Title: INDIGENOUS-CANADA: First Nations Goes Corporate By Paul Weinberg TORONTO, Oct 21 (IPS) - Leaders of native communities are looking for new opportunities to boost their economic development and create employment and self sufficiency and so reduce their dependency on government welfare. It's not hard to see why. A recent Canadian federal government report documented how income, education and life expectancy are worse on native reserves here than in 62 other countries of the world. But Tony Hall, a professor of native American Studies at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta says that economic globalization and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) is undermining traditional aboriginal concepts of communal ownership. "Little by little the unique legal domain of Indian country is being assimilated into the bank system," Hall says. Traditionally, native reserve band councils have had difficulty accessing finance capital for local community development because the common property concept of aboriginal communities made it difficult for banks to seize assets if a borrower failed to pay up the loan, Hall points out. With the encouragement of the Canadian government and the development of business opportunities in resources-rich First Nations' territories, financial institutions have started to support indigenous corporate projects. But Hull wonders whether in the process "the banks will replace the rule of the church and the federal department of Indian Affairs" as the dominating factor in the lives of native Canadians. Ottawa is promoting the creation of aboriginal businesses to lift native reserves out of their current economic situation, states Dennis Wallace, deputy minister of the federal Indian Affairs and Northern Development. He told attendees at the three-day First Nations International NAFTA Summit trade show, which woundup in Calgary Monday, that a new generation of Aboriginal entrepreneurs has emerged and is involved in more than 20,000 native-owned companies. The two co-sponsors of the Calgary summit, the Blood Tribe of Southern Alberta and the San Carlos Apache of Arizona in the United States are held up as models of First Nations successfully developing their economic base. The Bloods are selling bales of hay to Japanese companies while the the San Carlos Apache buy and sell cattle with their Mexican neighbours. Wallace admitted that while NAFTA has benefited Canada, the U.S. and Mexico as a whole, "Aboriginal people have not been able to fully embrace its opportunities or reap its benefits." He is anticipating that events like the Calgary summit will encourage trade and joint ventures among different First Nations peoples in the Americas. But, Marvin Mull Jr., national chairman of the San Carlos Apache who own some two million acres of land, says that in the United Staes "some reservations are too small or lack the resources," that would enable them to benefit from selling commodities to overseas markets. Also, Canadian natives have to undo a history of dependency and poverty that Ottawa helped to create during the settlement of western Canada at the turn of the century, says Lois Frank, a professor of native American studies at the University of Lethbridge. While whites were able to till the land as farmers, aboriginals who left their reserves to engage in any economic activity could lose their reserve Indian status or even be jailed. "We tend to blame the victims as the authors of their misfortune," Frank says. Ottawa carried out a contradictory policy at the time of wanting to assimilate native people to European culture, but also relegate them to a system of reserves, that South Africa later copied to set up its apartheid arrangement of racial separation. Frank notes that native people traded with each other for centuries and their initial contact with early British and French settlers in the fur trade in North America was conducted on an equal basis. If, after the founding of Canada in 1867, the federal government had allowed natives to remain self sufficient, their history might have turned out a little differently, she adds. Hall suggests that the First Nations NAFTA conference was about getting native people "to buy into" these new international trade agreements and regulations "that they had no part in making." He also says it is connected to Ottawa's promotion of a proposed free trade zone for all the Americas. This issue is particularly acute in countries like Mexico where the Zapatista uprising in the state of Chiapas in January 1994 started when indigenous people were in danger of losing their communal agricultural lands to large private interests. "My instinct is that this current conference in Calgary is a government initiated scheme to get some Indian leadership to sign away rights that have been violated by NAFTA," says Hall. Back in the early 90s, Hall briefly advised the federal Liberal party on native issues while it was in opposition and was fighting the pro-NAFTA policy of the Progressive Conservative government under Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. The Conservatives who dominated the Senate - Canada's upper house in Parliament - managed to beat back an opposition Liberal amendment that had stated: "nothing in NAFTA should supersede Aboriginal and treaty rights." Hall recalls that the opposition federal Liberals, then strong critics of NAFTA, were disappointed with the slow response by the First Nations leadership to a proposed continental free trade arrangement that would have a major impact on aboriginal land rights -- set out in treaties that date back to the 1763 Royal Proclamation under the rule of the British Crown and still carrying legal standing today in Canada. The Conservative majority in the Senate defeated the amendment, leading to the passage of NAFTA by the Canadian parliament. The federal Liberals - who subsequently defeated the Progressive Conservative Party in the 1993 national election, and came to power on a platform that would revise some of NAFTA's provisions - ended up signing the agreement as negotiated by the Mulroney with the United States and Mexico. 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