What to do with Native peoples?

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It's an acute case of white man's burden

All cheekiness aside, my knowledge of the situation in Canada is limited to the contents of this thread. And due to my status of a white teenager from a small town I lack the necessary experience to even think of possible solutions to the problem, but it definitely needs to be solved. The most important thing would be to make sure that education on reservations becomes a priority, and the money spent towards it, goes into the budget effectively. Somehow, you have to have a little bit of a culture change, so that the aboriginals value their education more, and know how important it is. You also have to facilitate movement in and out of the reservation for those who can contribute to society in effective ways. It also seems like bringing some highly educated aboriginals back into a reservation would be effective in helping to kind of peer pressure a priority change to education.

That's really all I have... And I also will add that I feel no guilt for the mistreatment of minorities before my lifetime, because I had no part of it. I didn't give anybody small-pox infected blankets, and I didn't have any slaves on a plantation. The people who still live with a huge chip on their shoulder for what happened long ago really disturbs me... But Triactus said some of these terrible things were going on 40 years ago in Canada, well I can certainly understand bitterness towards something that close.

 

Repping white meat. (chicken is apparently good)

 

Repped.

That's the thing - most people living in the US today are in fact, not descendants of the people who did this to the Native Americans. Relocating Native Americans and/or placing them on reservations has been going on for nearly 200 years at this point. My ancestors immigrated from Europe just two generations ago. The immigrant experience is the same for millions of white Americans. The large African American population weren't immigrants at all - the vast majority of them were brought here against their will. The large Latino immigration has occured since this happened to Native Americans as well. Basically, unless you're white and can trace a significant portion of your ancestry to immigrants who arrived from England in the 17th century - and very few Americans today can - you had nothing to do with how these people were treated.

 

Maybe not, but you guys are still refusing to budge off land that is theirs by rights...ho-hum...stir the pot and see who starts shouting

 

I live on a 0.1 acre plot of land, and my grandparents were coal miners. I highly doubt the Native Indians would be jealous or willing to switch places...

 

Heh heh, I can't talk, my family is orginally German!

 

...perhaps the European countries which contributed in the early slaughter of the Native Americans would contribute -- or at least give back the gold, silver, and gemstones which were taken after unleashing small pox, the plague and handful of other deadly diseases on the populace.

Between Christopher Columbus and the Conquistadors it is estimated they killed (either with weapons or disease) over ten million -- seven million by Ponce de Leon alone.

 

Well, my direct line ancestors were dirt poor. They sure as hell never signed any treaties and later broke them. But their countrymen did.

The thing is, history is rife with examples of technologically superior (please note the italics, people) cultures moving in and displacing other cultures. Even without the technological advantage, the advantage of numbers and centralized organization has given other cultures the advantage in taking land from their rivals. It happens. It's not nice, and it's bloody, messy, and some would even say unfair, but it's been going on for centuries at the least, if not millennia.

So on the one hand, Silvery, I have to take issue with the statement you made about it being "their" land. In Realpolitik terms, possession is 9/10 of the law. The land on which your home is situated may have been stolen by your ancestors from Celtic settlers 2500 years ago or whatever, but you would hardly say the land belongs to the Celts. Descendants of the Etruscans are really, really unlikely to get any reparations from the Italian government today, given that the Romans likely pushed them off the land thousands of years ago.

Now I know we are talking about hundreds of years and not thousands, but IMHO the principle remains the same. As I said, people of European, Oriental, African, and other descents are not likely to shove off anytime soon. Historically, what's done is done.

However, we pride ourselves on following the rule of law. We made deals or promised to make deals with these people. Hopefully, we have progressed beyond to vicious bullying that has been the hallmark of societies for much of history. God knows, the Canadian government has thrown billions of dollars at this problem for the past 100 years at the least.

Now some people mentioned residential schools. Those damn things are a blight on our past, absolutely. I feel for the suffering that the Native students underwent there, and the suffering their families felt at losing their children. Generous compensation should be paid to the victims. Not to every Native on the planet, mind, just the people who actually were in the schools. In some cases, children of the students have come forward with their hands out, looking for reparations. To me that's pathetic. If I knew the man who murdered my father, I would not go to the murderer's son asking for reparations. That's just plain ridiculous.

