Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to today's episode of Red Eye. I'm Jane Williams. Over the summer, o we're bringing you some of the highlights of our 2025-26 season, which wrapped up in mid-May.
Speaker: We're going to be back with our brand new fall season in September. Our first live radio broadcast will be on September 19th on Vancouver Cooperative Radio CFRO 100.5 FM and streaming live at coopradio.org slash red eye.
Speaker: Podcasts of interviews from that show will be posted the following week. In this episode, lawyer Bruce McIver joins Lorraine Chisholm to talk about his new book, Indigenous Rights in One Minute, What You Need to Know to Talk Reconciliation.
Speaker: Bruce McIver has written a new book that should become essential readings for Canadians who want to advance reconciliation. Indigenous Rights in One Minute asks and answers questions like, who qualifies as Métis?
Speaker: And what is the doctrine of discovery? Bruce McIver is the founder and senior partner at First Peoples Law and an adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia's Allard School of Law. He's a member of the Manitoba Métis Federation, and Bruce joins me now. Hello, Bruce.
Speaker: Hello. I want to start by expressing my gratitude to you for writing this book. It is truly genius. Oh, well that is very kind of you. Why did you write it I wrote it because i get asked those types of questions all the time.
Speaker: And I've been answering them for years. And I thought maybe I should put these into a book so they're more widely available. So that was the basic reason.
Speaker: And then part of my wider work I've been doing for quite a while, which is just trying to make a useful contribution to the national conversation that we have around Indigenous rights and reconciliation. I think there's a lot of misinformation or lack of information out there. So I wrote the book as a small contribution to try to make for a better conversation.
Speaker: Well, it's definitely going right on my bookshelf where I need to refer to it on a regular basis. so So tell us how the book is structured and how you came to this way of presenting the ideas in the book.
Speaker: Sure. The way I wrote it, and I joke with people, it's meant for someone like me that's got a short attention span, is that I pose each question, i give a one-sentence answer, and then I give about 300 350 more just to answer the question in a bit more depth.
Speaker: So it's not meant to sit down and read from page one to the last page. It's more meant to pick it up. You've got a question or just an interest in Indigenous rights, in reconciliation. You think you could use some more information,
Speaker: Or you get comments from colleagues, family members, friends, and you think, you know what, I don't think that's right. So hopefully you can find the information there to help you be part of a better conversation.
Speaker: Well, let's dive into an example. Page 32, the question, what's the difference between Aboriginal rights and Indigenous rights? What do people need to know about that?
Speaker: Yeah, that these are very different because Indigenous rights are Indigenous people's inherent rights. as being part of an Indigenous nation. And there's many different Indigenous nations across the country, all with their own particular laws and traditions. So those are Indigenous rights. Aboriginal rights are the rights that are recognized specific for Indigenous people under Canadian law.
Speaker: And what's in important there is that those rights are rights that fit within the tests and requirements made up by judges,
Speaker: within the Canadian law framework, work but they're not necessarily the same as, or they don't cover all the Indigenous rights that Indigenous people would have as being a member of their nation.
Speaker: Now, Bruce, you also ah highlight and link certain court cases to questions. For instance, why is the Tilt-Cotin decision important or why is the Sparrow decision important? What was your purpose in including these sections?
Speaker: Yeah, with this, I think that as a lawyer, if I can do it, I have a responsibility to try to explain these fundamental cases for non-lawyers.
Speaker: Because to know enough about Indigenous rights to have an informed conversation, it's important to at least have access to reliable information about these court cases. what they stand for, and then what they don't stand for, because there are a lot of comments you will read out in the press where people are expressing their opinions, but they're not really based on what the courts have had to say. So that's why it's important to be there, and it's also important I think, because then non-lawyers can see how the law is developed.
Speaker: It's really, really important. It's not, and I tell people this a lot, it's not like the tablets given to Moses by God coming down from the mountain. That's not how the law works. Real people acting as judges decide these things.
Speaker: Governments take positions on these issues. The law develops. And the law can develop in ah from at least an Indigenous perspective in a better direction.
Speaker: And if it's going to do that, I think we need to know more about the fundamentals of the law. In the answer to the question, how do courts limit the impact of Aboriginal rights? You say Indigenous people fail in court because they present evidence for an Aboriginal right, and then they're told they actually needed to present evidence for a different right. It's as if you say someone presents evidence they saw a chicken only to be later told they needed to prove they saw a specific type of chicken, a Rhode Island red.
Speaker: Talk about this problem. Yeah, this is a really important part of the difference between Indigenous rights and Aboriginal rights, because ah Aboriginal rights are what fits within the tests developed by the judges who decide these things in Canadian courts. And the test can be shaped in such a way to limit the effectiveness of the recognition of Aboriginal rights under the Constitution. One of the ways the courts do that is, well,
Speaker: We said you needed to identify this. You did something else. So we're going to decide it this way. It really is frustrating for Indigenous people because it can be a moving target in court where you can see a judge wanting to get to a particular result. And there's enough latitude.
