Appendix 3

The novelist, Hugh MacLennan, famously described the relationship between French and English Canada as "two solitudes." However, in the northern territories and the northern parts of the provinces, from Labrador west to British Columbia, Canada's two solitudes are not French and English but rather the Aboriginal and settler communities.

Many northern Aboriginal communities still depend in part on renewable-resource-based subsistence economies. Their political tradition is that of consensus decision making. They identify with the Arctic and Subarctic environment, seeing themselves as "Part of the Land, Part of The Water" (McClellan 1987). The settler population, on the other hand, has traditionally promoted industrial development. Settlers imported Euro-Canadian colonial and parliamentary practices to the North. And, after decades of neglect, settler governments now seek to "manage" the northern environment. Thomas R. Berger perfectly captured these competing northern visions in his book on the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry, "Northern Frontier, Northern Homeland" (Berger 1977). For the settler, the North is a frontier; for indigenous peoples, the North is their homeland.

Canada's preeminent Arctic environmental scientist, E. F. Roots, said: "For at least one thousand years, there have been two economies in the Arctic: an indigenous economy, small scale, attuned to local needs and responses, fluctuating with changes in natural conditions, and although with many ups and downs, providing the people within it with a culture and society that by any world standards must be considered successful; and an economy directed from the outside and designed to satisfy the needs, business demands, and political motives of non-Arctic areas. This external economy has been mostly based on the exploitation of resources considered valuable by the outsiders - ivory, whale oil, gold and other metals, petroleum - but not, in the main, resources that were seen as particularly useful to the internal economy" (Roots 1993).

When their usefulness as allies or guides ended, the northern natives became politically invisible. For Sam Steele, who ruled the Yukon Territory as policeman, magistrate and legislator during the Klondike Gold Rush, Aboriginal people hardly rated a mention in his autobiography (Steele 1915). The Canadian Parliament established a legislature for the Yukon Territory in 1898 but not until 1978 did any Yukon Aboriginal person win election to this body--although Aboriginal residents represented at least a quarter of the territorial population throughout the eighty-year period of their exclusion.

The images of homeland and frontier continue to exemplify the attitudinal poles of thought about the Canadian North. Much of recent Canadian northern and Aboriginal policy and, to a large extent, new foreign policy initiatives such as the Arctic Council are coloured by the need felt by decision makers to bridge the two northern solitudes. Now, as then, representation in British style parliaments has been but one of the vehicles for reconciling settler and Aboriginal points of view. More important vehicles were the instruments of devolution and treaties.

In the years since elected members of the legislative council first joined the Yukon Cabinet in 1970, devolution has transformed the governments north of sixty from colonial administrations to powerful regional entities accountable mainly to local populations. Today, after almost three decades of program transfers from Ottawa to Whitehorse and Yellowknife, the Yukon and Northwest Territories exercise most of the powers of provincial governments, as will Nunavut come 1999.

In a region whose economy is notoriously vulnerable to fluctuations in the value of its exports, political stability was provided by an important federal innovation known as formula financing. Formula financing guarantees a certain levels of revenue for the territorial governments by committing the federal government to fill the gap between locally generated tax receipts and territorial government expenditures. While not perfect, this formula has been a highly successful element of Canada's northern policy. Without it devolution might have been a much slower process and many recent innovations in northern governance might have been impossible.

The devolution of power from Ottawa to Whitehorse, Yellowknife and Iqaluit, was preceded by statehood in Alaska in 1959 and paralleled Home Rule for Greenland in 1979. Nowadays regional governments throughout Russia are coming into their own. So too are the regional governments in the Nordic countries.

When the regional governments throughout the circumpolar world founded the Northern Forum, the Canadian members were surprised to discover that the governors representing northern Scandinavian regions, like the Commissioners who until recently had ruled Canada's northern territories, were appointees of national governments. But things are changing even in the European North. For example, with Finland joining the European Union, Lapland's Governor of Lapland, for example, suddenly seems to be losing power to locally elected officials. European Union policy allows regional development funds to bypass national capitals and flow directly from Brussels to the regions, which has considerably empowered locally elected authorities. Europe's northernmost institute of higher learning, the University of Lapland has skillfully brokered such EU transactions, much to the benefit of both the university and the region. Since the Cold War ended, Lapland has also played a leading role in the formation and operation of several international bodies, including, the Circumpolar Universities Association and the Barents Region Council and the Northern Forum.

