"National Chief: 'We Should Not Have Been So Patient'"

OTTAWA - It is an astonishing admission. But George Erasmus now thinks he may have been wrong all along.

The national chief of the Assembly of First Nations - the political voice of Canada's 550,000 native Indians - sits in his third-floor office in the Ottawa and considers the five years he has been in office: Kahnawake, Kanesatake, St. Regis, Lubicon, La Verendrye, Teme-Auguma Anishnabai, Haida, Dene, James Bay, Manitoba justice, budget slashes, Meech Lake...

The list is so long, so painful, that he can be forgiven for thinking there might have been another way, a better way - any way that might have altered the recent course of Canadian history just a bit. After all, in the opinion of the national chief, it had nowhere else to go but up.

"We should never have been so patient," he now says.

"People like myself - we were always so gentle, so patient, so accepting of the government approach to whatever issue we were dealing with."

Erasmus always believed it was possible to negotiate. He kept the faith when so many other native leaders lost theirs, but now, with Kahnawake and Kanesatake, he is almost afraid to hope again.

It was two years ago in June that the faith of Georges Erasmus began to shake. Oddly enough, it happened over another, now-forgotten raid on a Mohawk blockade. "Canada," he said at the time, "we have something to say to you. We have a warning for you. We want to let you know that you are playing with fire.

"We may be the last generation of leaders that are prepared to sit down and peacefully negotiate our concerns with you."

He not only now thinks he was right to state this, he believes as well that he might have taken another approach as leader that is more in line with blockades than patiently sitting and waiting for the government to negotiate.

On his desk beside him is a letter from the president of the United States. It is not a letter sent directly to Erasmus, but a letter faxed to him by the World Council of Indigenous Peoples. It is merely a greeting from George Bush to the 46th annual convention of the National Congress of American Indians. It begins, naturally, with some meaningless verbal gladhanding. But then comes the sentence that fascinates George Erasmus:

"I also reaffirm," the president of the United States has written, "my administration's strong commitment to Indian self-determination and the government-to-government principles set forth by President Nixon in 1970 and expanded upon by President Regan in 1983."

Government to government. The phrase strikes George Erasmus as sweetly ironic. Here he has the prime minister of Canada describing native sovereignty desires as "bizarre" and yet here is the prime minister's closest political friend, George Bush, and his political mentor, Ronald Regan, accepting the notion as an American fact of life. Good enough for Richard Nixon. But not for Brian Mulroney.

Also on the national chief's desk are the texts of two recent Supreme Court of Canada decisions - the Sioui case involving four Huron hunters in Quebec, and the Sparrow case involving fishing rights in B.C. - two pro-native decisions that are highly supportive of traditional aboriginal rights.

Georges Erasmus has come to the conclusion that Canadian Indians have been wrong to believe negotiation would work. The only sure way to guarantee rights is through the courts, the way American Indians eventually achieved what the president himself calls "government-to-government principles."

"We had hoped to get a government that we could deal with," Erasmus says of his dreams when he set out on this job five years ago. "But even if we negotiate for the next 10 years what the hell is going to be the difference? I still have to deal with the deputy minister of Indian Afairs."

If he could do it all over again, the national chief now says he would have been "a lot more aggressive." In fact, if he could go all the way back to when he first took on this difficult job, he would have stayed on as president of the Dene Nation. And he would have fought to have the Dene Nation reconstituted as a government. It would set up its own laws, run its own affairs.

It would have led, of course, to a confrontation. He would, he believes, have been arrested. Just as he now believes necessary - but he would have then turned to the courts, forgetting completely the political process.

"If we had taken that route," he now says, "it would have been resolved long ago. I could have taken such a different course, but I didn't, because I've never given up on this country...."

The voice of the national chief trails off, the clear unspoken message that now, in the Indian Summer of 1990, he is himself on the verge of giving up on Canada.