The following is a commentary from Chief Bernard Ominayak concerning
the Treaty Alliance of North American Aboriginal Nations.  It gives
the reasons for the creation of the Treaty and some insight into the
workings of the Alliance.  It also says a lot about the man who
originated the concept of this mutual defense pact.  

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Treaty Alliance of North American Aboriginal Nations
Chief Bernard Ominayak


Increasingly Canada's aboriginal people are under seige by both
levels of Canadian Government and major resource development
companies.  They bull-doze their way into areas such as ours, using
their considerable political and economic power to push aside the
people they find there, exploiting the natural resources, wasting the
natural resources, using up the natural resources and then moving on,
typically having destroyed both the land and the aboriginal people. 
For all their wealth, power, education and world-wide experience,
they seem incapable of understanding what we always knew -- that you
can't destroy everything and still have anything left. 

In the past aboriginal people have tended to take these people at
their word and to basically follow their laws and the rules which
they've made for supposedly protecting important rights and competing
interests.  However painful experience makes clear that their rules
and laws don't work to protect our important rights and interests,
but only to rationalize, sanction and enforce what they intended to
do all along.

In the past aboriginal people have also tended to operate
independently of each other, each with our own agenda and each with
our own battles to fight.  Fighting to defend our rights and
interests independently of each other, and essentially following
political and legal rules developed by the other side, has not served
us well.  If we can't do better in the future there won't be much
left to talk about, either on the ground, in constitutional
conferences or any place else.

For all of our cultural, linguistic, historical, economic and
geographic diversity, it seems clear that we have at least a couple
of basic things in common, things on which we can all agree, things
around which we can form a common front.  These things are protection
of our aboriginal lands and our right as sovereign aboriginal peoples
to manage our own affairs and govern ourselves.

The Treaty Alliance of North American Aboriginal Nations is based on
commonly accepted principles of international law regarding the
rights of sovereign peoples to defend themselves and their lands. 
It's consequently similar in both tone and substance to earlier
mutual defense and assistance pacts signed by other nations under
threat.

As a first step the Treaty Alliance establishes a planning mechanism
for considering ways and means of enhancing our individual
capabilities through a pooling of available resources. For years
aboriginal nations have been agreeing to support each other but the
content of that support has been typically left until a crisis and
then defined in process under duress.  The Treaty Alliance is an
effort to do better than just react.

The Treaty Alliance creates a "Council" of signatories which in turn
constitutes a "Defense Committee".  It will be the job of the Defense
Committee to plan and recommend specific measures to give force and
effect to the general commitment of the signatories "to join their
efforts at self-help and self-defense through mutual aid and
assistance".

Aboriginal Nations must be prepared to do what's required to ensure
that Canadian Government and major resource development companies
start taking aboriginal people and our rights a little more
seriously.  Signatories to the Treaty Alliance hope that it will
provide us with what we need to work more effectively together to
protect our rights and lands.  If the major resource development
companies and their cronies in Canadian Government can't be stopped
from simply bull-dozing aboriginal people out of their way, it won't
be long before aboriginal people lose everything we have and value as
people.  

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 For more information contact web:car by e-mail or in writing 
                Aboriginal Rights Support Group 
                   Committee Against Racism 
                   P.O. Box 3085, Station B 
                   Calgary, Alberta  T2M 4L6