Ovide Mercredi
Mercredi, Ovide William
Ovide William Mercredi, lawyer, native leader (b at Grand Rapids, Man 1946). After graduating from U of Manitoba, Mercredi practised law at The Pas until 1982, when he became legal adviser and then director of the ASSEMBLY OF FIRST NATIONS at Ottawa. In 1990 he helped to co-ordinate the successful effort by the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs to block the MEECH LAKE ACCORD (see MEECH LAKE ACCORD: DOCUMENT) in the Manitoba legislature. A year later he succeeded Georges Erasmus as national chief of the AFN. A skilled and resolute negotiator, committed to the belief that getting constitutional recognition of ABORIGINAL RIGHTS was the necessary first step to solving aboriginals' problems, he was a prominent participant in the constitutional discussions of 1991-92.
The CHARLOTTETOWN ACCORD (see CHARLOTTETOWN ACCORD: DOCUMENT) produced a commitment to ABORIGINAL SELF-GOVERNMENT but no concrete details and its failure to obtain passage left aboriginal self-government on the constitutional back-burner. Mercredi's leadership of the AFN came under fire over his administrative style which did not include consulting the chiefs on a regular basis. He was elected to another term as national chief in a very close vote in 1994 and was defeated in July 1997 by Phil Fontaine.
Mercredi, Ovide
A skilled and resolute negotiator committed to the belief that getting constitutional recognition of native rights was the necessary first step to solving natives' problems (photo by Graham Law).
Links to Other Sites
National Chiefs
Photographs and brief profiles of previous NIB/AFN National Chiefs. From the website for the Assembly of First Nations.
The Dominion government's advertisement asked for volunteers "able to read and write either the English or French language" with "good antecedents" who were good horsemen...
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