Today marks a new milestone in a long history of broken trust between Indigenous people and the Government of Canada. A government that pledged its commitment to truth and reconciliation has failed again to live up to its promise. On a day when we were to focus on our Treaty fishery my people had to watch their Chief be arrested and detained to further intimidate us and to send a hostile message to all Indigenous people. That message is that the government of Canada can and will continue to strip us of our dignity when the opportunity arises.
The contrast between yesterday when an Indigenous Governor General dissolved the government and today is staggering and should concern all Canadians. Here you have a government that fails to honour what we should view as a sacred agreement between our forefathers and mothers as Canadians and Indigenous people – our treaties of peace and friendship have turned into conflict and mistrust. I’m calling on all my Canadian brothers and sisters to recognize that this is the definition of systemic racism. I want to take this opportunity to issue a plea to Canadians to stop this government from undoing what our people agreed upon in the original treaties. We are all better than a government that misrepresents us and brazenly dismisses and damages the special relationship between non-Indigenous people and our First Nations.
We recognize these actions are also focussed on satisfying the commercial fishery and to ensure Bernadette Jordan is favoured in the next election. We must all see through the dynamics at play here and say enough….we need to repair the damage they have done to our ancestral and sacred relationship. What happened today we all must know was never what the authors of our treaties intended. While we have lost all confidence in the government of Canada – we believe and trust in Canadians.