Beren brought up an interesting point -- BTW, Beren I didn't know you were a First Nations member -- in that the land that was given to the Natives was often really useless land in terms of farming. But now in many cases great natural wealth is being found on those reservations. If we value our integrity as a nation (a nation that I believe includes people of all backgrounds) we should compensate them fairly for the extraction of those resources, just as we would do for any other citizen.

Beren's other point was about the true nature of being Native. Thomas King talked about this when he told a story about a young Native who called him an "apple" (Red on the outside, White on the inside) because King was dressed in jeans and a dress shirt. King went on to say that he doesn't believe a Native is only a Native when he is dressed in regalia. Who gets to determine what being Native is? Certainly White's shouldn't, but should it be the purview of an elite few?

Beren, you seem to me to be an example of a Native who succeeded at working with modern culture. yet you keep portions of your old culture, which thing I applaud. Have you ever been accused of selling out your heritage or assimilating too much? I'd hazard you have, and I think that's a damn shame. If any group is so wrapped up in their efforts to establish their identity that they don't enter mainstream society, then IMHO there's very little that society can do to help them solve their internal problems.

More to come.

 

Well, I'll let Beren speak for himself, but I seem to remember Beren saying that he didn't grow up on a reservation. Perhaps the reason he assimilated into modern culture was because he was brought up in it...

 

LKD, I agree. Ownership of the land would be impossible to transfer. It would be like if the french canadians would demand to have Louisiana back.

Yes, awful things happened to the natives, both long ago and in the last generation. For that I sympathize and I apologize on behalf of my people. But if you dwell too much on the past, you forget the present and the future.

The child poverty rate in Canada is 11,3% (meaning 11,3% of canadian children are living in poverty) [source : http://www.campaign2000.ca/rc/C2000 Report Card FINAL Nov 10th08.pdf]. In 2001 (the most recent I could find), the rate for first nation children in Canada is 40% [source : http://www.campaign2000.ca/rc/rc06/06_C2000NationalReportCard.pdf]. Nearly 1 of 2 children are living in poverty. That is unbelievable.

Yes, white men came several centuries ago. Yes, natives have been discriminated, beaten and abused since. But what can we do TODAY? Let's be pro-active!

I understand that most natives feel robbed of their culture, of their identity. But does it help the situation if a lot of them are often drunk or if parents sell drugs to their children? My girlfriend's uncle married a native and is now living on a reservation. He told us that alcohol and drug use is a plague there. Even his son is a drug user. The uncle often leaves money lying around because he's afraid of what his son might do to get money.

What if, instead of granting tax exemption to the natives (I don't know if they have the same deal in the US), why not use that money to build infrastructures, programs, augment school fundings?

You are only going to change a society's mentality by better educating the children (and I don't mean strictly academical). But at the same time, maybe the government doesn't want the native as a proactive, healthy, *demanding* society...

 

You're right chick, I wouldn't say that the land my house is on belonged to the celts. I would say that the British have fully assimilated the native people here (a fact shown by the amount of red-haired stocky people, of which most of my mothers family are, here), not displaced them onto some crappy farmland out in the middle of nowhere and then felt supierior about it

 

Ha! I hope I don't come across as superior -- I do not believe that morally or ethically (or absolutely) Euro-Canadian culture is superior. The thing is, as Triactus alluded to, some pretty large groups of Natives are suffering quite badly. The rest of us are told, over and over again, that WE are the ones who caused this problem and therefore WE need to take steps to fix it. My position is not one of either superiority or paternalism. It is rather one of "these people (of a different cultural heritage) are my fellow citizens and should be treated as such. They are suffering. How can I and my fellow citizens (who share my cultural heritage) help and support them?"

 

What exactly is Euro-Canadian culture? I've never heard of the culture. I've heard of western culture, and Euro-North American culture, but never Euro-Canadian.

