The Treaty Annuity/Individual Empowerment initiative builds on the important work advanced in 2002-05 by the Treaty Annuity Working Group (TAWG), a special committee of the Social Planning Council of Winnipeg.

     The non-partisan committee, made up of Indigenous and non-Indigenous thinkers and former politicians (Liberal, Conservative, NDP), concluded that a modernized annuity would have an immediate and profound impact on the grinding poverty, social pathologies, and despair and hopelessness plaguing so many First Nations communities in Canada.

     TAWG hosted a national conference on the issue in 2004, which arrived at the following consensus:

• That modernized annuities based on Red River Valley farmland values would increase from $5 to about $5,000 per person;
• That the annuity be paid on a monthly basis (similar to the Canada Child Benefit) directly to eligible recipients or their guardians;
• That the modernized annuity be revenue neutral.

     Read the full conference report, Modernizing Treaty Annuities: Implications and Consequences, January 2004.

     The creation of TAWG was inspired by the work of Métis activist Jean Allard. The former NDP MLA in Manitoba, who had run sawmill projects for Indian Affairs (as it was called then), had grown increasingly frustrated by the seeming inability of Indian Affairs bureaucrats to deliver successful employment programs. He brooded on this issue of Indian poverty, realizing that poverty wasn’t just about money. It was also about powerlessness. He set to work on a book about the Indian political system, producing a manuscript called Big Bear’s Treaty: The Road to Freedom.

Big Bear’s Treaty clearly identified the problems that have led to the well-documented social pathologies in many First Nations communities and offered a radical new approach to Indigenous issues. He proposed modernizing treaty annuities—the sole individual right in the numbered treaties—as the means of empowering individual First Nations people to make choices about their lives outside the control of the vast system of bureaucrats from Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada, consultants, and chiefs and councils.

An extensive excerpt of Big Bear’s Treaty was published in the public policy journal Inroads in 2002.



Commentary:

The white man's burden

By Jean Allard

The Globe and Mail, July 16, 2002

It is my contention that the problems of status Indian governance today are not simply problems of corruption or poor administration...The real problems spring from the powerlessness and dependency of individual Indians...

Excerpt:

Big Bear's Treaty: The Road to Freedom

By Jean Allard

Inroads, Volume 11, 2002, p 109 (pdf)

Dave Courchene was dying. That’s why I’d gone to see him. His wife led me to the living room of their Pine Falls home, and a shrunken old man walked into the room. At first, I didn’t even recognize him. He was no longer the burley, fiery Indian leader of our younger days…



Report:

Modernizing Treaty Annuities:   Implications and Consequences

A Report by theTreaty Annuity Working Group 2004 (pdf)

The continuing problems plaguing Indian communities in Canada are well documented. Federal government policies and programs over the past thirty years have proved to be impotent in making any measurable improvements...