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It was a meme that's the reality. Get over yourself. Trying to make a point with you is like trying to juggle sawdust.
Twist it all you want I still stand by my statement.

   

I'm not contradicting your statement, nor twisting anything. I believe you try to treat people with respect. Which surprises me that you would post that meme full of alternate truth.

There is nothing reality based about that meme, and therefore you cannot be respectful of the people in it when you are disparaging claims that they did not make. Or are you now claming that Kamala Harris identifies as Native American?

   

Maybe that writer chooses to frame it that way, but they could just as easily say indigenous Canadians and non-indigenous Canadians.

90% of the use of 'settler' is used the same derogatory way other racist slang words were used in the past. Maybe a few First Nations writers have no ill intention, but a lot of First Nations people do use it with contempt and derision for non-indigenous people.

The reason why First Nations shouldn't use the word settler is because it comes across, to me at least, as the same as the n-word for African-Canadians, the c-word for Chinese-Canadians and so on. Polite society chooses not those words and I think settler needs to stop being used, unless it is by one of us 'settler' types.

As for the argument that my family and friends have benefited from 'stolen land', I'll counter with two points. My home is on treaty land, and while those treaties were unfair, the fact is they were signed nation to nation. Secondly, without sounding like an asshole (though that may be impossible on this), the First Nations also benefited from us 'settling' here. Their education, life expectancy, transportation, diet, and many other facets of life are far better than they were as a nomadic Stone Age culture, although I don't doubt some might prefer that way of life to the modern western one.

As I said, I support Truth and Reconciliation, but there is a correct way to go about it and calling Canadians 'settlers' starts the entire process off on the wrong foot.

   

Yes, the agreements were signed nation to nation, but they were repeatedly and continually broken and reneged by our side of things. That's the sort of thing that lands the breaker in court for breach of contract.

As for their being a nomadic 'Stone Age' culture with much better livelihoods now than they had when Europeans arrived, a lot of First Nations had agriculture (growing crops like corn, beans and squash), long-distance transportation (less need for wheeled vehicles when you have lots of rivers and wood for canoes, and probably a lack of suitable pack animals like the horses and oxen Europeans used), balanced diets and medicine (spruce needle tea is a great cure for scurvy), and governance (the potlach system among the West Coast nations, or the federal system of the Iroquois). The Europeans' main advantage was resistance to disease, as a lot of their life expectancy, diet and education issues weren't much better when they first arrived.

Our having better lifespans, medical care, transportation, etc. comes more from science and technology progressing than any innate European advantages in the 17th century. Native people might have benefited from those things more if their lives weren't micromanaged in a government attempt to "civilize" them with the kinds of social control that the Communists would approve of...and is one of the big reasons things are so shitty for them today.

Maybe restoring more Indigenous decision-making capacity and ensuring they have a solid land base to work with might go a long way to fixing the problem.

Given peoples' reactions in this thread, I wonder whether the bigger problem is some assholes using terms like 'settler' as pejorative, rather than opposition to the potential solutions I'm describing. Those solutions (which have been pretty consistent from many Natives from since before Confederation) might actually deprive the bigots who use the terms pejoratively of a lot of their credibility.

And that goes double for the far-left white assholes who crap on Canada in general. If they feel that strongly about it, why the hell are they still here?

   

No. They've proven that they can't do even simple things without screwing
them up horribly. A lot of the Chiefs have no accountability, and when things
go south, they blame everyone else before asking for more money to fix the
problems that never seem to get fixed.



The original article you posted had pejorative undertones, and in itself was
offensive in nature, to say the least. Most of the issues presented happened
well before my great grandfather's time, and yet I'm supposed to feel ashamed
and responsible?

The First Nation's linage goes back thousands of years or more, but the fact
that I'm a third generation Canadian doesn't make me any less Canadian than
any of them. I have a great respect for their traditions and such, but when
they blame every 'whitey' or Canadian, they undermine the very respect that
is being looked for. Until both sides treat each other like human beings and
fellow Canadians, we're going nowhere.



Free health care.

-J.

