Profile : Elijah Harper Stands Out as a Chief Among Canada’s Indians : He has become an unlikely political hero by saying no to Mulroney on the Meech Lake Accord. By doing so, he showed his people they could be effective players in the political establishment.

This has been a summer of tension between Indians and whites in Canada, but you’d never know it to see the man who started it all.

Elijah Harper is sitting in a hotel lobby bar in downtown Winnipeg, hunched over a cup of coffee and unwittingly attracting Anglo admirers the way a porch light draws moths on a summer evening.

“Hey, how’d the debate go last night?” asks a stranger in coat and tie, approaching Harper’s table and hoping to engage Canada’s most celebrated Indian in a political conversation.

“Very good move on Meech Lake,” gushes a blowzy blonde, passing on her way to the lambada club downstairs. She referred to an unpopular government initiative that Harper successfully opposed in June, winning in the process the hearts of countless white Canadians but even more importantly, awakening in Canada’s more than 350,000 Indians a sense of pride and determination to make their mark on the country’s political system.

“The people of Canada have finally noticed us,” said Phil Fontaine, an Ojibwa chief from Manitoba and a prominent native rights activist. “We have our hero, and that’s Elijah.”

Harper makes an unlikely political hero. He lacks the striking physical assets of, say, a Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan, or the I’m-right-and-the-hell-with-the-world hauteur of Britain’s Margaret Thatcher. He is heavyset, stooped and wears his hair in a long black ponytail. And when he speaks, his voice can barely be heard above the strains of the cocktail lounge piano.

He appears genuinely uncomfortable at all the attention he’s getting from both white and native Canadians. “Sometimes it’s overwhelming,” Harper said, sugaring his coffee and turning his head slightly toward the wall, the better to avoid the meaningful glances in his direction from all around the room. “I don’t always know how to react.”

Harper’s reputation, however, was sealed last June, when he played the pivotal role in facing down the Canadian federal government.

At the time, the government was trying to amend the national constitution in ways designed to appease disgruntled French-speakers in Quebec. The package of amendments, called the Meech Lake Accord, deeply offended native Canadians, however, because it gave legal status to the concept that Canada was founded jointly by the English and the French. Native peoples were forgotten.

For all the controversy it engendered, the Meech Lake Accord appeared to be a fait accompli until Harper, the lone Indian in Manitoba’s provincial assembly, took to the floor of the legislature, used procedural tricks to block the amendments which needed unanimous approval by Canada’s 10 provinces, and demonstrated to an astonished nation what one man can do.

His stand made Harper an instant national hero--the subject of folk songs. Manitobans sport “Elijah Harper for Prime Minister” buttons, and one Winnipeg couple has named their baby after him. Even hard-boiled Canadian journalists have been seen to weep when they interview the quiet but determined Harper.

But more important than the splash Harper made in the white political world was the impetus he gave native Canadians in the two weeks that it took him to kill the Meech Lake Accord. When he stood up and said “No” to the prime minister, Harper showed Indians for the first time that they could be effective players on the Establishment’s political stage. Since then, from one end of Canada to the other, Indians have jumped to follow Harper’s example.

“To native people, the two weeks in June, 1990, were a turning point in their history,” said Pauline Comeau, a Manitoba journalist and author of a forthcoming book on native affairs. Harper’s stand was followed this summer by a wave of native civil disobedience which swept much of this vast country. Consider:

* Heavily armed Mohawk Indians near Montreal blocked a major commuter bridge over the St. Lawrence River for seven weeks, calling attention to native claims on an old-growth forest that was due to be levelled for a golf course. The blockade disrupted the daily travels of tens of thousands of commuters in Canada’s second-largest city, and the Canadian army had to be called in before the barricades finally began to come down. Prime Minister Brian Mulroney has promised protesting Mohawks that the would-be golf course land will be theirs.

* In the logging region around Val D’Or, Quebec, Algonquin Indians have blocked a highway heavily used by timber interests to press the provincial government for better conservation measures.

* In Ontario, various bands of the Ojibwa nation piled ties, logs, and even an old refrigerator and a rusty bathtub atop key rail lines north of Lake Superior to protest slum conditions on their reserves. The rail blockades stranded passengers, backed up hundreds of freight cars, and led to the layoffs of more than a hundred rail yard workers.

* In British Columbia, Indians from a number of tribes likewise blocked a major rail line to protest unsettled land claims. When police would pull down a barricade at one point, other Indians would put up new barricades farther down the line. At the same time, Indian groups were blocking highways all over the province. The pressure eventually persuaded the provincial government to change its longstanding approach to land claims.

* In northeastern Alberta, a railroad trestle was torched following a long dispute over Indian land claims. Authorities have arrested an Indian man, although elders from his community say they oppose the use of arson for political ends.

* In southern Alberta, radical Peigan Indians with bulldozers have been diverting a channel of the Oldman River to protest the construction of a new, $280-million irrigation and flood-control dam. The Indians say the government failed to conduct proper environmental impact investigations before breaking ground. The government has won a court order to idle the bulldozers, but the Indians are vowing to defy it, and the water level in the river is already beginning to fall.

* In Manitoba, Elijah Harper’s home province, a record number of Indians are running for office in a provincial election scheduled this month. Some non-Indian politicians are even claiming to have Indian blood, the better to cash in on what Manitoba political analysts are calling “the Elijah Factor.”

