A Christmas wish list for our many Attawapiskats
andyt @ Wed Dec 21, 2011 11:04 am
This article makes some good points I had not considered about the native's plight. Doesn't change the bottom line tho, that no matter how much we help we give them, if their community isn't economically viable they'll never stand on their own two feet.
$1:
They may be closer to the North Pole, but the aboriginal people of Northern Ontario have a much harder time grabbing Santa's attention, apparently, than those of us in the South.
It's not that they're being unrealistically desirous of swimming pools and ponies. On the contrary, their wish lists tend to be almost heartbreakingly humble. The children of Pikangikum First Nation, an Ojibway reserve a few hundred kilometres north of Thunder Bay, told youth-engagement workers for the North-South Partnership for Children that they longed for running tap water.
MORE RELATED TO THIS STORY
First nations lament living conditions in ‘many Attawapiskats’
The cornerstones of a better Attawapiskat
Attawapiskat gets housing help
PHOTOS
Life in Attawapiskat
Can they garner our goodwill and understanding? That would be on their wish list. So would a desire for simple and practical help. I've met Oji-Cree people who would really just like to know how to operate a buzz saw, after spending the past few millennia hunting and trapping in the boreal forest before being catapulted into residential schools and then bounced back into the birch trees.
They know about Jesus, but they have no clue how to insulate prefab modular housing units shipped up by a federal bureaucracy that prohibits them from logging on “Crown land.”
The discussion shouldn't be about how we “throw all this money at them,” but rather how we don't toss over anything else, such as skills training or adequate education or moral support or even a simple, listening curiosity about their wild sense of disorientation.
Do you know how to operate a municipal sewage system for a town of 2,000? No? Well, why the heck would they?
When I visited the fly-in communities of Summer Beaver, Big Trout Lake and Sandy Lake in the summer of 2010, I met elders who could fashion a slingshot and bring down a ptarmigan in the time it takes you to check your e-mail, but they didn't know the significance of “sell before” dates on the cans of peas and stew they were stocking in their one store.
We ask them to “get over the past” and join modern Canada, but we haven't invested a moment of time into showing them how.
When remote reserves slide into crisis because of chronic poverty and a lack of training, Canadians respond by rearing up into high intellectual dudgeon about the “Indian problem.” The chiefs are corrupt! It's the fault of the feds! The provinces are to blame!
But who, simply, goes up to a community like Attawapiskat and offers to help build a playground? (Answer: a middle-school boy from Niagara Falls, Ont., named Wesley Prankard.)
It has only recently dawned on Canadian non-governmental organizations, philanthropists, private citizens and Rotarians that the kind of work they do in Haiti and Sierra Leone is equally valued in our own backyard.
Some citizens in Guelph, Ont., for example, have dubbed themselves the Friends of Webequie, and travel several times a year to that Northern Ontario community to help rebuild lost skills. They bring seeds for potatoes, pumpkins and squash, and teach the people how to plant. They repair houses and winterize them. They help find solutions to prescription-drug addiction, which is rampant across North America but for which there are no rehab resources on northern reserves.
A tiny NGO called Speroway works specifically with the community of Mishkeegogamang, running summer camps and building bunk beds to offset overcrowding.
Right to Play, which usually runs sports programs in Third World refugee camps, is now working in some of the communities at the request of the young people, who crave recreational activities.
These are practical, scalable interventions that don't require an entire constitutional debate.
A more ambitious wish on the native Christmas list would be to stop being smothered in insane red tape. Chief Donny Morris of Big Trout Lake dreams of a sawmill. He wants to be able to cull lumber from his traditional territory and build log homes.
But he can't to that.
He is flailing within the netted confines of the Indian Act. His people cannot own mortgages, they can't use local resources, they cannot stand on their heads without permission from three departments plus seven additional signatures on Parliament Hill.
It is this incessant bureaucratic hampering that has brought a once self-reliant people to their knees. We can leave them there, out of sight and out of mind, sleeping in shifts in mouldy homes while we engage in grandiose philosophical discourse. Or we can follow a kid's example and, like Wesley Prankard, just offer to lend a hand.
