We, Ketl-leel-mecum, Terri John, Loretta Thomas, Peter Knighton, Ray Pierre, Marion Lee, Sandie Daniels, Henry Sauls and Tsemhu7qw, native persons inhabiting ancestral homelands of the Pacific North West beyond the treaty frontier, SOLEMNLY DECLARE AS FOLLOWS:
1. The ethno-biological continuity of life as our ancestors knew it is at the point of no return throughout the Pacific North West. The systematic alteration of the ecology in which our autochthonous cultures flourish correspondingly, inevitably and self-evidently entails the systematic destruction of the continuity of our human cultural identity - for the character of our human cultural identity is by definition dependent upon continuity of the bio-cultural identity of our forests.
2. Materialism and spiritualism are not opposing and antagonistic forces in our native culture. Rather, over the eons they have been reconciled in an equilibrium. That equilibrium is maintained by our paramount cultural value: respect. In our culture, the goal is to take from the material world enough to survive not only as physical beings but also as spiritual beings. In contrast, we observe that in the non-native culture surrounding us enough is not enough. More is better. We observe that materialism and spiritualism are opposing and antagonistic forces in that non-native culture.
3. Our ancestors taught that this was not our business to try and change. Ours was to accept the world basically as we find it, and to leave the Mother Nature and to the Creator the education of this rapacious new race of people overrunning our homeland. Our principle of respect meant that it was not up to us to dictate to the whites how to live. Instead, our principle of respect led our ancestors to adopting a live-and-let-live survival strategy with the transplanted race of Europeans who came to occupy our country. Respect means coexistence in a relationship of peace and friendship - with all beings and things - and indeed there is no crucial difference between beings and things, for everything that exists is entitled to respect.
4. The Kings and Queens as the hereditary guardians of England and on behalf of the transplanted race agreed to conform with our principle of respect. As a matter of law the respect was to be mutual and universal. The Royal Proclamation of 1763 confirmed for all time that "the several Nations or Tribes of Indians with whom We are connected and who live under our Protection should not be molested or disturbed in the Possession of such Parts of Our Dominions and Territories as not having been ceded to or purchased by Us are reserved to them or any of them as their Hunting Grounds."
5. Today, we observe that in practice the respect paid to this agreed law has not been mutual. We gave our word. The whites gave their writing. We have kept our word. They have broken their writing. In terms of the Proclamation, we have not "molested or disturbed" the whites. But they have both "molested" and "disturbed" us. The crucial point, for legal purposes, is that this breakage was carried out, in practice, by local white governments which did not possess the jurisdiction to repeal or to amend the paramount law enacted by the Imperial government. Thus, the breakage of the paramount law describes the fraud, treason and genocide committed by the legal and political establishment of local government rather than a change in that paramount law.
6. In consequence, the whites and their native collaborators are not so much governing us as attacking us - treating us as squatting trespassers in our own homelands, destroying our forests, killing our people. Under the smoke screen of crimes masquerading as federal and provincial laws the whites are waging a war of physical and psychological intervention and attrition upon us. Systematically we have been physically killed, infected with diseases, beaten, imprisoned, threatened and sexually preyed upon. We are psychologically held up to contempt and ridicule, patronized, brainwashed, bribed, corrupted, threatened, and then criminalized for trying to defend ourselves. Their lawyers and politicians, who should uphold the paramount law, are effectively their generals and their police their storm troopers in the unremitting campaign to take everything and leave us nothing. Although it is all illegal, immoral and unjust, nevertheless the usurpation of our native jurisdiction to govern ourselves as a free people in a free land continues. Today, the white judges are the commandants of our concentration camps - the reservations onto which we are herded and from which we are forced to watch through the fence of chicanery the invasion, clearcutting, pollution and tortured death of the body of our Mother, the earth, our home and native land.
7. By casting nets across the mouths of our rivers the ancestors of the whites taught our ancestors they could break the continuity of our salmon runs, and starve us into submission. By having their priests and ministers promise us everlasting life they grouped us around churches, and thereby broke the cyclic patterns of our economy. By outlawing our potlatches they broke the legal, economic, political and social ties that bound our people holistically as nations. By kidnapping our children and beating our native languages out of them in residential and white schools they brainwashed our culture out of existence. By apprehending our children and giving them to whites they broke the family unit. By the whites' systematic removal or prohibition of alternative life support economies, native Elders have been made physically dependent for survival upon white social welfare payments, and in consequence may live in constant terror that by speaking out against white tyranny natives in general and themselves in particular will be deprived of the necessities of life. By training our children to be contemptuous of the ways of their parents the white establishment inculcated in our children a mirror image of the whites' sickness of racial ideology, thereby turning native against native, and by this means perpetuating the genocide to the point where today we stand at the bring of the plunge to the whites' final solution to the problem we constitute for them by our very existence and persistence. Today it remains the Indian Act system, with its network of nepotism, sycophancy to bureaucrats, and economic manipulation of a people reduced to abject dependency, that carries on the genocidal tyranny of the white master race - through the medium of the fostered "band" and "reserve" mentality of the privileged class of native collaborators: the Indian Act elected "chiefs" and councillors. Being appointed by these puppets, the paid Indian task force members and constitutional negotiators active in the Canadian constitutional revision process are fifth columns. Thus even the process of reform is prejudiced by the white system's monolithic and omnipresent usurpation of the connective relationships between persons and property - a usurpation that leaves no alternative to survival. Compared to Esson, Harcourt and Mulroney, Hitler is a crude amateur. White Canada and British Columbia have made a painstakingly "civilized" and refined art of the same end process that the Nazis overzealously hurried.
