While there has been, at every level, a constant effort to dissociate the native question from the Quebec question the course of events has continually brought them together, right from the  beginning of this country's history. If I may be allowed to digress here, it is not France or England whom we Canadians must thank for our survival on this land, but the native blood which flows in our veins and which has given our culture its inner force. In relation to the Natives who were in the present territory of what is called Canada we were, in the 18th century, an absolute minority. And the Royal Proclamation of 1763 was to apply to both, that is to say, the Indians and the Canadians. We were conquered simultaneously in a single war - the Seven Years War - to use the designation given to it by the Canadians. I myself prefer, to use a Huron word, the Yankee expression French and Indian Wars; it is far more correct. 

It appears entirely appropriate to cite here the concluding words of the Berger Commission, if only because they already anticipated, in 1977, the course of events which we have subsequently witnessed:  

"Both white [J.M.-sic] and native northerners realize that  [J.M.- the essence of the problem is to know] whether the political evolution of the North will follow the familiar pattern of the history of the West, or whether it will find a place for native ideas of self-determination ... 

The question of special status for native people in Canada and the forms it may take is [TR-sic] one thing; the continuing endeavour to reach an accommodation between anglophones and francophones is another. These questions are both of the first importance, but they are not the same question. The claims of the native people have a basis quite different from the claims of the two linguistic communities.  

Indeed, the native people find themselves defending their interests against the encroachments of a dominant society - whether anglophone or francophone - whose essential characteristics are the same [J.M.' underlining] ... For them, their history is not a book in which the last chapter has already been written. Rather, it remains to be written, in ways neither they nor anybody else can foresee." 

[TR - Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline, Vol. II, Part IV, p. 218 - official English text] 

A view of the situation which sees French Canada, so-called, and English Canada, so-called, as fitting the same set of characteristics with respect to the past of the Natives and their evolution, and the political - I emphasize political - foundations of native rights as different from those of Quebec, is difficult to share. If Quebec has rights, so do the Natives, and it is hard to see why the former should take precedence over the latter. 

There is, however, in Thomas Berger's summing up a program and a plan which practically nobody has yet had the courage and the greatness to carry through to its logical conclusion. If the present Commission refrains from doing so, if it does not set itself such a challenge at the outset, nobody else will ever be able to do it instead and I greatly fear that something will have been lost forever ... the very idea and proiect which is Canada, lying latent for four centuries and since Champlain's time to the north of New Spain and New England. 

This is why - after all, one has the right to dream - I dare to perceive a symbiosis and a move beyond the Laurendeau-Dunton Commission and the Berger Commission. One of two things has to happen: either this Royal Commission, because of forces which will  escape from its control, will hear the death knell of this country, or it will inaugurate its necessary new beginning, or, if one may say so, its real beginning. 

In any case, things will never again be what they were, and this Commission, by the very reason for its existence, the establishment of a native Third Estate, marks the full entry of Canada into the American hemisphere. Something, let's frankly admit it, that it has always refused until now. 

To take another approach: there is an aspect of the accepted discussion of the Canadian reality which it appears necessary to clarify, namely, the idea of two founding nations or, as they say  in English, two founding peoples. It has been repeated ad nauseam in recent years that the rhetorical  
assertion that there were, behind the idea of Confederation, two founding peoples - the Anglos and the Francos - completely collapses as soon as the native presence is brought into the discussion. It does seem, in fact, that such an idea is entirely without foundation, for quite different reasons. 

As soon as the words and the abbreviations are allowed to speak - and here I agree with the traditional English-speaking historians, such as Donald Creighton and the rest - there never were founding peoples for the good reason that there never was a confederative pact as such, but an Act of the British Parliament. An Act promulgating from London the amalgamation of colonial governments, not so much for the purpose of creating a country as out of administrative expediency, which is why its language is so uniformly dull and monotonous. To this day there is no BNA Act conceived and finalized here in America, but just a simple European administrative act - the BNA Act. 

In short, there never were founding peoples who met and sat down at a single table to dream and to implement the idea of a common country, for the good reason, quite simply, that there were not two peoples. There were not more Francos than Natives, in 1867, who would have been likely to sing of a Confederation which most of them would come to see as an imposition. Thus the BNA Act was for the Canadians, i.e. the Quebecois, what the Indian Act would be for the natives, a document initialled by "whites", certainly with some internal support from the colonials who were to be integrated.  

The idea of two founding peoples, which is emphasized so much that it blows up in pieces, was born after the event. It is an Anglo post-Confederation interpretation, an attempt to boost the tripartite Franco-Anglo-Metis country which people were refusing to make operative. If there had in fact been, in the l9th century, even a hint of a bi-national Canada resting on a native substratum, it can be assumed that Riel and the seven other native leaders would have been eagerly received with open arms, instead of being sent to swing symbolically on the end of a rope. The fact is that from that time on they represented the hope and the model which there is now, apparently, such an ardent desire to support. 

If I recall these facts it is because I hope that they will be quickly absorbed and superseded through the medium of the lesson they impose on us for the present time. The challenge is precisely to seek for that other country that has always been buried in this collectivity in gestation which is called both BNA and Canada. For if this country is not ready to be born and to cut its umbilical cords with itself it will break up. 

"If self-government means anything," said Mr. Justice Brian Dickson ,[5] very correctly, "it must mean that aboriginal perspectives are central to any redefinitlon of the relationship  between native communities and the Canadian polity as a whole."  

Reflection on these words will immediately force us to draw an inference. Any reflection on the native question - and I wonder why there is always such unwillingness to express the matter in  
these terms - is essentially about the political and geographical redefinition of Canada. 

For this reason it is not perhaps so much the state of research and deliberation on the native question that should be examined a priori as the state of Canada itself, or even the state of Canada in a native perspective. How then can we do this if we do not of necessity return to certain basic questions which are so obvious that we forget to ask them!