OTTAWA - Five men running for Canada's top job in native politics are grappling with an issue that could eclipse even the grim toll of abject poverty: the looming threat of the H1N1 flu virus.
Worries about what autumn will bring have overshadowed the usual pre-election platitudes as the Assembly of First Nations meets this week in Calgary to choose its new leader.
There are 639 chiefs from across the country eligible to vote Wednesday, most of them based in B.C. and the Prairies.
Amid the lobbying and deal-making for the three-year post vacated by the retiring Phil Fontaine, candidates are mulling questions of life, death and pandemic preparedness.
The H1N1 strain blamed for at least 45 deaths across Canada has taken a disproportionate hold on reserves beset by overcrowded housing and a lack of clean water.
"I know places where five families live in the same two-bedroom house built by the Department of Indian Affairs," says B.C. candidate Bill Wilson, a consultant and veteran of the political battles to have native rights included in the Constitution.
"And it seems that only when people die does the government respond."
The Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs estimates that about 30 per cent of more than 830 flu cases in the province stem from remote northern reserves that often lack basic water service.
This despite the fact that aboriginal people comprise just 14 per cent of the total population.
Close quarters in overcrowded homes serve as efficient incubators for the spread of illness. There have been six confirmed deaths from H1N1 in the province, including one aboriginal victim.
As of Wednesday, the Public Health Agency of Canada reported 10,156 confirmed cases across the country and 45 deaths.
Costly native health care has often been a political football punted between Ottawa and the provinces, with sometimes tragic results.
Health Canada couldn't provide a detailed plan for how it will deliver vaccines to isolated, fly-in reserves -- if and when a vaccine is available.
An emailed statement offered late Friday simply said the department has "well established mechanisms for the distribution of vaccines" to such communities, but didn't describe them.
"It seems that our remote communities are usually one of the last to get looked after," said AFN candidate John Beaucage, a former economist and grand chief of the Union of Ontario Indians.
When it comes to the assembly itself, he hopes that in future the chiefs will agree to extend the vote for national chief beyond the 639 leaders, offering it to First Nations citizens on and off reserve.
"If the AFN doesn't start becoming more relevant -- if it doesn't start being the AFN for everybody -- then probably the AFN shouldn't exist."
Beaucage has criss-crossed the country campaigning, as has Perry Bellegarde, a career politician and former Saskatchewan vice-chief for the assembly.
His priorities include pushing Ottawa to lift the yearly funding growth cap of two per cent that is applied to more than $10 billion spent annually on native programs. That amount doesn't keep up with inflation and native population growth, he says.
Shawn Atleo, vice-chief of the assembly for B.C., is the youngest candidate in the race at 42. But he cites a long list of accolades as a regional politician and promotes himself as a bridge builder.
"All First Nations share the fundamental barrier of Canada's non-honouring, non-recognition of treaties -- whether they were signed five years, 20 years or 150 years ago."
The key is a united native front across Canada to push for fair access to natural resources on traditional lands, Atleo said.
"Creating strong economies where people have the dignity of jobs. We need to return to that spirit and intent."
Candidate Terry Nelson, chief of the Roseau River First Nation in Manitoba, is perhaps best known for saying in 2007 that the only way to catch the attention of white "immigrants" is to get between them and their wallets.
Nelson says decades of negotiations haven't inspired Ottawa to give First Nations a fair share of the oil, minerals and timber that flow off disputed lands.
He says chiefs should negotiate directly with American, Chinese and other foreign investors desperate for natural resources.
"There's a lot of support out there for what we're talking about because we have the capability to stop the oil flow to the United States," he said.
Asked how that would happen, he said: "I'm not going to tell you that. But it doesn't involve blockades or anything like that."
Nelson says the idea that native people freeload on Ottawa is all wrong.
"There's nothing flowing as payment to the First Nations people," he said of the riches mined from traditional lands.
"It's been a free ride, all right. But it's been a free ride for the immigrants -- not for the Indigenous people."
