The Value of Snuweyeth
The hwinitum government has "taken" most of our territory. It has taken most of the wealth that our ancestors once had. In the past, they also tried to take our culture. In residential schools, they taught our people the English language and English culture. They tried to get us to forget our own language and our own culture. Or to raise generations of our people apart from the community so they would never learn the language and the culture. They have almost succeeded.
Our Hul'qumi'num language is not completely lost. Our culture is not completely lost. The hwinitum government now says they want us to preserve our language and culture. But there is one important part of that culture that they are still trying to destroy: snuweyeth.
The teachings of our elders come from many generations of experience. They are the wisdom our people learned over thousands of years.
Many of our people have tried to explain to the hwinitum the importance of snuweyeth, but they would not listen. Yet some of the hwinitum do have some idea of the importance of snuweyeth. That is why they want us to sign treaties. Treaties don't have to be bad, but every treaty the hwinitum government has ever been willing to discuss with us is a terrible deal for us. Every single treaty they have ever offered or discussed with us is designed to destroy snuweyeth.
Snuweyeth is not just some old stories. Snuweyeth is not just some good ideas. Snuweyeth is to us what the law and the constitution are to Canada and more. Our ancestors followed the teachings. Our elders tell us to follow the teachings. There is no higher law for us than the teachings of snuweyeth.
This is what the hwinitum are trying to do with their treaties. Not only to put an end to any hope that we could regain the use of our territory and fishing areas. Not only to "extinguish" our rights, but to destroy for all time the most important right our ancestors gave us. The right to follow snuweyeth.
There is no word in English that has the same meaning as snuweyeth. It is teachings that are as important as laws. To the English colonists and to modern day hwinitum Canadians, laws are orders from the government that you must obey or be put in prison. Snuweyeth is not orders or threats. It is wisdom about how to live your life. It is wisdom passed on by the elders of our own families who care about us and give us this wisdom as a gift, not a command.
There is no word in English for snuweyeth, but there is a word for our right to follow snuweyeth. That word is "sovereignty."
Sovereignty means independence from any political authority. For the Europeans and their Canadian descendants, that means the highest political authority of a nation. It means the person or group that everyone else has to obey such as the queen or parliament. For us, there was no king or queen or parliament changing the laws. There was no person who gave orders to everyone and punished anyone who did not obey. There was no one who had the power to change snuweyeth to benefit themselves at the expense of everyone else. We have our own nations, but in Coast Salish culture, families are more important than nations. It is more important whether someone is related to you than what nation they are part of. Each family group has its own elder leaders and no one in traditional culture has authority to give them orders and force them to obey or pass laws for the elders to follow. The elders of each family have a sovereign right to follow snuweyeth as they understand it.
The hwinitum government wants us to be governed by a chief and council that passes band council resolutions. This is the same as the mayor and council form of government that was invented in Europe centuries ago. They just changed the title of "mayor" to "chief" so it would sound more "Indian."
The politics around elections do more to split us apart than to bring us together. That, too, is a European tradition, not our own tradition. We do have our own ways and they worked very well for thousands of years.
The hwinitum government wants us to elect chiefs and councils to vote on band council resolutions. They want us split into factions by this kind of politics. They want our leaders to buy votes with government money and false promises. They want our band government to tax alcohol, tobacco, gasoline, food, land, income and everything else. They want us to look to the band office for jobs and paycheques. All of this is just like a city government in European culture. None of it existed in our traditional culture.
The reason they want us to live like this and be governed like Canadian towns and cities is because that's what they want us to be. They want to turn the Indian Reserves into city governments. That's what the "White Paper Policy" in 1969 was all about and they have continued to pursue it ever since. That is still what they want from the treaties they offer us.
They are prepared to pay billions of dollars and spend decades working on this project. As of 2002, we know that they had already spent over five hundred million dollars on treaties. Since then, how much more has been spent? We don't know. Why is this so important to them? The answer is simple. Cities do not have sovereignty. They are not politically independent. They want Canada to have sovereignty over our territories. They do not want Cowichan Tribes to have sovereignty over our territories. They don't admit this is what they want. They pretend they already have it. They tell us their queen is our "sovereign". She is a symbol of the sovereignty of the hwinitum government over Canada.
To us, she should be the symbol of hwinitum sovereignty over hwinitum lands, not over our lands. She is the Queen of England, not the Queen of Cowichan. Or perhaps she could be a symbol of our own sovereignty if we wanted to have a Queen of Cowichan as our symbolic leader. But that should be our choice, not a decision the hwinitum make for us.
