Murray Sinclair warns of violent rebellion if Indigenous rights continue to be oppressed | APTN N2N

[Music] tonight on nation the nation we sit down with Senator Murray Sinclair in a wide-ranging interview including his impact in the Senate and I'm not one to shy away from opportunities to remind them when they say and do things that ignore the rights of indigenous people Sinclair is most known for being chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission but he has a warning for society if it keeps ignoring indigenous people we will likely be creating a population of young indigenous people who will be prone to thinking about acting out violently against society hello I'm Todd llamaron and welcome to nation the nation those are strong words from Senators Sinclair and earlier this week I got a chance to sit down and talk with them where he had a lot more to say everything from growing up just north of Winnipeg to chairing the aboriginal justice inquiry to the TRC here now is the whole interview senators Sinclair were welcomed a nation a nation and thank you for talking to me well thank you for having me we're gonna start with that you're born on the former st. Peters reserve just outside of Selkirk meaning your family obviously didn't go to Vegas first of all why didn't they end up going to pay was well actually there are a number of families that stay behind after the legal surrender of 1913 there was about 90 families that refused to me to leave when my grandfather was one of them he had been a farmer in that area I owned the an acreage of 90 acres on the reserve and he farmed it and he wanted to stay there he liked the area plus he was a fisherman and in a relocation someplace where the st. Peters people were sent up to what is now peg was was MNO agricultural benefits and the fishing was unknown and proved to be not as good as it was down in the southern end of the lake where Saint Peters was located the question of the legality the surrender referred to the to the what we would now call the Federal Court of Canada the Federal Court of Canada ruled that it was an illegal surrender and so the government reacted to that decision by issuing a law called the st. Peter's Reserve Act in 1916 basically saying that the illegal surrender would be legalized if everybody who purchased land in the area would pay an extra dollar per acre into a fund and all of those First Nations people who stayed behind I had to enfranchise so my grandfather was one of them so obviously that must have shaped to help shape your future life than being enfranchised already yes it was one of the issues that we were confronted with early on and that is the lack of status between myself and other members my family who did live in the Penguins area and and so the question of how that all came about was one that we were informed about early on but it's it actually wasn't an issue very much I did a paper one time on the benefits of burden and burdens of the Indian Act and whether being a member of the First Nation and being and having status under the Indian Act was actually a benefit or not and my conclusion then was that it provided no benefit whatsoever there were no educational programs off reserve there was no funding for post-secondary students there were no services provided off reserve and any services provided on reserve were inadequate and the provincial government services were much better but it did clearly address and caused us to lose our sense of culture and identity I'm gonna turn the guest here career as a lawyer one of your first cases you took the judgments took you for the defendant and asked you what you were charged with that must have really hit home for you how indigenous people were treated in the justice system while I was in law school I became really quite enamored with the law and how the law worked and I saw its weaknesses I particularly saw that the fact that it was used as a weapon of colonialism for many years and and I also saw that so many of our people indigenous people were being victimized in the system because they didn't have proper representation people who understood them and so plus I love being in court I just loved arguing the people and so I went to court a lot when I was in law school I enrolled in the courses it took me to court and then when I got out I practiced law for a while and thought I'll do this before I get into politics so that led to a career as a lawyer or about eight years and then led to a career on the bench for 30 years is that what sidetracked you from politics was your career on the bench very much so yeah yeah it was but but you know I but he offered a judgeship twice not once but twice he turned it down three times actually a third time I did except the first two times I didn't really want to be a judge I saw it as a as a sort of like good dead-end job in the sense that you went to the bench and you didn't really do anything after that and you had limitations upon your freedom to speak your limitations upon your freedom to associate with people in the community and you know Plus quite frankly most of the people on the bench were old white guys and not the kind of crowd that I was used to hanging out with you know indigenous leaders Phil Fontaine Elijah Harper Eric Robinson basically took me out to dinner and said you have to do it because we need someone to to get in that doorway and open the door for other people so I said well I'll do it for three years and then I was sworn in as a judge on March the 5th of 1988 and on March the 7th of 1988 JJ Harper was shot and everything changed of course and to remind our viewers JJ Harper was shot by unipeg police within 48 hours the shooter was exonerated by the police and that of course with his death and the death of Helen video Osbourne led to the aboriginal justice inquiry which you of course ended up co commissioner of so what were your expectations heading into that that three year process well in a way I saw it as an opportunity to to take the issues of the relationship between indigenous people in the city want to pay police in particular but the justice system generally and bring that to the public for and to give indigenous people an opportunity to speak about their concerns with the the way the legal system was working and also to do a general review of how the laws and its historical context had been used by governments and others to limit the rights of indigenous people not just their legal rights as indigenous people but their basic human rights the right to vote the right to wear their cultural costumes for the cultural garb their the right to participate in ceremonies the right to do their