Candace Maracle  0:08  
In this video, I'm going to be talking about the various forms of leadership in Indigenous communities and the various forms of governance structures. I'm going to focus specifically on my community. One of the main reasons that I'm going to be doing this is to avoid the pan Indian approach that we often see when mainstream media covers Indigenous issues. Now, first, I'm going to give you a little bit of a backgrounder as to who I am and where I come from. My mom was Odawa, and Potawatomi. And my father is Mohawk. Mohawk people are matrilineal, which means that the children often take their mother's nation or clan, because of the way our traditions have been disrupted since colonization, a lot of those traditional forms of passing along the clanship or the nation to the descendants has shifted and changed. So as it happens in Western culture, my sister and I both took on our father's band, and that's his nation. And his last name, Maracle. Mohawk is the name of my nation, and my nation is part of a greater confederacy of six different nations. In our language, we refer to the Mohawk people as Ganienkeh, which also means the People of the Flint, and that refers to the surroundings of the place of our origin, where we originally came from in upstate New York. One of the first suggestions that I would make when you're reporting in Indigenous communities is to always ask your subject, how he or she identifies, what nation? So they consider themselves Aboriginal? Do they consider themselves Indigenous or Native American? The French also had a hand in naming our people and that's where we get Iroquois from a we call ourselves Haudenosaunee, which means people of the longhouse, which is the place where our ceremonies take place. Okay, I hope you're still with me. The Canadian government also has a name for us. And that's Indian. One of the biggest misnomers that's slowly been amended over history. But it's still in place and a lot of old Canadian federal legislation as it pertains to us. And right here on my certificate of Indian status card. Now, the greatest aim of the Indian Act was to get rid of the Indian and the tribal system, and assimilate the Indian people in all respects with their inhabitants of the Dominion as speedily as they are fit to change. Sir John MacDonald, 1887. Until the 50s, the Indian Act made it illegal for us to practice our ceremonies and it also denied women the right to vote up until the 1960s. I know this is a lot of information. And trust me, it's confusing for me too. But this brings me to my point, which is who's really in charge on Indian reserves?

Rohahiyo Brant  3:07  
The common belief is that there's the there's the chase with great big long headdresses. Okay, big plane style headdresses. And they're the the chiefs. And then there's the council. And it's elected through band council elections.

Candace Maracle  3:27  
Many First Nations people don't actually vote for our elected Chief and Council, that's the band, the chief, the elected councillors. They were an imposed governance structure by the federal government, which is why a lot of people, a lot of my people at least don't vote. One of the reasons that people do vote is because we fought long and hard for the right to vote.

Rohahiyo Brant  3:52  
When we look at it in terms of the language, if we ever have a traditional Council, and we have a band Council, and they're represented differently in the language we have in our traditional system. We have very different vocabulary for much older words. When we're looking at the contemporary Council, of course, we say Roya and a word for a chief, Band Council chief would be Royá:ne(r), or Yakoyá:ne(r) for a female,Royá:ne(r) for a male. And basically it means almost like a boss or a manager. So it's seen, and the way I see it's kind of more as a company operating, instead of a traditional Council of conducting business. And within each nation, we have chief stood up for a very long story. But we have representatives from each nation, and within each nation, we have a clan system. The traditional chief himself will be a Nahó:ten. is from a word that most people might know as yakoyá:ne(r). And we kind of translate it nowadays is it's good. More so it means it has a path in it. When it's back in the day, when you're going trying to find another place or you're trying to go hunting you're trying to get anywhere. You're in a very dense woods. Well, what's the most useful thing you could find well probably a path. So for something to have a path in it something, no path not only representing a way to get somewhere, but a sense of usefulness to it.
 

Candace Maracle  5:40  
Sid Hill is the traditional head chief of the Six Nations, the Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, Mohawk, Seneca and the Tuscarora he presides over the Grand Council. His title is The Tadodaho is a lifetime appointment. 

Tadodaho Sid Hill  5:56  
This is our passport here that we use to travel in law.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai