Secret Files Reveal Decades of Government Spying on Indigenous Activists
Ottawa, as the seat of federal power, sat at the centre of a covert Cold War surveillance operation that targeted some of Canada's most prominent Indigenous political organizations — and a newly published CBC Indigenous investigation has pulled back the curtain on just how deep that operation ran.
The investigation found that the RCMP Security Service, the spy branch of the national police force that preceded CSIS, had been systematically monitoring at least 30 legitimate Indigenous political groups and hundreds of individual activists throughout the 1970s. The organizations targeted were not fringe movements or criminal enterprises — they were mainstream political bodies fighting for land rights, treaty recognition, and self-determination.
Cold War Logic Applied to Indigenous Politics
The surveillance program grew out of the RCMP's broader Cold War mandate to root out communist influence in Canadian society. Security Service officers appear to have applied that same lens to Indigenous activists, treating legitimate political organizing as a potential national security threat.
Documents reviewed by CBC suggest that undercover informants were embedded within organizations, correspondence was intercepted, and detailed files were compiled on individual leaders — all without the knowledge of the people being watched. In some cases, the information gathered had nothing to do with security concerns and everything to do with tracking who was organizing, who was speaking at rallies, and which alliances were forming between groups.
The Scale of the Operation
What makes the findings significant is the breadth of the surveillance. This wasn't a targeted investigation of a specific individual or incident — it was a systemic, institutionalized effort to map and monitor an entire political movement. The 30-plus organizations identified represent a wide cross-section of the Indigenous political landscape of the era, from national bodies to regional and local groups.
Historians and legal scholars have long suspected that Cold War-era security services overstepped their mandates in monitoring domestic political movements, but hard documentary evidence has been difficult to obtain. The CBC investigation brings new specificity to what had previously been largely anecdotal accounts from activists who suspected they were being watched.
Why This History Still Matters
For many Indigenous communities, this investigation confirms what elders and longtime activists have been saying for decades: that the federal government viewed their peaceful political work as a threat rather than a legitimate exercise of democratic rights.
The implications extend beyond history. Several of the land rights and treaty issues that those 1970s organizations were fighting for remain unresolved today. Understanding that the government was actively working to surveil — and potentially undermine — those movements adds important context to why progress on those files has been so slow.
The revelations also arrive at a moment when Canada's relationship with Indigenous peoples is undergoing significant public reckoning, from the findings of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls to ongoing land rights disputes across the country.
A Reckoning with the Past
CBC Indigenous has been building its investigation through access to information requests and interviews with former activists and historians. The full scope of the surveillance program may never be completely known — security files from the era were subject to destruction, and what remains is held under strict access rules.
But the records that have surfaced are enough to paint a troubling picture: a federal institution using the tools of national security law to police a movement that was doing nothing more than demanding the rights promised to Indigenous peoples by Canada's own Constitution and treaty commitments.
Source: CBC Indigenous
