Presented by William Commanda

Algonquin Elder

1. SECTION I BACKGROUND

In short, the focus is on programs and processes that can lead to earth, individual and group healing, development and peace.

These ideas have been developed as a two fold vision, consistent with views of the Elders and peoples of the territory and the sacred prophecies of indigenous peoples.

The two fold vision focuses

• first on the healing, strengthening and unification of the Aboriginal peoples, and
• second on sharing indigenous ideology, values and culture with all others, in order to develop a circle of all nations and a culture of peace.

The time is now ripe to develop and advance these ideas more formally.

The vision for a healing and peace building centre in the heart of the country emerges out of the ashes of the colonization of this land. A short overview of the historic and current conditions of the lives of Aboriginal peoples is presented to underline the imperative need for an autonomous indigenous vision and actualization of the work on Victoria Island and its relevance for the whole country.

The land speaks of its purpose to the people who belong to it in a way that those who believe the land belongs to them cannot ever really understand. That is the fundamental reality of all colonized lands and here in Canada, it is the central truth that many people of diverse heritage must understand in order to reconcile the great angst in our national identity.

For the Great Divide in Canada is not the conflict between the French and the English, the east and the west, the earliest settlers and the other immigrants, its lighter and darker skinned peoples, or this country’s historic

tensions with its neighbours to the south; rather it lies hidden in the deep and profound alienation from the original peoples of the land, peoples who invariably live a more anguished life at every level than all the other inhabitants of the country.

Canada, governments and citizens both, needs to take a close and honest look at the history of the exploitation of the resources of the people who occupied this continent for countless centuries, the expropriation of the land, and the attempted cultural genocide. Then it needs to make genuine amends for these abuses. Only then will it be able to acknowledge and respect what the original peoples can teach and contribute to our joint development.

Elder Commanda expressed this in a profound and moving way in a meeting with the Governor General and His Excellency, and the Chairman of the National Capital Commission:

I ask you to look within and ask who you are, what you are doing here and who was here before you. Only then will you be able to forgive yourselves for what you and your ancestors have done. After that, you will be guided to do the right and honourable thing by the indigenous peoples, and we will all find healing together. (William Commanda)

In 1990s, the ancestral voices spoke from the land. They aroused and commenced the difficult process of unifying the first children; and they held up a mirror to the rest of the country in which governments and citizens could see both their darker selves and history as well as the potential for a better trail into the future.

This year, the Honourable Robert D. Nault, P.C., M. P., Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, in his presentation to the Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs, Northern Development and Natural Resources stated that "Geographically, my riding is bigger than France." (January 27, 2003). It is an interesting reminder of how this great continent might have looked to the earliest newcomers.

Indeed, when the French first arrived in the New World, and realized its vastness and resources, France’s first objective was to subject the Aboriginal peoples to it its authority and to assimilate them. But commerce, in the form of the fur trade, became the defining quality of the relationship, and exploitation of the resources of the land through the people rather than theft of the land guided the initial spirit of colonization.

When the British looked to these the northern lands, it was the French whom they conquered in 1760. But the great Algonquin chief Pontiac resisted this invasion into his country and drove the British back to the sea. Fearful of this strong resistance to occupation, King George 111 of Britain issued the Royal Proclamation of 1763. More than a third focuses on relations with the Aboriginal peoples, who were acknowledged as organized societies with which treaties must be negotiated. The key elements of this founding constitutional document include the acknowledgement of the nations and tribes as politically distinct groups, acknowledgement of the Crown’s responsibility to provide ‘protection’, and establishment of a treaty procedure to obtain ‘consent’ for land settlement.

The treaty process was the peaceful and not "warring" mechanism to establish relationships between peoples and nations, to reconcile their interests, and it implied a consent, a voluntary adherence, a reciprocal acknowledgement and a mutual respect by the parties. The Proclamation has remained so important to Aboriginal peoples because it confirms that they have an incontestable right over the land.

Aboriginal peoples of the east recorded such agreements in their sacred, ceremonial artifacts – wampum belts and strings; for them, the sacred, the spiritual dimension was an integral component governing all arrangements of life, and they trusted that the agreements would be honoured and respected accordingly. Sadly, many of these sacred items were stolen, confiscated or destroyed, and their stories and records lost, forgotten, ignored or denied. But three Wampum Belts carried by Elder Commanda remain vital and relevant to the indigenous issues of these times: one a prophecy belt and the other two agreement belts. They have guided the work of the Elder for thirty years, and are particularly relevant to this initiative:

If there is any doubt that the original peoples were in fact dealt with dishonourably and cruelly by the newcomers, the following itemization of the trials they were obliged to endure following the arrival of the earliest newcomers should be sobering.

The struggles commence with the land, and this remains an issue of great contention. The fundamentally opposed understanding of one’s place and responsibilities on the Earth, the opposing viewpoints of owning land versus being owned by the land, and the new energy of ‘comodifying’ what had been viewed as sacred: these constituted the climate of confusion, misunderstanding, exploitation and expropriation under which the land treaties were negotiated, and they bred a legacy of distrust and conflict.

