The Secwepemc elder who led the 1995 Gustafsen Lake uprising has condemned the federal government's reluctance to order an inquiry into what happened.

"There is no justice on stolen land," Wolverine, aka Jones William Ignace, wrote in an open letter released today. "There is no justice in the very same courts and institutions that have, without the jurisdiction to do so, created the Indian Act, that have legislated genocide, that have attempted to but have not and will not succeed in destroying us."

During the monthlong standoff in the B.C. Interior, 400 police officers and members of the Canadian Armed Forces were deployed in response to indigenous activists and supporters occuping a privately owned ranch. They claimed that they were practising a traditional sundance on unceded aboriginal territory. 

Police opened fire at one point, shooting a woman in the arm, before the siege ended peacefully. Evidence was later entered in court of an RCMP spokeperson saying "smear campaigns are our specialty."

Wolverine, 83, was found guilty of several weapons offences. He spent nearly five years in jail before being released in 1999.

"Already, the actions or lack thereof of the new Prime Minister and the Federal Minister of Justice and Attorney General are in direct contravention of the moral and legal obligations their respective stations require of them," Wolverine alleged in his letter. "I remind you that these obligations are constitutional."

In the letter, Wolverine also called Canada "a failed nation".

"Canada is crumbling under the weight of its own broken promises, constitutional violations and genocidal crimes," he claimed. "Our Tribes are rising, are formally unifying in the stance of full sovereignty and jurisdiction on our Territories."

Wolverine stated that evidence of this can be seen in indigenous people's struggles to "stop the destruction of their Homelands, whether that destruction is pipelines, fracking, logging, LNG terminals, fish farms, transport corridor expansions, mines, tar sands, or any other resource extractive industry".

With regard to the upcoming federal inquiry into missing and murdered indigenous women, Wolverine declared that the "ongoing murder and abduction of our Women must not be used to deflect the seriousness of the questions we are asking as it is the very same issues we are attempting to address in our questioning".