Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Cthulhu]

In spite of the failure of Ottawa's previous handouts to natives on reserves doing anything, they are deciding to throw out another $5 billion at the problem.

Ottawa pledges $5 billion to aboriginals

These handouts don't get to the heart of the problem. In 2005 it makes no sense to subsidize groups living in isolated communities that have no way to sustain themselves. The reserve system is an anachronism; it will never escape soaring unemployment. Giving out more money for services and infastructure is a band-aid solution when the communities can't sustain themselves. On top of that there have been far too many examples of it being misused either by the band coucils, chiefs or the citizens themselves. There is not enough accountability happening on the reserves.

The jobs are in the cities and always will be; rural Canadians have already known that for years and have made the exodus to urban centres. A number of aboriginals know that too, as there are actually more aboriginals living off-reserve than on reserve (70%). The problem off reserve is that there is nothing for them to hold on to.

There are very few native institutions in urban centres right now so there is little community for those natives who have left the reserves. Build them focal points in the cities, just as Italian-Canadians, Chinese-Canadians and other groups have. Put money into funding native meeting places, cultural centres, schools, churches etc. and keep the native community strong within urban centres. Natives are allowed free-post secondary education (from a pool given to the band councils); having them closer to the locations of the post-secondary institutions might encourage more to take up this offer.

Of course, there's the fear of native culture dying. That's a fair point--so spend money on preseving native culture rather than simply staying on the land for its own sake. It's unfortunate because natives have an attachment to the land but practically speaking its not enough. It makes no sense economically to support them in a setting where no little or improvement in the standard of living is possible. Towns thrive and expand from industry, not from handouts. People have nothing to do, part of the reason alcoholism and drug abuse are so rampant on the reserves.

This might be a moot point if the government falls, but I'm sure another deal will be reached with whomever is in charge in Ottawa. It simply doesn't seem like a workable solution to an ongoing problem.

[Wrench]

Aboriginals have to get off their aboriginal lazy asses and go to work.

Canadian Native is like a Mexican but a hell of a lot lazier.

[mithridates]

Theoretically $5 billion could work but they're just going to waste it. I could solve everything with $5 billion, and a lot of it would involve Wikipedia. First buy about two or more servers specifically for native languages, and give natives in jail the choice to either work during the day on what everybody else has to do, or to write in Wikipedia in their own language. Each native wikipedia should have at least 100,000 articles.

[Leslie Cheswyck]

And the cons would type it all in ebonics: Sho 'nuf, Clombus skubbamerka.

[winnie]

Thanks for the info. Although I don't think it will help much, it's still good to see that they haven't been entirely forgotten about.

To the others: save your ignorant comments. Educate yourself, then speak.

[Moldy Rutabaga]

In the late 1860s and 1870s, when the beaver and buffalo had been hunted nearly into extinction for the fur trade, the Canadian natives in the western provinces were teetering on starvation; they had traded away their food supply and now had to compete for land with new settlers. The reservation idea began as a solution by the government to help them. The idea was that if the natives had stable, fixed parcels of land they could learn to farm and eventually assimilate-- remember that nearly everybody else was a farmer or rancher in the west in 1870.

The program has been a massive failure for 135 years. Poorly administered from the start-- motives weren't always very pure and the land parcels weren't always very arable land-- the natives have been trapped since in a cycle of handouts, poverty, and isolation. Where they do not live on ramshackle reservations, natives live in the worst parts of cities where alcoholism, crime, and suicide are far higher than for the general population.

It was my minor, and my students seem surprisingly interested in the topic sometimes. I tell them that they are sensitive about the Japanese, and Canadians are very sensitive about the Indian problem. And no one knows what to do about it; including me. I can only think of a few comments. And I would like to know more about what NZ does with their Maori, and if things are any better.

1. There is no clear end-goal. Are we trying to assimilate the Indians, and thus destroy their culture, or make them independent, which isn't going to happen when there are no herds of buffalo to chase or maize fields to grow? Some assimilation is inevitable if their standard of living is to improve. To me reservations should be more like cities and less like agricultural districts. The model still seems to be in 2005 that reservations should imitate farm communities and the goal is out of date.