The Northern Forum, which is headquartered in Anchorage now includes among its members: Lapland, Alaska, Dornod, Heilongjiang, Hokkaido, Evenk, Kamchatka, Khanty-Mansiysk, Komi, Magadan, Nemets, Yamalo, Sakha, Sakhalin, Northern Norway, Norrbotten, Vasterbotten, Alberta, the NWT and the Yukon. When Canada's provincial premiers closeted themselves with the Prime Minister to conjure up the Meech Lake Accord, it appeared to many northerners that the South had forever frozen the North out of discussions about Canada's constitutional future. Consequently, the opening of dialogues with regions to the east and west seemed a highly attractive development for a jurisdiction like the Yukon, which already enjoyed positive relations with its immediate neighbours in Alaska and the Northwest Territories (Keith 1991) Long before the Arctic Council found favour in Washington or Ottawa, Alaska, the Yukon and the Northwest Territories were engaged in international relations around the circumpolar world. These relationships included trade missions to Finland, Norway, Sweden and Russia, official visits from those countries, and numerous bilateral agreements.

Devolution has transformed the territorial governments, from colonial or settlers administrations to popularly elected governments of what one federal judge called "infant provinces"(St. Jean 1988). Even more significant for the North's future have been the treaties between Canada and the region's indigenous peoples which effectively reconstructed relations between Aboriginals and settlers. Devolution mainly changed local political and administrative structures but the treaties altered basic constitutional arrangements and changed the historic pattern of settlement history. Modern treaties between the nation-state and northern Aboriginal nations have arguably been the principle instrument for mediating between the often polarized interests of the Aboriginal and settler communities.

As Canada's Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (Royal Commission, 1996) recently affirmed, the Aboriginal, or Indian, treaty remains a vital and evolving instrument for resolving inter-societal conflicts. Europeans frequently associate Indian treaties with the 19th Century, the settlement of the American West and the humiliation of the Indian reservation, but that is a mistaken impression. In the Americas, treaty-making is not only a very old practice, but one that continues to this day.

Elsewhere, I have suggested that Aboriginal treaty-making in the Americas has occurred in three historical stages (Penikett 1997). The first stage began soon after the Spanish arrived in the Americas, the most important of the early peacemakers being Bartholomew de Las Casas, the son of one of Columbus's shipmates. A New World plantation and slave-owner until he suffered a crisis of conscience, Las Casas became a Dominican priest and then spent the rest of his life petitioning the Spanish Crown about the enslavement and slaughter of millions of Maya, Incas and Aztecs.

In 1550, the Spanish monarch Charles V summoned Las Casas to defend his views before the Council of the Indies at Valladolid. In the debate that followed, Las Casas argued that Indians had the right to their own lands, religions and governments, that they could not be brought to Christ by force, or subjected to Spanish rule without their consent. As Lewis Hanke observes, this was the first time an European power had ever examined the justice of its empire building (Hanke 1974). More astonishing is that the priest from the distant Mexican province of Chiapas won the argument. Charles V temporarily ordered a halt to the Spanish conquest, but the slavery and slaughter did not stop. Las Casas had won only a moral victory, and his countrymen blamed him for creating the "black legend" of Spanish cruelty.

Las Casas had his admirers, even in England. However, self-interest not moral considerations normally motivated English policy in the Americas. After the British and their Iroquois allies beat the French army at the Plains of Abraham in 1759, Britain decided to reorganize its American colonies, and King George III issued The Royal Proclamation of 1763. The Proclamation established two important principles. First, colonists could only obtain land for settlement from the Crown, after the Crown had obtained it from Indian nations by way of treaty; thus the British government recognized Aboriginal title to American land. Second, the requirement to make treaties established the legitimacy of Aboriginal governments in British North America.

When Canada became a nation state in 1867, the federal government saw treaty-making as practically a closed chapter--at least until the national dream of transcontinental railroads required a series of new treaties to extinguish Aboriginal title in Western Canada. Government agents appeared to have drafted these late nineteenth century treaties in advance of the negotiations. The treaties crowded the Assiniboine, Blackfoot, Cree and other Indian nations onto reservations, granted the Indians small annuities and recognized limited hunting and fishing rights in the nation's former homelands. As instruments of assimilation, these treaties advanced a policy that sought not just to extinguish title but also to extinguish the Aboriginal identity. Under this policy, the government sent Indian children to residential schools to learn English and Christianity, while outlawing traditional religious practices such as the sun dance and the potlatch.

This practice of expropriation and assimilation continued well into the twentieth century. Vast areas in British Columbia and the Canadian North were still without treaties, and treaty-making was not a priority but, whenever a megaproject loomed, government lawyers began to worry about Aboriginal title. This was true of the United States as much as Canada. With the discovery of oil in Alaska in 1968, the U.S. Interior Department immediately sought a settlement with the state's Natives.

On paper, the 1971 Alaska settlement was the most generous ever made with Aboriginal people. The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act gave 45,000 Natives 44 million acres of land and almost a billion dollars. Yet the settlement was blatantly assimilationist. It abolished ancient forms of tribal government and traditional hunting and fishing practices, and then tried to convert Alaskan Natives into business people and land speculators. In its wisdom, the U.S. Congress gave control of Indian, Inuit and Aleut lands and monies to newly-created Native Corporations, most of which were not initially profitable.

