Jul 29/97: AFN elections-in their own words...

ASSEMBLY OF FIRST NATIONS NATIONAL ELECTION:

A PILLOW-FIGHT BETWEEN POLITICAL BED-FELLOWS

Settlers In Support of Indigenous Sovereignty
SISIS@envirolink.org
July 29, 1997

In their own words...

"AFN rivals embody competing visions: moderate Fontaine, revolutionary Mercredi take different approaches to struggle for native sovereignty" ..."Mr. Mercredi wants a political revolution in which natives will become sovereign rulers of their own affairs...Mr. Fontaine will take what he can get when he can get it."

- Globe and Mail, July 28, 1997

"In Gustafsen Lake last year, no university students were there, no college students, no leaders. There was no one there who had a job or a future. Gustafsen was Native people who had given up on the system or had seen the system give up on them. They were a group of people frustrated to the point where they had no loyalty to anyone, no loyalties even to their own people."

- AFN Grand Chief Ovide Mercredi, currently seeking reelection,
cited in Windspeaker, April 1996

Title of article: "Weary Mercredi would like to represent Canada abroad"
"'Look at my face.' There are tiny lines around Ovide Mercredi's dark eyes and deeper ones across his forehead. Worn down from trying to improve the lot of Canada's aboriginal people, under attack from some of them, Mercredi says he won't run for a third term as national chief. But he does have a second career in mind. 'I'd like to be an ambassador somewhere,' he says, 'somewhere like Australia or New Zealand where they speak English'"

- Wendy Cox, The Canadian Press, June 11, 1995

"Some of our people are not very nice"

- former fashion model and AFN hopeful Wendy Grant,
referring to the Ts'peten (Gustafsen Lake) Defenders,
Globe and Mail, August 26, 1995

"They're a group trying to make a name for themselves."

- Wendy Grant, Vancouver Sun, Aug. 1995


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