[...]While she [Elizabeth May] appeared to commit to reorganizing the Vision Green document, she didn’t address the errors or failings in her party’s policy proposals. This has been the approach of some of her supporters in my Twitter feed, in comments on the article and on Facebook. One Green candidate wrote hostile and condescending replies (since deleted) to my op-ed. And here’s a helpful note for progressives: saying (as did one Tyee commenter) that Natives are from a “stone age culture” will make you few friends.

So it is with some disappointment, if not necessarily any surprise, that I see the response sent to the Tyee from the Green Party’s parliamentary office. Instead of fixing the errors that remained days later on the Green Party’s “Vision Green” page on Indigenous people, the Green Party has chosen to concentrate their efforts on the words of a single Indigenous person — i.e., me — to attempt to rebut a single point in the opinion piece.

[...]

The clearest example of where the Green Party’s priorities lie is that their Parliamentary office had the time to prepare such an elaborate 1,400-word rebuttal to a single number in my article — when their website still contains their flawed “Vision Green.” As many in the Green Party will tell you, they’re a small party with limited resources. I don’t know if Elizabeth May approved or would approve of the squandering of those resources on the reply her office sent The Tyee, but I hope that at some point she will direct her staff to stop berating Natives and start engaging with us.

In anticipation of a fall book tour for his new novel, Seven Matches, Joseph Boyden is back in the pages of Maclean’s magazine with an article restating his claim of First Nations ancestry, and anchoring that in the results of a DNA test.

Boyden’s ancestry first came into question late last year when I, along with APTN and a number of other Indigenous activists, questioned Boyden’s right to speak on our behalf. We looked at his shifting claims of ancestry — covered here on CANADALAND — and his misuse of basic First Nations concepts like being “two-spirit,” and we presented the questions to the public for them to decide.

Broadly speaking — though with many notable exceptions — Indigenous people on social media took the position that he was not Indigenous. And broadly speaking, non-Natives, especially those in the media, claimed that he was, and that we had no right as Indigenous people to determine who belonged to our communities.

On July 26, 1989, then Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic unilaterally dissolved the assembly of the self-governing republic of Kosovo, which was an ethnic Albanian majority jurisdiction in Serbia.

This was followed by a referendum in July 1990, in which the majority Serbian population voted in favour of constitutional amendments that abolished “special status” and self-government for the minority Albanians. Over the next five years the situation disintegrated, with demonstrations, riots, rogue assemblies, and declarations, and eventually civil war and NATO intervention.

Taking away the protective rights and autonomy of national minorities is a dangerous thing. Because of this, actions such as the removal of “special status” without the consent of the affected minority is rare in modern times, seen only in countries like Milosevic’s Serbia or Francisco Franco’s Spain. Such moves are antithetical to what pluralistic democracies stand for, where the idea of “majority rule” is almost always accompanied by “minority rights.”

This week, it was revealed that Kellie Leitch appears to support the unilateral elimination of First Nations autonomy in Canada. The Prince Arthur Herald obtained audio from a conversation Leitch had with students from Concordia and McGill universities. One questioner asked about First Nations policy. Leitch said: “I would abolish the Indian Act…the people of Canada, and the Parliament of Canada, is supreme. And when people decide, that’s what we should do. And every Canadian should be equal. And if you think I need to go out and speak to Aboriginal Canadians across the country to ask them for their consent to change the law, it won’t happen and you know that.”

The Herald also reported that Leitch said that the “majority of Aboriginal Canadians” agreed with her position. “If you want to listen to the chiefs, you go ahead buddy; if you want to listen to those 600 elites, you go for it guy,” she said.

In other words, Kellie Leitch promises to eliminate the Indian Act and thus “Indian” reserves, and in doing so, to take away First Nations political autonomy without the consent of First Nations people. What makes this comment even more disturbing is she distinguished between “the people of Canada” and “Aboriginal Canadians,” who presumably are not part of the people of Canada.

Over the holiday break, I was asked to host the @indigenousXca Twitter account, an account shared by different Indigenous activists, academics, and artists each week. I used that hosting opportunity to raise the question of author Joseph Boyden’s Indigenous identity—his “Indigeneity.” Raising this question inadvertently brought an Indigenous debate about identity and belonging into the non-Native media mainstream.

The Walrus magazine and its editor, Jonathan Kay, were among the first non-Native media to take notice of the Boyden issue a few days after it arose on social media and in an aptn news report. Kay wrote an article that was sub-headlined: “Attacking a man’s racial composition is never an entirely benign exercise.”

In that article, and in a subsequent appearance on cbc’s The National this Sunday, Kay focused on the issue of race, saying “I am troubled [by] the interrogation of someone on the basis of their racial ancestry.” He characterized the aptn investigation into Boyden’s ancestry as being “precisely about his genetic makeup,” and suggested that it would lead to a “dna test mentality” in determining who could speak for Indigenous communities. On each of these three points, Kay is incorrect and shows a misunderstanding of the context of this Indigenous debate.

Kay is not alone in making this error. It has shown up in other non-Native writing on the subject. The Waterloo Record, for instance, described the controversy as an extension of the US Birther movement, which is based on the conspiracy theory that Barack Obama was not born in the United States: