Leading up to the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) leadership election, it sounded like Shawn Atleo was going to have a tough time getting re-elected as national chief: He was facing seven vocal challengers and trying to refute accusations that he was an assimilationist who’d grown too close to the Conservative government.
Yet not only did Atleo win, he did so quite handily under the circumstances, taking a majority in the first ballot and wrapping the whole thing up in the third with 67% of the vote. The claims that he has divided the chiefs and made life worse for First Nations during his tenure ring somewhat hollow given these results, especially when it’s remembered that it took Atleo eight ballots to get elected the first time, three years ago.
If part of what Atleo’s critics and opponents had hoped to achieve was more confrontational rhetoric, they attained a small victory there: Atleo didn’t exactly talk trash about the feds, but his post re-election speech included a renewed promise to “open doors, or kick them down,” and a rallying cry to “put the final stake in colonization.” He followed up with the crowd-pleasing claim that “no government has acted in good faith.”
Of course, none of that changed the fact that the chiefs strongly re-elected a man who has chosen to try to work with, rather than petulantly butt heads against, the government.
Read the rest of Marni Soupcoff's article at
The National Post
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