The Leader of the Fourth World: James Cairns Reviews Peter McFarlane’s (with Doreen Manuel) Brotherhood to Nationhood: George Manuel and the Making of the Modern Indian Movement
What Matters Now
Every city in Canada outside Quebec has its own Sir John A. Macdonald school or parkway or charity run or museum or decommissioned tugboat. Since the bronze personage of Macdonald once standing in Montreal’s Place du Canada was decapitated and smashed to bits in August, many other Macdonald statues have gone into hiding. But whether stashed under wooden crates or smirking on the ten-dollar bill, images of the racist colonist Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister, endure in part because so much else has been written out of politics in Canada.
Peter McFarlane with Doreen Manuel. Brotherhood to Nationhood: George Manuel and the Making of the Modern Indian Movement. Between the Lines. $32.95 402 pp., 9781771135108
What about a George Manuel Public School? Or the George Manuel International Airport? Never heard of them? They don’t exist. Like so many fighters for Indigenous sovereignty, Manuel is scrubbed from Canada’s official history. Yet as Peter McFarlane (working with Doreen Manuel, George’s daughter) shows in the excellent new edition of Brotherhood to Nationhood: George Manuel and the Making of the Modern Indian Movement (originally published in 1993), if there ever were a leader worthy of memorialization, capable of inspiring democratic movements to decolonize Turtle Island, Manuel is the man.
Through his grandfather, Dick Andrew, Manuel grew up with a living link to life in the BC interior prior to the “wave of white invasion” that stole and pillaged traditional Shuswap territory. Andrew could remember “the time when the Shuswap were masters of their own lives and their own lands,” but by the time George was born, three quarters of the Indigenous population had been killed by smallpox. The colonial state had enclosed traditional Shuswap hunting areas, handed over stolen lands to white settlers, supported Catholic missions, and forced Indigenous children into residential schools. Manuel, who was born in 1921 and didn’t hear a word of English until he was eight, would spend most of his life leading struggles to regain Indigenous sovereignty.
At nine, George was carried off to residential school in Kamloops by a cattle truck sent by the local Indian Agent. At twelve, George contracted tuberculosis, then spent years fighting for his life in a Catholic-run preventoria. In his twenties, Manuel was a “boom man” in the logging industry, a physically- and intellectually-demanding job keeping logs from jamming in the millpond. McFarlane suggests that the agility Manuel showed while dancing across floating trees served him well throughout his life as a community organizer and freedom fighter.
In contrast to sloppy left history that only notices Indigenous struggles for decolonization after the emergence of the 1970s Red Power movement, McFarlane tells stories of Indigenous resistance from across the twentieth century. For example, in 1926 when Manuel was five years old, two British Columbia Chiefs delivered a petition to the British king stating: “We Indians want our native titles to our native lands, and all our land contains as we are the original people of Canada.” In 1955, Manuel led a regional fight against a government decision to stop paying the medical costs of “gainfully employed Indians.”
Manuel’s accomplishments in the forty-plus years between that first political fight and his death in 1989 are staggering in their breadth and impact. McFarlane describes them vividly, and with the context necessary for contemporary readers unfamiliar with the finer points of state formation in Canada to grasp their political significance. In 1959, Manuel was elected president of BC’s North American Indian Brotherhood, and pushed for unity with the main group representing coastal Indians. In 1961, he became the Neskonlith band Chief. He served briefly in an experimental community development program through the Department of Indian Affairs, which Manuel used to build grassroots campaigns for decent housing. He travelled to Chicago to learn from leaders of the civil rights movement, and to Julius Nyerere’s newly independent, socialist Tanzania to build “an international framework around the Indian struggle in Canada.”
In 1969, the Trudeau/Chretien White Paper proposed extinguishing Indigenous rights and land claims once and for all. Manuel’s uncompromising leadership against the government’s assault drove his successful campaign to become Chief of the National Indian Brotherhood. The name of the group sounds impressive, but when Manuel took over the NIB, it was deeply in debt and employed only a single staff member. By the end of Manuel’s six years as National Chief, the NIB was in the black, with a large budget employing dozens of researchers and organizers. It had become one of the largest lobby groups in Ottawa, with deep regional roots. Manuel hired as his executive director the politically radical Marie Smallface Marule, a Blood Indian from Alberta just returned from three years doing anti-poverty work in Zambia. Marule describes recognizing Manuel’s unique gifts from the start:
George Manuel had a lot of presence. He had an international awareness and political astuteness. I was also surprised that he wasn’t worried about my radicalism at the time. It was easy to talk with him because he was incredibly bright and extremely well read. He was a prolific reader and he had a natural ability to analyze. He was also a great listener and could pump people for what they knew.
As National Chief, Manuel worked “to build a unified activist movement” that placed the land issue at the centre of government-to-government negotiations. He rejected cash for land, no matter the amount on the table. He dismissed symbolic recognition of Indigenous heritage or rights that weren’t directly tied to sovereign control over land. One of his final speeches as National Chief put a fine point on his vision:
Self-determination has to be our goal in our quest to recover the lands, energy, resources and political authority that we have entrusted to the White political institutions. We are saying that for the past hundred years we gave you, the White government, the responsibility to manage our lands, energy, resources and our political authority. You have mismanaged that trust and responsibility. Now we are taking it back into our hands and we will manage our own resources through our Indian political institutions.