 

What I mean is the mainstream culture that has developed in Canada -- it owes much of its present form to European (read that racially, White) ideas, thoughts, and traditions. I mean, our legal system for almost all of Canada derives from the British model. So does our Governmental system. In Quebec, they still use elements of the Napoleonic code for their civil law, yet that is still a European model, albeit a French one rather than an English one.

Despite the tons of immigrants from non-European nations, Canada is still predominantly made up of Europeans. If you count the Hispanic immigration from South America, IMHO that still makes them somewhat European as they speak a language that originated in Europe and cleave to a religion that is quite European in nature (I refer to the Roman Catholic faith here)

This culture is a good one, I think, though I would never say a perfect one -- we've made tons of mistakes over the centuries. It is what I term the mainstream culture here in Canada and it is so good that many immigrants find it attractive enough to want to come to the country and partake of the peace and bounty we enjoy.

I know a lot of Natives feel quite hostile to this culture, though, and look upon any aid from it with deep suspicion -- history has taught them well -- but as some have mentioned it's time for people to get over the past and work toward a future.

The stereotype of an "Indian" is an uneducated, shiftless bum who sponges money off of the welfare system and uses it to feed addictions to drugs and alcohol, and when the money runs out, they pimp Indian girls on the streetcorner to get their fixes. This is unfair in the extreme in that there are lots of Natives who do not come anywhere close to filling this stereotype.

That said, though, all you need to do is drive to the downtown core of any major Canadian city and you will find a large number of people who do fit the stereotype. Our newspapers are full of stories about reservations where life is so bad they have astronomical suicide rates and people drink photocopier fluid to get high. The incarceration rate amongst Native peoples is far higher than it should be, statistically speaking, and that's even with traditions in the legal system that state that judges should "go easier" on Native defendants.

Several international organizations have condemned Canada's record in how they deal with Native populations. I understand their positions, but once again, it's not like we're going to feasibly be able to just hand over the entire city of Winnipeg to Native leaders. Criticism is easy -- finding a realistic solution is much more difficult. I'd like to find that soluition, though.

 

Well, since I'm partially Native myself (only 1/64th, but it's still there), I feel I have every right to profit from the exploitation of my land! It's all you foreigners that need to get off!

Seriously, though, reality is that posession is 9/10ths of real law, and power is the other 1/10th. Historically, probably every ethnic group in existance today (including Natives, maybe not the Austrailian Aborigines though) has both been driven off their land, and driven others off their land. The only difference between all of those times and what happened in the Americas/Austrailia is that it happened more recently. It's ridiculous to expect people to "pay back" for what their ancestors did, on any topic; but it's even more ridiculous to expect it in an issue of conquest. If Ponce de Leon were still alive, I'd fully support bringing him up on war crimes charges (except I don't think the laws were around back then, either), but there's nothing more than that to do.

Now, if there is injustice still being done today, if there are laws on the books that are racially biased, if people are breaking laws to take advantage of others, that's something else.

 

Well there is such a thing as profiting from a crime as dmc pointed out. Are the Swiss banks right in refusing to keep back the gold to the ancestors of those jews who died on concentration camps? I know many others do not feel that way considering the preassure that's put on them and various other institutions that hold on to treasures stolen from the Jews during the holocaust. On the other hand I really don't see anyone giving much back to the native americans or anyone even putting any preassure on the Brittish, Spanish and French who probably have all sorts of artefacts made from the gold stolen from the new world, or the current American population to give out land for that matter.

I don't know personally a lot about the issues with native Americans but we do have our own native people (not that regular Finns aren't native) here called the Saami who basically wish to gain greater rights to the lands of Lapland (Northern Finland). Their problems are quite similar to those of Native Americans it seems, and they are in constant legal battles with the paper industry and forest owners in the area.

 

Morgoroth, the difference there is that a singular continuous entity has profited. The same banks that took the valuables still hold them, or have sold them off and now hold the money. By and large, the land owners that own land in the US today are not the same entities that took it from the Native Americans. Even arguing that the nation is the same is a very tenuous point.

As an asside, exactly what rights are they fighting for? Are we talking basic citizen rights, rights to hereditary lands, or rights to compensation?