The Canadian government continues to move forward with genocidal legislation framed as beneficial for the original people. Canada is still attempting to rewrite the historic relationship between the original people and settlers.
Trudeau is following in the footsteps of his late father in attempting to implement 1969 White Paper policy directives through modern legislation using hijacked terms like self-government and self-determination.
Both these terms imply that some benevolent, paternalistic force is “giving” governing or sovereign powers to a third party. This is false.
Trudeau the elder did not understand the original people of this island. Doused in white privileged thinking, both Trudeaus have willfully misunderstood the original relationship. The first people, the original people who inhabited this land, were raised with an understanding to share and help one another. They did not have an archaic encumbered process of dividing up blades of grass. The original people’s concept of land and resource sharing remains unchanged.
It is the settlers, posturing with news releases and Canada wide “engagement” sessions, who are the snake oil salesmen selling the extermination of the original people with bureaucratic marketing. The “Indian problem” keeps getting repackaged with federal solutions while the real solutions that are coming from the Indians themselves, are not heard.
Mainstream Canadians want to understand “equality” — but they look at it through their own lens. For mainstream parenting versus original people’s parenting: they do not understand the First Nation kinship relationship where older relations fill an ancestral role in educating and raising children. Mainstream has a nuclear family, and parenting books or policies that are generically applied. For mainstream each year, new challenges require new methodology in this one area.
In housing matters mainstream Canadians inherit or pay to own their homes. They pay property taxes and expect that water, roads, sewer, garbage and other services will be provided.
On the reserve there are not enough houses. Up to fifteen families can be living in one house. The original First Nation bands are underfunded for housing. For a population of three thousand people, housing allowances are set by the department of Indian Affairs at possibly ten new houses per year with limited funds for ongoing, existing home maintenance or renovations.
There can also be poor road maintenance, no access to clean water, poor infrastructure or limited services to maintain reserve homes.
Yes, the response is that indigenous people have to get or earn their own homes. Okay. The reserve or First Nation is located on communal property held in trust by the federal government. Therefore, it is almost impossible for a band or its members to get financing in for those people willing to pay for a home. The homes attached to private property enhance the property value. A home attached to communal property cannot increase the value of “valueless” land. This is valueless in mainstream property terms.
The land is not valueless. The land holds the hearts and integrity of the ancestors who have gone on to the final campground. The land speaks. The original people are part of this continuous cycle.
These are two examples of what is not known by mainstream Canada when they hear the budgets that promise so many “billions’ for the Indigenous. What mainstream Canada does hear is their rising blood pressure and the word tax dollars. They have not heard about the Indian Trust fund that was brought to Canada in 1913 that should be at an estimated 2 trillion dollars today earning 35 billion in yearly interest. Therefore, the original people have their own dollars that are being parceled out as “new or improved relationship dollars” each year by consecutive federal governments.
So Trudeau and his henchmen or so called ministers have been trying to spin that their new recognition and implementation of rights legislation is this year’s solution to the “Indian problem”. “For too long, the original people have not been able to determine their own destiny…” – this part is true. The Indigenous rights legislation is being touted as a continuing benchmark in the liberal’s determination to achieve “reconciliation”. How can there be any reconciliation when there have been repeated policies, jurisprudence and legislation answering a false understanding of the “Indian problem”?
There is much federal head shaking, complete with tears and heart wrenching apologies – all shed for the intolerable “Indian” situation. There is little head nodding acknowledging that privileged mainstream groupthink continues to put forward solutions that make whitesense. There is no acknowledgement of the years of physiological, psychological and spiritual abuse which have brought the original people to the highest unemployment rates, worst living conditions, highest suicide and incarceration rates and diminished life expectancies.
This is the ugly part that mainstream Canadians will not see. If the true history of this land had been taught understanding the manipulations, theft and fraudulent behavior of successive Canadian governments, maybe Canadians would understand equality cannot be achieved with any magic legislation, and not by the next federal election.
As long as the federal government keeps a public relations approach that is reasonable to mainstream measures, the reality and stark despair of the original people will not be seen. It is trickery. It is shifting the history and current affairs to trick Canadians and the global audience into believing all that can be done, IS being done.
This federal mantra of Trudeau, sadly, is being repeated his “aboriginal Canadians”. The Assembly of First Nations advocacy office has become an official “nation” with a wave from Trudeau’s wand – which means he has increased funding dollars to get Indian agreement.
What is the real solution? For one thing, Trudeau and his gang of posers have to stop pretending that they understand the “Indian problem”.
They can say that after 150 years, we have not broken the Indian spirit.
They can say, as Canadian guests, we have to have full communal engagement and it will probably take another one hundred and fifty years to undo the harms we have inflicted on the original people of this land.
They can say they offered us friendship, peace and were generous in accommodating our ancestors.
It is now time to repay this kindness and also time to learn from a great people who have flourished for centuries on this land. What has made this land great is not what we brought to it, but what has always been here. That is recognition and reconciliation.
This is 100% right. Mainstream Canadians do not understand that your land held in trust can not increase in value etc .. including I, until I read this.
As ‘Canadians’ we have a moral and ethical responsibility to understand the indigenous relationship (or lack of) with our sitting provincial and federal governments.
History must stop repeating itself. I am unsure how to help make that change.
H^ I will present this article to the highschool teachers I am meeting with tomorrow as the school boards roll out the revised curriculum. Yaw^ko: yoyantle