Chief Spence Is Clouding Idle No More with Her Problems

There have been a lot of things said about Chief Theresa Spence of Attawapiskat and what is now her month-long hunger strike on Ottawa’s Victoria Island. If you haven’t been following the story, Chief Spence is the leader of an embattled Northern Ontario reserve that made international headlines last year for exposing a humanitarian infrastructure crisis on Canadian native reserves. But what began as a protest to bring attention to Aboriginal treaty rights she says have been ignored by Canada, has quickly become a clusterfuck mired in slander, finger-pointing and ol’ fashioned racism.

From the inflammatory Ezra Levant of the Sun News Network suggesting she’s given an easy ride by media because “lucky for Spence, she’s Indian,” to the unbridled hero-worship of Obert Madondo of Huffington Post Canada. He claimed her actions eclipsed Nelson Mandela’s (and wasn’t kidding). Whatever your opinion of Chief Spence, there’s no denying that recent media reports have sharply changed the public perception of her protest, opening her up to increasingly harsher criticism.

Her detractors usually follow the same line of inquiry: is she even on a legitimate hunger strike and where did all of the millions of dollars in federal funding to her reserve really go? At the beginning of Spence’s protest, those types of questions by journalists earned them ‘racist’ labels. Unfortunately there are tangible roots to both allegations. When it became widespread knowledge she’d been subsisting on fish and moose broths, Spence’s critics found their reason to question the sincerity of her physical struggle, even if her diet still qualified as an extreme measure. Some now see her protest as a less authentic hunger strike, instead calling it a “liquid diet.” On the issue of missing millions, a more damning audit report by Deloitte (curiously leaked at an opportune time to discredit her), validated her critics once more. Among their findings, Deloitte maintains that out of the $104 million funneled by the feds to the band between 2005 and 2011, there’s a serious lack of paper trail tracking how it was spent. For example, of the 505 reviewed transactions by the band, over 400 did not have adequate supporting documents.

Theresa Spence chillin' with some blankets.

Yet in fairness to Spence, she never hid her consumption of broth from the media (that was more an oversight on the part of reporters) and the Deloitte audit doesn’t necessarily mean that her and her band were blatantly stealing millions of dollars. While Deloitte said that she couldn’t verify that the transactions by the band council were in line with their intended funding agreements, it was because, as CBC points out, staff turnovers and a change in record-keeping systems had caused a “corporate memory loss.” In other words, sorely lacking administrative skills by band officials were probably to blame.

However egregious their record keeping was, it might be another example of federal neglect: if Attawapiskat is unable to process transactions effectively, perhaps the government should’ve made it a priority to train or appoint a financial representative to do so. In fact, The Canadian Press released a report detailing the financial difficulties of several bands and the inaction of Aboriginal Affairs department to adequately address the problem. Not only do a quarter of reserves face similar difficulties to Attawapiskat, but as far back as 1995 auditor general Sheila Fraser detailed an expansive list of problems associated with how the Aboriginal Affairs department managed money.

A sweet Theresa Spence patch.

Nonetheless, other glaring contradictions by Spence continue to fuel controversy. Like having band investments in gas giants Enbridge (the type of environmentally unfriendly company she and Idle No More take issue with), or the appointment of her romantic partner Clayton Kennedy as band manager with a respectable salary, have cast a shadow over her tenure as chief.

To make matters worse, today's meeting between Harper and First Nation’s leaders has been marred with controversy, which is partially due to Chief Spence’s increasingly provocative behaviour. After the leaked audit, a Global News crew in Attawapiskat intending to do a story on living conditions in the community were summarily kicked off the reserve and threatened with arrest, in accordance with a media ban Chief Spence personally issued. A Toronto Star reporter was also escorted off Spence’s Victoria Island enclosure the same day. Spence followed that up Wednesday by declaring she would now no longer attend today’s meeting with Harper, because Governor General David Johnston (the Crown’s representative) won’t be attending, which she considers integral. Her insistence on Johnston’s attendance borders on nonsensical. His role within our constitutional monarchy is a glorified figurehead position with zero policy clout as all treaty obligations the Crown entered into were passed to the government.

Chief Spence would be better served attending the meeting; especially since it’s not only something she aimed to do, but the very announcement of the meeting brought tears to her supporters’ eyes. Anything short of showing up could be perceived by her growing list of critics as petty sabre rattling.

Regardless of whether or not you believe Spence is an opportunist or an inspiration there is no doubt that her actions have achieved success: bringing the sorry state of aboriginal affairs to a national debate. Even if you think her hunger strike is illegitimate or that she’s corrupt, you cannot deny that her actions have forced Canadians to finally acknowledge First Nations people and their concerns in a way that’s unprecedented. Whether or not she’ll be remembered as Canada’s Mandela is a whole other story.

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