We are not the only people who were colonized by the British Empire. We are not the only ones who were told that our language, our culture, our leaders, and our laws are to be replaced with the English language, English culture, English colonial leaders and English laws. Changing the name from English to Canadian doesn't make it any better. They are the same hwinitum.
What happened to the other nations that were colonized by the British? In Africa, Asia, the Pacific Islands, Australia, New Zealand, North America and British Guyana in South America, the people of the British colonies demanded political independence. They demanded sovereignty. Even within the British Isles the Irish, the Scottish and the Welsh demanded independence. The British government said, "no." The people they ruled did not just ask for independence, they did not just demand independence. They told the British that they had always been independent nations. They told the British government they were already sovereign. This happened in Ireland, Scotland, India and all over Africa. Even the British colonists in thirteen colonies in America said they were already independent countries. The native people there also said they were independent nations. The British tried for a very long time to keep control of all those people and even fought wars over it. But the British lost.
The British colonists in America got independence from Britain. The native people in India got independence from Britain. The native people in eighteen countries in Africa got independence from Britain. The Chinese people never lost all their territory to Britain, but they got back Hong Kong which the British had ruled for more than one hundred years. Even the native people of tiny islands in the Pacific Ocean got independence. All of those island countries and African tribes have ambassadors at the United Nations and are treated as legally equal to Canada or Britain or France. But not us.
Most of the native people of the British Empire got independence, but there were some places where that did not happen. A few of those were islands in the Caribbean where the native people had all been killed. Those places got independence anyway. There were six places where the native people still existed, but did not get independence. Those six places are Scotland, Wales, America, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. Two of these did not get independence at all and are still considered part of Britain. That's Scotland and Wales. The other four got independence, but it was British colonists, not the native people, who got independence. The reason appears to be simply that in these places, there were more British colonists than natives. The colonial governments could hold elections and not get immediately outvoted by the natives.
That is our situation. It is not that we are obviously part of Canada and nothing can change that. Some hwinitum say that. The hwinitum said we were part of the British Empire but something changed that. Eighteen countries in Africa were ruled by Britain and now are independent countries. The names of those countries are Botswana, Egypt, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Swaziland, Sudan, South Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, Zimbabwe, and Zambia. They are not ruled by Britain. They are not ruled by British colonists under some new name. The native people are actually running their own countries. If there had been fewer colonists and more natives here, we would probably already be an independent country run by natives. We might have problems like they have had in places like Nigeria and India where many different tribes and nations were put together into one country, but we would not be ruled by people whose ancestors came from Britain.
Many hwinitum say that we should just "get over it" and "It's all history, it's too late to do anything about it." Well, history is not over. Yes, it has been about 150 years since the British started trying to rule us and our lands. Yet in 2014, the people in Scotland were allowed to vote on whether to remain under British rule or not. They had a chance to return to native rule -- after more than 800 years of English Kings and Queens trying to rule them. They even signed a treaty in 1707 that supposedly extinguished their rights and ended their sovereignty. Even after that -- 307 years after that -- they still were allowed to vote on whether to become an independent country again. That was not a vote by all of Britain on whether to let Scotland go. Only people in Scotland got to vote on it. No, 150 years is not too long. It is never too late. Even in Canada, the people in Quebec got to vote on whether to be an independent country or not just because they have a distinct language and culture. They were never an independent country. It's just that most of the people there are descended from colonists who came from France instead of Britain.
Many hwinitum are ignoring all this. They are telling us that we don't have an equal right to the same sovereignty that tribes in Africa got. They are telling us that 150 years is too late for us even when we never signed a treaty giving up our sovereignty but it's not too late for Scotland after 800 years and even after they did sign a treaty more than 300 years ago giving up their sovereignty. They are telling us that a million native people in Canada is too few to be a sovereign country when the Island of Nauru in the Pacific Ocean with only 10,000 people got independence from British and Australian rule and is now a sovereign independent country. And only about half of those 10,000 people in Nauru are natives. If 5,000 natives in Nauru is enough to be an independent country, 5,000 natives in Cowichan are enough to be an independent country. They are telling us that right here in Canada that people in Quebec have a right to vote on whether to be completely independent from the government in Ottawa because they have a distinct society with a distinct language, culture and a different history from the rest of Canada. Well we have an even more distinct society with our own language, culture and different history. We have more of a right to an independence referendum than Quebec had. More than Scotland had. We have as much right to be an independent country as India or South Africa. And both of them actually are independent countries today. The government's lawyers know all this.