It's not that they're being unrealistically desirous of swimming pools and ponies. On the contrary, their wish lists tend to be almost heartbreakingly humble. The children of Pikangikum First Nation, an Ojibway reserve a few hundred kilometres north of Thunder Bay, told youth-engagement workers for the North-South Partnership for Children that they longed for running tap water.
MORE RELATED TO THIS STORY
First nations lament living conditions in ‘many Attawapiskats’
The cornerstones of a better Attawapiskat
Attawapiskat gets housing help
PHOTOS
Life in Attawapiskat
Can they garner our goodwill and understanding? That would be on their wish list. So would a desire for simple and practical help. I've met Oji-Cree people who would really just like to know how to operate a buzz saw, after spending the past few millennia hunting and trapping in the boreal forest before being catapulted into residential schools and then bounced back into the birch trees.
They know about Jesus, but they have no clue how to insulate prefab modular housing units shipped up by a federal bureaucracy that prohibits them from logging on “Crown land.”
The discussion shouldn't be about how we “throw all this money at them,” but rather how we don't toss over anything else, such as skills training or adequate education or moral support or even a simple, listening curiosity about their wild sense of disorientation.
Do you know how to operate a municipal sewage system for a town of 2,000? No? Well, why the heck would they?
When I visited the fly-in communities of Summer Beaver, Big Trout Lake and Sandy Lake in the summer of 2010, I met elders who could fashion a slingshot and bring down a ptarmigan in the time it takes you to check your e-mail, but they didn't know the significance of “sell before” dates on the cans of peas and stew they were stocking in their one store.
We ask them to “get over the past” and join modern Canada, but we haven't invested a moment of time into showing them how.
When remote reserves slide into crisis because of chronic poverty and a lack of training, Canadians respond by rearing up into high intellectual dudgeon about the “Indian problem.” The chiefs are corrupt! It's the fault of the feds! The provinces are to blame!
But who, simply, goes up to a community like Attawapiskat and offers to help build a playground? (Answer: a middle-school boy from Niagara Falls, Ont., named Wesley Prankard.)
It has only recently dawned on Canadian non-governmental organizations, philanthropists, private citizens and Rotarians that the kind of work they do in Haiti and Sierra Leone is equally valued in our own backyard.
Some citizens in Guelph, Ont., for example, have dubbed themselves the Friends of Webequie, and travel several times a year to that Northern Ontario community to help rebuild lost skills. They bring seeds for potatoes, pumpkins and squash, and teach the people how to plant. They repair houses and winterize them. They help find solutions to prescription-drug addiction, which is rampant across North America but for which there are no rehab resources on northern reserves.
A tiny NGO called Speroway works specifically with the community of Mishkeegogamang, running summer camps and building bunk beds to offset overcrowding.
Right to Play, which usually runs sports programs in Third World refugee camps, is now working in some of the communities at the request of the young people, who crave recreational activities.
These are practical, scalable interventions that don't require an entire constitutional debate.
A more ambitious wish on the native Christmas list would be to stop being smothered in insane red tape. Chief Donny Morris of Big Trout Lake dreams of a sawmill. He wants to be able to cull lumber from his traditional territory and build log homes.
But he can't to that.
He is flailing within the netted confines of the Indian Act. His people cannot own mortgages, they can't use local resources, they cannot stand on their heads without permission from three departments plus seven additional signatures on Parliament Hill.
It is this incessant bureaucratic hampering that has brought a once self-reliant people to their knees. We can leave them there, out of sight and out of mind, sleeping in shifts in mouldy homes while we engage in grandiose philosophical discourse. Or we can follow a kid's example and, like Wesley Prankard, just offer to lend a hand.
OnTheIce @ Wed Dec 21, 2011 11:40 am
andyt andyt:
This article makes some good points I had not considered about the native's plight. Doesn't change the bottom line tho, that no matter how much we help we give them, if their community isn't economically viable they'll never stand on their own two feet.
$1:
They may be closer to the North Pole, but the aboriginal people of Northern Ontario have a much harder time grabbing Santa's attention, apparently, than those of us in the South.
It's not that they're being unrealistically desirous of swimming pools and ponies. On the contrary, their wish lists tend to be almost heartbreakingly humble. The children of Pikangikum First Nation, an Ojibway reserve a few hundred kilometres north of Thunder Bay, told youth-engagement workers for the North-South Partnership for Children that they longed for running tap water.