The Alaskan experience proved highly instructive to Yukon First Nations as they started to negotiate their own treaty in 1973. Yukon First Nations and Alaska Natives speak related dialects, have similar subsistence economies and share ancient traditions of tribal or village governance. Their tribal homelands straddle the borders between Canada and the United States. They have many things in common, but a corporate model treaty was not to be one of them. Yukon First Nations insisted on negotiating a treaty that respected, not rejected, their cultural traditions. For this reason, the negotiations in the Yukon were difficult and protracted. The settlement took over 20 years to complete but, at the end of the day, 7,000 Yukon Indians won title to 41,000 square kilometres of land and a new legally-recognized form of tribal self-government.

In 1867, Canada's Fathers of Confederation wrote a constitution that divided all governmental powers between Ottawa and the provinces. Practically nothing was left for the Indian nations with whom Britain and, later, Canada made treaties. By 1992, it was clear that the Yukon treaty would carve a new piece out of that constitutional pie and transfer powers to First Nations from both the federal and the territorial governments. This settlement covered more than questions of land and money. First Nations and the territorial government would from now on share powers in fields such as education, economic development, the environment, health, welfare, wildlife and land management. Given the territory's uncertain constitutional future following Patriation in 1982, and the Meech Lake Accord in 1987, the Yukon government sought to consolidate its position by becoming a full party to territorial land claims settlements. It is a nice historical irony that some Yukon politicians believed Ottawa could not forever deny to settlers what it had recognized for Aboriginals in the Yukon land claims and self-government agreements.

As the result of another settlement between Ottawa and the Inuit of the eastern Northwest Territories, the new territory of Nunavut will come into being in 1999. The important thing about Nunavut is that in North American history it is the first regional government with an Aboriginal majority ever created by a settler state. Never before has either Canada or the United States allowed for the creation of a new regional government until settlers outnumbered the indigenous population. In the next century, resource developments could cause the Inuit to be swamped by southern migrants but in the near term at least Nunavut will be a homeland administration.

It reflects of the confidence the Inuit feel about their ability to determine their own destiny in the region that Nunavut will have a public government, a very different arrangement from the form of tribal self-government provided for in the Yukon treaty. As the first of its kind, the Yukon self-government agreement attracted much attention during the 1992 constitutional negotiations, and similar arrangements found their way into the text of the Charlottetown Accord. Perhaps because the Charlottetown Accord was defeated in a national referendum, no other Aboriginal group has yet been able to achieve the same kind of self-government arrangements, although negotiations are in progress in northern British Columbia and northern Saskatchewan.

Anatol Rapoport, the game theorist, has identified three kinds of conflict: "fights, games, and debates" (Rapoport 1988). In some ways, these descriptions fit the three stages of treaty-making. Las Casas tried to end the Spanish Conquest, a fight in which the Indians were the big losers. For the next two-hundred years the treaties made were mostly of the "peace and friendship" variety. Then, in 1763, George III sanctioned a more serious treaty-making game, a process of assimilation with ultimately few winners. Only in the current third or "debates" stage are negotiators making a real effort to understand the other parties' points of view and to create win-win scenarios for both the settler and Aboriginal constituencies. The authors of the Yukon and Nunavut settlements might be forgiven for thinking of them as two of the events that marked the beginning of third-stage treaty-making.

It is far too soon to judge the success of the Yukon model but some problems are already apparent. One problem touches on the issue of globalization, which everywhere has been a negative experience for indigenous peoples. At exactly the moment the Canadian government was negotiating the Yukon treaty, it was also negotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with the United States and Mexico. The Yukon treaty provides considerable protection for tribal lands and the Aboriginal subsistence economy. NAFTA on the other hand caused Mayan peasants in the Chiapas province to rise up in rebellion because they claimed it ended historic state protection of their communal land and subsistence farming rights. The Yukon treaty is protectionist, NAFTA is anti-protectionist. The two treaties seem to be based on radically different principles. When they come into conflict, which shall prevail? The history of broken treaty promises in North America should not make Aboriginal people optimistic about the outcome.

Concerned about the apparent contradiction between the two treaties signed by Canada, I wrote a letter to Prime Minister Chretien asking him to clarify Canada's intentions. In January 1995, Jean Chretien replied denying that NAFTA had undermined the rights of indigenous peoples (Chretien 1995), but the fact remains that NAFTA is plainly the logical outcome of a long process of economic liberalization in Mexico--a process which had the effect of seriously eroding the traditional rights of the Maya. So, the treaty-making begun by Chiapas's first bishop, Bartholomew de Las Casas, remains unfinished business in Central America today.