traditional ceremonies as well I set out to do what I can to make the system understand what it was doing and how it should change of course there's a bunch of recommendations out of its I know one in conclusion there's a quote by an elder his name's Rufus Prince and I'm just going to quote him and he talked about implementing the Aboriginal justice inquiry you've got to do this or we're going to suffer repercussions and the bureaucrats are going to find a nice high shelf for the your report and recommendation and a generation later if they have another Commission on the same subject they'll find it they're covered with dust of course we're a generation later have the recommendations my report gathered dust in your opinion you know in our report the AG report we talked about the need for an implementation process and we made recommendations around an implementation process and we targeted specific areas that we said really needed to be focused such as dressing the way indigenous people within the correction system within the child welfare system and by the police needed to be changed and that somebody needed to monitor that too and then to report on it publicly to say this is happening this is not happening the one thing that we didn't do then that we did do following the TRC the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was we didn't count upon the public reaction to the report and we didn't try to harness that public reaction and to talk about the importance that the public was going to have to end change and and I would say that to the extent that the reports recommendation as the AGI reports recommendations have made their way into solid policy and law it's because the public has demanded it the public has said we need to have these changes but ultimately I mean people that argue that things have gotten worse I mean some of the figures they talked about especially the over-representation indigenous people in prison back then even worse today oh absolutely and the child welfare rates are even higher than they were before a couple of reasons for that is because the way in which they've been implemented I've been to in fact enhanced authorities so governments who don't know what they're doing and in addition to that populations have changed we are the fastest growing population in Canada and still are and and so when you have a young boy like that plus population going up in poverty growing up in circumstances where their social connections are not strong plus they feel disconnected from the educational system you're going to have a disenfranchised group of people who are going to become more and more vulnerable to these processes and so that that's occurred and in fact we did predict that if we didn't do things effectively that the numbers were going to get higher my concern as it is today is that that energy from that group of disenfranchised youth could easily become a violent energy and it has to a certain extent there's a social philosopher by the name of Franz fanon who wrote in 1948 that when you have a colonized people who have been oppressed by one society first of all they tend to submit to the colonization oppression but then when they start to recognize what they're experiencing they will resist but when that resistance is quashed then they will start to take out their frustrations upon themselves so the high rates of personal abuse grow secondly they'll take it upon take it out upon those around them so violence against family members against neighbors against people in their community will grow but eventually they'll take out their violence on the oppressor so then you'll have rebellion and so my view is that if we continue to ignore what society is doing to indigenous people in terms of the poverty the educational failure rates and I'm not talking about the individuals who are feeling I'm talking about the educational system is failing in the child welfare rates we will we will likely be creating a population of young indigenous people who will be prone to thinking about acting out violently against society well on that note we need to take a break but we'll be back after a short break with more from Senator Murray Sinclair welcome back here now is part 2 of my sit-down interview with Senator Murray Sinclair okay senator Sinclair before the break you briefly mentioned the TRC which is probably something you're going to be most remembered for and you when you're first approached to be a commissioner you turned it down why was that well I had done an intervening inquiry and that was into the desks of twelve babies at the Health Science Center and it took an emotional toll on me to listen to evidence about how babies died particularly when I concluded that 9 out of the 14 or a number of them didn't have to die that if they had been handled properly they would have been alive but when the first set of commissioners couldn't get along and step down then I was called again and by that time in addition to that I was aware of the reaction of the survivors and the real disappointment they felt and their sense of victimization again at that and I thought well I'd always told students when I lectured at law schools that our obligation is this if you can you must and so I took up my own challenge I could so I did and you of course were there for several years how did you what got you through that because I endured and have must have been difficult at times it was a again an emotionally very demanding process but I was better prepared for it because of the experience of the AJ I and the baby death inquiry this time I instructed the commissioners and the staff to ensure that we had proper supports in place so we had spiritual supports for each of the commissioners for each of the senior staff and for all of the staff and that we had cultural supports for those who we required a wish to have the access to elders and ceremonies that all of the survivors who doing that at the end of every day invited us to join them and so we sat in a healing circle with them at the end of each day and they insisted that we had to at the end of each day and we also had to participate in those kinds of recovery processes because they could see the burden that it was having on us you know we listened to them we showed them our respect our concern and we believed them and they in turn took care of us so that was important of course at the end of it of the there were more recommendations recalled calls to action of course and the first five concerned child welfare how deliberate was it to put those at the front actually the first 25 or so calls to action are really aimed at the immediate problem so the change is