People are baffled today when Elder Commanda still says we cannot sell Mother Earth, ‘for who would sell his mother?’ Many, who had little or no lands in their countries of origin, have forgotten that only a few centuries ago, the land was the common resource of the peoples who resided upon her. Now people are faintly uncomfortable when Elder Commanda asserts, even your Bible says, in Leviticus Chapter 25, that the land cannot be owned.

Over the past year, he has also referred to this quotation from the Student Bible (New International Edition 1986) for this The Year of Jubilee:

The complementary explanatory note entitled 25:28 Property Rights states, "God’s law provided for a kind of redistribution of wealth every 50 years, when all land would revert to its original owners. The tendency for the rich to buy up all the property (which originally had been divided equally among families) was reversed in the Year of Jubilee. In essence, you could not sell your land, only lease it).

A full reconciliation seems beyond us at this time. But it is definitely dawning on many that in this time of crisis in the Earth’s health and well being, we may need the prayers and forgiveness of the indigenous peoples of the land to lead us to the road of healing, balance and integration.

If divorce from the land was one devastating way of stripping the indigenous peoples off their homes, it was only matched by the Indian Act, conceived by the country’s first Prime Minister, John A. McDonald (who also acted as his own minister of Indian Affairs). In 1876, he unleashed measures which were aimed at stripping them of their identity, by defining who was and was not Indian, and in that process dividing and conquering them, destroying their political, judicial and cultural structures, and their spirit of self reliance and independence.

The third crucial blow, and perhaps the most destructive, came with outlawing of their spiritual ceremonies. Here government attacked what the priests could not eliminate – the profound and integrated spirituality that impacted every facet of their lives.

The next attempt at cultural genocide came in 1892 with the Residential School era when children were not only frequently removed by force from their homes and every vestige of their "Indianess", including their language, attacked and undermined, but they were also violated physically and sexually. Sixty years later it was the time of the "Sixties Scoop", when the families were further eroded as native children from across the country were forcibly removed from their homes and housed with white families. In 1968 there was the White Paper, designed to further erode the status of the First Peoples, and eliminate the federal government’s responsibility to them.

The OKA crisis, fought over the issue of expanding a golf course over ancient aboriginal burial grounds, brought the different beliefs about land into sharp focus again, galvanized native peoples across the country into unity, and placed Aboriginal issues firmly on the front burner of the nation’s attention. And in the face of the current reality, Canada was forced to see the ugly reflection of its racist and exploitative past.

The overt and systemic racism at the core of Canada’s relationship with the indigenous peoples has become most graphically illustrated over the course of the last forty years in the criminal justice system. Several highly publicized cases served to draw attention to the disproportionate representation of indigenous peoples in all segments of Canada’s justice system – contact with police, courts, prisons and release programs:

• the 1971 murder and subsequent travesty of justice in the investigation of the Helen Betty Osborne rape and murder case,
• the 1988 police shooting of J.J. Harper, and
• the blatant racism integral to the arrest, trial and conviction of Donald Marshall Junior for a murder he had not committed.

This is a sad irony. Elder Commanda’s people are the Mamuwinini, the nomads; he tells often of how the Algonquins comprise 84 nations who spanned the North American continent. Now, the crushing of the spirit of the peoples has come full circle as so many young Aboriginal people pound the confines of their cells.

But this is not the only issue. Aboriginal peoples are denied any socio-economic and political power as an entity. While other ethnic groups have for decades been able to form associations to preserve and celebrate their diversity and individuality, the indigenous peoples have been denied the same opportunities to preserve their identities, languages and traditions. They have also been denied the right to unity. They have been attacked at the core of their spiritual heritage, that fundamental belief that "We are all related", and this has weakened them immeasurably.

They are also amongst

• the poorest, and struggle with homelessness or impoverished living conditions, both on and off reserve,
• suffer significant health crises, and struggle with debilitating substance abuse, fetal alcohol syndrome and fetal alcohol effect,
• experience the highest youth suicide rates,
• experience the highest school dropout rates,
• struggle with unemployment, on and off reserves
• have more single mother families, and
• suffer high rates of sexual, physical and mental abuse.

It is on the land again that we can explore our common position. For the past twenty years, Elder Commanda has been reminding us of the worsening conditions of life on Mother Earth. This took a most poignant form when he offered the opening prayer at the first World Summit on Arts and Culture, hosted by Canada in 2000.

As always, he acknowledged Mother Earth. He pointed out how he could not drink the waters on his reserve any longer. He mentioned the people who were dying of lung cancer because of the poor quality of the air, and of skin cancers because we have no protection from the strong rays of the sun any more. And finally, he told how he could no longer practice his art of canoe making because the birch tree could no longer grow big enough. It was a sad eulogy to the four chief elements. (William Commanda)

Now, as the world is forced to address environmental issues collectively, and we debate the Kyoto agreement, more and more of us cannot help but feel a panic in our very personal lives as we begin to realize where our disrespect for the four sacred elements has left us.