Speaker: and how the law works, that they can get there and still say, well, I followed the law in this particular situation.
Speaker: Bruce, one through line in the book, or at least one through line I took from it, is how all these elements are linked in a way by the Canadian project of colonization. Talk about how this is such a significant and persistent motive in Canada.
Speaker: Yeah, it's really important to understand that colonization is not a historical event. It's something that's going on today, every day in Canada.
Speaker: It's ongoing. It's part of the long-term project of removing Indigenous people from the land, so non-Indigenous people. people can exploit their lands. And we see that particularly across BC all the time. So it's important that it's not historical.
Speaker: It's going on today. We don't call it this most of the time. And in the book, I give the example that one of the discredited principles at the very foundations of colonization is the doctrine discovery.
Speaker: And we don't call it that in Canada now. We call it the assertion of crown sovereignty. But that's just a euphemism for the same thing that went on 150 years ago and is going on now.
Speaker: I want to move a bit from the map to the territory here. From your analysis, it seems that the system of proving Aboriginal title in itself puts Indigenous people at risk. You say if they assert their rights, they're criminalized. Can you talk about what that looks like on the ground right now?
Speaker: Yeah, we see it a lot in BC, probably for a lot of people. They just have to think back to the Wet'suwet'en and the coastal gasoline project. These rights exist, the rights over the land, the rights to decide how the lands would be used or would not be used. But because provincial and federal governments maintain a policy of denying those rights, it's not that they're asserted rights. They're denied rights.
Speaker: And so it's in the interest of the colonizers to continue to deny them. And then what happens, Canadian law kicks in there may be opportunities to consult.
Speaker: but there's no requirement to do anything in response to the objections raised by Indigenous people, then they end up being criminalized. I see this all the time. Land offenders, most often women, being criminalized under Canadian law.
Speaker: Because they're standing up for their rights that are supposedly protected under the Canadian Constitution. But as long as governments deny them, those land offenders can end up in jail.
Speaker: Let's take just one more question. Your book is subtitled What You Need to Know About Reconciliation. what is Reconciliation? Reconciliation. I think the answer I give in the book, and I was reading this recently, i i there's quite a bit in the book that I think people will find a bit direct, and maybe they'll find it a bit harsh, but it's the truth as far as I know it.
Speaker: And reconciliation, at least within the context of Canadian law, is how the law justifies Canadians' ongoing colonization.
Speaker: That there's a responsibility to do something, but it's there's no responsibility or no requirement to recognize that Indigenous people have a right to the land and to make decisions about that land. Instead, the way Canadian law works is just accept that call the Narsers can show up claim the land, displace Indigenous laws, and now let's reconcile instead of dealing with that fundamental lie that's at the basis of the Canadian nation-state.
Speaker: Interestingly, on the page opposite to the question on reconciliation, you ask, what's the Indian problem? Got a stark contrast there. Yeah, so that's one you get all the time. And so I explain in the book that this is the type of thing that's used against Indigenous people all the time.
Speaker: This type of dialogue, that there is, quote, an Indian problem, And what can non-Indigenous people do to solve it? The answer I give in the book is that there is no Indian problem. The problem is Canada.
Speaker: And that's what Canadians need to accept. I know it makes a lot of non-Indigenous people uncomfortable, but until they accept that uncomfortableness, we're not going to move towards anything resembling true reconciliation.
Speaker: Bruce, Pam Palmitter says, if there's ever a book that needed to be in every school, library, and bookshop in Canada, it's Indigenous Rights in One Minute. And and I have to say, i completely agree with that. In writing this book, what are some of the ways you would imagine it being used or hope it would be used?
Speaker: I've seen it being used now a lot within government, within industry, within just conversations. So what I get some of the most gratitude from is when I'm talking to a person that's not involved in Indigenous rights, but they've picked it up, they've read a bit, and they tell me, thank you so much because I've heard this kind of misinformation my whole life. And you know what? I thought it was wrong, but I couldn't be sure. And now I have a book that I can go to and say, actually, this is what the law is. is.
Speaker: And this is what these concepts and principles mean. And that's why they're important. So if that's how the book is used around the kitchen table in those kinds of conversations, I'll be very happy that I've made a useful contribution.
Speaker: Well, thank you so much for talking with me today, Bruce. I hope many people will take this book as part of their essential reading. Great. Thank you very much. I've been speaking with Bruce McIver. Bruce is the founder and senior partner at First People's Law and an adjunct professor at the University of British Columbia's Allard School of Law. His new book is Indigenous Rights in One Minute, What You Need to Know to Talk Reconciliation.
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Speaker: I'm Jane Williams. Thanks for listening.
