To St. John’s, where last week Memorial University published a “Draft Policy for Consultation on Indigenous Verification.” It’s a doozy. Here are the key bits:

Verification Pathways for Recognized Indigenous Collectives in Canada Under the policy, an applicant will follow one of the three verification pathways for membership/citizenship with a Recognized Indigenous Collective in Canada: Pathway A requires the applicant to confirm their connection to a Recognized Indigenous Collective through the submission of primary documentation; Pathway B requires the applicant to confirm their connection to a Recognized Indigenous Collective through the submission of secondary documentation; Pathway C is reserved for specific incidents of displacement resulting from assimilationist policies and practices of colonial institutions.

And

For the purposes of this policy, a ‘Recognized Indigenous Collective’ in Canada is either 1) an Indigenous collective that is federally recognized and holds Constitutional rights under section 35, or 2) is accepted as an Indigenous collective by their federally-recognized neighbours. Neighbours include those with whom a Recognized Indigenous Collective has historical relationships, with particular attention being paid to relationship within the three Indigenous groups under Section 35, specifically: First Nations to First Nations relations; Inuit to Inuit relations; and Métis to Métis relations.

If you were coming in cold to Indigenous politics in Newfoundland and Labrador, this might appear unremarkable. But in fact, if adopted, this policy represents a huge U-turn for Memorial, and one that might have some serious implications for the university’s future in Labrador. Because if you read between the lines, what this definition actually says is that the university no longer recognizes the Indigenous group known as the NunatuKavummiut, which is represented by the NunatuKavut Community Council or NCC.

The NunatuKavummiut is a group which has gone by many names in the past. At some point in the seventeenth or eighteenth century, some Inuit moved off their historic lands in Northern Labrador and travelled south to the area around Happy Valley and Goose Bay to begin trading with British. As often happens at colonial trading posts, traders begin starting families, and some mixed families began living among these communities. Until well into the twentieth century they went by names like “liveyers” (meaning people who lived in a place all year round). When the term “Métis” became politically useful after the adoption of the Constitution in 1982, members of this group started calling themselves “Labrador Métis” or “Inuit Métis,” though they were careful not to claim equivalent status to the Métis Nation of the Red River. Eventually, as the Red River Métis got increasingly riled about anyone other than themselves using the name “métis,” the group changed nomenclature and began referring to themselves as Southern Inuit. Which did not get them out of trouble; it just seriously annoyed the Inuit groups in Labrador, who, while not denying that some individuals had Inuit heritage, denied that this group were Inuit.

The NCC would doubtless like you to read this passage from The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (1996):

Although we have less information about the Métis people of Labrador, we believe that they are probably also in a position to exercise the rights and powers of nationhood. Certainly, the Labrador Métis community exhibits the historical rootedness, social cohesiveness and cultural self-consciousness that are essential to nationhood, and they are developing a political organization that will allow them to engage in effective nation-to-nation negotiation and to exercise self-government. While the way of life of the Labrador Métis is very similar to that of Labrador Inuit and Innu, the Métis culture is sufficiently distinct to mark them as a unique people, and in our view they are likely to be accorded nation status under the recognition policy we propose.

At the same time, the Labrador Inuit and the Innu Nation (despite the similarity of the name, the Innu are Algonkians, not Inuit, though their territories in norther Labrador to some extent overlap) would like you to know that they do not consider the NCC to be an Inuit organization at all and consider them to be a “shape shifting non-Indigenous organization” which is simply out to try to try to co-opt Indigenous identity for financial gain. Are there some NCC members with Indigenous backgrounds? Sure. But NCC itself is, so they claim, outright Pretendian. The Inuit/Innu position on this has become a good deal more strident in the past few years for reasons which are somewhat unclear to me, but I assume it has to do with NCC making increasingly aggressive land claims which overlap with Inuit and Innu territory.

Anyways, back to Memorial. On the whole, Memorial’s position for most of the past couple of decades has been pro-NCC in the sense that it has always invited them to the table for new initiatives, and they have always enthusiastically done so. When the institution opened a campus in Labrador City (which happens to be near the region where the NunatuKavummiut population is the thickest) it made some specific commitments to the NCC, such as giving it a guaranteed seat on the Academic council. So the implications of the new policy aren’t just about Indigenous verification policies; essentially, a renunciation of a very important set of community relationships in Labrador. It’s a very big deal, and the NCC is angrily and predictably treating this as a slap in the face, calling it a “huge failure in Indigenous reconciliation policy.”

To what extent was the Memorial community in St. John’s aware of what a big deal it is and what kind of a backlash it might cause? It’s an interesting question. Policies on Indigenous recognition tend to be in a class of policies where the group of people making decisions and commitments on the institution’s behalf is fairly small, with the institution at large choosing to be blithely indifferent. And now the institution is kind of in the soup.

To be clear, I am not saying the new draft policy is a mistake because it starts a row. One could equally argue that the mistake was to have accepted the NCC in the first place, given the offense it (eventually) caused the Inuit and Innu. I am absolutely not passing judgment on what the correct policy should be or should have been. Given the way the politics of recognition have played out in Labrador over the last couple of decades, it is unclear to me how a provincial university, particularly one which has paid an admirable amount of attention to the North in recent years, could have avoided getting drawn into these debates and offending one side or the other.

I mean look, even the Government of Canada has a hard time working this one out. On the one hand, it has a clear policy which recognizes only four Northern Labrador groups as truly Inuit, none of which are NCC. On the other hand, in 2019, it signed an MOU with the NCC which the Government said was designed “to move forward together to find shared and balanced solutions that advance reconciliation in a way that respects the interests of members of NCC and all Canadians.” (The Innu sued the feds for signing this agreement because they argued the NCC was a settler organization with competing land claims to its own; the superior court dismissed the suit, but in a manner which gave the Innu a partial victory to the Innu because it said the MOU didn’t actually recognize the NCC as Indigenous). If the national government can’t figure out how to handle a collective that clearly has Indigenous roots but can’t work out a way to describe its identity or ambitions in a way that doesn’t annoy other Indigenous groups with more settled histories, you can hardly blame a university for failing as well.

It’s hard to run a university these days. Simple solutions for working with community partners are scarce, but ways of causing offence are easy. This is just one tiny example. My best wishes to those working on the draft.