MORE RELATED TO THIS STORY
First nations lament living conditions in ‘many Attawapiskats’
The cornerstones of a better Attawapiskat
Attawapiskat gets housing help
PHOTOS
Life in Attawapiskat
Can they garner our goodwill and understanding? That would be on their wish list. So would a desire for simple and practical help. I've met Oji-Cree people who would really just like to know how to operate a buzz saw, after spending the past few millennia hunting and trapping in the boreal forest before being catapulted into residential schools and then bounced back into the birch trees.
They know about Jesus, but they have no clue how to insulate prefab modular housing units shipped up by a federal bureaucracy that prohibits them from logging on “Crown land.”
The discussion shouldn't be about how we “throw all this money at them,” but rather how we don't toss over anything else, such as skills training or adequate education or moral support or even a simple, listening curiosity about their wild sense of disorientation.
Do you know how to operate a municipal sewage system for a town of 2,000? No? Well, why the heck would they?
When I visited the fly-in communities of Summer Beaver, Big Trout Lake and Sandy Lake in the summer of 2010, I met elders who could fashion a slingshot and bring down a ptarmigan in the time it takes you to check your e-mail, but they didn't know the significance of “sell before” dates on the cans of peas and stew they were stocking in their one store.
We ask them to “get over the past” and join modern Canada, but we haven't invested a moment of time into showing them how.
When remote reserves slide into crisis because of chronic poverty and a lack of training, Canadians respond by rearing up into high intellectual dudgeon about the “Indian problem.” The chiefs are corrupt! It's the fault of the feds! The provinces are to blame!
But who, simply, goes up to a community like Attawapiskat and offers to help build a playground? (Answer: a middle-school boy from Niagara Falls, Ont., named Wesley Prankard.)
It has only recently dawned on Canadian non-governmental organizations, philanthropists, private citizens and Rotarians that the kind of work they do in Haiti and Sierra Leone is equally valued in our own backyard.
Some citizens in Guelph, Ont., for example, have dubbed themselves the Friends of Webequie, and travel several times a year to that Northern Ontario community to help rebuild lost skills. They bring seeds for potatoes, pumpkins and squash, and teach the people how to plant. They repair houses and winterize them. They help find solutions to prescription-drug addiction, which is rampant across North America but for which there are no rehab resources on northern reserves.
A tiny NGO called Speroway works specifically with the community of Mishkeegogamang, running summer camps and building bunk beds to offset overcrowding.
Right to Play, which usually runs sports programs in Third World refugee camps, is now working in some of the communities at the request of the young people, who crave recreational activities.
These are practical, scalable interventions that don't require an entire constitutional debate.
A more ambitious wish on the native Christmas list would be to stop being smothered in insane red tape. Chief Donny Morris of Big Trout Lake dreams of a sawmill. He wants to be able to cull lumber from his traditional territory and build log homes.
But he can't to that.
He is flailing within the netted confines of the Indian Act. His people cannot own mortgages, they can't use local resources, they cannot stand on their heads without permission from three departments plus seven additional signatures on Parliament Hill.
It is this incessant bureaucratic hampering that has brought a once self-reliant people to their knees. We can leave them there, out of sight and out of mind, sleeping in shifts in mouldy homes while we engage in grandiose philosophical discourse. Or we can follow a kid's example and, like Wesley Prankard, just offer to lend a hand.
It's not that they're being unrealistically desirous of swimming pools and ponies. On the contrary, their wish lists tend to be almost heartbreakingly humble. The children of Pikangikum First Nation, an Ojibway reserve a few hundred kilometres north of Thunder Bay, told youth-engagement workers for the North-South Partnership for Children that they longed for running tap water.
MORE RELATED TO THIS STORY
First nations lament living conditions in ‘many Attawapiskats’
The cornerstones of a better Attawapiskat
Attawapiskat gets housing help
PHOTOS
Life in Attawapiskat
Can they garner our goodwill and understanding? That would be on their wish list. So would a desire for simple and practical help. I've met Oji-Cree people who would really just like to know how to operate a buzz saw, after spending the past few millennia hunting and trapping in the boreal forest before being catapulted into residential schools and then bounced back into the birch trees.
