By Marty Logan
MONTREAL, Dec 11 2001 (IPS)

When a Canadian Native leader threatened to expose to the world his fight with government over land wanted by a ski resort, he used a tactic that aboriginal groups have employed successfully since his father drove the Constitutional Express two decades earlier.

In November, Chief Arthur Manuel of the Neskonlith First Nation told a press conference in west coast Vancouver that he would take his struggle against the Sun Peaks ski resort to the International Olympic Committee (IOC) if the provincial government refused to negotiate.

Vancouver, the largest city in the province of British Columbia, is bidding for the 2010 Winter Olympics and Manuel says publicity of the land dispute would hurt the city’s image.

“Canada signed the U.N.’s Rio Declaration that says they protect traditional knowledge,” says Manuel by mobile phone as he drives from Vancouver to his home in the interior.

“They stand up in Ottawa and make fine speeches, they stand up in international forums and make very fine speeches but when it comes to integrating that at the community level, they’d rather arrest a 76-year-old lady then sit down and say ‘Well, how can we reconcile these interests?”‘ he says.

In July, two Neskonlith elders were among four people police arrested at the resort, 350 kilometres east of Vancouver. In August, provincial employees dismantled a camp that Natives had built on the site to symbolise their traditional use of the land.

The Neskonlith oppose Delta Hotel’s planned 70 million dollar expansion of the resort but the provincial government says it will not negotiate until the Natives leave the site – which a judge has ordered them to do.

“It’s not a protest camp,” says Manuel. “They’re all saying there’s protests up there. Hell, we’re not protesting up there, we’re living up there. We’ve always lived up there. What they’re doing is trying to take us out of our residency.”

In 1980, Manuel’s father George, then Neskonlith chief, organised and led 1,000 Natives to Canada’s capital, Ottawa, to lobby politicians to guarantee aboriginal rights in the soon to be revised Constitution.

Known as the Constitution Express, that demonstration, and other missions to the United Nations in New York and to Europe, is credited with the introduction of Section 35, the Constitution’s clause that recognises Native rights.

“International appeals never really go away. They continue to reappear,” says University of British Columbia law professor Douglas Sanders, who has written about George Manuel’s role in the founding of the World Council on Indigenous Peoples – the first international aboriginal organisation – in the 1970s.

“The Lubicon Lake (Nation) tried to get visibility at the time of the (1988) Calgary Winter Olympics with their campaign against the oil company that sponsored the show The Spirit Sings as part of the broader Olympic program in Calgary,” Sanders recalls.

While a Lubicon-led boycott against the museum exhibit succeeded only partly, another group, the James Bay Cree, has won battles by winning over international public opinion.

In the early 1980s the Cree, who have consultative status at the United Nations Economic and Social Council, launched a massive campaign to block a hydroelectric project on the Great Whale River in northern Quebec. Recruiting environmentalist Robert Kennedy Jr. to lobby the U.S. politicians who would decide whether to buy Great Whale power, the Cree captivated the public when they travelled by dogsled and canoe to New York City.

Their victory was sealed when New York State cancelled a power contract and Quebec shelved the project, although last month the Cree and the government announced they would develop a smaller project on neighbouring rivers.

Another Native group, the Carrier-Sekani Tribal Council from central British Columbia, is awaiting a possible formal hearing at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the rights body of the Organisation of American States. The group says that by permitting logging on its land, the provincial government is blocking Natives from practising their traditional way of life.

Manuel says that while international campaigns grab attention, they are also practical. “The only time in Canada when the RCMP (the national Royal Canadian Mounted Police) and (local) police are a little bit more cautious about running in and clubbing you and beating you up, is when you have international people watching,” he says.

Not all appeals succeed. Last year, Native groups in eastern Canada were among those who asked the IOC to reject Toronto’s bid to host the 2008 Games because of a controversial garbage dump the city was developing. After hearing their complaint, then IOC President Juan Antonio Samaranch reportedly told the protesters, “That’s your problem.” All the same, Toronto eventually lost to Beijing, thanks in part to cultural gaffes by its mayor.

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