John Kim Bell is a successful conductor, an outspoken advocate for the arts, and a Mohawk from aboriginal Quebec. You would think he’d be a role model in the First Nation community, but in fact, the opposite is true. Bell has a habit of being publicly critical of native leadership, and has sparred with national activists on the issues surrounding aboriginal rights. Adding to the controversy is the fact that Bell often makes sweeping pronouncements about what it will take to lift Canada’s native people out of an endless cycle of poverty, contradicting and criticizing native leaders as if he himself had grown up on a reservation and clawed his way to respectability, which he didn’t.