Canadian aboriginals come to learn about nation-building
By Amiram Barkat
What would cause a respected Canadian Native American leader from the province of Saskatchewan, laden with honors and honorary degrees, to get up one day and praise Hitler for having "fried" six million Jews?
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The remarks were made last December by David Ahenakew, former head of the Assembly of First Nations and Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations and a member of the Order of Canada, to a local Saskatchewan paper, the Saskatoon StarPhoenix.
"The Jews damn near owned all of Germany prior to the war," Ahenakew said. "That's how Hitler came in. He was going to make damn sure that the Jews didn't take over Germany or Europe. That's why he fried six million of those guys, you know. Jews would have owned the goddamned world. And look what they're doing. They're killing people in Arab countries."
Media across Canada picked up and endlessly quoted Ahenakew's words until he finally convened a press conference to apologize. But Jewish organizations refused to accept the apology, infuriating the Native Americans, who thought the apology should have ended the affair.
Edwin Jebb, also Indian and head of the school system in Opaskwayak, a town in the neighboring province of Manitoba, agrees with the Jewish organizations. And during a tour of Yad Vashem yesterday, he said that Ahenakew's words were no mere slip of the tongue.
"He had expressed his views to his own people many times previously, but none of them corrected him," said Jebb, one of 10 Manitoban educators from the Cree and Dene tribes who are currently visiting Israel as guests of the Canadian chapter of B'nai B'rith.
"Ahenakew became an ostracized leader, but our people still don't understand the gravity of what he said. We, who have suffered persecution and racism, should be the last ones to say such things."
There are 650,000 Native Americans in Canada and they call themselves the First Nations or aboriginals. Most live in towns on the plains or in isolated rural villages, and they suffer from severe poverty, drugs and crime.
By contrast, Canada's 360,000 Jews, most of whom live in the country's major urban centers, have one of the highest standards of living in the world. The two communities are thus worlds apart geographically, socially and mentally, and it was only following Ahenakew's remarks that the leaders on both sides became aware of this distance.
A few days later, senior B'nai B'rith officials met with First Nation leaders and agreed on a trip to Israel by the Native Americans and reciprocal visits by Canadian Jews to aboriginal communities.
The organizers of the Israel trip did not merely want to make concrete the Jews' suffering during the Holocaust, they also wanted to advance a political agenda. Anti-Semitism has recently been on the rise in Canada, with anti-Semitic incidents up 60 percent in 2002. "Palestinian emigres in Canada are waging a very effective information campaign," said Ruth Klein of B'nai B'rith Canada.
"The idea of the underdog resonates greatly with the aboriginals who feel, with a great deal of justice, that Canadians refuse to admit the wrongs they have done them. We wanted to present Israel to the aboriginals as a positive model with which they could identify - the idea that a minority can survive mass destruction and succeed in establishing a state, language and culture of its own."
Such a model is relevant to aboriginal leaders because one of their major concerns is the widespread ignorance of tribal history, customs and languages among members of their community.
And listening to Sharon McKay, another member of the delegation, it seems that the message has been received. "What most impressed us about Israel was the Israelis' success in preserving their ancient language, their culture and the memory of their Holocaust," she said. "Those are things that unfortunately don't exist among us, and I hope to learn from you how to improve the situation."
Ahenakew, meanwhile, has been indicted on charges of inciting hatred; his trial was due to start this week, but was postponed at the request of his attorney, Allan Gold. He has also been stripped of almost all his honors - except the most prestigious of all, the Order of Canada. The Canadian government has not yet responded to Jewish organizations' request that he be stripped of this too
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