They know about Jesus, but they have no clue how to insulate prefab modular housing units shipped up by a federal bureaucracy that prohibits them from logging on “Crown land.”
The discussion shouldn't be about how we “throw all this money at them,” but rather how we don't toss over anything else, such as skills training or adequate education or moral support or even a simple, listening curiosity about their wild sense of disorientation.
Do you know how to operate a municipal sewage system for a town of 2,000? No? Well, why the heck would they?
When I visited the fly-in communities of Summer Beaver, Big Trout Lake and Sandy Lake in the summer of 2010, I met elders who could fashion a slingshot and bring down a ptarmigan in the time it takes you to check your e-mail, but they didn't know the significance of “sell before” dates on the cans of peas and stew they were stocking in their one store.
We ask them to “get over the past” and join modern Canada, but we haven't invested a moment of time into showing them how.
When remote reserves slide into crisis because of chronic poverty and a lack of training, Canadians respond by rearing up into high intellectual dudgeon about the “Indian problem.” The chiefs are corrupt! It's the fault of the feds! The provinces are to blame!
But who, simply, goes up to a community like Attawapiskat and offers to help build a playground? (Answer: a middle-school boy from Niagara Falls, Ont., named Wesley Prankard.)
It has only recently dawned on Canadian non-governmental organizations, philanthropists, private citizens and Rotarians that the kind of work they do in Haiti and Sierra Leone is equally valued in our own backyard.
Some citizens in Guelph, Ont., for example, have dubbed themselves the Friends of Webequie, and travel several times a year to that Northern Ontario community to help rebuild lost skills. They bring seeds for potatoes, pumpkins and squash, and teach the people how to plant. They repair houses and winterize them. They help find solutions to prescription-drug addiction, which is rampant across North America but for which there are no rehab resources on northern reserves.
A tiny NGO called Speroway works specifically with the community of Mishkeegogamang, running summer camps and building bunk beds to offset overcrowding.
Right to Play, which usually runs sports programs in Third World refugee camps, is now working in some of the communities at the request of the young people, who crave recreational activities.
These are practical, scalable interventions that don't require an entire constitutional debate.
A more ambitious wish on the native Christmas list would be to stop being smothered in insane red tape. Chief Donny Morris of Big Trout Lake dreams of a sawmill. He wants to be able to cull lumber from his traditional territory and build log homes.
But he can't to that.
He is flailing within the netted confines of the Indian Act. His people cannot own mortgages, they can't use local resources, they cannot stand on their heads without permission from three departments plus seven additional signatures on Parliament Hill.
It is this incessant bureaucratic hampering that has brought a once self-reliant people to their knees. We can leave them there, out of sight and out of mind, sleeping in shifts in mouldy homes while we engage in grandiose philosophical discourse. Or we can follow a kid's example and, like Wesley Prankard, just offer to lend a hand.
That is an epic amount of BS.
So many false statements and assumptions.
andyt @ Wed Dec 21, 2011 11:59 am
Really? No truth to it at all, huh? Natives don't suffer from lack of social capital, or if they do it's all their own fault?
BartSimpson @ Wed Dec 21, 2011 12:23 pm
The best thing you can do for these folks is to move them into civilization. Or let them return to their own ways and leave them alone - and that means letting them fish, hunt, and cut trees as they need them without interference from pointy headed bureaucrats who can't be bothered to actually see the way these people live.
andyt @ Wed Dec 21, 2011 12:26 pm
BartSimpson BartSimpson:
The best thing you can do for these folks is to move them into civilization. Or let them return to their own ways and leave them alone - and that means letting them fish, hunt, and cut trees as they need them without interference from pointy headed bureaucrats who can't be bothered to actually see the way these people live.
I fully agree. The latter tho is not feasible in many places. We're using the environment they used to live their traditional lives for other purposes. It takes a lot of space to support a small group of hunter gatherers.
And they don't want that anyway. They talk about traditional ways, but they want those with all the mod cons we have. Traditional ways seems to mostly mean living off tribute. Natives have been sold a fairy tale by their leaders.
BartSimpson @ Wed Dec 21, 2011 2:04 pm
andyt andyt:
BartSimpson BartSimpson:
The best thing you can do for these folks is to move them into civilization. Or let them return to their own ways and leave them alone - and that means letting them fish, hunt, and cut trees as they need them without interference from pointy headed bureaucrats who can't be bothered to actually see the way these people live.