Even under the hwinitum laws, we have a right to sovereignty. It is the most important of all aboriginal rights. It is the one they don't want us to know we have because it is so powerful. It is this right that they are willing to spend billions to "extinguish". It's not the hunting rights and the fishing rights or the "land claims" that are the main issue for them. It is sovereignty. They talk about buying out our other rights just to avoid discussing sovereignty. The reason for this is that nations do sometimes sell lands or fishing rights to each other. But nobody ever sells their own sovereignty. Not for any price. Not for nine hundred billion dollars. Not for all the money in the world. The hwinitum government knows that if our people understood our rights, we would not sell them for any price. That is why they talk about paying us to "extinguish" our hunting and fishing rights and to buy our "land claims". Then they put tricky words into the treaty documents that say their queen is our sovereign. If we agree to any treaty that says that, they will say we gave up our sovereignty to their queen. The purpose of those words is to destroy our own sovereignty. The reason they feel like they need to destroy our sovereignty is because they know that our sovereignty actually still exists.
We were clearly sovereign before they came here. We never signed any treaty giving away our sovereignty. So we are still sovereign. It really is that simple.
What does sovereignty really mean for us, though? We weren't planning on having our own queen anyway. Most of our people probably don't care if we have an ambassador at the meetings of the United Nations. If we did have a chance to vote on being an independent country, would we even vote to do it? Or would we vote the same way they did in Quebec and Scotland and say no to independence? And if we would vote to be part of Canada anyway, then who cares?
Here's one reason why sovereignty matters: snuweyeth. The wisdom of our ancestors is more valuable than any amount of money or lands. Yet when our elders tell us how things should be, when they are giving us teachings from snuweyeth, this is no longer treated like it's the most important thing. How the chief and council vote on a band council resolution has the power of law. The words of snuweyeth are treated like the yapping of a small dog that can be safely ignored. This is not right.
The reason for this is that the Indian Act says band council resolutions are the law. The Indian Act says nothing about the words of the elders or snuweyeth. Why do we follow the Indian Act? It was passed by the parliament in Ottawa. Who has more authority in Cowichan territory, the parliament in Ottawa or the elders in Cowichan? Who has sovereignty? It is the same question. If sovereignty over us and our lands belongs to the queen and her parliament, then we should follow the Indian Act instead of snuweyeth. If sovereignty belongs to us in our lands then we should follow snuweyeth and not the Indian Act. We do have a right to do that. And we should.
At election time, families vote against other families to put their relatives on council. In our traditional ways, people from every family came together to make decisions on matters of importance to the community. Nobody got left out because their family didn't have enough votes to get on council. There was no council. Decisions were not made by outvoting people. Majority rule seems good to hwinitum because it's better than just letting one person (a king or queen) make all the decisions. But it's not better than letting all the people make the decisions. Our way was to always seek nutsa'maat. One mind. The hwinitum don't seem to know how to do this. But we do.
Having the wisest elder in each family meet with elders from other families and come to a unanimous agreement on what to do is a much better way. It has worked for our people for thousands of years. Sovereignty means we can just do this again whenever we want to.
We don't have to abolish the band government. At least, not right away. The Canadian government admits that the band government has some kind of authority. They do not admit the elders have any authority at all. Yet if we want to live by snuweyeth, it is simple for the elders to meet and discuss things in the traditional way. There does not have to be any difference between what the elders decide and how chief and council vote. All it takes is a chief and council who will vote in favor of what the elders have decided.
The whole system of chief, council and band office is a hwinitum way of doing things. We should look at how, step by step, our community can do things in more of our own traditional way.
Snuweyeth can help us with many things. Maybe with everything.
In an effort to restore traditional ways, there are three critical issues we will have to deal with. One of these is poverty. Another is the thousands of hwinitum living in our traditional territory. The last one is the hwinitum government saying our traditional territory and fishing areas don't belong to us anymore.
So first, there is poverty. Even though our people were actually wealthy before 1863 when the hwinitum government first sent settlers into Cowichan lands, now most of our people are poor. If all the money that the hwinitum government provides to the band office were to stop tomorrow, we would have a very bad problem. It is not good that we are dependent upon money from the hwinitum government. It gives them power over us.
Our ancestors had wealth because they had a strong economy of their own. The hwinitum government destroyed that economy. When our economy was strong, we were strong. We were independent. When our economy was destroyed, we became weak. Many countries today have independence officially, but their economies are weak and they get millions of dollars a year from other countries -- like Cowichan Tribes does from Canada. Countries like that are not very independent.
