Arlen Dumas elected grand chief of AMC

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This article was published 19/07/2017 (3032 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs elected Chief Arlen Dumas from Pukatawagan as grand chief Wednesday.

Chiefs representing over 150,000 people, more than 12 per cent of Manitoba’s population, had issued a statement in the morning saying to expect a definitive decision on the first ballot, despite a crowded field of five candidates, who were seeking to replace Derek Nepinak.

Normally, the election is a process that takes two or three ballots.

About an hour after the first ballot, however, chiefs started texting results, giving the win to Dumas, with 33 out of 54 votes on the initial ballot. The election is for a three-year term.

Voting was held during a two-day assembly of chiefs that wraps up Thursday in the northern Manitoba First Nation of Nisichawayasihk at Nelson House, located 80 kilometres west of Thompson. The assembly represents 62 of the 63 First Nations in the province.

 

The AMC confirmed the election, and in an email indicated the vote breakdown was a landslide for Dumas. The other four candidates collected a handful of votes each.

Dumas is not a stranger to leadership, having served in various capacities with northern-Manitoba based Manitoba Keewatinowi Okimakanak, including as its vice-chief, and with the AMC as a proactive member of the executive, finance, treaty and self-government committees, said his campaign manager Rana Bokhari, former leader of the Manitoba Liberal Party.

“He is held in well-regard for his focused and determined advocacy in the face of complex issues and difficult opponents,” she said in a statement.

“I am honoured to be so strongly supported by my colleagues along with my community members, family and friends,” the statement quoted Dumas saying.

In his newly elected role as grand chief, Dumas is committed to working with all communities and their leadership and emphasizing the need for unity as an integral process to establishing a new and more promising future for all of Manitoba First Nations, the statement concluded.

Dumas is a northern Cree chief of Mathias Colomb First Nation in Pukatawagan, widely known in environmental and Indigenous-rights networks across the country. Raised on his family’s trapline in Churchill and educated in an Ontario prep school, Dumas’s leadership has been credited for turning around the fortunes of the remote community north of Flin Flon once known as “Dodge City of the north.”

First elected chief of Mathias Colomb First Nation at age 31 in 2008, Dumas famously fought mining interests in court over extraction rights. Later, he secured a memorandum of understanding with Omnitrax to buy the Churchill rail line before it was damaged in flooding in March. He remains head of one of two rival First Nation-led groups that want to take over the rail line to provide stable transportation in the province’s north.

By tradition, the office of grand chief rotates back and forth between between the province’s predominantly Cree northern bands and southern Ojibwa bands

Current Grand Chief Derek Nepinak, from the southern Ojibwa First Nation of Pine Creek, announced last fall he would not run for a third term, writing in a Facebook post at the time that he would not “accept any more titles within the colonial system.”

Five candidates ran for office but none had Dumas’s prominent public profile.

 

alexandra.paul@freepress.mb.ca