For all the dislocations the protesting Indians are causing, white Canadians have reacted with surprising tolerance.

True, some whites have hurled rocks at Mohawks or burned Indians in effigy this summer--but others have chained themselves to fences in sympathy with the Indians, or slipped food through police lines to hungry native protesters. South African Nobel laureate Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu got in on the act, traveling to a remote Ojibwa community in northern Ontario and likening what he found there to “many of the conditions at home.”

The man who started all this was born 41 years ago in a tent in the bush near Red Sucker Lake, a tiny community in northern Manitoba, accessible only by air in the summer and by ice roads built over frozen lakes in the winter.

The second of 13 children, Elijah Harper was sent, according to local tradition, to live with his grandparents as soon as he was weaned. His childhood education consisted of the techniques of hunting, trapping, herbal medicine and ancient religious traditions, passed on by his grandparents as they moved from trapping camp to trapping camp.

“I never missed electricity,” he said. “I guess you don’t miss what you never had.”

But Harper’s father yearned for his son to get a formal education, so when Elijah turned 9, the family sent him to a residential school for Indians. Residential schooling for natives was the policy of the Canadian government at the time; officials believed they were doing the youngsters a favor in getting them out of the bush or off the reservations, and forcing them to learn English.

“The Department of Indian Affairs wanted to educate Indian people and ‘civilize’ them,” said Harper. “The policy then was assimilation and integration. Basically, it was cultural genocide.” Many adult Indians today say they were beaten or even sexually molested in the residential schools, and those who escaped physical harm say they were psychologically damaged by being told that their languages and cultures were inferior. Residential schools have been discontinued in Canada.

By the age of 16, Harper had dropped out of his residential school and returned to the trap lines around Red Sucker Lake. Under pressure from his father, though, he eventually traveled to Winnipeg, earned a high school certificate, and spent a year at the University of Manitoba, studying anthropology. He went into community development work and landed an analyst’s job with the provincial Department of Northern Affairs.

When a Tory government came in, Harper quit and decided to run for chief of his tribal band back in Red Sucker Lake. He was elected in 1979.

“I’ve always been interested in politics at the community level,” he said, ticking off native youth organizations to which he belonged in the residential school and at the University of Manitoba.

When his three-year term as chief expired, he ran for the provincial legislature and was elected on the ticket of Canada’s social democrats, the New Democratic Party, which is generally the country’s third-largest vote-getter behind the Progressive Conservatives and the Liberals. Some Indians criticized him for engaging in “white” politics, but Harper ignored them.

“You know, in order to advance your interests, you’ve got to be involved in every aspect of Canadian society,” he said. “You’ve got to know how the system works, why it makes the decisions that it does.”

Even after his electoral successes, though, Harper might never have become a household word if it hadn’t been for the ill-starred Meech Lake Accord. Indian groups opposed it for the three years Mulroney’s government nudged it toward becoming law, but to little effect until just weeks before the ratification deadline.

Previously, Canada’s Indians tended to fight their battles individually or within their tribal groups. If they had any political impact, it tended to be regional. They never were a unified national force. Harper was active in the largely fruitless “Red Power” movement of the 1960s, which Harper described as a narrowly based Canadian equivalent of the American Indian Movement. He, for example, lobbied for such causes as establishment of a department of native studies at the University of Manitoba and hiring of a special native students’ adviser.

Harper said it was widespread citizen support that carried the day for him this summer. “This one is different because it’s community-based,” he said. “Taking a stand against the federal government generated so much grass-roots support across the country. It just grew and grew. I got telexes representing thousands of people. We were flooded with calls. The secretaries couldn’t keep up.”

Today, Harper said he feels a responsibility to nurture the sense of unity he awakened among Indians last June. He has spent the summer traveling Canada, making speeches and counseling the Indians involved in civil disobedience. A sometime drinker in the past, he has sworn off alcohol, wanting to be a dry role model for Indian children. He speaks out against the use of violence: “I believe in resolving things peacefully,” he said. “It always seems that if you keep sitting at the table, talking, there’s hope.”

Almost everywhere he goes, Harper receives a hero’s welcome, showers of gifts and praise, and traditional feasts of pickerel, corn and bannock--a native hard bread.

“He’s a role model that we can look up to, as someone who stood up for our rights and won the day for us,” said Ojibwa chief Fontaine.

But words like that seem to be more than the modest Harper can bear.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, pouring more sugar into his coffee and looking away once again. “It does injustice to give credit to just one person. There were a lot of elders and leaders, and we stood together. I was just part of it.”

Canada’s Indians Draw the Line

Here is a partial list of towns where there have been major acts of Indian civil disobedience this summer: ONTARIO

Pic Mobert Indians halted train traffic at White River. Ojibwa Indians blocked rail tracks at Longlac and Schreiber. BRITISH COLUMBIA

Lil’wat Indians blocked a rail line at Mount Currie. Indians from several tribes blocked highways at Prince George, Lillooet, Kamloops, and Kelowna. Stl’atl’imx Indians blocked a rail line at Seton Portage. QUEBEC

Algonquin Indians blocked a highway during a logging protest at Lac Barriere. Mohawk Indians blocked the main highway through Oka. Mohawks blockaded a bridge and fortified a reservation at Chateauguay. ALBERTA

A railroad bridge at Grande Centre was torched, allegedly by a Chipeway-Cree Indian. Peigan Indians have diverted a section of the Oldham River upstream from a new dam project near Lethbridge.