Just a few reminders should provoke our attention:

• it is estimated that in about 150 years, we depleted the oil and gas it took the planet 300 million years to accumulate. In just 100 years, the world population has grown from 1.5 billion to over 6 billion people, who will have ever increasing energy resource needs,
• the climate is changing dramatically; reckless clear cutting of forests has destroyed air quality and water balances,
• the air that we breathe, drinking water and the seas are contaminated by the wastes of industrialization,
• soil is being eroded, modified by chemicals and is losing its fertility,
• farming is in crisis; mad cow disease is a new concern and we have now embarked on farming sealife; increasingly we use genetically modified foods, and

• old and new diseases threaten whole nations with annihilation.

As we transform the wild, we grow further estranged from the life sources that sustained humanity from its very beginnings. With this alienation from Mother Earth has also come greater anxiety about our physical, mental and emotional health.

Here in North America, we now see the fruits of our unquenchable self centred materialistic drive in the new crises – disproportionate distribution of wealth, homelessness, crime, violence, substance abuse, and the anger, violence and hopelessness reflected in today’s youth. These struggles take their place against the back drop of a looming global war.

Yes, we are living in difficult times. But the spirit of the indigenous peoples is not extinguished. Despite the years of silencing, it is rising and presenting the world with new ways of understanding

• our relationship with Mother Earth (sustainable development),
• our relationships with each other (restorative practices),
• health (wholistic healing) and indeed,
• with an all encompassing spiritual dimension.

Many world spiritual leaders now recognize that the salvation of the Earth is inextricably connected with the salvation of the indigenous peoples, and few, spiritually inclined or otherwise, can deny that the Earth and all her creatures are in great agony.

Elder Commanda likes to quote this Native American Prayer whenever the occasion arises, because it is a dire and sobering warning about the irrevocable equalizer gaining on all our lives:

Elder Commanda reminds his peoples that their ancestors welcomed the newcomers, and that they now have a responsibility to honour that commitment. This is the energy that drives his work for racial harmony and inclusion, and his efforts have sometimes been misunderstood.

But with Elder Commanda’s vision for the indigenous healing centre comes the opportunity for the reawakening and cleansing of the energy of the land and the incarnation of the fires of a circle of all nations and a culture of peace in an all encompassing spirit of unity.

Elder William Commanda, Romola and Aboriginal Architect Douglas Cardinal have worked formally and informally to make presentations on the Elder’s vision for Victoria Island, and to seek input into and support for its development. (With the exception of one funded Elders Gathering, Elder Commanda has borne all the expenses for materials, meetings and travel in the development of this vision. He has undertaken this work in addition to his own Circle of All Nations work and demanding travel schedule, and without the support of any administrative infrastructure.)

The following is a breakdown of this outreach effort since 1998; please note that focused efforts to intensify this process commenced in August 2001.

Algonquin Anishinabeg Nation Tribal Council – 1998, 2001, 2002

Circle of All Nations Millennium Peace Gathering - 2000

March 2002 Victoria Island Healing Centre Algonquin Elders’ Gathering – 2002

Circle of All Nations Annual August Spiritual Gathering – 2000, 2001, 2002

Aboriginal Day Gathering of Nations Pipe Ceremony at Victoria Island – 2002

Circle of All Nations November Workshops - 2002

Lac Simon, Pikogan, Temiscaming, Winneway, Golden Lake

Kitigan Zibi

Aboriginal Organizations involved in healing programs in the Ottawa area

Aboriginal Healing Foundation

First Nations Confederacy of Cultural Educational Centres

National Aboriginal Health Organization

Aboriginal Community Healing Organizations

Governor General and His Excellency – 2000 and 2002

Heritage Canada

National Capital Commission

Public Works Canada
Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development

Health Canada

City of Ottawa

Elder Commanda has also shared the vision at international events in Germany, South Africa, United States and the Bahamas, and with indigenous Mayan, Hopi and Navajo elders. There is great interest and support for all the Elder’s work from his diverse global community, which is exciting for the international peace building component of the Victoria Island vision.

• Healing, strengthening and unifying indigenous peoples
• Healing individual and collective relationships with Mother Earth
• Healing relationships with all others

A two pronged plan is envisioned to achieve this objective

• Create a Circle of Nations Spiritual Healing Centre for Aboriginal peoples to

The key priorities for each component of the overall plan are envisioned as either processes, programs or spaces. Together they constitute a living ecosystem from which indigenous ideology can retrench on the sacred land, strengthen and be shared with all, and take its rightful place in the governance and values of this land. It is seen as going without saying that both women and men and young people will be actively involved in developing this vision with the Elders.