Despite the deep cultural resonance of the Idle No More (INM) movement across Canada’s indigenous population, the social phenomenon faces difficult challenges. It is so sweeping in its concerns that it runs the risk of being vague, unfocused, and self-contradictory.
Methods and strategies are conflicting, with short-term, illegal rail blockades happening or being considered, while the movement’s founders call for action but within legal confines.
Here in Burns Lake, some people who self-identify with the movement are anti-development. Yet the entire region’s viability is based on resource extraction, like forestry or mining. Does INM envision an eventual partnership with federal and provincial governments in developing natural resources, or does it want to see a moratorium on resource activity?
The Wet’suwet’en use INM to stake out their position against the Pacific Trail Pipeline (PTP), but they work with Huckleberry Mines Ltd. to make sure that there’s an adequate financial framework in place to profit from mining within their own traditional territory.
It’s a contradiction to call for a moratorium on resource extraction elsewhere while relying on resource development in your own region for your livelihood.
Pacific Trails Pipeline may see tremendous opposition among some of the Wet’suwet’en, but at the same time it’s welcomed by the signatories to the First Nations Limited Partnership (FNLP) of 15 First Nations who support the pipeline and the plan to build it on their traditional territories.
Fundamental incompatibilities like this with regard to natural resources, especially in B.C., are the death knell for productive dialogue. We have yet to see how different First Nations plan on settling their own differences of opinion when it comes to industry partnership to extract mineral, wood fibre, and energy wealth.
Idle No More challenges the authority of traditional ‘Indian act’ structures, like band councils and elected chiefs. Maybe developments like the FNLP are the cause of this unrest.
It’s also just as possible that grassroots First Nations feel that band chiefs are not able to get a fair deal for the resources extracted from, or transported through, their territories. The grassroots may feel that their leadership is dated and ineffectual, with Idle No More presenting as much of a challenge to existing band councils as it does to the federal and provincial governments.
It’s a young movement and the people that lead it and shape it, if what’s going on in Burns Lake is any indication, are genuine leaders.
Suicide rates among indigenous peoples range from two to 11 times the national average, depending on the region. The poverty and lack of hope found in so many First Nations communities is unacceptable. Clearly something needs to change to finally bring this sick and dysfunctional situation to an end.
If INM is the beginning of a transformation of the relationship between indigenous people and Canada that will draw this chapter of our shared national history to a conclusion, then so much the better.
Whether or not INM can sustain the scale and momentum that it has taken on is another question. The answer to that question will depend as much upon the internal politics that divide indigenous people from one another as it does upon the politics that have brought about Idle No More.
