A Remarkable Canadian
by Donald Sutherland

Despite witnessing and personally experiencing the heart-wrenching history of genocide against First Nation people in Canada, Ovide Mercredi has remained committed to non violent solutions.

In June of 2012, I had the privilege of sharing a classroom with a living legend. At the Canadian School of Peacebuilding, Ovide Mercredi, former National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations was my instructor in Great Leaders of Peace. Ovide is a graduate in law at the University of Manitoba with specialization in Constitutional Law.

Ovide’s presence in the classroom was nothing short of amazing. He is deeply spiritual, soft spoken, riveting, grounded, inclusive, and humorous. His subject matter is thoroughly rooted in his mind, emotions, and in every bone in his body. What is that subject matter?—The history of his people. The long history of the Cree on the Great Plains of North America stretches back many hundreds of years with the massive herds of buffalo grazing on the grasslands supplying practically all of their needs. Hides were used for clothing and shelter, meat for food, bones and horns for tools and sewing needles. The air and water were free of modern chemicals and other pollutants.

In the short space of four hundred years, the life of the Cree and all other First Nation Tribes was turned upside down and inside out by the arrival of thousands of settlers, railways, horses, guns, whisky, and devastating diseases such as small pox. Very quickly, the buffalo were reduced to small mountains of bones, resulting in malnutrition and starvation for many First Nation people. Without lawyers or qualified interpreters, Chiefs of the time felt compelled to sign “Treaties” designating their severely weakened people to postage stamp “Reserves” where they had no option but to take welfare.

Until quite recent years, the policy of the government of Canada was to “dispose the Indian problem” by “taking the Indian out of the Indian.” The most destructive segment of this policy was to forcibly take First Nation children away from their parents, grandparents, extended families, and communities and send them off, for the most part, to church-operated Residential Schools. The legacy of this misguided culturally destructive, trauma-producing policy has become more and more evident in a host of different settings such as dysfunctional families, addictions, prostitution, gang memberships, overcrowded prisons, and school drop-out rates. More recently, the policy of the Canadian Government has moved to ramp up the extraction of oil, mining, and hydro resources on Reserve land by large corporate interests without “bottom up” on Reserve, democratic consent. Three current examples are described in briarpatch Volume 41, Number 2—March/April 2012—fracking on Blood land, massive oil and gas development on traditional Lubicon territory, hydro dam construction in northern Manitoba. (google film on OKA crisis).

Despite witnessing and personally experiencing the heart-wrenching history of genocide against First Nation people in Canada, Ovide Mercredi has remained committed to non violent solutions. He is a student and admirer of Gandhi and has visited India to gain first-hand understanding of his methods. Ovide has been nominated by the government of India for the Gandhi Peace Prize.

Reprinted courtesy of Earthcare Connections, PO Box 1790, Wynyard, SK S0A 4T0. Phone (306) 554-LAND, email: info@earthcare.ca, www.earthcare.ca. Donald Sutherland is a career counsellor, personal coach, and mediator with special training in restorative justice. He is also a professional agrologist who divides his time between Saskatoon and Winnipeg, and he is also an active farmer in west-central Saskatchewan, email: donaldsutherland@sasktel.net.