How investigating Indigenous activists became a CSIS priority for at least a decade

Katsi'tsakwas Ellen Gabriel says she was sitting in the Japanese consulate in Montreal when she started to learn how far Canada’s spies can reach. 

It was two years after Gabriel was the Kanien'kehá:ka (Mohawk) spokesperson during the military’s 1990 siege of Kanehsatà:ke and Kahnawà:ke, commonly called the Oka Crisis. That summer, a botched police raid on a small blockade ignited a tense 78-day armed standoff, as activists fought to stop a golf course expansion from desecrating a cemetery at Kanehsatà:ke, near Oka, Que.

In 1992, Gabriel was invited to an Indigenous conference in Japan and planned to travel on a Haudenosaunee Confederacy-issued passport. But she couldn’t get a visa, so she went for a meeting to find out why.

That’s when she says a Japanese official pulled out a dossier on her as thick as a novel, telling her it was compiled by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS).

“He said, ‘You're going to go to Japan and you're going to shame our ally Canada, our friend Canada’,” Gabriel told CBC Indigenous. 

“And so they wouldn't give it to me.”

Indigenous rights activists have long accepted that surveillance by the state is the price to pay for asserting their sovereignty.

Now, recently declassified documents confirm CSIS subjected Indigenous activists to a series of “Native extremism” investigations for at least a decade beginning in 1988, in a countrywide surveillance program that became more intrusive following the resistance at Kanehsatà:ke.

The investigations are confirmed in about 1,000 pages of previously secret internal papers from CSIS and its review body dated from 1988 to 1999, released to CBC Indigenous over about three years via four formal access to information requests and one informal request for records already released.

“Consistently, in all of these reports, ‘Native extremism’ is identified as a leading priority,” said Jeffrey Monaghan, an associate professor of criminology at Carleton University in Ottawa.

Through the 1990s, “Native extremism” was categorized under the umbrella of “domestic terrorism” or “domestic extremism,” the papers show. The latter was one of CSIS’s four broad categories of “terrorist groupings.”

“The language that CSIS used in this document fundamentally delegitimizes the rights of Indigenous people. I think it's fair to claim that a lot of this language itself is racist. It's highly colonial,” said Monaghan.

Vibert Jack, litigation director at the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, expressed similar concerns.

“The biggest issue that stands out is just the overreach of CSIS, and tied to that is the systemic racism that this so-called ‘Native extremism’ program of theirs demonstrates,” he said.