I fully agree. The latter tho is not feasible in many places. We're using the environment they used to live their traditional lives for other purposes. It takes a lot of space to support a small group of hunter gatherers.
And they don't want that anyway. They talk about traditional ways, but they want those with all the mod cons we have. Traditional ways seems to mostly mean living off tribute. Natives have been sold a fairy tale by their leaders.
It's probably going to hurt my rep as a heartless conservative, but with the Canadian Natives I've always wondered at how they get treated with less consideration than polar bears and whatnot. Just my $.02 but Natives who want to live the old way should enjoy as much respect as a flippin' polar bear gets.
Bruce_the_vii @ Wed Dec 21, 2011 3:35 pm
When I was a small one I had a subscription to the "Beaver" on the Canadian north and it had colourful pictures of natives eating artic char in igloos. Moving such people into the modern world has proved difficult. For one they are over 1000 miles from any city. They don't speak the language. When you think of the Indians you have to put your anger control on because they haven't gotten their act together and think rather that their condition is difficult and situation dire. The article is just Christmas time happy talk; it's hard to say anything cheery about the situation.
Thanos @ Wed Dec 21, 2011 3:47 pm
The $6 to 10 billion spent on them every year is indication enough that they haven't been left to rot by an uncaring white man's Canada. If the white man's pissed off at anything it's because we've been paying this money for decades, and will be for perpetuity, and nothing ever gets better. There's lots of services provided for them by government, businesses, and churches. If it means nothing then it's only because you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink. If Natives want to live in some fantasy land about the "ancient ways of the elders" being enough to sustain them in a modernized world then they better be prepared to accept the consequences of that decision.
And those regulations are there for a reason, and that's because certain Native chiefs don't give a damn about what their on-reserve business activities. The Natives living right next door to Calgary opened up an asphalt plant. Good for them? Not so much. They were using dirty used oil in the process, had zero filtering in the plant, and were gassing the southwest side of the city with noxious oil smoke and fumes whenever they fired the machinery up. That's why the feds stepped in and forced them to shut it down. The same disrespect for the neighbouring non-Native communities is also evident in spades on both coasts, where local Native bands can fish as much as they want (even out of season, regardless of how much damage it causes to the fish population) no matter if it wipes out the businesses of non-Native fishermen. These chiefs, band councils, and other high rolling slicksters living on the reserves have to be watched and regulated carefully. There's been too many examples of the criminality they can get up to when the feds turn a blind eye to their activities.
jeff744 @ Wed Dec 21, 2011 4:07 pm
$1:
Do you know how to operate a municipal sewage system for a town of 2,000? No? Well, why the heck would they?
I know a couple people that worked on the sewer system of my home town of 2000, they made nearly min wage and required little training because they were just there to make sure to replace refill certain chemicals and check gauges, if anything broke they called in a specialist. How hard is that?
BartSimpson @ Wed Dec 21, 2011 4:15 pm
Thanos Thanos:
The $6 to 10 billion spent on them every year is indication enough that they haven't been left to rot by an uncaring white man's Canada. (edit for space - no offence intended)
Thanos, I guess what I'd say is that if you're a Native and you want assistance then you'll have to move to an actual town or city that has the services you need. Otherwise, stay where you are and live the same way your ancestors lived before you and don't bitch about it. Likewise, white people need to STFU when Natives are doing the things that Natives did for thousands of years before animal rights whacktivists and tree huggers came along.
saturn_656 @ Wed Dec 21, 2011 4:27 pm
$1:
white people need to STFU
That's ok, we'll have our Canadians of non-European descent do the talking.
Plenty of Canadians kicking around that aren't white.
Freakinoldguy @ Wed Dec 21, 2011 6:45 pm
Who wrote this drivel?
$1:
When I visited the fly-in communities of Summer Beaver, Big Trout Lake and Sandy Lake in the summer of 2010, I met elders who could fashion a slingshot and bring down a ptarmigan in the time it takes you to check your e-mail, but they didn't know the significance of “sell before” dates on the cans of peas and stew they were stocking in their one store.
