In a quiet hotel room in downtown Ottawa, Georges Erasmus calmly recalls what may have been the low point in his 50-year fight for Indigenous rights.
It was 1996, and the Dene leader had just finished co-chairing the landmark Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP). The time had come to present its vision for pivotal change to Prime Minister Jean Chrétien.
When it was over, that meeting would leave Erasmus the most discouraged he’s ever been in his professional life.
“The guy couldn’t have cared less,” Erasmus told CBC Indigenous.
“I mean it was tragic, actually. It was very obvious that nothing was going to happen. I would think that somebody off the street would have been better to receive this big, milestone report.”
The episode is recounted in Erasmus’s new memoir, Hòt’a! Enough!, co-authored with Toronto-based writer Wayne K. Spear and published this month.
Erasmus, 76, says there is no single highlight that stands out above the rest from his storied career but when asked about that meeting, he acknowledges the shelving of RCAP may be the lowest.
Erasmus was “beyond stunned” by the reception, he says.
“Chrétien was in the Dark Age, using terminology that hadn’t been used for maybe 40 years, and we were in spaceships,” Erasmus says in the book.
But the overall story has more highs than lows in telling how Erasmus reluctantly became one of the most prominent Indigenous leaders of his generation.
A radical youth
Born in 1948 in the Tłı̨chǫ community now known as Behchokǫ̀, N.W.T., Erasmus entered school at six years old speaking only Tłı̨chǫ and French.
The man who would later impress many with his thoughtful political style proceeded to fail Grade 1.
“I was pissed right off,” Erasmus wrote.
“I’m still pissed!”
Erasmus learned English quickly, but that sentiment may accurately describe the tone of his early work as a community organizer and member of the Indian Brotherhood of N.W.T.
Dene chiefs founded the brotherhood in 1969, during the widespread resistance to the Pierre Trudeau government’s White Paper plan to assimilate First Nations into mainstream society.
The Red Power movement was sweeping North America, and radicalism was in the air, particularly for youth, Erasmus says.
“It was a time where people were prepared to be more radical than the previous generation,” he said.
He was elected brotherhood president in 1976, right in the middle of a public inquiry into the proposed Mackenzie Valley pipeline led by judge Thomas Berger.
Dene in N.W.T. largely saw the pipeline as a threat, and they expressed their aspirations in a 1975 political manifesto, “The Dene Declaration.” While it stopped short of seeking outright independence, the declaration demanded recognition of Dene nationhood.
The book says this activity was seen as so radical that Canada’s spy service, which was then part of the RCMP, was soon investigating Dene for “suspicions of subversive political activity” and “Marxist insurgency.”
“Convinced that Indian Brotherhood staff were writing the Berger report, the RCMP raided their building in search of evidence,” the book says.
Berger’s report recommended a 10-year moratorium on pipeline construction, to settle land claims in the area.
As national chief
After leading the Dene Nation, Erasmus was elected to lead the Assembly of First Nations in 1985, taking over a heavily indebted national organization burdened by a “culture of cronyism” and suspicions of corruption.
The first thing the new national chief did was change the locks and order an outside audit, in a bid to clean up and unify a divided assembly.
He became known for his calm, diplomatic style as national chief, earning him the moniker of “the 11th premier.”
Yet he struck a very different tone in 1988, after winning a second term, when he delivered a fiery warning of “violent political action” by the next generation if Ottawa didn’t immediately deal with First Nations’ legitimate grievances.
His prediction came true in 1990 when a Kanien’kehà:ka (Mohawk) blockade against a golf course encroaching on a burial site turned into a shootout with police and a 78-day armed standoff near Oka, Que.
“With Oka, it was just like puncturing a boil,” he says.
A year later, in the wake of the confrontation at Kanesatake, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney created RCAP, which Erasmus would co-chair after finishing his second AFN term. For Erasmus, if Oka highlighted serious problems with the Crown-First Nations relationship, RCAP had the solutions.
“And what do they do? They ignored it. They laughed at the recommendation that we needed to, over a period of time, spend like $2 billion more per year,” he says.
“And what we said was, in 20 years, in a generation, what will happen is the benefits will start coming back.”
Rise and fall of the Aboriginal Healing Foundation
From there, Erasmus details the rise and fall of the $350-million Aboriginal Healing Foundation, which he helped set up in 1998.
But the foundation soon learned that healing the trauma of residential schools can’t happen overnight, or even in a decade, so it petitioned the government to extend its mandate and loosen the tight restrictions on how the foundation could invest its cash.
It couldn’t convince the Conservative government of Stephen Harper, and the organization wound up operations in 2014, which Erasmus calls “a sad, stupid, and tragic squandering of an opportunity.”
In 2004, Erasmus took a job as chief negotiator for the Dehcho First Nations self-government process, a post he held for 12 years, which he’s back in now after a roughly eight-year hiatus, so his story is still unfolding.
As for the book, Erasmus hopes to reach the younger generation and inform Canadians about the enormous injustices First Nations face in their fight for civil and Indigenous rights.
“If five per cent of Canadians are aware of that, that’s a lot,” he says.