Rudy Platiel/The Globe and MailGary Potts, a young charismatic Anishnabai chief of the Temagami First Nation near North Bay, Ont., walked into the office of Bruce Clark, a young idealistic small-town lawyer, in Haileybury in 1973 and used the $5,000 proceeds of a trapping grant to hire him.
Mr. Potts remained defiant. He told a documentary on the battle that the fight would go on and that Canada had run into “a spirit that rises from the Canadian soil.” Mr. Potts was awarded an honorary doctorate by Trent University in Peterborough for his life’s work. His philosophy was characterized by a plea for co-operation and conciliation with Canadian society. That philosophical grounding is all the more pertinent today amid the controversy raging in our pandemic world about how to deal with systemic racial discrimination.
The father, Philip, and his son were eventually allowed to sleep on the floor of the cabin for the night. His last recorded public statement – long after logging protests and decades of court battles – was to students and academics at a Temagami Weekend conference in 2017, when he emotionally stressed the need for conciliation between the Anishnabai and non-Indigenous societies.But despite that talk about co-operation and conciliation, Mr. Potts was also a fierce defender of native rights and protector of his people’s wilderness – called N’Daki Menan – which was regarded as an Anishnabai heritage.
Indigenous leaders had long argued that at the time of treaty signing there was a poor understanding among Indigenous leaders of what the treaties really meant or the legal implications that were subsequently framed into law. Indigenous leaders asserted that the implications of what ended up in writing went way beyond their idea of what the signers originally believed had been orally negotiated.
He said Mr. Potts’s principled resistance and charismatic leadership brought him national attention and an influential role with the Assembly of First Nations. The two first met when Mr. Cullingham was a young CBC reporter and they had a 40-year friendship.
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