The Assembly of First Nations (AFN) is Canada’s largest and most influential lobby group representing Treaty Indians.
I can’t say I have much use for RoseAnne Archibald, the first female AFN national chief, who again accused her regional chiefs of hypocrisy as they recommend her removal for the second time in a year.
My negative feelings about Archibald are not because of her election on July 8, 2021, after a fifth round of voting with only 50% of ballots cast, an outcome some insiders felt was illegitimate because the AFN charter requires that a national chief be elected with 60% of the vote.
Nor are they grounded in the charges of AFN workplace harassment or other irregularities, which were even preceded by a report dated May 3, 2021 by an independent investigator into bullying and harassment against Archibald when she was Ontario regional chief that involved 10 complaints. Only seven of the complainants agreed to be interviewed and the issue hit dead end after the complainants refused to file formal claims because they said they feared workplace retribution. Although Archibald was not interviewed, the investigator reported that each of the seven complainants was credible and had well-founded concerns about pursuing their complaints further.
As for the first set of AFN charges, they involved bullying and harassment allegations from four of her staff members filed under the organization’s whistleblower policy. A fifth complaint by the former CEO followed sometime later.
In a statement issued June 16, 2022, the AFN confirmed it received the complaints the month before against Archibald and determined the findings supported further inquiry by an external investigator.
In her own statement released the same day, Archibald said she welcomed the investigation while calling for a forensic audit and independent inquiry into the last eight years of AFN operations.
The AFN executive committee and its national board of directors nevertheless voted to temporarily suspend her at full pay the very next day, pending the outcome of the investigation by an external investigator.
Archibald was reinstated on July 5, 2022 at an AFN General Assembly, when the Indian Bands-in-Assembly, the organization’s grassroots ruling body, roundly rejected a resolution calling for her suspension with only 44 voting in support, 252 voting against, and 26 abstentions.
The current call for her removal immediately followed the release of the investigator’s report on April 28. The resolution to remove her stated the investigation found Archibald had breached the AFN’s harassment and whistleblower policy, along with its code of conduct and ethics.
Archibald responded that “The AFN executive committee is out of line and their motion is completely unnecessary as 75% of First Nations-in-Assembly overwhelmingly endorsed [on July 5, 2022] my leadership and approach to create more transparency and accountability at the AFN.”
To her early charges against the AFN establishment, Archibald added the claim of misogyny — the hatred, distrust, marginalization, exploitation or discrimination of women — an accusation with surface credibility given its systemic occurrence among aboriginal peoples.
This misogyny goes back to ancient times, and became more intense on the Plains with the domestication of wild horses following their importation by the first Europeans conquerors, a process that enhanced the economic and political roles of men. Further east, the development of the fur trade had the same effect.
Its most conspicuous current sign is disproportionate violence — including the heinous crime of murder — against indigenous females by indigenous males.
The 11-member AFN executive committee — consisting of the national chief and regional chiefs — met on June 14 to set the agenda for this week’s closed-door assembly concerning the results of the investigation into Archibald’s conduct.
Saying that the meeting did not go well is an understatement with shouted charges and counter-charges flying back and forth between the national chief and the regional ones.
The chiefs-in-assembly met on June 28 to once more address Archibald’s fate in a one-day online Zoom gathering.
Neither the complainants nor the public were permitted to attend Wednesday’s meeting though the AFN granted CBC News access under embargo until it concluded.
Proceedings began with a briefing by Ottawa-based employment lawyer Raquel Chisholm, from the firm Emond Harnden, whose summary of the investigation, released last month, found Archibald harassed two complainants and retaliated against all five.
Archibald then released her own counter-report, disputing the findings.
“I have not been weakened from the attacks,” Archibald told the delegates. “I have been made stronger and better.”
With her political career hanging in the balance, Archibald gave an impassioned speech, arguing the AFN would set a dangerous precedent by firing its first female national chief over what her lawyer called “minor breaches” of human resources policies.
“Many women are watching,” she said. “What’s happening to me would never happen to a male chief. It would never happen to any of my predecessors.”
The non-confidence motion to oust Archibald as national chief needed 60% support from Band leaders in attendance to pass. It eventually secured 71%, or 163 of the 231 votes cast.
While Archibald has cleverly tried to conflate the issue of a hostile workplace with entrenched AFN rot and corruption, the two sets of issues need to be separated even though it may be credible to opine that the harassment occurred because Archibald was determined to root out several possibly intertwined AFN problems such as incompetent administration, worker apathy and poor job performance, inflated salaries, wasteful spending, political patronage, exorbitant payout demands, unaccountability and a lack of transparency, untendered contracts, and related issues.
Exposing these shortcomings and suggesting that hundreds of employees should be dismissed, including dissolving the AFN secretariat — the administrative and operational arm of the organization, which employs about 200 people – must have rocked the glad-handing AFN male-dominated establishment to the core.
But my real concern is not about an organization that has long been regarded with cynical dismissal even by ordinary indigenous people but about national leaders such as the current one propagating outright falsehood about aboriginal issues.
In an interview with Stephen Sackur on BBC’s HardTalk on August 4, 2021, Archibald claimed that the bodies of 1,600 murdered Indian Residential School children had been ‘recovered so far’:
Stephen Sackur: Yeah, but to be clear, RoseAnne, sorry to interrupt, this is very important, that they were not deliberately exterminating First Nations children over the course of a century and a half, were they, this wasn’t designed to kill?
RoseAnne Archibald: Oh, it was designed to kill, and we’re seeing proof of that, ,1600 little children, little ones, innocent children, have been recovered so far. By the time that this process is done, we’ve, we’ve only, we’re only talking about eight of these institutions so far. There were 139 recognized institutions across Canada. There were a total of 1300 institutions in total, so we’re gonna be into the thousands upon ten thousands of children found. I am not sure how you can say that that’s not intentional, and that the recovery of so many little children doesn’t signify what it is, which is genocide. The U.N. calls it genocide. We call it genocide.
It seems the Canadian government didn’t get the memo. Despite Chief Archibald’s confident assertion to Sackur, the government has been completely silent on the alleged recovery of the bodies of 1,600 murdered children.
Ditto for the media. No media outlet in Canada, not even the CBC, has reported the discovery in Canada of the bodies of 1,600 murdered children.
On 25 April 2022, Chief Archibald announced at a UN conference that she was sending a letter to the UN Commissioner for Human Rights.
Did that letter allege that the bodies of 1,600 murdered children had been recovered in Canada? Canadians are not allowed to know, because Chief Archibald has kept that letter secret.
Archibald accusations of corruption, secrecy, unaccountability, even hypocrisy, at the AFN apply to her as well.
The next chief, male or female, is bound to continue these reprehensible practices.
Hymie Rubenstein is editor of The REAL Indigenous Issues newsletter and a retired professor of anthropology, the University of Manitoba
