The Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit Adventure

The Challenge of Creating a "Made-in-Nunavut" Government

Alfred Taiaiake, a Mohawk from Kahnawake, who is Director of the Indigenous Governance Program at the University of Victoria, warns “…indigenous governments may simply replicate European systems” and his argument continues:

"But even if such governments resemble traditional Native American systems on the surface, without strong and healthy leaders committed to traditional values and the preservation of our nationhood they are going to fail.

Our children will judge them to have failed because a government that is not based on the traditional principles of respect and harmonious coexistence will inevitably tend to reflect the cold, calculating, and coercive ways of the modern state.

The whole of the decolonization process will have been for nothing if the indigenous government has no meaningful indigenous character….

Resistance to foreign notions of power and control must become a primary commitment – not only as a posture in our relations with the state, but also in the Native communities treat our own people.

The state’s power including such European concepts as ‘taxation’, ‘citizenship’, ‘executive authority’, and ‘sovereignty’, must be eradicated from politics in Native communities. In a very real sense, to remain native – to reflect the essence of indigenous North Americans – our politics must shift to give primacy to concepts grounded in our own culture."