Jacqueline St. Pierre, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter, The Manitoulin Expositor

MANITOULIN—The files read like a nation whispering to itself in the dark—paper trails, code names, shadows parked across the street. But the story they tell is not new. It is an old habit, dressed in Cold War language.

Long before the Royal Canadian Mounted Police began cataloguing Indigenous leaders under what it called a “Native extremism program,” it had already been deployed as an instrument of removal—enforcing a federal vision of land that required Indigenous peoples to be confined, managed and, when necessary, displaced.

In the late 19th century, as Canada pushed westward, the North-West Mounted Police—predecessor to the RCMP—was sent to secure territory for settlement and the railway. They enforced the reserve system that followed the numbered treaties, restricting movement through the pass system and compelling First Nations onto designated lands. During moments of resistance, including the North-West Rebellion, police and military forces acted in tandem to suppress Indigenous and Métis assertions of sovereignty. What followed was not only defeat, but surveillance: Indian Agents, backed by police, monitored movement, gatherings and political expression.

By the mid-20th century, that surveillance had evolved—but not disappeared.

Newly declassified RCMP Security Service files confirm that, during the 1970s, Canada’s domestic intelligence arm infiltrated and monitored Indigenous political organizations across the country. Intelligence dossiers, informants, covert surveillance and wiretaps formed the backbone of what officers internally called the “Native extremism” program.

The documents—nearly 6,000 pages released in 2025 after prolonged access-to-information battles—show that the federal government approved covert wiretaps targeting the National Indian Brotherhood, now known as the Assembly of First Nations, during the mid-1970s.

For leaders like Georges Erasmus, the confirmation lands without surprise.

“Because it’s been happening for so long, it’s just become second nature,” he said. “I’ve always one way or another known that they were there.”

The files trace surveillance as early as 1968, when the Security Service began monitoring Indigenous organizing amid what it described as “radical ferment.” That language echoed broader anxieties of the era—heightened after the October Crisis—but the scope of monitoring extended far beyond any credible threat of violence.

A turning point came in 1973, after Indigenous youth occupied the Department of Indian Affairs in Ottawa, removing documents that exposed internal federal operations. The RCMP described itself as “unprepared.” What followed was an expansion: a deliberate effort to build what it called “human source development in the Native area.”

The program grew into a national surveillance network.

Hundreds of individuals and at least 30 organizations were monitored, including the Dene Nation, Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations, Métis National Council and Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami.

RCMP methods included paid informants, physical surveillance, photography, intelligence-sharing with federal departments and the FBI, and the collection of personal data ranging from travel plans to financial information. Files were stored under the label “racial intelligence.”

The stated goal was “broad penetration of extremist groups.” But the records themselves acknowledge that investigations extended into land claims, internal governance disputes, and social and economic development—core elements of lawful political activity.

Criminologist Shiri Pasternak described the program as a violation of political and human rights, noting that intelligence gathering appeared aimed not only at observation, but disruption.

Confirmed tactics included urging the withdrawal of funding from targeted organizations, attempting to block international Indigenous activists from entering Canada, and using police actions—such as drug raids—to interfere with political organizing.

Legal scholar David Milward said the program represented a breach of democratic principles, rooted in the same paternalistic assumptions that underpinned earlier federal policies, including residential schools.

Those assumptions were visible in how the RCMP framed its work: Indigenous movements were cast as susceptible to outside influence, their leaders as potential threats, their demands as instability.

Yet many of those surveilled would go on to become nationally respected figures, including George Manuel, Marie Marule, Noel Starblanket, Phil Fontaine, John Amagoalik and Tony Belcourt.

Mr. Belcourt, whose file was opened in 1972, recalled that even moderate leadership drew scrutiny.

“We were agitating,” he said. “We wanted to get attention.”

The Security Service’s attention, once fixed, was difficult to shake. By 1975, the program had reached its peak, assigning priority targets and compiling extensive personal and political intelligence. Surveillance continued into the early 1980s.

The excesses of that era—including illegal break-ins and other covert operations—led to the McDonald Commission and, ultimately, the creation of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service in 1984.

Yet the commission devoted minimal attention to the surveillance of Indigenous movements.

For some, the legacy is not only historical.

