To understand the evolving relationship between Aboriginal and Non-Aboriginal people, I like to look back to the final report of the Royal Commission of Aboriginal Peoples in Canada. And the work of the ARCAPP, as it was known was released in 1996. And they used a particular wheel as an organizing principle to understand the way that relationships developed between Aboriginal and Non-Aboriginal people. It's important to contextualize the work of the ARCAPP. In the events that happened in 1990 and that lead to a crisis in Canada which then cause the formation of this Royal Commission. And I would like to say a little bit about why the report of the Royal Commission matters even now, some 20 years later. First of all, we have to understand what happened at Kanesatake or Oka in 1990 there's a lot of resources out there that explain the details of the crisis. But for our international participants, it's important to know that there was a long standing resistance to a development project that was occurring on lands bordering the Kanesatake reserve. Just northwest of Montreal,uh, Quebec in Canada. And the events leading up to, What's now known as the Oka Crisis included the expansion of a nine hole golf course to eighteen and a condominium development on lands that included burial sites of Mohawk people. So the Mohawk residents of Kanesatake actually, set up resistance with numerous residents in the town, neighboring town of Oka. They marched against the development project. They sent letters to the mayor and council. And they were ignored for many months leading up to this to the tension. What, what ended up happening is, the bulldozers were. We're going to come in to, desecrate the area known as the Pines, where the burial site was. And that was the point at which the, the women and men of Kanesatake erected a barricade on a small unpaved road that led to the pines, and the police were called and sent in to remove the, the blockade. What happened is the that, that morning of July 11th, 1990. Things didn't go as planned for the, the SQ or the provincial police. And, in the ensuing chaos, the Mohawk people moved onto the main road, and erected a barricade there. There were shots fired. It's, it's not clear whose, whose bullet entered the body of Corporal Marcel Lemay, but one officer was found dead after the shots were fired, and this, This barricade and the tension between the Aboriginal and Non-Aboriginal residents in the town of Oka became very pronounced, Aboriginal people in solidarity with the Mohawks of Kanesatake sent in people to help with the barricade. They sent food and supplies, it became, quite a national cause in the Aboriginal people across Canada had not been this united I think since, since opposition to the white paper of 1969. So, it, it really brought a lot of Aboriginal people together and it, it brought many Canadians to question how things could get to this point. They wanted to understand how did the relationship get to the, to a point where the, the Canadian Army was sent in to relieve the SQ in the middle of that summer. It was a very long standoff, I think the second longest standoff in,uh, North American history with the Mohawks and the police and then the Army facing down each other at the barricades for the entire summer of 1990 right into, The fall when it started to get when it started to get much colder at the end of September and things dissipated. The tensions that, that occurred around Oka were really felt all across Canada and the prime minister of the time, Bryan Malrooney. He set up a royal commission with a very broad mandate to look at renewing and restoring the relationship between aboriginal and non-aboriginal people. And the interesting thing about this royal commission is that it, you know, a lot of royal commissions differ on how valuable they are. But this one was very se-, seen as very credible aboriginal peoples because the commissioners were aboriginal peoples themselves, highly respected among community people. And they undertook a very involved community based consultation process. They visited literally hundreds of aboriginal communities. They commissioned hundreds of research reports on various aboriginal issues. They Sought testimony from aboriginal people, both, in leadership positions but also community grass roots people and voices, and they put everything that was collected out there available on a on a, on a [unknown] for seven generations, and their final report released in 1996, was several volumes, five volumes with 440 recommendations and quite literally thousands of pages to read it's, it's actually a good read. [laugh] I actually would recommend it. But it's a, it is a, it's a lot of reading. But if there's any issue affecting aboriginal people in Canada. I always encourage people to go to this document as a good starting point. Because it really did cover everything from, from education justice women's concerns, elder's concerns, youth And if, if there's any issue, it was, it was covered. They were given a very broad mandate to look at everything that affected the relationship between Aboriginal and Non-Aboriginal people. So it's a really good starting place, And one of the things that was you know, very accessible about the Royal Commission's final report is the way that they organized. The history the, the discussion of all these issues around this, this medicine wheel in 4 quadrants of pre-contact, early contact period, the colonial period and the contemporary moment. And so, I like to use this ...this way of organizing, to look at the relationship, so what, how do we characterize the relationship between aboriginal and nonaboriginal people, and also to look at education. And so we'll be using this, this way of looking at history and development of these issues and concerns through this wheel as its, as an organizing principle. (End of transcription.)