8. Terri John is an energetic and idealistic Lil'Wat native person and member of the Mount Currie Indian Band, by education, experience and profession a community planner and social worker, a family provider, and a caring mother turned political publicist advocating the supersession, for her children's sake, of the corrupt Indian Act system by a return to political structures and values more consistent with the continuity of her people as a distinct, independent, honourable and healthy native society. Her thinking is typical of a legalistic approach traditionally taken by native Elders. This approach remarks the obvious fact that since they were here before the whiteman and since there is no treaty that therefore as a matter of law the whites are trespassers, usurpers and tyrants upon territory situate beyond the treaty frontier.
9. Ray Pierre is also a Lil'Wat person, who was raised as such - in the sense that his first language, mind-set and allegiance are Lil'Wat, as distinct from Mount Currie Indian Act Band, although he too is a member of that band. He went on to become an accomplished, experienced and trained band manager. But because his fundamental allegiance to Lil'Wat never left him, he politically sympathizes with the concept of a fundamental restructuring of native political life, to a situation more in harmony with the old ways and values. This makes him a passive advocate of the same process of change more dramatically and publicly espoused by Terri John.
10. Marion Lee is a Shuswap native person and member of the Spallumcheen Indian Act Band, lately employed as its Social Development Director, a mother of two dependent children whom she supports with her earnings from employment. Sandie Daniels is also a Shuswap native person and member of the Spallumcheen Indian Band, lately employed as Marion Lee's Social Assistance Clerk, a mother of two dependent children whom she also must support on the basis of earnings from employment. Loretta Thomas is also a Shuswap native person and member of the Spallumcheen Indian Band, lately employed as the Band Office janitor, a mother of two dependent children whom she also supports upon the basis of earnings from employment.
11. These five persons share in common a commitment to the rule of law, and the experience of malicious persecution in terms of gainful employment as a result of this commitment. Terri John, Ray Pierre, Marion Lee, Sandie Daniels and Loretta Thomas were fired by the "Chiefs" and Councils of their respective Indian Act "bands" in vindictive and malicious retaliation for political and legal positions occupied by them. They argued publicly that the structure of the Indian Act system is illegal when implemented beyond the treaty frontier. They argued that it was undemocratic, being based upon control by family cliques of the patronage process that parasitically fosters a privileged class of native collaborators who implement the white establishment's genocidal tyranny. For this they were fired by the very persons whose corrupt privileges their argument for structural change threatened.
12. In furtherance of their legal and political position the above persons have, in several distinct proceedings both in the domestic law and in the international law systems of the non native race, focused the legal issue upon the prima facie ultra vires character of the Indian Act and of the Supreme Court Act under paramount natural, international and constitutional law, and upon the genocidal consequences to native society of the breach of the said existing paramount law. That is, since our lands are beyond the treaty frontier therefore the federal and provincial governments have no jurisdiction. The whole legal point of the treaty process is precisely that it is the means specified by the Imperial government whereby local governments can acquire jurisdiction in relation to the yet unceded Indian territory, including the Pacific North West which is specifically designated "Indian territory" in all of the crucial constitutional legislation referable to what is now called British Columbia. The point is that some of British Columbia, where treaties have been made, is within the treaty frontier. As to those parts the whites have, in virtue of those treaties, acquired jurisdiction. As for the rest of the Pacific North West, it remains for constitutional purposes unceded "Indian territories." White, that is federal and provincial, jurisdiction does not exist in such Indian territories - that is the whole point of the term as used in the constitutional legislation. In these circumstances none of the federal Acts, like the Indian Act and the Criminal Code, apply to the part beyond the treaty frontier, which is the part we are concerned with today. Similarly none of the provincial legislation, such as the Wildlife Act and the Land Titles Act, applies either. Most importantly of all, the legislation governing the non-native courts does not apply, for exactly the same reason the other legislation does not apply. That is, since the federal and provincial legislatures do not have jurisdiction themselves they can not possibly vest jurisdiction in courts they create. If they could, their courts would in virtue of the interpretive monopoly over the dispute resolution process be able to achieve indirectly the illegal result the legislatures creating them could not achieve directly. For this reason, the very process of non-native courts exercising jurisdiction beyond the treaty frontier is inherently illegal. What is more, since for practical purposes it results in the shifting of control of the tax authority and resource use from natives to whites it is fraudulent. Since that particular form of fraud is deemed by the Royal Proclamation to be contrary to the Queen's military interest and security, the fraud is treasonable. Since the fraud and the treason have genocidal consequences, therefore the wrongful exercise of jurisdiction breaches the Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, 1948.
