Canada has become a leader in the movement against the
racism practiced against indigenous peoples that has so long been common
practice in much of the world. Is it possible that Ottawa will really follow
the lead of Alberta and other provinces by recognizing the rights given to
aboriginal people in the Constitution without hassle? Such an act would shift
cases out of courts into nation-on-nation negotiations.
It�s taken 36 years since repatriation of our constitution
for our national government to reach this point, and it will take many years
more for the system to move from legislation into practical reality. But in
the end it will reduce legal conflict, generate goodwill and save taxpayer
dollars. That�s a lot, and it�s part of a larger story I�d like to share.
This tale began when the dogs of war were raging across the Atlantic during
WW2.
Although he was a life-long pacifist and supporter of
human rights causes, Albert Einstein will ironically be remembered also as
the man who convinced US president Franklin Roosevelt to begin the Manhattan
Project. Led by the United States with support from Britain and Canada, the
development of nuclear weapons took place during World War II. It led to the
only use of nuclear bombs in anger (so far), at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In a now-famous letter, Professor Einstein suggested that
nuclear chain reactions in large masses of uranium could release �vast
amounts of power and large quantities of new radium-like elements.� And, he
speculated, �Extremely powerful bombs of a new type may thus be constructed.�
While America had only poor ores of uranium, Einstein said, �There is some
good ore in Canada.� Therein lies a tragic story.
Twenty years ago, an indigenous woman from the Sahtu First
Nation described that tragedy to a United Nations conference on Human Rights.
Cindy Gilday spoke on a panel considering whether the environment, the
economy and human rights were �cross currents or parallel streams.�
The company I worked for, Amoco Canada (now BP), had
sponsored Ms. Gilday�s presentation at the conference. Held in Edmonton, its
purpose was to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights � a document largely drafted by John Peters Humphrey, a Canadian
who served as the first director of the United Nations� Division of Human
Rights.
The Edmonton conference brought together human rights
activists from around the world. Many had been jailed for having the impertinence
to suggest, for example, that their national governments endorse democracy.
One speaker after another described the global struggle
for human rights. They argued forcefully that rights are universal, and do
not conflict with cultural or religious values. Ms. Gilday�s presentation
spoke to the experience of one Indigenous nation during the Second World War.
At the time, her people lived a largely nomadic existence: few spoke much
English, and they knew almost nothing about the war. As it happened, however,
their traditional territory was near the uranium mine being developed for the
Manhattan Project.
The ore came from a rich deposit of uranium and radium
along the shores of Great Bear Lake, in the Northwest Territories. During the
long days of summer, a wartime mining company hired local men to carry
40-kilogram burlap bags of ore from the mine to the Mackenzie River. They
carried those loads for long hours, for months on end. When the bags ripped
apart, the Sahto people shifted the spilled ore off the trail, but took the
contaminated bags to their temporary village. There, the burlap found many
uses.
Years later, the ore-carriers began dying of cancer, and
the community (today a settlement of some 450 known as Deline, 544 km
northwest of Yellowknife) became, in Ms. Gilday�s words, �a village of
widows.� The people became aware of the connection between radioactivity and
cancer. They also came to understand that they had unwittingly helped
contaminate their remote northern homeland with radioactive waste.
The families of the men who served as ore-carriers during
the war had wounds that are yet to be healed, Ms. Gilday said. �Like most
Native Americans, their culture, spirit and their very beings are linked
intimately with the well-being of mother earth. This has been compromised by
uranium mining contamination....If their environment is compromised, their
lives are compromised.� She said their wartime experience involved a breach
of human rights, which no government had ever attempted to redress. But there
was a war on, and that took precedence over everything else.
But whichever side of this argument you take, I thought at
the time, Ms. Gilday�s story illustrated three powerful trends in modern
society. The dynamic relations among public health, safety and the
environment were a single issue. Another was that many of the world�s
indigenous peoples were learning to mobilize public opinion in their effort
to reclaim traditional lands and livelihoods. The third was that moral claims
based on human rights have economic and political force. �Each has powerful
implications for globally organized business,� I reported.
Declarations of Human Rights. Another important
source of change in Canadian attitudes to each other came indirectly from the
human rights efforts of John Peters Humphrey, a Montr�aler. Montr�aler Mr.
Humphrey drafted the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights, which the UN passed in 1948. The following
year, he drafted and the UN passed a group of related international
agreements, which included the four Geneva Conventions.
The Soviet Union�s UN representative, Andrei Vishinsky,
dismissed the declaration as just a �collection of pious phrases.� Sadly, for
the first two decades of its existence, Vishinsky�s assessment seemed to be
accurate. But by the 1970s the declaration had begun gathering momentum. For
example, in 1977 Canada passed the Canadian Human Rights Act, with the
express goal of extending the law to ensure equal opportunity to everyone
with our country.
