This editorial Is reprinted from The Eastern Door weekly of Kahnawake. It was writtenby editor Kenneth Deer.
The recent Supreme Court opinion on Quebec separation, while closing some windows to Quebec, left a wide opening to the Indigenous Peoples.
The court said Quebec did not have a right to separate under international law, stating that:
“The international law right to self-determination only generates, at best, a right to external self-determination in situations of former colonies; where a people is oppressed, as for example under foreign military occupation; or where a definable group is denied meaningful access to government to pursue their political, economic, social and cultural development.
“In all three situations, the people in question are entitled to a right to external self-determination because they have been denied the ability to exert internally their right to self-determination. Such exceptional circumstances are manifestly inapplicable to Quebec under existing conditions.
“Accordingly, neither the population of the province of Quebec, even if characterized in terms of ‘people’ or ‘peoples,’ nor its representative institutions, the National Assembly, the legislature or government of Quebec, possess a right under internaitonal law to secede unilaterally from Canada.”
While this statement denies Quebec aspirations to use international law as a vehicle to gain independence, it leaves the door open to Indigenous Peoples.
The court opinion states that colonized peoples have a right to external self-determination. Quebec is not a colonized people because Quebec has been the COLONIZER. The French have been the ones to colonize this land since the time of contact. Just as the English have.
When Quebec, or Lower Canada as it was called at the time, joined the Dominion of Canada in 1867 and began distancing itself from Great Britain, it was not being decolonized. Not at all. Canada was a colony of Great Britain and it was detaching itself from the “Mother Country,” but Canada itself was a population of colonizers who had colonized the Indigenous Peoples living there.
It was our people who were colonized, not the Canadians or the Québécois. Separating Canada from Great Britain did not change our colonial situation.
And still today, the Indigenous Peoples living in Canada have not been decolonized. We have been subjugated, oppressed and denied access to our political structures, our spirituality, our land and resources, and denied any social and cultural development. All of these elements, as clearly stated in the Supreme Court opinion on Quebec separation, if applied to Quebec, would give them a right to external self-determination. It does not apply to Quebec but it does apply to the Indigenous Peoples in Quebec.
Canada may argue that it has given the Indigenous Peoples ample control over certain program delivery systems to mimic self-determination, but it is very clear that the Indigenous Peoples have never been decolonized. And as such, we have an external right to self-determination, by virtue of the Supreme Court of Canada’s own definition of that right.
The Supreme Court did not want to make any statement on the issue of the Aboriginal question in a separate Quebec. Instead it dodged the issue by stating that it did not have to deal with the question since it denied Quebec’s legal right to secede under international law.
However, it inadvertently helped our argument for self-determination probably more thanit realized.
