It’s been about 150 years since General Phillip Sheridan mused that the only good Indian was a dead Indian.Thankfully, Canada never got down as low as Sheridan’s brutal clearances of the old hunting grounds in the West after the Civil War. But despite token efforts to lay a kindly cultural veneer over the fact that we are all living on stolen land, this country continues to have its own profound failures on this file.
If you want to know why Attawapiskat Chief Theresa Spence is on a hunger strike, it is because official apologies from on high do not feed families, build houses, install water systems or educate kids. It is because some of the poorest bands in the country have concluded that Stephen Harper has to be put on the spot.
Now he has been, along with Canada’s smiling but so far silent governor general. Nine days and counting: no meeting, no eating.
For Harper, the official apology recently offered to Canada’s aboriginal peoples in front of the cameras with full pomp and circumstance is likely to be the whole deal. If this politician can get away with mere words on things he doesn’t really care about, he will.
He made a similar symbolic gesture when he said that the Quebecois were a nation — except he never said who the “Quebecois” were and what being a nation actually meant. Quebec voters decided it was an empty fraud perpetrated by a politician looking for easy votes and rejected the Conservatives. If Canada’s First Nations people have arrived at the same conclusion, that Stephen Harper is full of baloney, no one should be surprised.
Canada’s natives fill the prisons and jails, live in impoverished housing, disappear along highways without much of a fuss, die in infancy, drop out of high school and kill themselves at rates significantly higher than other Canadians.
Their health needs are looked after by 150 doctors and 1,200 nurses. A sickening percentage of First Nations citizens of this country get third world educations, short shrift in the courts, and virtually no consistent coverage in the media.
Here is the standard treatment on the tube.
Once every five years or so, there is a stunning expose that shows a particular native community living in staggering poverty, e-coli in the water supply, shacks for houses, no local schools. It might be northern Ontario or the coast of Labrador, but the story is always dramatic and episodic, never thematic.
The name of action is lost in the heat of resolve. The bone-crushing inequalities with the wider society persist and so too does the social injustice. It is a form of assault. As Ghandi once put it, poverty is the worst form of violence.
All too many Canadians seem to have bought into the notion that natives in this country all get free skidoos and live lives that are just one big, extended hunting and fishing trip. Reality check. Back when Donald Marshall Jr. was railroaded for a murder he didn’t commit, his “trial” lasted one day. A murder trial.
When Marshall, the son of Grand Chief Donald Marshall Sr., was finally exonerated after spending eleven wasted years in federal prison, the Nova Scotia justice system blamed him for the course of justice that had stolen his youth. You needed to be there to comprehend the depth of the racism operating in the system. I was, and I will never forget it.
Most of the time the plight of Canada’s natives is swept under the rug of endless, byzantine “negotiations” that go nowhere. It’s now big news when they arrive at a “preliminary, draft” deal, as was announced yesterday by Algonquin negotiators. The First Nations manager class engages the federal government’s manager class and that is that.
When the talks fail, or stall — or, best of all, cause dissension amongst native groups — the governments involved invariably blame the natives. Why not? They get blamed for everything else.
On the very day that Stephen Harper was apologizing to aboriginals for the unimaginable crimes against them, including the residential school tragedy, Pierre Poilievre was in the studio of an Ottawa radio station lecturing natives on how to live “responsible” lives. Having forgotten the enormity of what has been done to the indigenous people of Canada, the government explains away the shameful mess of native life by ascribing character flaws to the very people who have been damaged.
Stephen Harper’s devious, dishonest, and divisive personal role in the housing fiasco in Attawapiskat is a case in point. After the Red Cross intervened in the native community in November of 2011, which brought international condemnation down on Canada, the PM attacked the probity of the band leadership.
Harper purposely and falsely left the impression with Canadians that the Conservatives had given every person in Attawapiskat $50,000. As NDP MP Charlie Angus pointed out at the time, what the PM didn’t say was that the money was spread out over six years. So when the real calculation was done, each resident of Attawapiskat received $8,000 per year — or less than half of what is spent per capita on other Canadians on things like health and education.
As Angus put it, “Harper’s line rang out like a dog whistle to a racist base that believed that those Indians couldn’t be trusted with our money.”
The only systematic effort by all levels of government to address native issues in Canada was taken in the dying days of the doomed government of Paul Martin. The prime minister, the country’s premiers and aboriginal leaders hammered out the Kelowna Accord, a five-year deal investing $5 billion in changing the terms of life in this country for First Nations, Metis and Inuit peoples.
According to the timetable established at Kelowna, it would take ten years to raise up aboriginal peoples to the living standards of their fellow Canadians in health, education, economic development and housing. Then the Conservatives came to power with five priorities of their own, none of which included native issues. The financial terms of Kelowna were quickly ditched, as Jim Flaherty’s first budget made clear. As one native leader from Winnipeg observed at the time, the pine beetle infestation in British Columbia got more money than urban aboriginals.
It gives comfort in certain quarters that native politics have had their full share of political and ethical scandals, from corrupt elections in Burnt Church, New Brunswick to bloated salaries for band leaders in many parts of the country. It is often said that Canada’s aboriginals want to spend public money without accountability.
People who believe that haven’t read the Indian Act. As Chelsea Vowel observed at the height of the Attawapiskat crisis, “Bands are micromanaged to an extent unseen in nearly any other context that does not involve a minor or someone who lacks capacity due to mental disability.”
But the greater irony is this: if there are people who think band councils in Canada don’t properly account for the expenditure of public monies, what must they think about the Harper government, which still continues to deprive parliamentary officers of basic financial information about departmental cuts from the last budget? What must they think about the Al Capone accounting of the F-35 program? What must they think about G8 and G20 spending that was $900 million higher than any other such meeting on earth?
Chief Spence can be forgiven if she needs the prime minister’s ear for a few moments. How can there be $28 million to market an ancient war and no money to provide clean drinking water for aboriginal communities?
How can you set up the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and then force it to go to court over access to crucial documents? How can there be $50 million for gazebos in Muskoka but not enough for basic housing in Attawapiskat? And how can Canada be the sixth most developed country in the world and our indigenous peoples sixty-sixth?
No one should bet the farm that the prime minister will meet the chief. On the other hand, Stephen Harper should bear in mind that you can’t starve an idea — no, not even in Harperland.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics
Author: Michael Harris
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