understanding and tolerance of our people in contemporary Canada, and Mr. Erasmus and his successors have all had a major hand in that. The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples was a byproduct of the Oka crisis and Ovide Mercredi's persistence thereafter. Matthew Coon Come blurred borders to make land rights a real issue. And Phil Fontaine has built a bridge between aboriginal and non-aboriginal Canadians that's still getting stronger today.
But many people on reserves don't even know these men, or what the AFN does, and that's because their lives aren't really changing. The AFN will never matter to them as long as their aunties are losing limbs to diabetes, their children are getting sick from bad water and their siblings are killing themselves out of despair. People have rarely seen how leadership at a national level has trickled down to the grassroots.
The ultimate solution is to give the million or so registered first nations people in Canada an actual vote in a national grand chief's election, although that likely won't happen for a while. For now, those 633 chiefs really need to ask their people to look beyond their communities, and value their input in forging this country's future.
Canada is about to become a whole lot different in the next couple of generations - the aboriginal population is growing faster than any other group of people. The seeds are in the ground; now it just needs to rain.
Waubgeshig Rice is a broadcast journalist and writer who lives in Winnipeg.
