Perry Bellegarde

Perry Bellegarde is a Canadian First Nations and Métis activist and politician, who was elected as national chief of the Assembly of First Nations on December 10, 2014.^[1] A member of the Little Black Bear First Nation in Saskatchewan, he has served as a band councillor in Little Black Bear, as chief of the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations and as the Saskatchewan regional chief of the Assembly of First Nations.^[2]

Background

Born in 1962 at the Fort Qu'Appelle Indian Hospital in Fort Qu'Appelle, Saskatchewan,^[3] he was raised on the Little Black Bear reserve and attended elementary and secondary schools in the nearby towns of Goodeve and Balcarres.^[3] After high school he attended the Saskatchewan Federated Indian College,^[3] and later studied business administration at the University of Regina.^[3] Following his graduation, he worked as director of personnel for the Saskatchewan Indian Institute of Technologies,^[3] before joining the Touchwood–File Hills–Qu’Appelle Tribal Council in 1986.^[3] After acceding to the presidency of that organization in 1988, Bellegarde led negotiations to transfer management of the Fort Qu’Appelle Indian Hospital from the federal government to local First Nations,^[3] and initiated and implemented the city of Regina's new urban service delivery centre for First Nations people.^[3]

Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations

In May 1988, Bellegarde became president of the provincewide Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations,^[3] a position which automatically made him a regional vice-chair of the AFN.^[3] He served in this role until 2003, and was later reelected to another term in the position in 2012.^[4]

In this role, he endorsed Neil Young's Honour the Treaties fundraising concert tour, which raised funds for the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation's legal fight against the Athabasca oil sands.^[5]

AFN leadership

Bellegarde was a candidate in the AFN's 2009 leadership election, in which he was defeated by Shawn Atleo on the eighth ballot after six successive ballots on which the candidates were virtually tied.^[6] He did not run in the 2012 election, in which Atleo won a second term.

After Atleo's resignation in 2014, Bellegarde ran in the 2014 election,^[7] and won on the first ballot.^[1]

He has identified one of his early priorities in the position as lobbying for the federal government to establish a judicial inquiry into missing and murdered aboriginal women,^[4] an issue which has dominated First Nations activism in the 2010s.

References