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Defending The Nation

The Native Youth Movement unites Native youth at a time when their futures are most at stake

John Kennedy, The SFU Peak

(CUP) Meet Derek Edenshaw. Besides
being Native\Haida and Cree to be exact—
he’s a father, a journalist, a poet and a
well-established local musician. Most
importantly, however, he’s a well-respected
leader of the Vancouver chapter of the
Native Youth Movement (NYM).

At 21 years old, he’s seen and done
more than most people have by that age.
The fact that he now leads such a
normal life, however, makes him a bit of an
anomaly.

The conditions under which so many
First Nation youth in Canada are raised far
too often prevent First Nation adults from
leading the kinds of lives the majority of
Canadians take for granted. Edenshaw
knows this; he’s already spent two years of
his life in jail.

As an off-reserve Native—the most
common kind—one of the more noticeable
things about Derek is his absolute dedica-
tion to the self-empowerment of all First
Nations people.

"Reserves? Get off the reserves!" he
says, "As long as Indian people are sitting
on these little pots of land—what they’d
call a ranchero down in California, a place
where you keep animals—as long as
Indians are staying on this land, these
little reserves, we’re fucked."

His advice?

"Get off them and go to your territories,
it’s the only logical thing to do."

Edenshaw, along with many _ other
Natives in NYM who have overcome over-
whelming odds, spends most of his time
fighting for a better future for First Nations
youth.

The Native Youth Movement, as the
name suggests, brings Native youth from
British Columbia and the rest of Canada
together to raise the political conscious-
ness of Native youth, and to fight for
Native self-determination and preservation
of heritage. Since early 2000, five new

NYM chapters have been formed in both
Canada and the United States, and
according to Edenshaw, five more will be
formed in B.C. within the next few months.

Born in Winnipeg, the NYM came into
being as a way for Native youth to band
together in support amongst extreme
social conditions: poverty, substance
abuse and violent gangs. The cultural

 

Derek Edenshaw

landscape and social geography of
Winnipeg also played a significant role in
the beginning of such a movement.

"Winnipeg has the highest population of
Native people per capita, for a city that’s
not reserve," explains Edenshaw.

He sees the social unrest among
Winnipeg’s Natives—and accompanying
gang problems, alcoholism, and abuse—
combined with their strength in numbers,
as the catalyst for the creation of the NYM.

"It started off as a way to mobilise, to
give a bit of a steam back to these hurting
kids."

The organization gained national appeal
after a 1995 conference on Native issues
in Ottawa called Sacred Assembly and put
on by the Assembly of First Nations, in
which young Natives felt they were being
ignored by their community leaders.

"A lot of the Native organisations were
talking ‘Youth this, youth this, youth that,
for our future, but there was no youth

participation," said Edenshaw.

According to Edenshaw, these blind
spots in the Assembly highlighted the
need for a platform in which Native
youth could address important issues
themselves.

The Vancouver chapter of NYM was born
shortly after, and it began a gigantic
recruiting spree.

"Every young Native kid in Vancouver
was down," says Edenshaw. "[They were
all] somewhat involved, somewhere."

The NYM has made youth involvement in
the treaty process a number one priority.

British Columbia is the one province
where treaties were never signed at the
time of European colonization. Until the
early 1990s, the government had’t even
begun the process of addressing the
unceded territory, which comprises most
of today’s British Columbia. Since then,
only the Nisga’s treaty has been ratified,
while the majority of existing treaty
negotiations are in the late stages of the
six-stage process.

The NYM, however, is opposed to the
B.C. government’s approach to treaty
negotiations—as much with the B.C.
Liberals’ as they were with the NDP’s.

"The NYM have declared themselves the
official opposition to the B.C. Treaty
Commission (BCTC), the B.C. Treaty
process," says Edenshaw.

“We called it a fraudulent process [in the
early 1990s when it began] and to this day
we Call it a fraudulent process."

The NYM’s argument revolves around
the fact that the chief and council of every
band—funded by the Department of Indian
Affairs (DIA)—while elected, seldom rep-
resent the true wishes of the grassroots
constituents, and in most cases, end up
having to "sell out" traditional Native land
to the wishes of the government.

“The whole treaty process is a big scam,"
says Honey Desjarlais, one of the founding
members of NYM Vancouver. According to.
her, while the sentiment of average band
members is in strong favour of compensa-
tion for unceded land, this gets lost when

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