William Nikolakis - Reclaiming Indigenous Governance: Reflections and Insights from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United States

If you can remember the taste, you can rebuild the recipe. There is a common, consistent theme in conversations across the Indigenous world of North America that in order to go forward, we must look backward. In order to rebuild successful governance, we have to remember what that looked like through our own cultural lens, not as Indigenous people but as Ktunaxa, Blackfoot, Cree, Anishinabe, and so forth. Terms like indigenize and decolonize are like ice cream; everyone has a favorite flavor until they taste something new. The taste that the Ktunaxa people long for is the taste of our own identity. As the original peoples of Turtle Island, we and so many others have been hidden under the blanket identities that the colonial governments covered us with. Many of us have suffocated, or are near death.

In the forty-plus years that I have been actively involved in what is often known as Indian politics, I have been many things. I have been an Indian, a Native person, an Aboriginal person, a First Nations person, an Indigenous person... and these are just the politically correct terms. But I am Ktunaxa, a citizen of the Ktunaxa Nation. This identity lives in my heart, not on a piece of paper. The culture of the colonizers is a paper-based culture where relationships are likely to be negotiated and written down, not built in the process of being lived. The spirit of the law is forgotten and the focus is on the letter. The Ktunaxa Nation recognizes the Syilx, the Secwepemc, the Blackfoot, andother nations with whom we have shared thousands of years of interactions. The Ktunaxa Nation recognizes its own citizens. If you can trace your Ktunaxa roots backward into the past, then you are Ktunaxa, and it does not matter what some other government says you are. When we accept the labels that are generalizable and portable to accommodate other governments, we chip away at our own identity. The time has come to remember, reclaim, rebuild. Remembering is rebuilding.

Less than one hundred years ago, the Ktunaxa Nation was, for the most part, self-sufficient. We still lived a life that reflected our own understandings of the world and our long-established relations with each other. There are tribal citizens alive today who can still recall those days with clarity and purpose. We want to get back to that, but sometimes we get in our own way. Over the years, elders have acknowledged that it is often our own internal struggles that hold us back in our fight to rebuild systems of our own for governing our lands and communities. The Canadian courts and the governments of Canada increasingly recognize our rights, but the hard part is the internal effort to put meaning to those rights, to give them practical effect on the ground. That requires leadership.

Politics and leadership are not the same. Today we need fewer politicians and more leaders. Many of the people who are actively involved today in Ktunaxa nation rebuilding are descendants of Ktunaxa hereditary chiefs, of men and women who knew how to be leaders. Those nations that have replaced politics with leadership and who are remembering what self-government is in terms of cultural beliefs and practicesthey are the ones most likely to win the support of their citizens. They are the ones most likely to advance in spite of the uncertainties of the broader environment that we have to live in.

To me, nation building or rebuilding is about nations reclaiming their identities. It is about nations reclaiming their own version of the relationship between individual and community. Call it citizenship or whatever you like, but that relationship is rooted in what we shareour culture, our obligations to each other, the understanding of our roles in our communities, our roots in the past. Nation rebuilding is about getting out from under the Indian Act in Canada or, in another country, getting out from under whatever colonial mechanism keeps you accountable to someone elses idea of who you are or who you should be.

When the Ktunaxa Nation entered into the British Columbia Treaty process in 1994, we decided that our purpose was to create our own government, something that reflected our peoples vision and could bring it into being. Wewanted internal recognition of the authority that the nation has by virtue of inherent right, and then to build culturally legitimate institutions that could effectively exercise that right and represent us in interactions with the other governments around us. Self-determination through self-government was our first priority; if that led to a treaty with the other two levels of government, that would be good too.

For two years we held meetings, most of them in our own citizens homes, sitting at the kitchen table, talking about what our people wanted, searching for that vision. Our people focused in particular on four things: our land, our language and culture, our people, and our government. Those were the things we wanted to be in charge of and to take care of.

We talked a lot to the young people during those two years, because we knew they would have to live with whatever we created. There was one young woman on our staff who met often with young people to talk about the future of the nation. One of the things that came out of her conversations was an idea of the nation as a kind of a tipia wide circle of multiple poles that meet together at the top. Each pole was one element or activity that our young people felt was important for the nation, a critical piece of the picture. A tipi is a strong structure because of that circle of poles, their feet on the ground, joined at the top. It is a sturdy structure that can protect you. As you strengthen each pole, you strengthen the structure.

In the course of conversations like those, we began sharing our ideas and rebuilding our nation. We began building a government of our own, a government of laws. The concept of law is not foreign to the Ktunaxa; living within the natural law that was given to the Ktunaxa by the Creator is at the core of our being. The Ktunaxa creation story is the source of the Ktunaxa Nations responsibility; Ktunaxa citizens were entrusted with the responsibility to act as stewards within their homelands. The Creator owns the world and we are to care for it accordingly. The Ktunaxa creation story has been handed down for thousands of years and is a comprehensive, multilayered accounting of how human beings, including the Ktunaxa, came to be. It describes relationships. The Ktunaxa language describes concepts of how humans relate to our environments: social, spiritual, and physical. These relationships are what we would describe as our culture. The concepts embedded in the Ktunaxa language inform us of how we are to behave, how we are to govern ourselves. This shared language, our stories, our history, and our concepts of relationship make us unique. We live and act within the natural law, developing structures, systems, policies, procedures...