13. Tsemhu7qw is a hereditary watchman of the sacred sites and graveyards of Lil'Wat, a sacred trust he has carried out for 20 years the last 10 of which have been as head man among equals sworn to that responsibility. Throughout this period he has been tending Ure Creek Valley, one of the sacred areas most highly charged with A7xa7: sacred power and significance. He now stands charged under his English language name, Harold Pascal, with obstructing justice contrary to the Criminal Code. This charge exists because Tsemhu7qw refused to stand aside to permit construction workers to blast and bulldoze a logging access road into and up the Ure Creek valley for the purpose of clearcutting its timber. Tsemhu7qw opposed the granting of an injunction by the Supreme Court of British Columbia, on two grounds: first that that court prima facie has no jurisdiction beyond the treaty frontier, and second that the region in question is sacred. The Supreme Court judge first refused to address the law precluding his own jurisdiction, and he then decided that the area was not sacred. Since July 2, 1991, the Court of Appeal of British Columbia has refused to grant an appointment for the hearing of Tsemhu7qw's appeal, and in the meantime irreversible damage and sacrilege are proceeding apace, with the assistance of police brutality and the criminalization of the valley's conscientious native defenders, including Tsemhu7qw.
14. Peter Knighton is born of the hereditary guardians of Carmanah, and is a former elected Indian Act "chief" of the Ditidaht Indian Band, a position which he in conscience resigned. In his hereditary guardian capacity he opposes the illegal sale to the white establishment of the timber rights of Carmanah by the Ditidaht Indian Act Band which has no legitimate ownership to that timber either in native law or non native law. Legally and politically he occupies the same position as recited above. In furtherance of this position he has commenced an action in the Supreme Court of British Columbia in which the prima facie ultra vires character of the Indian Act and of the Supreme Court Act is now the focused issue. In response, the white legal and political establishment and its native collaborators are lying and cheating in order to evade the addressing of this fundamental legal issue. Most recently the federal Minister of the Environment, like the Indian Affairs Department have outright denied the existence of his court case, on the untenable ground he has withdrawn it. By this preposterous yet effective tactic Peter Knighton has been discredited among potential support groups, for misleading the public to think he has a court case, when high ranking white officials deny its existence.
15. Henry Sauls is a Shuswap native, and former elected Indian Act "chief" of the Neskainlith Indian Band, which latter office he relinquished when experience taught him the structure of the system was corrupt beyond the possibility of redemption. Sauls observed the Indian Act system is a means to the destruction of native culture. For this reason, he observed it is not a matter of finding ways to make that system more responsive to native needs by working with and through it. Rather, since that system itself is the cause rather than the symptoms of the ills of native society, the system itself must be eradicated if ever the native body politic will achieve again a healthful condition. The various task forces and native negotiating teams fostered and sponsored by the federal and provincial governments so far have been extensions of the corrupt Indian Act system, in that the native appointees come up through its ranks and owe their political offices on the various constitutional committees to its chiefs and councils. Rather than participate in the fraud which this process constitutes, Sauls chose rather to resign and to exercise his nation's sovereign right to hunt beyond the treaty frontier. For this activity he has been charged with breaking provincial law, which itself ostensibly is supported under the federal Indian Act's section 88 adoption of provincial laws of general application. In his defence, he argues that the Provincial Court Act is ultra vires for the same reasons the Supreme Court Act and Indian Act are ultra vires. The area where the hunting took place is beyond the treaty frontier, and under paramount natural, international and constitutional law the precondition to white jurisdiction is a treaty.
16. On May 9, 1992, a native Elders Court convened beyond the treaty frontier at Skeetchesten and acquitted Henry Sauls of those hunting charges brought against him under provincial legislation in the Provincial Court of British Columbia. The basis for this acquittal was the Elders' finding that the alleged offence was legal within the purview of native law, that the native law was confirmed in its paramountcy by non-native natural, international and constitutional law, and that pursuant to the rule of law this paramount law rendered inoperative beyond the treaty frontier the conflicting provincial legislation relating both to the substantive offence and the Provincial Court's jurisdiction to hear it. Judge Blair PCJ sitting at Kamloops will on June 11, 1992 be asked out of comity to hold the matter res judicata in any event of his lack of statutory jurisdiction.
17. Ketl-leel-mecum is a Sa-al-tkw't national, an Okanagan speaker residing near Summerland and a registered member of the Penticton Indian Band for Indian Act purposes. Rather than raise the existing law in a defensive sense in the non-native legal system, he brought that law before the Court of Sa-al-tkw't. That Court consists in native Elders exercising their inherent jurisdiction to hear and to pass upon disputes arising in or relating to the occupation, health and harmony of Sa-al tkw't. The Court's jurisdiction is to see that the fundamental law of respect is itself respected, and to provide advice and guidance for this purpose, much the same way as in non-native society the Privy Council of elder statesmen advises the English monarchs on legal issues. The issue as framed before the Court of Sa-al-tkw't focused upon the same facts and law as bear upon the legal issues defined above. The Court of Sa-al-tkw't on May 26, 1992, resolved the said issue.