This is one of the main reasons that the Canadian government funds the budget of Cowichan Tribes and other Indian Bands. It keeps us dependent instead of independent. The truth is that we could use our sovereignty to make much more actual money than comes to us now from Ottawa. Each family could get money coming directly to them and not be dependent on the government in Ottawa or dependent on the band office, either.
(For details on how this could be done, see Economic Essay Number One.)
Another issue we will have to deal with in any effort to restore our important traditions is that there are thousands of hwinitum living in our traditional territory and fishing in our waters.
In some ways we are lucky. We have had serious problems dealing with them, especially at the beginning, but now our hwinitum neighbors living in our lands are much nicer than colonists in other countries that other native tribes have to deal with. The most important thing we can do is to avoid conflict with them. The hwinitum who live in our traditional territories are our neighbors. More than that, they are immigrants to our lands. They have been taught to think of our lands as their country. The more we talk about our own sovereignty and our rights, the more likely they are to become alarmed and oppose us politically. We need to think about their rights and what will benefit them. We need to find ways to make sure that a return to snuweyeth in our territories benefits the hwinitum here. Then we need to explain that to them. Right now they think that our rights cost them money. That's the main reason hwinitum oppose our rights. All we have to do is show them how they will benefit more if things are done the way we want. After all, we are not trying to take anything from them. We have a solution that will create more opportunities, more wealth and a better life for everyone here, not just for Cowichan people. If the local hwinitum in our lands understand that and they actually benefit from our first steps in that direction, they will want to go further in that direction with us. They will support our rights, our snuweyeth, and our sovereignty. Some of them are already supporting us just because it is right. The rest will support us when they see how it benefits them. And it will.
(For details on why the hwinitum would benefit from snuweyeth and how to convince them, see Economic Essay Number One.)
The final major issue is the hwinitum government saying our lands and our waters don't belong to us anymore. Right now, this one seems the most difficult. But if the other issues are solved, this one becomes much easier. Imagine what it might be like ten or twenty years from now if the other two problems are already solved. Imagine that our community makes important decisions by nutsa'maat among the elders from every family guided by snuweyeth. Imagine that by asserting our sovereign right to follow snuweyeth, we have become very wealthy. Imagine that every family in Cowichan Tribes is wealthy. Not just able to pay the rent, but owning houses, owning businesses, earning regular income and saving up money in the bank. Nobody needs a band office job or a cheque from the government. Now imagine that our hwinitum neighbors have also been able to benefit from all this. Imagine that almost all of them have become much better off because of our return to traditional ways. Most of them own businesses or have jobs that depend on money from the traditional economy that we created with their help. They have seen what kind of decisions our elders make and how we treat people. Our elders consult with local hwinitum family leaders before making decisions that affect them. The local hwinitum no longer fear that we'll try to throw them all out of their houses if the Canadian government admits that we still own our traditional territory. Perhaps they already have lease agreements with us in which we agreed to let them live there in exchange for rent payments. These payments could be very small at first, gradually increasing to full market value over a period of many years.
Imagine a future in which no hwinitum politician in our traditional territories can get elected to the Canadian parliament or the BC legislature by opposing us because even the hwinitum voters in our territory don't oppose us. If the politicians from this area were in favor of what we want, the hwinitum government would be much more reasonable. What do they care in the rest of Canada whether Cowichan Tribes traditional territories are owned by Cowichans or hwinitum? What do they care whether fishermen need to ask permission from the DFO or from native elders and native owners of the fishing areas? They might care about whether Cowichan Tribes is part of Canada or not, but they can be reasonable about that. After all, they let Quebec vote on it. Why not us too? And if they can be that reasonable, maybe we would vote to be part of Canada.
Most hwinitum today think it is ridiculous to talk about indigenous people having a vote on whether to be part of Canada. If you never look outside of Canada, you could be fooled into believing that this is some radical idea that can never happen. We constantly hear the message that this is all in the past and everyone is Canadian now and of course all these lands are Canada. They tell our people this in political speeches, in the news, in every patriotic thing anyone ever says and above all, they told our people this in residential schools. They also tell our people that in the negotiating tables for the BC Treaty Commission. Everything that really matters is "off the table". It isn't up for negotiation.
