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thepeel
Joined: 08 Aug 2004
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 Posted: Thu Jan 24, 2008 8:29 am Post subject: Rethinking the reserve |
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A thought-provoking series on the state of Natives and policy in Canada.
http://www.nationalpost.com/news/canada/rethinkingthereserve/index.html
A sample:
| Quote: |
Real warriors hold jobs'
Kevin Libin, National Post Published: Sunday, January 20, 2008
Chief Clarence Louie of the Osoyoos Indian Band in Osoyoos B.C.Jeff Bassett for National PostChief Clarence Louie of the Osoyoos Indian Band in Osoyoos B.C.
From property taxes to private schools, condos to casinos: How a new generation of aboriginal people is trading reliance on government for a return to self-sufficiency. With this, the National Post begins a five-week series examining some surprising solutions to the challenges that have plagued the reserve system.
Whatever we agree, or don't, about the history of Canadian aboriginals, or about their current station, and what they do or don't need, are or aren't entitled to, we can all surely concede one fact: For thousands of years, Indians in North America -- or, if you prefer, Turtle Island -- somehow managed to get by. How well? That, like everything else, is up for interpretation.
But we do know this: They survived. Even flourished. They built homes. They created forms of governance and social organization. They provided their own food -- enough to allow, despite almost certain scarcity at times, their numbers to grow from a small band of northeast Asians who wandered here something like 10,000 years ago to a population somewhere in the millions as of the 15th century, before Europeans began establishing permanent settlements here and cooking up plans for what to do about all those natives.
"For 9,700 years we weren't reliant on government or anybody," says Calvin Helin, son of the hereditary chief of the Gitlan Tribe of the Tsimshian Nation and a Vancouver lawyer and author. Of course, there was no choice. There was no Indian Affairs department to provide housing, no provinces to issue welfare payments.
Put aside, for a moment, debates about land claims, fishing rights, self-governance and the hundred other aboriginal-related issues Canadians continue to wrestle with, and Mr. Helin sees an obvious cause-and-effect relationship.
After more than a century of increasing government control, the ability of First Nations to provide for themselves has diminished to a point where today nearly all bands are heavily or, often, completely dependent on handouts to survive.
The conclusion is inescapable: If government money were the key to aboriginal prosperity, Mr. Helin expects they might be the most prosperous people in history.
"Money in and of itself can't solve anything," he says. "You can throw $100-billion at the problem and you would get an even more massive welfare trap."
Mr. Helin represents part of an emergent wave of aboriginal thinkers and leaders who have begun publicly rejecting the status quo, wherein bands have been conditioned to seek sustenance from without -- Ottawa -- rather than from within, and instead calls for a reawakening of ancient aboriginal ideals of self-sufficiency. |
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ersatzredux
Joined: 15 Dec 2007
Location: Same as it ever was, same as it ever was
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| Posted: Thu Jan 24, 2008 1:18 pm Post subject: |
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A new wave of sell outs more like-and-considering how few on reserve natives make it through university, a new trickle. As a Bigstone Cree friend of mine put it- our biggest downfalls have been gambling and booze. So now we have licensed casinos on our land? Oh yeah, that's the bold future for aboriginals.
As for ending all support, I'm in full agreement - that is if we give them their old landbase back to it. . Easy for assimilated Indians looking to set up in business for themselves to talk about, a bit harder for the people who have been left behind to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps with the havoc apartheid and intentional cultural genocide has ravaged on their societies. It's an amazing universal cultural trait though. No matter where you go, the rightwing are always self-serving fucks positioning themselves to speak for people to whom they are actually the enemy. |
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