Urban reserves offer a renaissance

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/01/2015 (3914 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Arboc smoke shop, gas station and nearby VLT lounge is a humble little cluster. Its trailer and pumps and low-slung lounge are easy to miss among the shiny new hotels and car dealerships that have popped up along the TransCanada Highway through Headingley.

As small-time as it is, the tiny urban reserve helped spark Swan Lake First Nation’s renaissance, turning it into one of the best-run and most self-sufficient bands in the province. The small business ventures gave the band capital — cash-flow that helped fund everything from new playground equipment to a wind-farm proposal to the new casino near Carberry. The band was even able to fix up nearly every old house on the reserve. During a visit a couple of years ago, photographer Ruth Bonneville and I coveted one of the cool log cabins the band built for several young families, a kind of test project for a home-building business. It’s pretty rare to be jealous of a rez house.

If that’s what a small urban reserve can do for Swan Lake, imagine what one at Kapyong Barracks could do for First Nations in general.

The Arboc project was among the capital region’s first urban reserves, one that allowed Swan Lake access to customers near Winnipeg and to the modest tax breaks available to status Indians who shop and work there.

Since then, despite molasses-slow bureaucracy and a treaty land claim process that’s essentially stalled, Manitoba has begun to see the next generation of urban reserves, a big step up from the original gas-bar model.

Two years ago, after many stops and starts, Long Plain First Nation won reserve status for its squat office building on Madison Street in the Polo Park area, a block behind the Future Shop. Yellowquill College is ensconced there, a Petro-Canada station looks ready to open any day and there are plans for expansion.

Despite racist rumblings, nothing bad happened. The building didn’t become a slum. The Indian Posse didn’t take over. Everyone paid their bills.

Meanwhile, Peguis First Nation, rolling in millions after winning a decades-long land-claim fight, recently bought MPI’s old licensing centre on Portage Avenue next to the RCMP headquarters. Renovations worth $500,000 are underway. The building is 95 per cent leased. It’s likely Winnipeg’s next urban reserve.

Peguis Chief Glenn Hudson says he’s told the feds and the city he’d like to convert the building to a reserve in a year. That’s crazy talk, but it shouldn’t be.

Canada routinely failed to live up to the simple math laid out in treaties signed more than a century ago, so bands in Manitoba are still owed thousands of acres. At last count, the 15 bands who are part of the 1997 Treaty Land Entitlement Framework Agreement are owed a total of 460,000 acres. Many other bands hold individual land debts.

While we continue to lament high welfare rates and federal “handouts” that form the backbone of many reserve economies, it takes eons for bands to win the very thing that might break that cycle — reserve status for an urban parcel.

Take, for example, Sapotaweyak Cree Nation. In 1998, Sapotaweyak signed its Treaty Land Entitlement agreement, detailing how many acres it was promised in 1874 — more than 100,000 acres — but didn’t get. In 2006, the band bought a old liquor control commission property in Swan River as part of its TLE. Six years later, the band finally reached a deal with the town detailing how the band would pay for municipal services. It took another two years for the feds to award the parcel official reserve status. The process took eight years at best, 140 years at worst.

Sapotawayak was the only band that got new reserve land of any kind under the TLE process last year, evidence the process has ground to a halt.

Chiefs such as Peguis’s Hudson believe urban reserves, and the jobs and revenue they bring, are the key to self-sufficiency for indigenous people and self-government for First Nations.

They’re even more than that, though. Urban reserves are one way to combat the racism we’ve now acknowledged exists in Winnipeg. They can bridge our physical divide, making everyday neighbours out of indigenous people and companies. They are a way to reconcile, to give bands like Peguis back some of their traditional lands — the valuable kind, not the stuff we didn’t want anyway. They are an in-your-face antidote to all the subtle stereotypes — that indigenous people won’t work hard, can’t do deals, don’t want better.

That’s Hudson’s vision for Kapyong Barracks, the former base whose fate is now mired in court challenges and the tedious TLE process. It’s far from certain First Nations like Peguis, Swan Lake or Brokenhead will ever see their claim on Kapyong materialize. But if it does, Hudson envisions the next generation of urban reserve. What started with smoke shops and grew into office buildings could morph again into a real neighbourhood — a combination of condos, apartments and single-family homes, green space, mainstream big-box stores, maybe an educational facility. Imagine if it had a Winnipeg version of Vancouver’s new Skwachàys Lodge, the boutique hotel that showcases indigenous artists.

“I think Winnipeg will be pleased with what we have in our plan. It will blend right in,” said Hudson. “When people step off the curb in city of Winnipeg land onto First Nations land, they probably won’t even notice.”

maryagnes.welch@freepress.mb.ca