At the same time as Manuel led the push for Indigenous sovereignty within the Canadian state, he led efforts to build an international organization fighting for justice for Indigenous people all over the globe, “a voice for the Fourth World.” Breaking away from official Canadian delegations (much to the fury of consular officials and foreign governments) in New Zealand, Australia, Tanzania, Kenya, Sweden, Guatemala, Argentina and elsewhere, Manuel met with ordinary Sami, Maori, Mayans and others – Indigenous people often living in poverty imposed through colonization. It was grassroots experience and trust that Manuel used to build the World Council on Indigenous Peoples, and to serve as the organization’s first president.
Then came Manuel’s fight against Trudeau’s constitutional repatriation plan. Although Manuel never dropped his opposition to the process, he played a key role in winning the “Aboriginal rights” that were eventually enshrined in Canada’s constitution. The chapter on how the 1980 “Constitution Express” wrought major concessions from federal and provincial governments is one of the liveliest in McFarlane’s biography. By the time Manuel organized hundreds of activists to travel by train from British Columbia to Ottawa to halt a renewed confederation deal that failed to recognize full Indigenous self-government, he had stepped back from being National Chief of the NIB. Yet rather than retire into the life of leisure and honours he doubtless deserved, in 1979 Manuel was elected to the no-less-important role of president of the new Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs.
Reveling in the excitement and successes of the Constitution Express was tempered by the fact that Manuel had been hospitalized before BC activists reached Ottawa. The heart problems that plagued him for years could no longer be ignored, and poor health pushed Manuel into retirement from politics a few years later.
The book takes a compassionate approach to Manuel’s complicated relationship with his children (indeed, Manuel’s daughter, Doreen, is the book’s leading source and is listed as a collaborator on the book’s cover); however, it’s clear that Manuel and his family made deep and painful personal sacrifices in the service of the movement for justice. When Manuel died in 1989, he left “the world as he had come into it: battling poverty and illness.”
McFarlane’s biography tells the story of a remarkable man who moved, and was moved by a decades-long mass struggle against the settler-colonial Canadian state and the dispossession of Indigenous land and lives everywhere on earth. The book describes a model of community-based leadership. The car trips, the phone calls, the billets, the trans-continental flights, the meetings with peasants on dirt-floored huts in the jungle – no matter his title or where he stood on the planet, Manuel chose to talk with and listen to the people. He understood himself to be accountable to communities, and knew that oppressed people fighting for bread and freedom were the source of his power.
Early in the book, McFarlane explains that part of his reason for publishing a new edition of From Brotherhood to Nationhood was to include more stories of Indigenous women who were active in the struggles led by Manuel. It’s debatable whether the new book achieves this goal. I was hoping for deeper reflection on the gendered character of Manuel’s organizations and campaigns, but the book remains largely about men, and McFarlane has little to say about that.
Manuel’s life and legacy are celebrated by many Indigenous activists. His granddaughter, Kanahus Manuel, a birth keeper and founder of the activist group Tiny House Warriors, writes in the book’s powerful afterward: “We are all continuing the work of my grandfather, George Manuel, who led the great awakening of his generation, when the people rose up after a century of vicious oppression to once again assert our rights to land and liberty.”
Still, there are no public schools, parkways, or airports named after George Manuel, not simply because Indigenous leaders are less well known by most Canadians (though they are) or because their accomplishments are less significant (arguably, they are far more honourable than those of any of Canada’s official heroes). The fact is that George Manuel’s vision, his politics, his life’s work, are incompatible with Canada’s conception of itself as a legitimate, democratic state. Perhaps Canadian officials are less overtly racist today than they were in the 1950s, when the head of the Indian Affairs Department publicly longed for the day “when all the Indians from coast to coast… have been integrated with the rest of the population.” But the Canadian government continues to claim sovereignty over unceded Indigenous land, disregard Treaty obligations, and use violent force to crush Indigenous land reclamations.
Without stating this point explicitly, McFarlane’s biography makes it clear that it’s impossible to support both the legitimacy of the Canadian state and Manuel’s rejection of it. You have to choose sides. As a white settler committed to genuine decolonization, my role in paying tribute to Manuel’s legacy is not only to encourage everyone to read this important biography, but to participate in transformative struggles against Canadian colonialism, and toward Manuel’s vision of Indigenous sovereignty.
James Cairns is associate professor of Social and Environmental Justice at Wilfrid Laurier University, and a Senior Editor at Hamilton Review of Books. He is the co-author (with Alan Sears) of The Democratic Imagination: Envisioning Popular Power in the Twenty-First Century (University of Toronto Press, 2012). His most recent book is The Myth of the Age of Entitlement: Millennials, Austerity, and Hope (University of Toronto Press, 2017).