How NWT Indians formed a brotherhood for self-rule and why Canada took notice.
By Jasmine Budak
In 1967, Canada turned 100 and Yellowknife became the new capital city of the Northwest Territories. With this new hub status came a federally appointed commissioner and his team from Ottawa. Around then, southern-style hamlet councils were beginning to pop up in each village, and a federal Indian Affairs branch had set up shop in Fort Smith. Gold, radium and uranium mines dotted the terrain and oil and gas exploration was on the horizon. As their land attracted bureaucracy and business, it seemed to the Dene that their input was frustratingly ignored.
Although the territory’s chiefs met once a year with an Indian Affairs bureaucrat, many saw the meetings as hollow exercises. “It was a nice meeting and we got to see the chiefs from other bands…but we all felt the same, that we were the only ones who wanted to get things changed. Each year…we would be back saying the same things…” a chief once said.
Then in 1968, the federal Indian Affairs department closed its Fort Smith bureau, and with it the chiefs’ only opportunity to meet – a stinging portent of what was coming.
In the summer of 1969, the Trudeau government presented its White Paper in the House of Commons. The provocative policy proposed to dissolve the department of Indian Affairs and reassign the responsibility to provinces and territories – effectively wiping out the government’s constitutional duty to Canada’s first nations. The paper fuelled outrage.
Meanwhile that summer, a delegation of 21 Parks Canada officials came to Lutselk’e to push the idea of a national park. It would be located within some of the best hunting grounds on the east arm of Great Slave Lake. At the meeting, Chief Pierre Catholique realized that the park had been in the making for ten years. It was the first he had heard about it.
Soon after, Catholique famously stated: “Never again will one chief sit down with many government people. From now on, if 21 government people come to a meeting, 21 Indian leaders must come and sit across the table from them.”
In October of 1969 the territory’s 16 chiefs formed the Indian Brotherhood of the Northwest Territories. Mona Jacob was president and Neil Colin, Joe Catholique, Charlie Charlo and Ray Sonfrere were vice presidents. Herb Norwegian, Fort Simpson chief at the time, recalls: “I felt like I was in a field of dandelions sprouting all over the country.”
Aboriginal groups in British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan had already formed in the 1930s and 40s, but most were dismally funded and struggled to survive. The introduction of the controversial White Paper, and new funding for aboriginal groups, initiated a swell of powerful unions. By the end of the 1960s, there were four national, one regional and 33 provincial organizations.
The first task of the new Brotherhood was to establish Dene rights and fight for self-rule over lands they had inhabited for thousands of years. Even though the White Paper was never adopted, NWT’s new government was already handling most aboriginal affairs, including schools, hamlet councils and treaty money.
And in 1972, sticking to the same blueprint it had laid out for aboriginal people across southern Canada, the federal government proposed to settle land claims by creating Indian reserves and handing over money in compensation for aboriginal rights. For the Dene, the idea of claiming land was absurd. Fort Good Hope resident George Barnaby once said: “People are using the word ‘claim.’ We have no claim. The land belongs to the Dene.”
In 1973, the Brotherhood filed a caveat – or interest in land – to more than 1 million square kilometres of land. They hoped to prove that Treaties 8 and 11, signed by their ancestors in 1899 and 1921, did not abolish their sovereignty – and rights.
In September that year, after a summer spent gathering testimonies and evidence, NWT Supreme Court Justice William Morrow ruled that Dene had not abolished their land rights when signing the treaties and had “what is called aboriginal rights.” It was a victory: Dene rights were finally affirmed in Canada’s legal system, paving the way for land claims negotiations.
When the Supreme Court ruled, Francois Paulette, then chief of Fort Smith, was in his political science class at the University of Lethbridge. “I remember arguing with my professor because he said we wouldn’t win,” Paulette says. “Then the ruling came out, and the whole class was applauding.”
Even though the NWT Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court of Canada later overturned the caveat, Judge Morrow’s ruling on aboriginal rights was never challenged. Meanwhile the movement was growing. The Brotherhood ballooned with young men and women, many in their early 20s. Some would go on to become premiers, members of parliament and grand chiefs still defending the same rights.
The ire and energy of these young activists troubled the RCMP, especially following a joint assembly of the Brotherhood and the Métis Association in 1975. That day 300 people voted to adopt the Dene Declaration, a gutsy 15-paragraph statement that essentially pledged independence. “We tore apart the office and found a bug,” Paulette recalls. “I was under surveillance – we all were.”
By the mid-1970s, the Brotherhood, by then called Dene Nation, was inundated with oil and gas exploration along the Mackenzie Delta. Two distinct camps emerged: one that supported a gas pipeline, asserting that Dene would prosper, while others believed in protecting their land. In 1975, B.C. Judge Thomas Berger made his epic journey to 26 NWT communities, gathering a sense of what Dene really wanted. Fort Good Hope chief Frank T’Seleie made this famous statement: “You are coming to destroy a people that have a history of 30,000 years. Why? For 20 years of gas? Are you really that insane? The original General Custer was exactly that insane.”
Berger later imposed a moratorium on oil and gas development until land claims could be settled. Now some three decades later, a natural gas pipeline project still dangles within reach, but today would thread a different geo-political landscape. After the Dene/Métis comprehensive land claim agreement fell apart in 1990, claims regionalized and three of five in the NWT have since settled. Some Dene still hold onto the days of unity. “We’re not as strong as we used to be,” Paulette says. “We’re too fragmented. We don’t have the same passion.”
But the Dene coalition was not without discord. Inevitably, people disagreed about the group’s fundamental direction. Some opposed Dene involvement in territorial politics, while others saw it as their right, and the only way to initiate change.
Since then, many Dene have become politicians – some of them premiers – having cut their teeth in the Brotherhood. “They were good times,” Herb Norwegian says. “It was like we were in university and the elders were our professors. I don’t think any of us have left those teachings behind.”
