The task of rescuing the Assembly of First Nations begins now

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If you’re a fan of the high drama of politics, and you’ve never been to an Assembly of First Nations election, you are missing out.

How could it be anything but dramatic, with more than 630 chiefs voting for one national chief, who is supposed to represent all the different nations – with so many diverse languages, dialects and life-or-death problems to manage, including addictions, high numbers of children in foster care, and national policing issues?

“This isn’t about us,” said Cindy Woodhouse, the AFN’s newly elected national chief said in her victory speech on Thursday, standing at the podium with her parents and children. Her win took days of campaigning and six rounds of voting, after which Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations vice-chief David Pratt conceded this morning – a heartbreaking concession for Mr. Pratt, who had been campaigning for months before the election period even began.

The national chief’s job is to represent the nations when dealing with the Crown and Ottawa. “To Canada: we are coming for you,” said the mom of two, a member of Pinaymootang First Nation and the AFN’s Manitoba regional chief. For six years, Ms. Woodhouse worked with former AFN chief Perry Bellegarde, whom she thanked from the podium, along with RoseAnne Archibald, the former national chief who was removed in June by a non-confidence vote after a tenure beset by infighting.

“We work for the chiefs, first and foremost, and for the First Nations people,” she said.

But what does that actually look like?

The AFN needs an identity overhaul, and I hope Ms. Woodhouse has the chutzpah to do it, by making it an organization that makes our people proud, based on the spirituality of our nations and our laws. Instead, over the course of the past few days of politicking in Ottawa’s Shaw Centre, things have felt slightly bizarre. The procedures, the resolutions, the omnibus motions, the votes that only chiefs could participate in – it all felt rather colonial.

The paternalistic 1876 Indian Act created band council chiefs, and those chiefs are the ones who voted Ms. Woodhouse in. She works for them, and then the people they serve. But shouldn’t things be the other way around? If all First Nations people had a say in the election, maybe that would be the case.

In 1970, the National Indian Brotherhood planted the seeds of what would become the AFN, a body whose purpose was to uphold treaty rights in a country that was trampling all over them – and, by doing so, treating Status First Nations people as second-class citizens. We’ve spent more than 150 years of trying to dig ourselves out of Canada’s harmful policies. As I write this, Neskantaga First Nation is on Day 10,536 of a boil-water advisory – making it just one of many communities lacking this basic human right.

To enact change, you’ve got to be tough. You’ve got to look at Canada and the Crown in the eye, refuse to give an inch on our inherent treaty rights, and reject bills such as C-53, which would extend treaty rights to a community that has appropriated First Nations history. Our ancestors’ blood is the land. It is not Canada’s right to give it away.

Ms. Woodhouse has stood firm before. She worked hard to help negotiate the historic $40-billion settlement around the class-action suit over racial discrimination in child welfare – a move that pitted her against others, including the First Nations Family and Caring Society, which had argued in 2022 that the agreement at the time excluded some children and families.

Can one leader fix everything? Of course not. But there is hope that the new national chief will get us closer to the self-determination our ancestors wanted for us when they signed the treaties. They did not want to see us kicked around by Canada’s laws and Western ideals; they wanted to see us making sure the next seven generations are taken care of.

And we’ll need a formidable leader to stand up to a Conservative government that is likely to be elected in the next two years – a party that has broadly shown that it does not give a fluff about First Nations rights or land claims, with a leader who, in 2008, said the following about residential school survivors: “My view is that we need to engender the values of hard work and independence and self-reliance. That’s the solution in the long run – more money will not solve it.”

Pierre Poilievre apologized the next day, after then-prime minister Stephen Harper issued an a national apology to residential school survivors. But this kind of thinking remains to this day, and we need to stand united all the same against it. Ms. Woodhouse now needs to summon the collective power from all of our nations to protect our inherent rights, and bring the pride and belonging back to the AFN.