Grand Chief Ronald M. Derrickson served as Chief of the Westbank First Nation for a dozen years and was appointed a Grand Chief by the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs.Handout
Grand Chief Ronald M. Derrickson served as Chief of the Westbank First Nation for a dozen years and was appointed a Grand Chief by the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs. He is co-author of the award-winning Unsettling Canada: A National Wake-Up Call and The Reconciliation Manifesto. His latest book is Fight or Submit: Standing Tall in Two Worlds, from which this essay has been adapted.
My political commitment today is as a grand chief, but my occupation is businessman. Although it would be more accurate to say entrepreneur. I am a hunter and gatherer of business opportunities and today I run more than three dozen businesses. And I am not shy about being successful. Outside my office building, 25 Coastal Salish totem poles rise from the surrounding grassland. The office itself has become a kind of Indigenous art gallery with paintings, sculptures and carvings from Indigenous artists from British Columbia and beyond. When I step inside, I am always reminded of the beauty of my people and their amazing talents. How we have endured the waves of oppression that were released against us again and again.
At some point in my life I said the hell with it, I am as smart or smarter than any white man and I am not going to go through life with downcast eyes. Or downcast anything. From the first moment I stepped into a white classroom as a six-year-old Indian kid, I understood that I would have to fight or submit. And very quickly I learned that there were a lot of white Canadians who would not hesitate to use every advantage, every underhanded trick to steal from us. At a very young age I determined I would not hesitate to use the same tactics against them to fight for myself and my people. I did not pull punches in my career and I will not pull my punches here.
A favourite negotiating tactic was charging a premium for white racism. When I was negotiating and someone said something racist, I would show no reaction, but I would quietly add a penalty to the negotiation, something between $15,000 and $20,000 to my bottom line so they would pay in hard cash for their transgressions, even if they were unaware of it. (I hope some of my negotiating opponents are reading this and know now why my ask was suddenly raised in the middle of a negotiation and why I would settle for no less than the additional 20 grand.) I know that most of those who negotiate on our behalf today would not think of doing such a thing, and that is proof that they should not be negotiating on our behalf.
One of the first acts when I became chief in the 1970s was to commission a detailed 400-page study of how white Canadians managed, through self-serving legislative and legal manoeuvres as well as outright fraud, to steal our lands from the original grant until we were left with the tiny portion that we have today. The study is a lesson in the profound dishonesty and rampant fraud of our white neighbours. I will give you some examples here so you can understand how our land was outright stolen by local conspirators and how Indians were beaten back whenever they tried to protest the injustices – often using the same tactics that were used against me when I was chief 50 years later.
I would be elected and re-elected five times and I would manage to transform Westbank First Nation from one of the poorest to one of the most economically successful bands in Canada, increasing its revenues by 3,500 per cent in my first six years in office. But, being band chief turned out to be a death-defying act for me that was capped off by a Royal Commission into my affairs. Even for a speedboat champion, this would turn out to be one hell of a ride.
In the summer of 1982, I could feel the hatred rising around us. In trying, at long last, to get a fair deal for ourselves, and in having real economic success, we had kicked the hornet’s nest of racism and anger that had been hovering on the edges of our dealings with white Canadians for the past 100 years.
My first encounter with the plot was on Aug. 21, 1982, when I received a knock on the door and was met by a thug from Edmonton, wielding a sharpened still bar, a two-foot-long piece of steel with a sword edge.
Instantly, blows from the bar were raining down on my head with murderous intensity. Blinded by my own blood, I managed to get up a couple steps and kicked him in the face and then ran upstairs and pulled a revolver from my gun cabinet and shot the assailant in the shoulder. He went down. Realizing he had brought a sword to a gunfight, he got up and stumbled back down the stairs. I looked through the window from upstairs and saw he was pulling out a sawed-off shotgun from his car, and so I shot him again from the window. The police captured the man as he was preparing to flee back to Alberta, with my bullet still lodged in his hastily bandaged shoulder, when a local motorcycle officer heard his description on the radio and arrested him in his motel parking lot.
Today, the 2,500-acre Westbank Band area that I began with is now 5,306 acres. I have done my bit to reverse the century of our land losses. I left the job of chief with my head held high, having accomplished more than I had set out to do and kept the faith of the people of the community who had once again put their faith in me.
Canada is taking a long time to get its act together. The Trudeau government’s sham reconciliation is collapsing under the weight of its own falsehoods. They even kicked Jody Wilson-Raybould, their prize Indigenous woman supporter, out of her justice portfolio and then out of cabinet and even out of the party, and in the past two years they have likely arrested more Indigenous land defenders than Stephen Harper ever did.
We saw these racist policies in force again last week when the RCMP stood idly by while Mi’kmaq lobster fishermen were attacked by an angry white mob in southern Nova Scotia. Mi’kmaq people were assaulted, their equipment destroyed and a vehicle burned by the white fishermen with the complicity of the police and government. The same thing was happening on our salmon rivers in British Columbia 40 years ago and it is depressing to see it still happening today.
I am encouraged by the dedication of many of our young people in standing up for their rights, but I must admit, I am impatient at the rate of change in a country that promises so much and delivers so little.
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