necessitated by what's going on in a child welfare system where front and center as where the change is required to address the health issues of indigenous people the incarceration rates of indigenous people and the substandard housing substandard living conditions that indigenous people were facing they're all at the front end because what we said is it's hard for you to talk about the big questions of life when it's those little questions of survival that you really have to struggle with every day and sometimes they take up incredible amounts of energy and prevent you from getting to those really big questions so we said those these things have to be addressed so that people will be able to look at the larger questions down the road and that is you know things like how do we change the relationship with government it's hard to talk about that question when you're fighting a social system where your grandchild is being taken away that very morning and you're spending the next three or four years fighting to get your grandchild back and that's what's important to you at that time and so we said that needs to be fixed first bill c92 the reform of child welfare appears to be the result of call-to-action number four but what's the biggest problem you see so far with that bill well there's lots of problems with the bill it's not anywhere near what we written about is necessitated by the experience of indigenous people are having with the child welfare system it doesn't address adequately the question of provincial jurisdiction it doesn't deal quite a well with the question of funding for indigenous agencies Human Rights Tribunal decisions are still not being implemented and I'm not going to come any close to being implemented by this particular bill so it has a lot of weaknesses but the one thing that it does have that people must not lose sight of is that it clearly recognizes jurisdictional rights of indigenous communities indigenous people to making all of the child welfare decisions for themselves and so if indigenous communities find themselves in a position where without government support without government involvement they can exercise their right to deal with child welfare issues in their communities or for their members there's a huge effort on right now to get it passed this week alone it's in the House and Senate committees being studied and pre studied I guess what's your gut feeling is this one going to be one that actually gets Royal Assent well I don't know the answer to that some days I wonder if we're going to get anything done in this Senate at this time but the bill actually hasn't reached the Senate yet we did a pre study of it on through the Aboriginal peoples committee and the pre study identified a number of weaknesses in the bill and and the minister's team in the house has indicated that they will look at the report from the Aboriginal peoples committee and to identify those areas that they feel they might be able to address I know that two areas that were identified that being very major concerns for the committee were the area of funding and the the question of provincial jurisdiction and so whether the federal government is prepared to put amendments in place before it gets to the Senate so that we don't have to amend it in the Senate and then send it back and get into that back and forth action remains to be seen but the reality is that the Senate has a role to play here and so we don't like it we can amend it and send it back and then they have to decide whether they accept it and if they don't want to accept it then they send it back and so we keep doing that we could of course be running out of time to buy their yeah but you know I keep telling people we have until the middle of October so let's let's not be so shy about that no nobody wants to stay here over the summer time but if it's important enough then we'll do what we need to do and the same is true for the indigenous languages bill it has two similar kinds of weaknesses of course you do a lot more than work just as a senator you letter review at the Thunder Bay Police Services Board calling for its complete overhaul why did you agree to do that review it was a moment of foolishness I think and I only say that partly facetiously because I thought I would have the time to do it but it was an important public responsibility and I was asked by the interior government to take it on and I having had some experience working with people from Thunder Bay both indigenous and non-indigenous I knew that the question of policing in that area was a really serious issue and and I had good staff to work with me on it and so when we undertook the review we identified throughout the process the major issues that we felt needed to be taken care of and and when I assured my reports last year I was pleased to see that they acted very quickly on immediately suspended the board and put in place a new commissioner so so I think they I think they've started to process a change it's really important finally are your chemo Center just a few years ago you talked about it you'd wish you could get more done but is there something that you feel you have gotten accomplished in that short time I I dunno I do have this sense that my mere presence changes the way people think and talk about things certainly the way they talk about things I think has changed and and I'm not one to shy away from opportunities to remind them when they say and do things that ignore the rights of indigenous people or ignore the fact that this is going to have a negative impact upon the indigenous community or to tell them that we need to do more than what we're now doing when it comes to the vulnerable indigenous community which has been put in that position by past government legislation including former acts of the Senate and so I said the Senate has a role to play in reconciliation as well and they need to accept that and so having said that now I'm giving some direction I think to helping them understand how to make that happen well I wish we could talk more it's been fascinating to talk to you senator Sinclair thank you for speaking to me well thank you very much [Music] welcome back thanks for watching our feature interview with Senator Murray Sinclair we're taking a week off but we'll be back in two weeks to hear our political panel of MPs debate the issues of the day I'm Paula Moran have a great evening you you

Channel: APTN News

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Keywords: aptn nation to nation, Murray Sinclair, N2N, Indigenous

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Length: 23min 54sec (1434 seconds)

Published: Thu May 02 2019