Yet, there is some good news for the Maya. Guatemala, one of only two American countries with a majority Aboriginal population, recently signed a treaty ending its 36 year long civil war, a horror story which cost 100,000 lives. To their credit, several European powers, including Spain, have injected millions of dollars into negotiating and implementing this treaty. Central America may seem a long way from the Arctic, but the point is that Canadian economic and trade policies both have Aboriginal aspects. This may be important for several reasons, not least one identified by Will Kymlicka, in his book Multicultural Citizenship: "[T]he single largest cause of ethnic conflict in the world today is the struggle by indigenous peoples for the protection of their land rights" (Kymlicka 1995).

So, treaty-making with Aboriginal peoples in the Americas continues today. In the Canadian North it has become a highly-evolved instrument of inter-societal accommodation. No longer is the Canadian government trying to impose one model of treaty on all Aboriginal groups. The James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement, The Inuvialuit Final Agreement, the Gwich'in, Sahtu, Nunavut and Yukon settlements are each in their own way quite distinctive. It may be difficult to understand current Canadian northern policy without appreciating the extent to which the country's policy-makers have over the last 20 years tried to make a just peace with northern Aboriginal peoples.

This wish to accommodate the Aboriginal interest is also influencing Canada's Arctic foreign policy. Among Canada's objectives in working to establish the eight-nation Arctic Council may be: the promotion of sustainable development; the active participation of northern peoples in circumpolar international relations; and the extension of the peacemaking or dispute resolution experience into new venues. These are all matters affecting Aboriginal and Northern interests.

Canadians strongly supported the 1991 Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy. We are increasingly conscious of the Arctic environment as fragile and powerful, hard and beautiful, strange and near. Symbolically, it is our Brazilian rainforest. The April 1997 House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee Report puts "pursuing sustainable development priorities as the centrepiece of circumpolar cooperation" (Standing Committee, 1997a), and the first major public event announced at the September 19, 1996 launch of the Arctic Council was a conference on sustainable development to be held at Whitehorse in April 1998.

The Bruntland Report greatly influenced Canadian public opinion. Sustainable development, or the balancing of environmental and economic considerations, has become an extremely popular idea, especially the round table concept. For Canadians, the round table has become a metaphor for the inclusion of all interested stakeholders' interests, not least Aboriginal peoples. Before the Foreign Affairs Committee, Oran Young proposed several principles of sustainable development, including: subsistence preference, co-management and subsidiarity (Standing Committee, 1997b). These principles have already found expression in Canadian law in the land claims treaties worked out with northern Aboriginal groups over the last decade. They might even have been derived from that source.

Although the question of participant funding remains a major unresolved problem, the Canadian government seems genuinely serious about involving Aboriginal people in the work of the Arctic Council. In several recent statements, Foreign Minister Axworthy has noted that the Council is unique among international bodies for involving northern indigenous peoples as Permanent Participants. The appointment of Mary Simon, an Inuk politician, as Canada's first Circumpolar Ambassador can be seen as further evidence of this commitment.

Having both Russia and the United States as neighbours in the Arctic, makes Canada, like the Nordic states, very interested in security questions. Unfortunately, the Americans have tried to keep issues of military security off the Arctic Council agenda. Still, the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee has noted the urgency of "completing the transition to a new understanding of security that incorporates human and environmental dimensions and promotes cooperative endeavours, especially in regard to the serious contamination and nuclear safety issues in northern Russia" (Standing Committee, 1997a). As a country with a proud tradition of international peacekeeping and a considerable recent experience in domestic peace-making, Canada may be keen to apply its experience in dispute resolution to a wide range of Arctic issues (Standing Committee, 1997b).

Canada is an Arctic state, a multicultural society, a consciously northern nation. Over the last two decades, the country has been slowly coming to terms with the Aboriginal dimensions of its national identity. This fact is now at last finding expression in Canada's official foreign policy. Oran Young believes that multiplicity of actors, including Aboriginal organizations, regional governments and environmental advocates, will make coordination difficult (Young 1996), but Aboriginal entities like the Inuit Circumpolar Conference and regional groupings such as the Northern Forum have illuminated the possibilities of Arctic internationalism. As the first chair of the Arctic Council, Canada's representatives should ensure that the work of this new international organization is informed by the country's experience and innovations in northern governance, devolution treaty-making. Canada and the other Arctic nation states need to make the Arctic Council a relevant and vital organization, not just for the diplomats and politicians, but also for the peoples of the circumpolar world who wish to end the solitudes of Aboriginal and settler communities, indigenous and external economies, industry and environment, East and West, South and North.

*(Updated version of April 26, 1997, Presentation to the Calotte Academy in Rovaniemi, Finland : Northern Solitudes: Canadian Policy, Aboriginal Actors and the Arctic Council)

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