It lingers in habits of caution. In the instinct to watch the watcher. In the quiet knowledge that political organizing—especially when it challenges the foundations of land and power in this country—has long been treated not as a right, but as a risk.

Yet the Cold War lens did not fall only on Indigenous peoples. During the same period, LGBTQ Canadians were also drawn into the orbit of national security suspicion. Under what is now known as the LGBT Purge, thousands were surveilled, interrogated, and removed from the military and public service. The rationale was stark: difference itself could be a liability, a point of vulnerability, a risk to the state.

The methods were familiar—files compiled, informants cultivated, lives reduced to intelligence entries.

In 2017, a class-action settlement led to the creation of the LGBT Purge Fund, acknowledging that national security had been used as a pretext for systemic discrimination. For many, it marked a rare moment of institutional recognition—an admission that surveillance had crossed into violation.

The RCMP has declined to comment on these specific historic operations pertaining to Indigenous movements, stating only that it has changed and is committed to repairing relationships with Indigenous communities.

But the record, now unsealed, traces a line that runs deeper than any one program—back through decades of policy and enforcement, to a time when the same institution helped move people off their lands, and then kept watch to make sure they stayed there.

The language of the Cold War has long since cooled. The files, now unsealed, remain.

They trace a line that runs deeper than any one program—through eras that renamed the same impulse. From “civilization” to “security,” from “removal” to “extremism,” the vocabulary shifts, but the posture holds.

Watch. Record. Contain. And, when necessary, call it protection.

But history has a way of circling back—not only in what is revealed, but in what is asked of it.

In 2017, survivors of the LGBT Purge secured a formal reckoning through the courts, leading to the creation of the LGBT Purge Fund. The settlement acknowledged that surveillance, justified in the name of national security, had crossed into systemic violation—careers ended, lives altered, identities treated as threats.

It was, in part, an admission that the state had watched too closely, and acted too harshly, without cause.

The question now—quiet, but persistent—is whether that same logic applies elsewhere.

What does accountability look like for those whose political organizing, governance work, and community advocacy were catalogued under “racial intelligence”? For those whose meetings were monitored, whose movements were tracked, whose organizations were infiltrated—not because of proven criminal activity, but because their assertions of land, rights, and sovereignty were perceived as risk?

Could the surveillance of Indigenous movements—carried out under the same Cold War rationale, using many of the same methods—meet a similar legal threshold?

Could there be, one day, a parallel to the Purge settlement for First Nations?

The obstacles are not small. The surveillance of LGBTQ public servants was, in many cases, tied to employment records, dismissals, and clearly documented harm within federal institutions. The monitoring of Indigenous communities, by contrast, often unfolded in diffuse ways—through intelligence files, disrupted organizing, denied opportunities, and a quieter erosion of political autonomy that is harder to quantify, but no less real.

Legal scholars have already begun to question whether these actions constituted violations of Charter rights, of freedom of association, of political expression. Others point to international human rights frameworks, where the surveillance and disruption of Indigenous governance could be understood not simply as overreach, but as part of a longer continuum of state control.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Wiikwemkoong Unceded Territory—one of the few First Nations in Ontario never to sign a treaty surrendering its land—was not politically quiet. It sat within a wider surge of Anishinaabe assertion across Manitoulin Island and the North Shore, where questions of jurisdiction, land use, and federal control were being actively contested.

During this period, Indigenous political organizing intensified across the country. The federal government’s 1969 White Paper—an attempt to eliminate Indian status and dissolve treaty relationships—was met with widespread resistance, including from leaders and community members across Ontario. That resistance coalesced through organizations like the National Indian Brotherhood and regional political bodies, while community-level advocacy often unfolded outside formal structures: in band councils, community meetings, and land-based disputes.

Men from Manitoulin, including those from Wiikwemkoong, were involved in these currents—pushing back against federal authority, asserting local governance, and engaging in the broader Red Power moment that swept across Turtle Island.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police Security Service did not limit itself to headline figures. As the declassified files show, it monitored gatherings, tracked regional developments, and relied on informants embedded in communities and urban Indigenous networks. Northern Ontario, including hubs like Sudbury and Toronto, was part of that surveillance map.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Please see next week’s edition for an interview with well-known Indigenous women’s rights activist Jeanette Corbiere Lavell.

The Manitoulin Expositor

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