An Open Letter to Clarence Louie
By Adam Barker
Chief Clarence Louie, you certainly are making a name for yourself. You are not only an elected chief of the Osoyoos band in the Okanagan Valley, you are also the band’s Chief Executive Officer. Under your direction, the band has financially prospered – a vineyard and winery, and a golf course and ski resort in a popular tourist area will do that – and you have gained massive attention all across Canada, delivering fiery speeches to groups of aboriginal people from the 49th up to the Arctic.
You have even been written about in the Globe and Mail, which practically gushed about how your band has risen up from bankruptcy to financial self-sufficiency in five short years under your guidance. You have been lauded for telling indigenous peoples to get off welfare, get in touch with reality, and work hard to break free of poverty. You have “arrived.”
Far be it from me, a Settler Canadian, to tell you how to run your affairs. I believe that indigenous peoples can and will solve their own problems, and that we Settlers need to clean up our own messes if we want to help. But I just cannot shake the feeling that you are missing something in the path you have defined toward self-sufficiency. You sound too much like the colonial voices that have worked so hard to push your people down.
Chief Louie, you urge indigenous people to work hard and compete in the cut-throat world of finance and economic development. You want indigenous people to get a job, show up on time, and work extra hours. I can see why many Canadians find your position admirable – those are the same lessons I was taught growing up about how to be a “good citizen.”
I wonder if you are aware of how lacking in compassion and understanding your position is, considering your advice to dissenters is to “Get over it… Get some counselling.” It’s not as easy as all that to overcome the structures of indigenous oppression. Little has changed since the days of small pox blankets, missionaries, and violence at the hands of the North West Mounted Police - except that the oppression is normalized and thus less obvious.
The Price of Capitalism
Participating in the dominant economy does not guarantee any freedom from the ill-effects of an increasingly violent and nihilistic society. For all the “wealth” in Canada and the United States, have we not become some of the most unhealthy people on the planet? Does it not say something disturbing that the much-maligned reserve conditions are not so different from the urban social decay that is so apparent in the United States and Canada? Why copy Canada’s failures?
Even those lucky enough to succeed in the market environment pay a dear price. North Americans work harder, longer, with fewer vacation and holiday days than anyone else in the world (yes, even fewer than in Japan). Oh, there are some ultra-wealthy individuals who are making out quite well from all this, but let us be honest: we cannot all be at the top of the pyramid in this system. Most of us spend our lives labouring for the wealth of others, and get stress, social disconnect, and poor personal health in return. I have to ask, Chief Louie, do you want this for your people?
Do you ever consider why it is that your message is so well-received by the people who run national newspapers and powerful businesses? Perhaps it is because they see in you the sort of thing that colonial elites have been pursuing for years: a man with indigenous heritage and a powerful position among his people, who ultimately wants indigenous peoples to cooperate and obey the same government and corporate systems that murdered, raped, and stole from indigenous peoples for centuries – and in many ways, still do.
In your speeches you tell other indigenous leaders to stop running around fighting hundred-year-old battles. What about the little matter of a golf course and a burial ground in Oka back in 1990? How about the corporate clear-cutting on Nuu-Chah-Nulth territory in Clayquot Sound? Or perhaps the illegal development on Haudenosaunee (Six Nations) land that have resulted in stand-offs and police brutality over the past year? Are these wrongs recent enough for you? Or should the young men and grandmothers who were handcuffed and beaten on the ground in Caledonia go get counselling, as you suggest for the “twenty percent” of indigenous peoples who disagree with you?
Blaming the Victims
Chief Louie, of course you are well-received because your message plays right into the desires of Canadian colonial elites. You wipe the slate clean of the history that makes sense of the present, and in so doing legitimize the authority of the Canadian state, the hegemony of exploitative economics. You justify the belief that the problems in indigenous communities stem from the stereotypes of lazy, regressive indigenous politics. You blame your own people for their ongoing oppression.
You see, Chief Louie, while your “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” message certainly appeals to the colonial mentality that so many of us carry, there is just not enough critical analysis and honest reflection in your words for your perspective to serve as a useful plan for the future. It is true that your land, in the beautiful Okanagan, can support a vineyard and winery (to say nothing of making money from alcohol, which is such a widespread problem in so many communities), and a golf course and ski resort (I do wonder if your ancestors can recognize their land underneath those manicured greens). So it might be easy to see the capitalist system as full of hope and opportunity. But who does this opportunity benefit?
Is it enough to take over the role of colonial governors and merchants and commodify your own peoples’ lands for sale, regardless of the consequences? Colonialism has always been about two goals: acquiring land for the colonizer, and using that land to turn a profit. Your strategies participate with and enable those goals, ignoring the connections to land that previous generations fought and died for, and that many indigenous people still fight for today. I cannot see this as a winning strategy; I can only see capitulation and collaboration.
Most indigenous peoples have been exiled to lands either remote from the rest of Canadian society, or engulfed by rampant (sub)urbanization. For these communities, the lands of the Osoyoos band might as well be fictional. Others simply cannot conceive of becoming absorbed into the capitalist system, which is so environmentally toxic, personally draining, socially isolating and oppressive, and disrespectful towards both the land and the communities which are ultimately dependent on the land for survival.
Perhaps the so-called twenty percent (which you might be understating) of indigenous peoples who disagree with you do not need counselling, and are not simply lazy. Perhaps, like you, they see the value in hard work but do not see the value of assimilation and scant lip-service to an indigenous identity. Perhaps this “twenty percent” is not obsessed with ancient wrongs, but are grappling with continuing, contemporary issues that you seem all too ready to gloss over.
There are many indigenous people – young and old, of all genders, with or without education, from the cities and from the reserves – who see that the master’s tools have never dismantled the master’s house, and would rather sacrifice the benefits of economic development for the hard yet ultimately more rewarding work of cultural and social resurgence against oppression.
Adam Barker is a settler academic from Haudenosaunee territory; he now lives and works in WSANEC (Coast Salish) territory. He is a recent graduate of the MA in Indigenous Governance Program, University of Victoria, and is an active writer and alt-media junkie.