Western democracies expected their leaders to raise human
rights issues when they visited such countries as China. Large corporations
that bought from Third World sweatshops or operated within the countries that
were the worst abusers of their citizens frequently found themselves the
targets of boycotts and picket lines. And countries that systematically
violated human rights found the world�s economic powers imposing embargoes
and economic sanctions upon them.
No one understands this better than South Africa�s
Anglican archbishop emeritus Desmund Tutu. As a critic of the former
South African system of Apartheid, Mr. Tutu received the Nobel Peace Prize in
1984. His moral influence led to intense international economic and
diplomatic pressure on the racist government of South Africa, and his efforts
contributed to abandonment of institutional racism, in 1994. This was an
important victory for the human rights movement outside the western world.
Tutu was the keynote speaker at the human rights
conference in Edmonton. The charismatic archbishop characterized South
Africa�s victory over Apartheid as a �spectacular victory over the forces of
evil and wickedness.� In his introduction to a wide-ranging address on South
Africa�s Truth and Reconciliation hearings, which he had led, this tiny man
added a small but enormously significant comment, to thunderous applause.
�Our victory is your victory,� Mr. Tutu said. �Thank you, thank you, thank
you, for your support.�
After centuries of human rights abuses, Mr. Tutu said, �We
in South Africa are a wounded people, in need of reconciliation. By enabling
this reconciliation to occur, perhaps God is setting up South Africa as a
beacon to the world.� He chuckled about �the perverse sense of humour� of the
Divine, which he said could make �a troubled country like South Africa a
beacon of hope for such countries as Bosnia, Rwanda and Serbia.�
The movement that Mr. Tutu so articulately represents had
gained strength in recent decades. Why?
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights and a group of
related international agreements, including the four Geneva Conventions
signed in 1949, created a body of thought respecting human rights, war crimes
and humanitarian law. Although it took some time, national governments and
international bodies have given teeth to this body of law. And publicity
promoted by human rights groups is combining with TV and computer screens
full of graphic scenes of humanitarian disasters. Victims are no longer seen
as someone else�s problem.
There is also the question of the moral high ground. Many
� perhaps most � of the world�s human rights activists are driven by a sense
of higher purpose. Albert Einstein famously remarked that �God does not play
dice with the universe.� Cindy Gilday talked about the �culture, spirit and
very being� of Indigenous peoples as being �intimately linked with the
well-being of mother earth.� And Archbishop Tutu�s profession speaks for
itself.
While spiritual values are no doubt one important value
behind the human rights movement, �the struggle for democracy� is another. In
a notable book by that name, Patrick Watson and Benjamin Barber put the point
concisely. �We found that to tell the story of democracy is also to explore
the fundamental human urge towards self-mastery and liberation: the
inclination to speak openly, communicate freely, pray according to one�s
beliefs, dance to one�s own tune, think as one pleases � but to do so in the
company of other men and women in a spirit of cooperation.�
At the time, I was a true believer. Many forces shaped the
human rights movement. The expansion of democracy was one. The human spirit
is certainly another. A sense of the Divine, perhaps, is a third. And a growing
body of international law underlies all three. Whatever the causes of this
remarkable movement, people throughout the world have benefited.
This movement took on a new character with the United
Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). The UN
issued the declaration in 2007, but Canada was one of four countries that
initially objected to it � the others were the United States, Australia, and
New Zealand. That began to change after July 2015 when the Government of
Alberta announced plans to incorporate UNDRIP provisions into law and policy.
The federal government followed suit and withdrew Canada�s objector status in
May 2016, although at the time Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould said the
government�s stance on the declaration couldn�t be adopted as is into
Canadian law.
�Simplistic approaches such as adopting the United Nations
declaration as being Canadian law are unworkable and, respectfully, a
political distraction to undertaking the hard work actually required to
implement it back home in communities,� Wilson-Raybould told the chiefs at the 37th annual Assembly of
First Nations.
Will it continue? That�s the question of the hour. The
decline of the once-great American democracy worries me greatly. So do wars
and environmental damage throughout the world � disruptions which have
created conditions in which our planet now hosts more than 65 million
refugees, asylum-seekers and internally displaced people.
As the map at the beginning of this piece illustrates,
Canada, Scandinavia and a few smaller nations in Oceania are the lucky
countries in the world. In those countries, dynamic democracies are fighting
the racism Sahtu activist Cindy Gilday described with such fervour twenty
years ago.
