From indigenous nationhood to neoliberal aboriginal economic development

In the paper Cliff Atleo provides an overview of Indigenous-Settler relations in Canada, thoughtfully mapping out the historical context of this relationship in the latter half of the 20th century that help set the groundwork for the greater acceptance of neoliberalism and the contemporary Aboriginal economic development agenda. [...] Taiaiake Alfred, in his most recent book, Wasáse, writes of Western liberalism and colonialism, The basic substance of the problem…is the belief in the superiority and universality of Euroamerican culture, especially in the concepts of individual rights as the highest expression of human freedom, representative democracy as being the guarantor of peace and order, and capitalism as the only means t [...] In many ways, this mirrored the policies of the “termination era” in the United States.15 Dale Turner writes that it was a “calculated attempt by the federal government to ‘get out of the Indian business’…by unilaterally legislating the Indians into extinction.”16 Harold Cardinal wrote in The Unjust Society, a passionate and polemical response to the White Paper, that the government plans were “en [...] It is the emergence of this kind of mutual acknowledgement that I would understand to be the only standard of positive change and integration.22 Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Manuel, Cardinal, Deloria and others would continue to call for Indigenous community resurgence in the spirit of noninterference, however, as the struggle increasingly took place at the negotiation tables and in the court r [...] The Nisga’a of British Columbia brought their claims before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in England in 1913.24 The Nisga’a would continue to lead the way in the political and legal realms, and in 1973, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled on a claim brought forward by Nisga’a leader, Frank Calder.