Michèle Audette would have wanted to say thank you to the Montreal Canadiens when the hockey team recently recognized the metropolis as “traditional and unceded territory” Mohawk. And if some doubt the historic presence of the Mohawks on the island, the new senator then suggests that the club include in its pre-game message more indigenous nations who claim such ancestral occupation.
“Where I’m uncomfortable, for example, is when you say ‘not ceded’, she explains in an interview with To have to. Because in my opinion, if you say “not ceded”, it is because you are going to do everything to help us in our approach for the right to self-determination […] I do not think that the institutions are there. I don’t want it to be just cosmetic. “
On October 16, the Canadian broadcast for the first time a message acknowledging the rights of the Mohawks to the territory of Montreal, which has been criticized by historians and described as an “error” by the Minister responsible for Native Affairs, Ian Lafrenière. . For his part, Mme Audette has developed a message of territorial recognition for Laval University in Quebec, which lists no less than five nations claiming a presence on the site, without specifying whether or not it has been “ceded”.
Entering the Senate
Appointed Senator this summer by Justin Trudeau, Michèle Audette reaches the crowning dream of her career as an Indigenous activist. She had already tried twice to sit in the Upper House: at the turn of her thirties, then at 37. It is finally in the Innu language that she will be sworn in on November 22, a first in the history of the Senate.
The former commissioner of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, who notably held positions in academia and in the senior civil service of the Government of Quebec, maintains that Indigenous nations are intimately linked to their relationship with the territory.
However, the new independent senator was not convinced by the promise of the new federal Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations, Marc Miller, to “give back land” to the country’s First Peoples. “That, I can not wait to see what it will look like”, she drops, a few days before her first session in the Senate.
To talk about a real restitution of the territory, she maintains that it is necessary to establish a “patient” discussion, with “the will that we tell each other the real things”, not only with the federal government, but also with the government. Quebec, since the management of the territory encroaches on provincial jurisdiction. And this is where everything risks blocking. ” Right now, [dans] the dynamic that I feel, that I observe, I do not believe that there is this opening there, she drops. “Restoring the land”, I like that, but in Quebec, Quebec is also going to have to [négocier dans] these spaces […] For me, this is something that will take several generations. “
Block roads
In terms of reconciliation with the Aboriginals, Michèle Audette also flays the Legault government, without naming it. “There are places where they are not all there, they have a hard time recognizing systemic racism. And we are not talking about genocide! It means that we are not even in a real process of reconciliation yet […] On the one hand, we are going to authorize logging companies to cut trees on the territories that the nations have lived in for a long time and which are still present; and afterwards, this same government will talk about reconciliation. “
Senator Audette fears above all that the Indigenous nations and their ancestral knowledge will be left aside in the struggles between powerful orders of government and their many lawyers. Governments should better support the various nations so that they have a voice in all negotiations, she said, otherwise she calls for more gestures, such as blocking roads.
“It also becomes frustrating: protected areas, caribou, the river, the rivers. There are plenty of great resources for which we have knowledge, but we are not considered at all. Whether it is for climate change or for economic development, we are never there. We must denounce! We have to take the media, we have to take the courts, we have to take the United Nations, we have to block roads. There are not many tools of action left to remind the state that we are here. “
A question of education
Once her “moccasins are inside” the Senate, as she puts it, Michèle Audette wants to make education her priority, or her “battle caribou”, in order to achieve “the self-determination of our nations”.
His dream is, in a way, to rewrite history textbooks in an unprecedented collaboration between Aboriginals and non-Aboriginals. “Introducing or supporting a bill on education for the First Nations, Métis and Inuit, it is clear that this is a goal of life for me. “
The approach takes on even more meaning in Quebec, according to her, when the teaching of contemporary Aboriginal realities is lacking. Provinces like British Columbia and Saskatchewan would also have a head start in this area. Even Ontario, she says, includes in its French-language curriculum references to Indigenous figures such as Joséphine Bacon, Ghislain Picard and Naomi Fontaine.
“Joyce Echaquan is proof that there is a lack of knowledge, a collective ignorance. And education is partly to blame. Because we have not shown the beauty, the diversity, the difference of these nations. “