Tobique First Nation

[Press release, passing it on]

For immediate release
January 28, 2008

PRESS RELEASE

The self-determining people of the Tobique First Nation (TFN) are saying loud and clear that we have had enough of the racism and bureaucratic bullying that our community has received from the Department of Indian Affairs since the first Indian Act and the first Indian Reservations were forced upon our people. Why is it that ONLY Indians are forced to live on government-made reservations and under the government-made Indian Act? Why is there no government act or government reservation for the French or Germans etc? Everyone knows why, and it has nothing to do with Indians wanting it that way and everything to do with the theft of our homeland.

Our people are fed up and are organizing to take our self-respect and our self-determination back in order to fulfill our responsibility to the Seventh Generation. We are meeting in order to develop a strategy and an action plan.

Both the strategy and action plan are to create a better and equal relationship with our political and bureaucratic "rulers". A relationship that is based on mutual respect, mutual tolerance, mutual understanding and mutual acceptance. As opposed to how it has been: distrustful, adversarial, confrontational and acrimonious.

The straw that broke the camels back was the recent action by Indian and Northern Affairs Canada (INAC) officials to fire the consulting firm that was hired by INAC to assist the Tobique First Nation as it works to straighten out its longstanding financial/fiscal mess.

INAC’s action to fire this consultant firm was done without cause. It was done highhandedly with no prior consultation with neither our community, nor its elected officials nor the consultant firm.