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Perry Bellegarde, elected grand chief of the Assembly of First Nations on Wednesday and the now the most powerful native politician in Canada, has spent the last 16 years honing a single, unambiguous message.
To paraphrase another prairie politician who hit it big on the national stage, in Mr. Bellegarde’s view, the First Nations want in.
A career politician and longtime regional chief from Saskatchewan, Mr. Bellegarde has long argued for a broader interpretation of treaty rights, one that would see First Nations earn a much larger share of resource revenues and jobs.
In a fiery first speech as grand chief Wednesday, Mr. Bellegarde doubled down on that theme. “To the people across this great land, I say to you, that the values of fairness and tolerance which Canada exports to the world, are a lie when it comes to our people,” he said.
“Canada will no longer develop pipelines, no longer develop transmission lines, or any infrastructure, on our lands as business as usual. That is not on.”
His final remarks drew one of the loudest responses from the crowd: “Canada is Indian land,” he said. “This is my truth and this is the truth of our peoples.”
The speech, which came after Mr. Bellegarde swept to an easy first ballot victory at the AFN’s national convention, marked a significant departure from the conciliatory tone of his predecessor Shawn Atleo. But for Mr. Bellegarde, it was a perfectly on brand.
First elected as a chief in his mid 20s, Mr. Bellegarde was thrust onto the provincial stage in 1998, when he beat back two challengers to become the head of the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations (FSIN) at the age of 35.
From the start, he focused in that job on what he called “the treaty agenda.” In a 2001 interview, he called Saskatchewan’s booming uranium, potash and energy industries “unfinished treaty business” and vowed to extract a greater share for his people — in jobs, cash or both. In 2013, he called for a moratorium on new resource permits in Saskatchewan, decrying the lack of a revenue-sharing agreement with First Nations as “economic racism.”
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