2. We keep throwing money at the problem without worrying about results. For a small country, 5 billion is a lot of money. Much of it will be wasted on government bureaucracy and corrupt band leaders. The grant is not part of a larger strategy, but is meant solely to make an even more corrupt Liberal government get re-elected. We feel good for a moment, but we do little to force reform of the way the natives govern themselves or what they do with the money. We don't give welfare or EI without strings to make people train themselves or look for a job-- why do we give natives aid with no accountability or management? Why does a supposed democracy fund a smaller subset which is not run democratically?

3. There are few issues in Canada so polarized as this. I know many, many people who hate natives and say 'why do we give these jerks so much of our tax money to sit and drink beer all night? why do they get free everything? why can't they get a job?' Our answer is to call these people racists and ignoramuses. But these opinions are held by so many people publicly and privately, and there is never any kind of public dialogue on legitimate complaints because people are afraid of being called names. Instead, some of my friends mutter that maybe deep down they're right and the eggheads don't know reality.

Only my 2c.
Ken:>

[khyber]

There are natives who "sit around and do nothing" (to put it crassly).
There are natives who struggle to do anything because problems outside of their control.
There are natives who are doing just fine for themselves.
There are reserves that need a LOT of money, and reserves that have the potential to GIVE money.
Could just be a thing with aboriginal and government leaders more than native people themselves.
Though certainly if you were to give a 19yr old suburban kid 35,000$ most of them wouldn't really spend too much time investing that money.

[Octavius Hite]

Good to see the level of stupidity and ignorance on this board isn't diminished! What a relief, my day isn't made without hearing some bonehead being a bigot about Arabs/Muslims/Women/Aboriginals especially coming from people who couldn't get jobs (or girls) in thier home countries.

However there was some resonable comments in some of these posts.

1. The endgame has to be giving First Nations people's self-government by whch they will then manage their own affairs. In Nova Scotia the Membertou band has gained an ISO 9001 rating and built major buinesses in the community. They are on their way to building an Aborignial economy, eliminating unemployment and raising the standard of living in this community. However the Labrador Innu have had alot of oppertunities and now we are discovering that the band leaders are stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars. But the problem does remain that some of these crazy reserves in the hinterlands of Ontario and Quebec and Nunavut will never really be able to build any type of successful economy so we will have to help them and give them the chance to move into the cities or other reserves.

2. Homeownership on reserves must increase. This is being tried by some reserves and it has to continue and expand so that Natives can buy their own homes and are thus more likely take care of them and it helps elimenate housing shortages.

3. We must recognize that more than 50% of Natives in canada do NOT live on reserves, they live in the major cities (Winnipeg, Vancouver, Toronto). We need to put resources in the city such as Native run drop in clinics, health clinics, housing associations, employment centres, Womyn's centres, etc. Don't forget that the majority of Sex Trade workers who are murdered or disappeared in canada are Aboriginal women (see Robert pickton in Vancouver or the current serial killer in Edmonton, etc.).

4. We must not break deals we make. Canadians love to b*tch and moan about how natives don't pay taxes. They reason they don't pay taxes is not because we are especially generous or that they are poor and deserve a break, it's because we signed a treaty saying they didn't have to! That's right folks our government signed a contract many, many years ago saying that they didn't have to pay taxes in exchnage for their land and other things. Get over it! Is it maddening? Yes! But so is the fact that Quebec doesn't pay the fair price for electricity from Newfoundland. We have a long history of bonehead deals both provincial and federally so get over it because it is never going to change.

5. Non-native Canadians cannot run any program for natives, it doesn't work. Should there be some oversight to make sure that money isn't stolen? yes. However non-natives don't understand native issues so we shouldn't be running these programs that's how we ended up in this mess in the first place (residential schools, forced relocation, assimilation, Chretien's 60's Whitepaper etc etc etc etc).

Those are some helpful (I think) suggestions to at least move forward a little bit when it comes to sloving all the problems in the First Nations of Canada.

[Wrench]

I live in Northern Alberta and I have seen the worst natives can offer. For Every one native that works there are 50 that sit on their lazy ass. I know because my step dad was a native. I was never a racist until I moved to Northern Canada.