Chances are the author met these people partying at Landmark Hotel in TBay which the natives own and is used a base for them when they get flown into town every couple of months. I guess having Natives own the hotel and have the Government fly you into a major city every couple of months to shop, get medical care and party is still considered living traditionally and a major hardship.
$1:
Do you know how to operate a municipal sewage system for a town of 2,000? No? Well, why the heck would they?
Who ever wrote his has a good point since I don't know how to operate the sewage system. But, then again unlike certain residents of Attawapiskats I was never trained to do it.
Who ever wrote this is either the worlds biggest apologist or works for Indian affairs and wants a budget increase. Either way it's still drivel based on stereotypes and halftruths.
Psudo @ Wed Dec 21, 2011 11:32 pm
It's fine to copy the text of links that say "Photos" and "Related Stories," but they're not much use without the actual links that go with them.
link
Federal overregulation of reservations is certainly a problem that would likely squelch any attempt to create an industry. They need rights to manage their own resources for their own economic benefit, and their far more limited resources necessitate more attention to sustainability. I think some economics education would help, too. Agriculture would be good, and works even for those who want to maintain a traditional lifestyle. Solar panels and a water reservoir would help with utilities, maybe satellite internet and some education could give them a bite at the computer science apple. There's the stereotypical casino route for anyone near white civilization, or they could follow the example of a reservation near here that runs a financial institution with even less liability than a LLC that provides zero collateral, high interest loans. But, in the end, they're going to suffer from a lack of investment capital and limited reservation land with few natural resources. It's an uphill battle at best.
romanP @ Thu Dec 22, 2011 12:50 am
Bart is right about letting them live the way they choose without interference from the government. But there is much more to it than that. This is not about "how much can we give before enough is enough", but "what tools can we give them so that we no longer have to give". The indigenous people of this country need a means to self-determination. It is not about how much money we can throw at a problem and hope it goes away - it's so much more about how much we've taken away.
If Attawapiskat were able to collect royalties from the diamond mine that sits on their land, I'm sure they would not be in half as much trouble.
But still, many, many people do not realise the extent of the damage caused by the colonial and genocidal policies of our government, including the very Prime Ministers who have not only continued these problems but made them worse, the current Prime Minister very much included in that bunch. When Stephen Harper says "stop mismanaging taxpayers' money" to the people of Attawapiskat, I want to puke on his shoes. The $90M spent over five years pales in comparison to what Bill C-10 will cost us, and it is a bill which will further marginalise native people who already make up a significant portion of the prison population. Instead of teaching people, all of us, to build better lives, the Conservative solution is to put more people who are already disadvantaged into a system that will ensure they remain that way.
The residential school system has done lasting unfathomable damage to generations of native people. They have had much of their culture and language taken away from them, as they were taught to hate those things and themselves, in hopes that they would destroy themselves. This is not a paraphrasing or vague interpretation of government policy, it was the government policy and still is. In the 1920s, a federal minister for the residential school program said he hoped that one day, there would not be a single native left alive in Canada.
And we continue to desecrate native burial grounds to this day. The Ontario Municipal Board continues to encroach on unceded indigenous land, which includes ancestral burial places. If any of us had our cemeteries dug up to build a suburb on top, we'd have pitchforks and torches in hand without a thought.
The idea that we are in any way victims in this situation is utterly disgusting. It is the people who are going to freeze to death in their tents if they don't get proper homes who are the victims. It is the people who have had their self-determination taken away by vicious policy that wants them dead who are the real victims.
Thanos @ Thu Dec 22, 2011 2:32 am
The government offered to fly them out of the reserve until the new homes can be built. Which would have meant that they'd miss the worst of the winter and return later in spring to some nice place to live in. This "letting them freeze to death in their tents" nonsense is a vicious lie being perpetrated by the usual cretins who aren't capable of any argument except for the race card. How about you produce your own fucking magic wand and build them a home overnight yourself? If you have one and can do it then you're far ahead of any government on the planet because none of them out there, with the possible exception of the United States Navy, have the ability to pull that one off. They live in a goddamn swampy forest with roads that are inaccessable for 9/10ths of the year and can really only be supplied by air or by ice road across the bay. You tell us how Stephen Harper or anyone else in the fucking world is supposed to make magic happen in defiance of the environmental reality of where this community is located.