This Changes Everything

“Indigenous Rights and the Power of Keeping Our Word” (Pages 367-370)

Klein recalls a 2004 meeting she attended with two First Nation leaders and senior representatives of one of the world’s major credit rating agencies in New York. Arthur Manuel, former Neskonlith chief and a leader on Indigenous land rights, had requested the meeting as part of his bid to challenge governments that were not respecting Indigenous land rights. He realized the only way to influence them was to hit them with the threat of financial costs. So, he was challenging Canada’s AAA credit rating (granted by the agency) because Canada had huge outstanding and unacknowledged debts to First Nation peoples from taking and exploiting lands without consent since 1846.

Many First Nations tribes had filed lawsuits against Canada to this effect, and in the meeting, Manuel shared these with the agency. The agency responded that as the First Nations had no power to enforce their rights or collect these debts, Canada’s credit rating would remain unaffected, regardless of the rights or wrongs of the matter.

At the time, Indigenous peoples did not have powerful forces behind them in these land-right struggles, but since the rise of Blockadia-style resistance, that has changed: “an army of sorts is beginning to coalesce around the fight to turn Indigenous land rights into hard economic realities” (370).