Thoroughly FNUC'D, No Question About It

I don’t know if there’s a Cree equivalent of foot-in-mouth disease. (Leader-Post). But Clarence Bellegarde, the Chief of the Little Black Bear First Nation, a close political ally of Morley Watson (whose actions brought First Nations University of Canada to grief unparalleled in the Canadian academic world) and the chairman of the First Nations University of Canada board of governors, pretty much burned every bridge with two levels of government and the Canadian academic community have tried to build since its Feb. 17, 2005 takeover.

Sixteen people with PhDs (as of last count) – and about a third of its professors have left FNUC (Planet S). Enrollment has fallen by a third – mostly by third and fourth year students who learn that the college is falling apart, and if they want their degree to mean anything, they go into the University of Regina. The college has gone from being a source of pride to a joke in the Saskatchewan and Canadian academic world. And it will continue to be a joke – as long as aboriginal politicians continue to run the show into the ground, as they have done with most band businesses (the Landmark Inn) and enterprises (File Hills Internet, Lebret Eagles and Beardy’s Rage of the Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League).

Paul Martin -- no, not that Paul Martin, this Paul Martin (Paul Martin Communications) once explained this to me. The reason why most co-operative ventures and state capitalist enterprises fail is that the needs of the consumer aren’t always the needs of the owners of a business when the state is involved. For example, many state business ventures were create not to make a profit for the state, but to get people working or to ‘diversify the economy.’ But if establishing a profit wasn’t the most important thing, it wouldn’t run as well as a business that was mandated to provide a profit.

So it is with a university. FNUC’s mandate was to educate The Best and The Brightest of Canadian aboriginal society. That’s why the chiefs and a small cadre of aboriginal academics convinced two levels of government to establish the college. But whether as a side-effect, or whether it was the established goal of Morley Watson and then FSIN Grand Chief Alphonse Bird (and there’s evidence either way regarding this) FNUC isn’t doing that any more. It’s now a cog in the FSIN patronage machine, run by people who otherwise couldn’t get a job in academia or in the private sector.

And if I’m Saskatchewan’s advanced education minister, well, I should be feeling as if Chief Bellegarde is going to ask for a smoke afterward. (Leader-Post) The province gave FNUC close to $5 million to deal with its budget shortfall, its new collective agreement, and a study that rehashed the Anaquod report – in order to deal with their problems, and FNUC’s board of governors told them something involving sex and travel in that order. In the words of this long-established 12-step support group (AlAnon International), FNUC doesn’t see its funding agents as partners, or as people for whom they are financially responsible to. FNUC sees its funders as ‘enablers.’

Frankly, the only solution is for the feds to step in permanently. The Readers’ Digest version sees the minister of Indian Affairs doing something like this: the feds cut all funding – all funding – until the board of governors resigns and the FSIN turns over trusteeship of the Regina campus and FNUC to the federal government. There’s no sense in the FSIN keeping political control of the university any longer since they’ve demonstrated that they’re not capable of running a two-float parade, let alone something as complicated as a university, whose job is to fundamentally question – and provide answers to -- the political masters of a society.

The only other option would be a disaster of the first magnitude for Regina – the federal government closing FNUC in favor of establishing Departments of Native Studies in other universities – say, the University of Northern BC, Athabasca University, the University of Northern Manitoba, and the Universitie du Quebec-Abitibi. Not only would it mean an incredible brain drain in Regina (FNUC’s blood purges have been partly stemmed by having many of those jumping or being pushed out landing on their feet at the U of R), but also it would mean the end of a concentration of aboriginal thinkers, intellectually feeding off each other, which is what a good university provides.

That’s not going to happen under Stephen Harper’s watch. For all the bluster and blather about ‘traditional Indian decision-making,’ Chief Bellegarde’s thought process is the same as Leon Trotsky’s, George W. Bush’s or Gary Goodyear’s. Political hacks read science like one of those psychological inkblot tests: they read into it what they want. If a politician thinks the October Revolution was the result of the first stage of the creation of a New Soviet Man (Wikipedia) , or that global warming is a hoax perpetrated by the Birkenstock generation, (Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, U.S. Congress) or that the best way to ingrate your political party into Jewish life is to engage in some Palestinian-bashing (Impolitical), then woe betide anybody -- no matter what their education -- who gets in that politician's way. The politicians are never the ones to deal with the consequences of such actions.

In one way, you could argue that FNUC’s problems could go back to the time of the treaty signings (in southern Saskatchewan’s case, 1874 with the signing of Treaty 4). In those treaties, the Canadian and British governments agreed to recognize aboriginal governments as rulers over aboriginal people – but those governments have never agreed to anything like a bill of rights or a constitutional precedent to recognize its peoples’ rights. Institutions such as FNUC have progressed beyond the understanding of the FSIN: the only way they can respond, like an abusive spouse, is to lash out and take control.