Ovide Mercredi is many things, but a terrorist isn’t one of them.

A lawyer, poet and member of the Order of Canada, he’s an accomplished Cree leader who spent two terms leading the Assembly of First Nations in the 1990s. And yet, sitting inside his Winnipeg living room flipping through a hefty stack of formerly secret intelligence files, Mercredi is compelled to set the record straight.

“I don’t appreciate being called an extreme Native,” the former national chief says emphatically, “because I’m not a terrorist.”

Yet there he is, in black and white — named in a secret 1997 domestic counterterrorism report from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), which lists Mercredi’s call for a national day of protest against federal policy inaction as “Native extremism.”