Look outside Canada and the picture is very different. Former Neskonlith Chief Art Manuel has spent many years doing that, as his father George Manuel did before him. The British came here as colonists. They colonized our lands and set up a new government, the colony of British Columbia. In the rest of the world, this is called colonialism. The government of Canada doesn't want to call it that. They prefer to talk about the "pioneers" who settled the country and the "history of first nations in Canada." The reason they don't want to call it colonialism is that in the 20th century, colonialism became a discredited idea. Almost all the colonies in the world became independent nations. Canada is a member of the United Nations and one of the main principles of the United Nations is that colonialism is wrong and should come to an end. Another principle is the "right of self-determination of peoples". That means that every nation -- including First Nations -- has a right to decide if they want to be an independent country or not. That right to decide is sovereignty. We have the right to be part of Canada if we want to. We have the right to not be part of Canada if we want to. We have the right to negotiate something in between or become an independent country if Canada won't agree to it.
Art Manuel and his father have been telling people for years that Canada is lying to the world about what is going on here. They have told the other nations that we are agreeing with Canada's policies. They have claimed that indigenous people will be happy to sign away all our rights and all our lands as soon as the treaty table negotiators agree on exactly how small an amount we will be paid for giving up our priceless sovereignty.
That's not what has happened in the rest of the world. More than a billion other indigenous people got independence. Their sovereignty is recognized. They don't have to do what British or French or Spanish colonists tell them to anymore. The United Nations recognized in 2007, by a vote of 144 to 4, that indigenous peoples have a right to decide for themselves whether they want to have independence for their own nations. This was called the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. It was made absolutely clear that this does apply to us and to Canada. This is why Canada was one of the four countries that voted against it. But one hundred and forty four countries are in favor of it. That's almost the entire world.
In 2016, newly elected Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau finally agreed that Canada would stop opposing the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. That includes our rights to our land, all of it, not just the reserves. That includes our right to engage in economic activities on that land. It includes the right to political self-determination. That means the right to decide that we will follow snuweyeth in our own territory and the laws of Canada and British Columbia will have no authority here. Based on past history, there is no reason to believe Canada will live up to these words.
That is why we should not leave it up to the Canadian government. We have the right to decide whether our lives will be ruled by the Indian Act or by snuweyeth, whether we will battle each other in elections for chief and council or whether we will come together to achieve nutsa'maat.
We do not have to wait for Canada to give us permission. Sovereignty is the right to decide for ourselves and we already have that. Canada just doesn't want to admit it. But by endorsing the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, they already did admit that we have the right to sovereignty. They admitted it to the whole world. Yet they continue to try to get us to agree to "treaties" where we would give up our priceless sovereignty for nothing and give up nearly all our land for a small amount of money per person. Perhaps as little as $40,000 per person when our land is worth something closer to two and a half million dollars per person. What they owe us for being on that land rent-free for over a hundred years is at least another $15 million per native person. Even worse, they ask us to give up snuweyeth and replace it with a European-style mayor and council government no different than the City of Duncan or the City of Victoria.
There have been very few consequences for Canadian politicians for lying to us and lying about us. Telling us one thing and doing another. Times have changed. Art Manuel was able to get an international organization to impose millions of dollars of penalties on Canada because it allowed timber companies to log our lands while paying us nothing. This was during the softwood lumber dispute.
Within Canada, it is extremely difficult to oppose the Canadian federal government or even the provincial government. But in the rest of the world, Canada is just one country among many. There are treaties that Canada has signed and international laws that Canada has agreed to obey. There are consequences that will be imposed on Canada if it breaks those treaties and breaks those laws as happened in the softwood lumber dispute.
One of the rare successes of the Hul'qumi'num Treaty Group came when it finally went beyond the treaty table and brought our case to an international organization, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
We do not have to rely upon hwinitum lawyers from Canada to tell us what our rights are. We do not have to sign treaties they ask us to sign. We do not have to obey their laws that were designed in the 1800's to keep us poor and powerless. We do not have to let them keep using our land without our permission, without paying rent, and without concern for what they are doing to the environment.
There is a path that leads us back to the prosperity our ancestors had for thousands of years. There is a path that leads back to the revival of our language and culture. That path is snuweyeth.
First we can use it to rebuild our own economy and bring our people out of poverty. Then, we can use it to show our hwinitum neighbors who live in our territory exactly how they will get more money and a better life when snuweyeth, instead of hwinitum laws, is the highest authority in our territory.
When our economy is strong and our people are strong, when our hwinitum neighbors are with us instead of against us, we will be able to follow snuweyeth and the government of Canada will not be able to stand in the way.