Changes needed for aboriginal self government, political scientist says

September 14, 2005

Source: Queen's University:
http://qnc.queensu.ca/story_loader.php?id=4328255cdef0b

Changes needed for aboriginal self government, political scientist says

Canada must reinvent the state to deal with the concept of Aboriginal self-government and bring Aboriginal people fully into the nation, political scientist Alan Cairns says in a new book just released by Queen’s University’s Institute of Intergovernmental Relations.

"An old order which had prevailed for much of the modern era in which indigenous people were marginalized, despoiled of their lands, culturally assaulted, and often experienced cataclysmic population declines is on the defensive," he says in his book First Nations and the Canadian State: In Search of Coexistence.

Cairns, professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia who previously wrote the widely praised book Citizens Plus, compares in this study the challenge of eliminating the internal colonialism of Aboriginal people to the epochal ending of overseas colonialism in the Third World. "The ending of internal colonialism is much more complicated than ending the overseas variety," he says.

Echoing the transformation of Third World colonialism, Aboriginals and others have called for self-government to end what has been dubbed Fourth World colonialism. But there are practical problems, notably the small populations of Aboriginals in the areas where they reside together and the fact they are scattered about the country, often in large metropolitan areas.

He notes that only 5.6 per cent of Indian bands, 35 out of 627, have on-reserve populations of more than 2,000 people while nearly two-thirds have populations of less than 100. "First nations are micro-nations," he says. "Micro nations cannot by themselves handle macro-tasks. They can, however, if proper conditions exist, handle functions appropriate to their capacity."

As well, he argues, consideration has to be given to their connection to the Canadian state -- whether Aboriginals should follow what philosopher Charles Taylor has called "deep diversity," in which they are Canadians indirectly through being members of their national communities, or whether that weakens the capacity of the Canadian state to help such an alienated group and they must have a strong, common identification with other Canadians to the Canadian state while still prizing their differences.

Cairns opts for a middle ground in which constitutional recognition of indigenous diversity is accompanied by an overlapping citizenship regime. "The latter is not separate citizenships, but a citizenship in which some, but not all components of citizenship are shared, and some but not all components are different," he says.

Towards that goal, he recommends: