MARCH 3, 2004

Imperialism, Conquest, Indigenous Peoples, Aboriginal Title, Treaties, & International Law: The Occupation of BC, Iraq, & the West Bank, the Extradition Cases of Sitting Bull, Leonard Peltier, James Pitawanakwat, & John Graham

by Anthony J. Hall
Founding Coordinator of Globalization Studies
University of Lethbridge

In a recent article in the New York Times Magazine entitled “How To Talk
About Israel,” Ian Buruma tackles the touchy relationship between
language and anti-Semitism. In suggesting a road map for linguistic
manoeuvres throughout one of humanity’s most dangerous minefields of
triggered weaponry, boiling recriminations and overheated semantics,
Buruma details that “It is neither anti-Semitic nor blindly
anti-American to point out that the United States could have done much
more to stop Israel from humiliating the Palestinians by turning the
occupied territories into a kind of Wild East of gunslinging settlers
and hounded natives.” (1)

In drawing this comparison between the lawlessness characterizing the
frontier expansions of both the United States and Israel, Buruma
suggests in a few short phrases the bare outlines of an historical
pattern that goes far to explain some of the root dilemmas in many of
the world’s most inflamed hot spots. He creates a minimalist sketch
depicting how the means and mentality of conquest run throughout the
trajectory of history linking European imperialism, American Manifest
Destiny, and the Palestinian policies of the United States’ most
favoured ally in the Middle East.(2)

The propensity of the world’s sole remaining superpower to prefer
conquest and unilateralism over the more demanding requirements of
negotiation, multilateralism, and the rule of law was displayed recently
in the US-led invasion of Iraq. Many profound issues are coming to light
as the government of the United States struggles to draw order from the
disruption of war, and from the ruthless tyranny of a discarded former
client regime. How, for instance, can a basis of domestic law and order
be established in Iraq, given that the roots of any new regime lie in
the infractions of international law committed by the occupying powers
of the United States and Great Britain? What rights and titles continue
to adhere to the people and peoples whose lives form the bridge of
continuity leading back to indigenous polities that predate the arrival
of both European empire and the current occupation of foreign forces?

As I see it, this second question leads us into the law and politics of
Aboriginal title, a concept that I maintain can be broadly applied in
venues of international law and global geopolitics. I argue that the
concept of Aboriginal title provides a valuable lens of interpretation
on history, politics, and law in many settings. It provides a deepened
perspective on the apportionment of influence and wealth in a global
milieu where the largest plurality of people and peoples have been
subordinated under systems of credit and debt, assets and liabilities,
empowerment and disempowerment, rooted largely in the genre of
colonialism initiated in 1492. In The American Empire and the Fourth
World I have grouped and labelled this repressive complex of forces as
the Columbian conquests, an expansionary thrust which began with the
modern era of globalization in 1492.

I see Aboriginal title and the Columbian conquests as inter-related
concepts. The former, if recognized and affirmed, represents something
of a remedy or an antidote for the latter. Both ideas have acquired
added meaning in a era of increasingly borderless and monocultural
capitalism, a time when a single polity is in the process of globalizing
the revolutionary forces entailed in the five-centuries-old process of
transforming the Western Hemisphere into the work-in-progress known as
America.

The United States emerged from a civil war in British North America that
began with a conflict between competing camps of imperialists. One of
the central points of contention between these camps was a disagreement
over how to incorporate the lands and Indigenous peoples of Canada into
the British Empire after the defeat of French imperialism in the Seven
Years War. (3) The substance and outgrowths of this disagreement, ones
which figured integrally in the emergence of the present superpower from
a former superpower, need to be better understood in an era when the
United States holds a virtual veto power over virtually any structural
change in the architecture of global governance.

The nature of American power becomes especially clear when the focus is
placed on those many Indigenous peoples whose configurations of
Aboriginal territory and culture are not reflected in the design of the
national governments exercising sovereignty over them. Among the
Indigenous peoples facing this dilemma are the Ogoni of Nigeria, the
Kurds of the Middle East, the Sami of Scandanavia or the many hundreds
of menaced Aboriginal societies rooted in the rich biocultural diversity
of Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia. Like Indigenous peoples
throughout the Americas, the oldest polities throughout most of Africa
live in nation states whose boundaries more reflect the rivalries of
European imperialists than the legacies of Aboriginal history.

Among all such Indigenous peoples, the plight of the Palestinians seems
to have emerged as a particularly potent symbol of Aboriginal
dispossession and disempowerment. The broad identification of so many
citizens globally with the struggle of the Palestinian people for land
and self-determination suggests the wide popularity of the notion that
the decolonization movement of the 1960s and 1970s did not deliver on
its promise of liberation. The experience of the Palestinians serves as
a reminder for the majority of the world’s citizenry, whose Aboriginal
societies were collectively on the receiving end of European
imperialism, that the colonialism of the Earth’s dominant enclaves of
power never really ended. While the empires of Europe were dismantled, a
new kind of imperial power structure was put in place. Its organs of
authority include the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and
the World Trade Organization. These agencies, in turn, are widely viewed
as extensions of the tight control of a class of global elites whose
power is based in the transnational corporations and financial
institutions that arose with the growth to worldwide proportions of the
military-industrial complex centered in the United States.(4)

A big part of my motivation in writing The Bowl With One Spoon, of which
The American Empire and the Fourth World forms part one, is to describe
how some of the constitutional legacies of European imperialism can be
invoked to challenge the legality of some of the current machination of
the informal American empire. The Royal Proclamation of 1763 is the best
example of an imperial instrument with broad remedial applications in an
era when the world is dominated by the lawless, laissez-faire empire of
a single superpower. As I see it Royal Proclamation of 1763, in which
King George reserved the interior of North America as an Indian hunting
ground and as a mercantile hinterland of the Canadian fur trade, was the
primary cause of the schism within the British Empire that gave rise to
the creation of the United States. The Royal Proclamation of 1763 was
thus instrumental in generating the American Revolution, perhaps the
most consequential single event in the entire course of world history up
to this point. The Royal Proclamation essentially outlawed conquest as
an acceptable means of expanding Anglo-American settlements within
British North America. In a power grab of major proportions, King George
III sought to set up himself and his royal heirs as the sole authority
capable of purchasing Aboriginal title from the peoples indigenous to
the imperial Indian reserve imposed unilaterally on Great Lakes area and
on the eastern half of the Mississippi Valley. In so doing, King George
sought to place control over the western expansion of the Anglo-American
settlements in the imperial government and, indeed, in the sovereign
jurisdiction invested in his own person.

The Royal Proclamation of 1763 became a symbol of Tory tyranny for some
whigs on both sides of the Atlantic. It helped arouse the antagonisms
that would eventually coalesce in the string of accusations against King
George in The Declaration of Independence. Some saw in the monarch’s
Proclamation proof that the King was trying to undo the constitutional
principles established by the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Thomas
Jefferson went much farther, countering the Crown’s recognition of
Aboriginal title with a theory stating that Anglo-American settlers held
their own form of native title. This form of original title he dubbed
“ allodial title” in 1774 in a pamphlet entitled A Summary View of the
Rights of British America. The idea of allodial title, argued Jefferson,
went back to the imagined rights of free Saxons in England before their
liberties were supposedly constrained by an alien Crown in the Norman
conquest. (5) In his theory of allodial title and in his authorship of
large portions of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson drew
heavily on the writings of John Locke. In Two Treatises of Government
Locke had assigned North American Indians to the infant stage of
humanity. Locke associated this imagined infancy with a state of
undisturbed nature before the existence of money and before what he
characterized as the improvement of North American lands through the
investment of labour by transplanted English farmers.(6)

There were broad implications for the genesis of international law in
King George’s seminal recognition that Indigenous peoples possess
Aboriginal titles to their own ancestral lands, titles that cannot be
transferred or alienated without obtaining Aboriginal consent in public
negotiations. The recognition and enforcement of this principle could
yet establish the framework for the attainment of a level of justice in
international relations that has yet to be attained, for instance, by
the Palestinians, the Kurds, and the Aborigines of Australia. It
establishes principles that remain highly contested in British Columbia,
one of the world’s pre-eminent testing grounds for the integrated
exercise of Aboriginal title within the social organization and
political economy of complex, industrialized polities.

Over the course of much of its history, the United States has acted as a
force whose actions have pointed against the edification and enforcement
of the principle that it is a violation of international law to push
forward the unilateral dispossession of Indigenous peoples through
conquest. Indeed, again and again the United States has opposed the
principle that it is subject to any international or transnational
authority higher than itself. It has opposed the proposition that there
are any external juridical constraints on its exercise of coercive power
to widen its own sphere of ownership, jurisdiction and influence.

This reservation of the power to crush coercively any resistance to its
ascent from republic, to transcontinental empire, to global superpower
goes right back to the Declaration of Independence. Among the many
alleged crimes of King George outlined in it, is the charge that the
British monarch “has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our
frontiers the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is
an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions.” This
pronouncement is, to say the least, a bold contradiction of the
principles of universal liberty and equality that rightfully constitute
the Declaration’s most celebrated ideals. The accusatory reference to
the link between North American Indians and King George points
unmistakably to the Royal Proclamation’s recognition that the peoples
indigenous to the newly-acquired section of British North America hold
Aboriginal titles to their ancestral lands-- titles that cannot be
unilaterally extinguished or transferred. Those including Jefferson who
sought to use the Declaration of Independence to mobilize Anglo-American
resistance to British imperial authority countered King George’s
qualified recognition of Aboriginal and treaty rights by advancing a
form of racial profiling whose effect was basically to criminalize all
Indians.

In 1776 the new polity-- the new experiment in human governance-- was
ushered into life on the principle that there is no such thing as a
legitimate right of Aboriginal self-defence, let alone an Aboriginal
right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. In designating
indiscriminately all of America’s Indigenous peoples as violent and
anarchistic savages who must be placed outside the rule of law, outside
due process and outside the framework of universal liberties cited as
the very reason for creating the United States, the founders prepared
the way for a trajectory of frontier lawlessness whose most recent
manifestation is evidenced in elements of so-called War on Terror. The
pattern was established that would someday see the West Bank of the
Jordan River become the site of a ‘Wild East of gunslinging settlers and
hounded natives.” The pattern was established that would someday see the
so-called ‘detainees” of the US military base at Guantanamo Bay Cuba put
in the same constitutional no-man’s land once inhabited by the
incarcerated Geronimo and his captured band of Apache resisters. Like
Geronimo and scores of other Aboriginal resisters captured in the
American Indian wars, the Guantanamo Bay prisoners have been placed
outside the framework of both international and domestic law. They have
become the most obvious descendants of the merciless Indian savages
referred to in the passage of the Declaration of Independence that made
provision for the United States to engage in a perpetual War on
Savagery, a War on Terror.

Between 1787 and 1871 the United States seemingly shifted away from the
position articulated in the Declaration of Independence. In the
Northwest Ordinance and in almost 400 Indian treaties negotiated
according to its terms, the US government adhered to many of the
principles codified in the Royal Proclamation of 1763. By making the
federal authority responsible for waging war on Indian nations or for
purchasing Aboriginal titles in ceding treaties, the central government
took jurisdiction from the state governments over the process of western
expansion. It took over precisely the powers claimed by King George in
1763. This innovation in American federalism invested authorities in
Washington DC with the primary imperial role in the construction of the
United States as a transcontinental empire. It centralized power in the
American capital in a fashion that prepared for the day when the
Pentagon, the State Department, the CIA and its related agencies would
take over many functions in global governance similar to those once
performed by the Colonial Office of the USA’s British imperial parent.

As a politician who came to national prominence based largely on his
military reputation as an adept Indian fighter, Andrew Jackson inflicted
a great blow to this fledgling tradition of Indian treaty making in the
United States. In the 1830s he made Indian removal a central pillar of
his presidency. In direct opposition to a pivotal ruling by Chief
Justice John Marshall’s Supreme Court, the Jackson administration joined
with Congress in pushing forward a policy of ethnic cleansing based on
the forced relocation of all Indian groups east of the Mississippi to
new homes in the designated Indian Territory west of the Mississippi. In
advancing this policy Jackson opposed the federalists and sided instead
with states’ rights activists. These proponents of state sovereignty
sought and eventually obtained the backing of the US military in
forcibly removing in the Trail of Tears several thousand multicultural
citizens of the Cherokee Nation from the western frontiers of Georgia.

The broad, continental scope of Jacksonian Indian removal involved the
violation of over a hundred Indian treaties, all of which had been
ratified by a two-thirds vote of the American Senate. In leading the
Protestant lobby opposed to Jacksonian Indian removal, Rev. Jeremiah
Evarts presented extensive and detailed analysis of the implications of
such a massive transgression of US treaty law. He emphasized that the
United States would someday pay an enormous price in terms of negative
world opinion for engaging in such brazen disregard for its own domestic
laws and for the emerging framework of international law.(7)

In more recent years historian John R. Wunder has made a similar
observation concerning the decision of Congress in 1871 to terminate
altogether the practice of treaty making with Indigenous peoples within
the United States. The decision, which was buried in an Indian Bureau
finance bill, involved a resort to the imperative of conquest over the
law of Aboriginal title. It embodied an assault on the fragile
principles of international relations as advanced by King George in the
Royal Proclamation of 1763 and by the authors of the Northwest Ordinance
in 1787. According to Wunder, it entailed “a serious modification and
violation of international law and a threat to the diplomacy of the
United States.”(8)

From 1871 until the present, the US government has based its claims to
much of its territory on the doctrine of conquest. In 1987, for
instance, officials of the US State Department forwarded the following
justification for US jurisdiction over Indians to the United Nations
Human Rights Committee. In response to a question posed by several
Aboriginal groups, the representatives of the US government answered,
“ conquest renders the tribes subject to the legislative powers of the
United States and in substance, terminates the external powers of the
sovereignty of the tribe.”(9) This position re-iterated the central
premise of the ruling in 1955, when the US Supreme Court in the case of
Hee-Hit-Ton Indians vs. The United States denied that the Indigenous
peoples of Alaska retained an Aboriginal title in their ancestral lands.
The ruling included a number of references to the jurisdictions said to
flow from conquest. “Every American schoolboy knows,” the jurists wrote,
“ that the savage tribes of this continent were deprived of their
ancestral ranges by force.” The treaties before 1871, they ruled, were
mere rituals rather than transfers of title to land. It was, they
decided, “the conquerers will that deprived [the Indigenous peoples] of
their land.”(10)

As I see it, the history of US expansionism in North America and
throughout the Western Hemisphere helps provide explanation and context
for many aspects of the superpower’s present positioning within the
global community. The unilateralism of the United States, for instance,
has its deeper origins in the effort to fend off international
intervention in the institution of American slavery before 1865. It also
has its origins in the effort after the War of 1812 to domesticate
Indian Affairs and the closely related policies and processes of western
expansion. Indeed, because of the fear that the territorial integrity of
many countries might be challenged by the elevation of Aboriginal
Affairs to a higher level of transnational concern, the US government
has shared with many governments, including those of Canada and
Australia, a largely unspoken determination to constrain issues
pertaining to the treatment of Indigenous peoples within the confines of
domestic law and politics.

The determination of authorities in both the United States and Canada to
act repressively in order to constrain issues of Aboriginal title and
Indian treaties within domestic confines has been demonstrated
repeatedly in recent times. In 1995 in British Columbia, for instance,
the Canadian army and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police declared war
militarily and psychologically on a small group of armed Aboriginal sun
dancers at the Battle of Gustafsen Lake. By their own accounts, Crown
officials have admitted that government forces shot at least 77,000
rounds of fire into the camp, whose 18 or so members included elders and
children. Many explosive devices, included internationally banned land
mines, were tested in the most aggressive government use of armed
military force within Canada in the twentieth century. In spite of a
slew of wild, politically-motivated allegations of terrorism made
against the self-declared Shuswap Defenders, including by BC’s chief law
enforcement officer, most members of the sun dance camp ended up facing
minor mischief and trespassing charges. The one Defender who refused to
abandon the jurisdictional argument which lay beneath the sun dancers
patriotic stand, William Jones Ignace, aka The Woverine, ended up
spending 5 1/2 years in federal penitentiary for his conviction for
attempted murder. After serving his time the elder, who is now 72 years
old, was subjected by the Parole Board of Canada to a three-year gag
order, a dubious prohibition on freedom of speech in a country that
supposedly honours its Charter of Rights. This gag order was placed on
an individual who is probably the most accomplished and knowledgeable
speaker on the planet of the Shuswap language, one of the world’s many
thousands of Aboriginal tongues whose imminent loss reflects the
policies of cultural genocide which have been integral to the
unconstitutional regime of the Canadian Indian Act from the beginning of
its illegal imposition. The lawyer of Jones Ignace, Dr. Bruce Clark, a
devoted scholar who achieved his Ph.D. in Scotland through his
completion of a ground-breaking study on the international and
constitutional law of Aboriginal title in North America, faced a
psychiatric exam, incarceration, leg irons, disbarment, and the full
brunt of a media “smear campaign.” The point man of this campaign, the
RCMP’s Sgt. Peter Montague, described smear campaigns at the time of the
Battle of Gustafsen Lake as a “specialty” of his unit, one which worked
in this and other related cases especially closely with BCTV based in
Vancouver.

Of this episode a former Attorney General of the United States wrote,
“ Canada employed all the violence, deception, wiles and corruption
learned from five hundred years experience in crushing Indian people.”
One of the ironies of the tactics employed at BC’s Camp Zulu, where the
Canadian Crown’s Indian fighters based their operations, was that the
effort to domesticate and crush the resistance movement ended up
internationalizing the Aboriginal title issue in Canada’s westernmost
province. In the autumn of 2000 in Portland Oregon Judge Janice Stewart
denied the request of the Clinton White House to extradite James
Pitawanakwat, an Aboriginal veteran of the Gustafsen Lake conflict. In
her ruling, which was not appealed, Judge Stewart referred to the
“ occupation by the government of Canada” of “sacred and unceded tribal
land” in BC. She also referred to “uncontradicted evidence,” which
Splitting The Sky, Mervyn Brown and I helped prepare on the request of
Pitawanakwat’s federally-provided lawyer, “that Canadian government
engaged in a smear and disinformation campaign [in 1995] to prevent the
media from learning and publicizing the true extent and political nature
of events [in the Gustafsen Lake conflict].(11)

In the Pitawankwat ruling the judge made specific reference to “false
affidavits” used as the basis for the “extradition by fraud” of American
Indian Movement (AIM) activist Leonard Peltier from British Columbia in
1977. As Peter Matthiessen documented in his monumental work of
investigative journalism, Peltier’s removal from Canada and his
subsequent conviction is widely regarded as one of the most notorious
cases in US history of federal abuse of the American criminal justice
system.(12) The details of the case became particularly well known
throughout the Soviet Union in the ebb and flow of the Cold War. The
episode was one part of a campaign in the United States and Canada to
infiltrate and destroy the American Indian Movement, an organization
demanding that governments in North America adhere to the international
law of Aboriginal title and Indian treaties. Among those killed in the
mid-1970s primarily by federally-backed para-military forces were almost
a hundred AIM members and sympathizers on the Pine Ridge Reservation in
South Dakota. They included Anna Mae Pictou Aquash, a Mik’maq woman from
Nova Scotia. The frozen body of this much beloved pillar of AIM’s
sovereigntist stand was found in February of 1976. Federal agents
decided to cut off her hands to send them for fingerprint identification
at the FBI Lab in Washington D.C.. In early February of 2004 after a
four-day trial, Arlo Looking Cloud was convicted in Rapid City South
Dakota for “aiding and abetting” in the murder of Anna Mae. Aquash’s
real killer, federal authorities in the United States charge, is John
Graham, an AIM member whose home is in Yukon and who is presently under
house arrest In Vancouver.

The Peltier and Pitawanakwat cases help establish the legal and
political context for the current request that John Graham should be
extradited from BC to the United States to face charges that he murdered
Anna Mae Aquash during the height of the virtual civil war at Pine
Ridge. The John Graham case is extremely important because it draws
attention to an array of covert and often illegal federal tactics
employed in both the United States and Canada to destroy AIM and its
related organizations. One of the objectives of this destruction was and
is to stop the international campaign to publicize government and
corporate violations in North America of both Aboriginal title and
Indian treaties. The John Graham case serves as a reminder that the
Indian wars of the Western Hemisphere never really ended; that the rule
of state terror by conquest still takes pre-eminence over national
security through the rule of law when it comes to dealing with the most
militant wing of the First Nations sovereignty movement. The Graham case
serves to point how AIM was unrelentingly infiltrated and destabilized
by federal agents who succeeded in creating a climate of such pervasive
fear and distrust in the organization that even Anna Mae became subject
to suspicions that she might be collaborating with the FBI’s
Counter-Intelligence Program, the notorious COINTEL-PRO. In outlining
their position on the John Graham matter, the Vancouver Chapter of the
Native Youth Movement pointed to the COINTEL-PRO’s campaign “to create
paranoia and division, to turn members against one another (just as the
FBI had done with the Black Panther Party).” NYM Vancouver went on to
say in their press release of 7 February, “We cannot say with certainty
that John Graham did—or did not—kill Anna Mae. We have neither the
information nor witnesses at our disposal to make such a decision.”

The Vancouver chapter of the NYM have added their voice to the growing
chorus who are absolutely firm in their conviction that John Graham must
not be sent to the United States to face a travesty of justice like that
handed out to Leonard Peltier , or, for that matter, to Sitting Bull.
Sitting Bull was not successful in receiving the kind of asylum in
Canada that was later granted in the United States to James
Pitawanakwat. Because of the Crown’s unwillingness to allow the Indian
hero of the Battle of Little Bighorn to make a home in Canada’s Cypress
Hills, the great Sioux leader was eventually killed by a Sioux police
agent in the course of the Ghost Dance resistance that culminated in the
Seventh Cavalry’s revenge at Wounded Knee in 1890 for the defeat it
suffered at Indian hands in 1876. The inability of the US criminal
justice system to deal objectively and fairly with any aspect of its own
role in Indian fighting, past and present, was demonstrated clearly in
the final days of the regime of President Bill Clinton.(13) In the
period briefly before federal power was handed over to the regime of
George W. Bush, several hundred FBI agents conducted an aggressive
demonstration outside the White House to demand that the outgoing
American president not grant clemency to Leonard Peltier. This FBI
demonstration, the first of its kind in the entire history of the
federal police force, illustrates the extreme politicization of the
criminal justice system in the United States when it comes to keeping
the cover on the dynamics of modern-day Indian fighting. It illustrates
that when it comes to issues involving Aboriginal title and Indian
treaties, there is no such thing as a separation between the powers of
law enforcers and those of law makers. There is no real separation of
power between police, judges, and politicians when it comes to the
oldest and most complex human rights issue in the Western Hemisphere.
(14) Under these conditions, it becomes a classic test of the quality of
Canadian sovereignty to see if it is possible to get to the bottom of
the John Graham affair in our own country. If Graham ends up in the
United States, I for one will take it as a very clear sign that Canada
has become devoid of real sovereignty, that our once somewhat
self-governing country has become a thoroughgoing colony of the
superpower to the south.

The reality that the Indian wars of North America never really ended is
underlined by the themes of continuity running between the extradition
cases involving Sitting Bull, Leonard Peltier, James Pitawanakwat, and
John Graham. The location of their cases in the matrix of international
treaty law points to the contrasting constraint within domestic confines
of Aboriginal title, Indigenous peoples and their treaties with other
polities. It points to the systematic abuse of the most marginalized
constituencies in the Americas. From to dark circumstances surrounding
the overthrow of Haiti’s Jean-Bertrand Aristide to the assassination
with US-complicity of Archbishop Oscar Romero in El Salvador in 1981,
the champions of liberation theology have figured prominently among
those who have faced notorious obstructions in their quest to defend the
poor. The modern-day Indian wars within North America are reflected on
an inflated scale throughout many parts of so-called Latin America,
where, for instance, over 100,000 Mayan Indians were murdered in
Guatemala by a right-wing puppet regime answering to the government of
US President Ronald Reagan. The extension of the Indian wars finds
global expression in a long series of regime changes through US-backed
coups in, to name only a few, Iran, Guatemala, Congo, Indonesia, Chile,
and Haiti. Now the so-called War on Terror renews the power of the
American military-industrial complex that affirmed its global dominance
over the course of the Cold war. This trajectory of police state
activism connects the internal assault on AIM in the 1970s to the recent
occupation of Iraq. The lead up to that occupation saw at least 10
million global citizens take to the streets on February 15, 2003, in an
effort to pre-empt the so-called pre-emptive strike of the Bush and
Blair regimes. The invasion of Iraq without UN sanction points to the
extreme unilateralism these days of the US government. President Bush’s
positions are in stark contrast to those of former US President Woodrow
Wilson, who, with all his inconsistencies, did present a vision of a
world parliament in 1917 based on the ideal of the self-determination of
all peoples.

The US government failed to join the League of Nations, a rejection that
helps to remind us of the deep historical roots of those attitudes of
discomfort within the superpower at any approach to world order that
would situate the United States within a multilateral framework of
global law. In the post-World War II era, for instance, the US
government failed to ratify the Genocide Convention until 1989, over 40
years after most countries ratified this instrument designed to fix
legal accountability for the most appalling of all crimes against
humanity. What, it might be asked, is the relationship between the crime
of genocide and the extinguishment of the political economy of
Indigenous peoples through the unilateral taking and remaking of their
lands without negotiation or consent? Without negotiation or consent--
without adhesion to the principles constitutionally codified in the
Royal Proclamation of 1763-- what else other than conquest is the
unilateral appropriation of Aboriginal territories? As I see it, it is
the prohibition on conquest as a legitimate instrument of international
relations that stands as the real principle presently as issue in the
ongoing negotiation of about 50 modern-day treaties in British Columbia.

In the Declaration of Independence King George was demonized along with
his allies, the so-called merciless Indian savages, for the complex of
alliances that began to develop between 1763 and 1776 from even an
incomplete and half-hearted imperial application of the principles of
the Royal Proclamation. The effects of this paradoxical constitutional
instrument continue to be felt in Canada, in, for instance, the recent
creation of Nunavut and in the making in British Columbia of the Nisga’a
Treaty. The effect of gradually applying the Royal Proclamation of 1763,
however imperfectly, to the political evolution of Canada over more than
two-and-a-half centuries has been to ease and modify some of the most
lethal features of colonization. The effect has been to contribute to
the discrediting of the imperatives of conquest, ethnic cleansing, and
assimilation in the process of empire building. Who can tell what
adjustments might occur in US policy in, for instance, Iraq, Kurdistan,
Israel, and Palestine, if the superpower’s government was to revert back
to adherence to the principles it adopted between 1787 and 1871 in
recognizing Aboriginal title as a feature of domestic and international
law? Who can tell what insight we might gain in Canada into the real
dynamics of our relationship with the superpower when we make it clear
to the US government that we refuse to re-enact in the case of John
Graham the farce attending the removal from this country in 1977 of
Leonard Peltier. We exercise the sovereignty of Canada, therefore, when
we refuse to extradite John Graham. That refusal establishes the
necessary precondition for us to investigate and arbitrate in Canada the
facts that led to the tragic death of a native daughter and mother, the
demise of the beautiful, articulate, and erudite Anna Mae Aquash.

ENDNOTES

1.Ian Buruma, “How To Talk About Israel,” The New York Times Magazine,
31 August, 2003, p. 33

2.See Conrad Cherry, God’s New Israel: Religious Interpretations of
American Destiny (Englewood Cliffs N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1971); Patricia
Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World,
1492-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Albert K,
Weinberg, Manifest Destiny: A Study of Nationalist Expansion in American
History (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1963)

3.Clarence Walworth Alvord, The Mississippi Valley in British Politics:
A Study of the Trade, Land Speculation and Experiments in Imperialism
Culminating in the American Revolution, 2 Vols., (Cleveland: The Arthur
H. Clark Company, 1917); Jack M. Sosin, Whitehall and the Wilderness:
The Middle West in British Colonial Policy, 1760-1775 (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1961)

4.See, for instance, Stanley Aronowitz, “Global Capital and Its
Opponents,” and Heather Gautney, “The Globalization of Violence in the
21st Century: Israel, Palestine, and the War on Terror,” in Implicating
Empire: Globalization and Resistance in the 21st Century World Order,
Aronowitz and Gautney, eds. (New York: Basic Books, 2003), pp. 65-83,
179-195

5. Thomas Jefferson, A Summary of the Rights of British America
(Williamsburg: Clementinarind, 1774), republished in The Papers of
Thomas Jefferson, Julian P. Boyd, ed., (Princeton University Press,
1950), Vol. 1, pp. 121-137

6.John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, Peter Laslette., ed. (New
York: New American Library, 1965). See Robert A. Williams Jr., The
American Indian in Western Legal Discourse (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1991), pp. 263-300; Barbara Arneil, John Locke and America: The
Defence of English Colonialism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996)

7.Reverend Jeremiah Evarts, Cherokee Removal: The “William Penn” Essays
and Other Writings, Francis Paul Prucha, ed., (Knoxville: University of
Tennessee Press, 1981). See Prucha, American Indian Treaties: The
History of a Political Anomoly (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1994), p. 16

8.John R. Wunder, “No More Treaties: The Resolution of 1871 and the
Alteration of the Indian Rights to Their Homelands,” in Wunder, ed., The
Range: Essays on the History of Western Land Management and the
Environment (Westport Conn: Greenwood Press, 1985), p. 53

9.U.N Document E/CN.4/GR.1987/7/Add.12, 30 September 1987 cited in
Franke Wilmer, The Indigenous Voice in World Politics: Since Time
Immemorial (Newbury Park: Sage Publications, 1993), p. 58

10. Supreme Court ruling on Hee-Hit-Ton Indians vs. The United States,
1955, cited in Ward Churchill, “The Tragedy and the Travesty: The
Subversion of Indigenous Sovereignty in North America, in Contemporary
Native American Political Issues, Troy R. Johnson, ed., (Walnut Creek:
Altamira Press, 1999), p. 28

11. The first quote is from former US Attorney-General, Ramsey Clark,
which appears as the book blurb on the cover of Splitting The Sky’s and
She Keep’s the Door’s From Attica to Gustafsen Lake (Chase BC: John
Pasquale Boncore, 2001). The ruling on USA vs Pitawankwat is published
in Canadian Native Law Reporter, no. 1, 2001. See Kirk Makin, “US Judge
won’t Extradite Canadian Native Activist, Globe and Mail, 23 November,
2000, p. A1

12.Peter Matthiessen, In The Spirit of Crazy Horse (New York: The Viking
Press, 1983)

13.Paul Barnsley, “Free Peltier Campaign Fails,” Windspeaker, Vol. 18,
no. 10, February, 2001, p. 1

14.Anthony J. Hall, “Confronting the hard Realities of North Americas
Ongoing Indian War,” The Radical, Vol. 3, no.5, January, 2001, pp. 1-3, 17

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