   

As a serial immigrant, I don’t mind being called a settler as long as it’s not followed by this chant from my wife’s former country:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Settler,_One_Bullet

I live in a part of Canada (NL) where the original inhabitants were wiped out by the disease, starvation and violence brought by European, well, settlers and I feel that history as I walk in the forests here. At a national level, however, we are stuck with each other and will have to work this out. If at all possible, the Minister in charge on ‘our’ side should be aboriginal themselves. At the moment, we seem to be talking past each other.

   

The Beothuks. Still have trouble wrapping my head around them being wiped out
to this day. For a whole people to disappear like that...

-J.

   

Kind of hard to do when you have federal bureaucrats breathing down your neck, you have to write a bunch of reports that aren't actually read, your budgets are stretched pretty thin and you have less power than a municipal mayor or councillor.

And we always seem to demand more accountability from Native leaders than the ones we elect ourselves. When our own elected leaders obfuscate or undermine the work of entities like parliamentary committees and the Auditor General (something both the likes of Harper and Justin Trudeau have done) their supporters often jeer the other party but remain oddly silent when their own does it.



My intent in the original article was to think about what exactly this claim meant, and point out that these are the only lands I, and by extension all the other people of any race who live here, can call home. I'm not British, I'm not Irish and I'm not German-none of those places mean a damn thing to me.

And this isn't meant to cause shame, blame or guilt-emotions that I've wrestled with myself for years. Maybe I didn't express it as well as I could have, but this is my way of saying "fuck that" to those ideas. It's one reason why I oppose taking down and vandalizing statues-as Murray Sinclair pointed out, it just smacks of revenge and shaming.

It'd be one thing if these things were all in the past, but they're not. The legal status and rights of a lot of Native people is still unclear, as multiple court cases have shown. The last residential school closed in 1996, back when I started using pimple cream. Non-Native people talk on Facebook about "Shoot An Indian Day", stick threatening notes in Natives' mailboxes, or burn down their attempts at building their own livelihoods. Native defendants can still get railroaded by the legal system.

We tried forcible assimilation, to make Native people undifferentiated Canadians. Not only did it not work, it's directly caused a lot of the shit we see today. We need a new solution, or perhaps an old solution that we never really tried.

The old solutions have been mentioned in reports, books, letters and the Treaties themselves going back decades, even centuries. That would actually be a way of treating each other as people, more so than the way we've tried to do it for nigh on 200 years now.

As long as we insist on assimilation, we're going nowhere.

   

Canada is not a nation that assimilates people, like our neighbours to the south. We are supposed to be a nation that celebrates diversity.

As I said in another post, I believe we must coexist. However I do feel the Indian Act is racist and designed to keep the indigenous people down, I also believe that giving free money to people, in this case- ultimately keeps people from wanting to better themselves.

By scrapping the IA and recognizing some of the land claims, and allowing the Indigenous to self govern. We could create a different type of municipality, something akin to a regional municipality and give it money for infrastructure, it would probably address some of the 3rd world conditions that exist on some of the reservations today.

Just my two cents.

   

They were extremely vulnerable to European contact. There was probably only a thousand of them and they had a nomadic cycle through the year that was drastically disrupted by the new arrivals.

   

Very true, and one of the many reasons I support a path forward with TRC.




You're correct on the first half, but most First Nations (in Canada at least) were stagnating technologically and wouldn't have advanced much in technology had the Europeans not shown up.

The Europeans, on the other hand, went through the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution (among other transformational events), and likely would have kept their advancing technologically even if they didn't 'discover' the Americas.





More independence would be a good thing - there are a fair number of First Nations In Alberta (Tsuaa T'ina, Sawridge Band, Enoch Cree Nation for example) that have shown that if left alone, they can not only manage themselves, but actually prosper.

I'm sure there are other First Nations across the country which have similar success stories, we just need to make sure all First Nations have the supports in place (supports that they feel they need, not what we think they need) to help them all achieve that.





Definitely.

   

Well said, however whatever system is set up needs to be developed based on what the First Nations they themselves want.

   

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