Jack Danylchuk
Northern News Services
Yellowknife (Jun 25/01) - The voices of the dead may add a new chapter to a treaty that transferred a vast swath of the Northwest Territories to federal control and give tax exemptions to their descendants living off reserves.
According to official accounts, Cree, Beaver, and Chipewyan leaders who negotiated the terms of Treaty 8 in 1899 believed they would never have to pay taxes of any kind.
"This has been very narrowly interpreted to apply only to persons living on reserves," said Karin Buss, a lawyer pleading the landmark case before Judge Douglas Campbell in Federal Court in Edmonton.
To build the case, Buss gathered transcripts of interviews with witnesses to the treaty process and the testimony of living descendants of chiefs and headmen who were there in the summer of 1899.
"All history is looking backwards; we're trying to take the judge back through the use of transcripts and testimony," Buss said.
One such witness is Celeste Rhandele, the grand-daughter of Laurent Dzieddin, a Chipewyan headman who added his mark to Treaty 8 at Fond du Lac, an isolated mission on the North shore of Lake Athabasca.
In a voice barely audible in the expectant silence the court room, the grey-headed elder related what her father told her of the events of July 25, 1899, when Chipewyan gathered to meet David Laird, the treaty commissioner.
After the negotiators broke for lunch, the priest who acted as an interpreter during the discussions encouraged all to accept the treaty and the money that came with it, Rhandele testified through an interpreter.
"The treaty would be honoured as long as the big rock across the lake does not move, the wind blows and the sun shines," she said.
Dzieddin added his mark to the treaty beside that made by the chief, Maurice Piche, with the understanding that it reflected their wishes. In fact, the treaty terms had been negotiated a month earlier at Grourard, on Lesser Slave Lake. After collecting signatures there, the commissioners separated and took to the Northern waterways, seeking endorsements in communities at the farthest edge of the territory.
"They couldn't read it, and they thought it was a unique document, but what they were signing a set contract," Buss said in an interview.
Treaty 8 makes no mention of taxation, but in a report to Clifford Sifton, superintendent of Indian affairs, Laird said that Indians wanted health and education benefits, and assurances that they could hunt and fish and not be subjected to taxation or conscription.
"We assured them that the treaty...did not open the way to the imposition of any tax and there was no fear of enforced military service," Laird wrote to Sifton.
Moreover, Laird told Sifton, "it would have been impossible to have made a treaty if we had not assured them that there was no intention of confining them to reserves."
It was Gordon Benoit, a former Fort Smith resident, heavy equipment operator, truck driver and gadfly to federal authorities, who found the key passage and filed the suit almost a decade ago.
"It's a question that's plagued our people since the signing of the treaty," Benoit told one interviewer.
The suit has the support of several Treaty 8 tribal organizations, and if successful will bring benefits to First Nations in Alberta, Saskatchewan, British Columbia and the Northwest Territories.
The Akaitcho NWT Treaty 8 Tribal Corp. which represents Dettah, Ndilo, Lutsel K'e and Deninu Kue withdrew from the Benoit case in April.
Sharon Venne, Akaitcho chief negotiator, said the corporation "has taken the position that it is better to negotiate than pursue legal action."
It may be another decade before there is a final decision, but if the suit succeeds, thousands of Treaty 8 beneficiaries living off reserve will be exempt from income tax.
"It would also recognize that there is a form of the treaty, an oral record, that does not appear in the text," Buss said.
