Jan 1, 2001 - The day I was in the New York Times " Canada's Tribal Women Fight Corruption"

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/01/world/canada-s-tribal-women-fight-mostly-male-graft.html?mcubz=3

Women Seek Accountability in Tribal Governments
New York Times:
Jan 1, 2000

CANADA: Women Seek Accountability in Tribal Governments

Against a winter prairie backdrop of bare trees, honking Canada geese, and four-wire fences, Leona Freed stands out larger than life. Eyes blazing and firing verbal buckshot, she is a new kind of Indian radical. Her primary targets are not white people, but rather Canada´s tribal chiefs, whom she accuses of "rigging elections, stealing government money, and going on fancy gambling vacations in the States, while their people live in third world poverty." "If the non-natives operated their businesses like the chiefs, they would be in jail," said Mrs. Freed, who is 48 years old and pays household bills by bagging onions at $5.20 an hour. Her husband, Glen Freed, has had a towing business.

Mrs. Freed - one parent was Sioux and the other Ojibway - is part of a loosely organized new movement largely made up of Indian women who are taking on Canada´s native establishment and are determined - particularly after embarrassing and well-publicized corruption scandals - to make clear how the equivalent of $4 billion American is spent on Canada´s one million indigenous people, including Inuit and others. Unchecked corruption and nepotism pushed these women to violate a central tenet of minority group politics: breaking ranks when dealing with the white majority.

Mrs. Freed is president of the Manitoba chapter of the First Nations Accountability Coalition. In Saskatchewan the anti-corruption group´s chapter is led by Rita Galloway. Farther west, in Alberta, the clean government fight is led by Yolanda Redcalf, a 33-year-old Cree woman who has gone on hunger strikes outside tribal offices to demand accountability. And in British Columbia, it is Meaghan Walker-Williams, a 28-year-old woman who formed the Somena Governance Society to prod tribal leaders on Vancouver Island to open up closely guarded tribal accounts for public scrutiny. This noisy clean government movement is propelled by quiet changes in Indian society.

Over the last 30 years, the number of Canadian Indians with college degrees has grown to about 150,000 today. Increasingly business oriented, Canadian Indians under age 30 are more likely to start their own businesses than their counterparts in other ethnic groups. These better- educated tribal members are demanding modern accounting of tribal budgets and a stop to patriarchal ways.

"Who are we going up against? Mostly males," said Mrs. Freed, who added that tribal chiefs often have the power to withhold welfare and college tuition payments as well as to deny families access to public housing. Many tribes explicitly excluded women from leadership roles and from property inheritance, justifying it as tradition. Such thinking has also defined tribal membership. An Indian man who marries a non-Indian woman has full rights of membership, including a share in federal benefits. An Indian woman who marries a non-Indian man often forfeits these benefits for herself, and they do not apply to her husband at all. In 1985, Indian women who had married non-Indian men regained their legal status as Indians in Canada.

But on returning to reserves, they often found themselves off lists for services. Noting that she has six children and nine grandchildren, Mrs. Freed said: "The women are tired of what´s happening. We want a future for our children." "Suicides, abortions, crime rates are all going up," Mrs. Freed said with a raw anger. (Two days before, her 20-year-old niece, Jerilyn Dawn Price, mother of a small boy, had killed herself.) Last year, Mrs. Freed turned her accountability drive into a national road show, conducting what she called hearings, 13 of them in seven provinces, drawing Indians from about one-third of the country´s 609 reserves, lands set aside by the government for Indians. She collected stories in a 200-page report later delivered to Canada´s Senate. "I told them the elections are rigged," she said at a roadside diner here. "The chiefs pay for the voting. They bribe the people. They intimidate the people. The same crooks get in, year in, year out. "I told them like it is, some of these senators, their jaws were hanging open. The chiefs were so mad."

Under a 1988 Canadian federal court ruling, tribal accounts were deemed to enjoy the kind of secrecy accorded privately held companies. Today, even though the federal government provides almost all of some tribal budgets, the accounts are not made public to taxpayers - and are often kept secret from tribal members. During the 1990´s, moreover, federal aid to Indians increased by about 50 percent. Over the last three years, the number of tribal fraud allegations investigated by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police has increased to 48 from 3. Last summer, about one- third of Canada´s 912 Indian groups failed to file audits with the federal government.

A steady stream of stories about corruption have appeared in Canada´s newspapers, tales that have contributed to a hardening of the attitudes of non-native Canadians to tribal leaders. In Nova Scotia last spring, the chief of a Micmac reserve was found to be compensating himself with the equivalent of about $275,000 American in salary and expenses; at the same time the provincial premier´s salary was $53,300. On the reserve, which is $10 million in debt and has an unemployment rate of about 70 percent, the average per capita income of the 2,700 members is $7,735.

In Canada, however, the message of tribal corruption has been most vividly illustrated by reports of junkets to sunny climes. In Toronto, government support for an Indian addiction center, Pedahbun Lodge, was cut after it was disclosed that $110,000 in treatment money was used last year to send employees to California. In Alberta, unfavorable publicity forced the Samson Cree tribal government to cancel a 12-day trip to Hawaii for 55 members. But, according to auditors, $200-a-day stipends paid to each trip participant were never returned. Newspapers disclosed that the former director of the Saskatchewan Indian Gaming Authority had used provincial government money to travel with his wife to Barcelona, Brisbane, Paris and London.

The most damaging scandal occurred in November in Sagkeeng First Nation, about 200 miles northeast of here. In 1996, a federal audit had found that directors of the Virginia Fontaine Addictions Foundation Inc. had used program funds for employee trips, characterized as research, to Australia, Hawaii and Las Vegas. In September, the center closed for renovations and sent 70 employees on a weeklong Caribbean cruise, billed as "a professional development retreat." Foundation officials have given contradictory explanations for that trip´s financing, including payments by the center to golf clubs, Ticketmaster and a jewelry store in St. Maarten. Barb Gervais, a center worker, said all the young people at the center were sent home before the cruise. She said it was her second, after a 1998 voyage to Mexico, the Cayman Islands and Jamaica, with center officials and a Health Canada official from the federal government.

In early December, the Mounties arrested a center employee and charged her with threatening Ms. Gervais and another whistle-blowing former employee. Finally, federal support was cut off after center officials refused to cooperate with auditors. Political support among Canada´s 31 million people seems to be thinning for settling native Canadian claims, a process that may eventually cost $140 billion, or roughly $7,000 for each taxpayer.

An editorial in The Globe and Mail noted in reference to modern government officials and social workers that "while the missionaries of old ran roughshod over native leaders, the new missionaries pay an exaggerated respect to native elites that are often unaccountable and sometimes corrupt."

Last summer, John Stackhouse, a reporter for The Globe and Mail, hitchhiked across Canada to take the pulse of his nation after writing from abroad for several years. He concluded that white perceptions of native privilege and corruption constitute "Canada´s most hidden anger," and that the deep split between natives and immigrant Canadians is the country´s greatest division. The controversy over spending at the Fontaine Addictions center is part of "the white media agenda," said Ron Fontaine, chief of Sagkeeng First Nation, in a letter to chiefs of Manitoba´s 63 bands, as tribes call themselves. "We are easy targets; we make a mistake and it is amplified," agreed another tribe member, Phil Fontaine, who served until last summer as grand chief of the Assembly of First Nations, Canada´s Indian power structure, which has been working for two years with auditors to enhance accountability.

In late November, Phil Fontaine resigned from the center´s board. "The immediate reaction is that First Nations cannot manage their own affairs," he said in an interview. Mrs. Freed and other Indian critics say it is the federal government´s system of sending money through the tribal chiefs that spawns corruption on the reserves.

Taiake Alfred, a Mohawk who directs the Indigenous Governance Programs of the University of Victoria, said that "one of the most effective ways to colonize people is to give them money and make them dependent on bureaucracy for their well-being." "Indian Affairs," he added, "has set up this system and actively promotes the corruption of officials in communities, and only gets upset when the system is uncovered in the press and they get bad p.r."

Or as Mrs. Freed put it: "As long as they are good little Indian puppets, they will be rewarded with no accountability. They can do what they want with their band funds." Opposition politicians have embraced Mrs. Freed and her allies, saying they articulate criticism that Canada´s ruling Liberal Party refuses to make because Indian leaders routinely deliver tens of thousands of votes to the Liberals. After Mrs. Freed started to take on the local power structure, a gang of Indian youths smashed the windows of her husband´s tow trucks, drove their riding mower into their house trailer, slashed their tires and "slugged one of my boys in the face." Then, a friend told her, her name had been written on "a big long bullet." "She´s got a lot of nerve," her husband said after his wife had climbed into their battered 1978 station wagon.

"A few times there, she said she would get life insurance. But we never got the money together."