Now the poor woman is being pilloried because she isn’t Ghandi or Mother Teresa. No, really! And aboriginals in general, other than the ones who dine with prime ministers, are also having a hard time in the image department.
A Manitoba newspaper editorialized that aboriginals are corrupt and lazy and even wondered if they might also be terrorists.
And how about this comment posted on a newspaper website about the situation unfolding with Idle No More. The writer has figured it all out:
“We are possibly seeing the opening rounds of a civil war in North America. Lines are being drawn and passions are rising to fever-like levels. I called it weeks ago that the current native insurrection is being supported by foreign anti-western entities to destabilize our economy and society from the inside. American and Canadian ultra-leftists, Iranian Military Intelligence and Palestine supporters are the shadows behind the curtains … we must be ready to do our duty for the nation if and when the time comes.”
Reading the media this week has been like having a picnic on the killing floor of an abattoir. By my count, Chief Spence has been fat-shamed, bitch-slapped, traduced and ridiculed. She has been demonized in a way that other minorities never would be and no one ever should be. Not in this country, nor anyplace else.
After the meeting at Rideau Hall attended by Chief Spence the twittersphere lit up with tasteless jokes about ‘wampum’ — some of the tweets coming from and being retweeted by the country’s national journalists. No big deal you say — just the gallows humour that comes with the territory. Perhaps. But some of it was surprisingly, well … insensitive.
“You really know what I think you should do with that wampum belt,” one of them read. Not racist, you understand — just gritty.
In Cohen’s 1966 masterpiece, one of the boys in the orphanage bites off his warts in order to pass inspection. I wonder, is that what we expect Chief Spence to do? The Harper Brigade exposes all the warts and she’s supposed to bite them off to pass inspection.
Instead, warts and all, she refuses to be voted off the island — even after getting the word from pollster Darrell Bricker that only 29 per cent of Canadians approve of what she’s doing.
It is interesting to note that, in Postmedia’s story featuring the Ipsos-Reid poll, the findings are laid out exactly as the PMO has laid out the government’s policies.
The lead of the piece says that Canadians don’t want more money sent to reserves without proper audits and financial accountability. It goes on to state that only 33 per cent of Canadians think the money is being well-managed by native leaders.
These facts have the Harper echo to them — building as they do on the wickedly leaked Attawapiskat audit that started the feeding frenzy on Chief Spence. My favourite attack line from the PM’s spinmakers is that she staged the hunger strike because she knew the audit was coming.
Right, she left the remoteness of Attawapiskat for the centre of the political universe in Canada to avoid fallout.
Buried toward the end of the Postmedia story is a fact that arguably should have been the lead: Only 27 per cent of Canadians think the Harper government is being fair and reasonable on First Nations issues. Which means 73 per cent think otherwise.
And here is another number toward the bottom of the story — 63 per cent of Canadians think Ottawa should act to raise the quality of life for aboriginals. Quite a different impression than the one created by the lead — that Canadians are sick of forking over their hard-earned moolah to casino-struck SUV owners posing as Indian chiefs.
One of the ironies of that narrative is that, if you take a look at the money being harvested from traditional native lands, the question becomes not how much the natives are wasting but who is receiving the subsidy and who’s doing the subsidizing.
In the case of Attawapiskat, DeBeers is developing a diamond mine with an expected GDP impact of just under $7 billion. For that, the company gives the band $2 million a year.
As for the Harper government, since it has come to power, it has transferred $90 million to Attawpiskat while Ontario gets the diamond revenue. Here’s what else the natives get: hard hats for some temporary jobs and a giant crater in their traditional lands after the company has taken the stuff that sparkles and blown town.
Then there is the case of the Lubicon Cree, who have never signed away their land rights. They have yet to get a share of the wealth already removed from their traditional territory — in the neighborhood of $14 billion in oil and gas revenues. And when a 4.5 million litre oil spill hit Lubicon land in 2011, it was the Lubicon Cree who were left to live with the environmental degradation.
And talk about deadbeat tenants — the Parliament Buildings and its occupants are 145 years behind in the rent. Perhaps one day the draft deal announced last week by a team of negotiators representing the Algonquin will actually change some of that. Until it does, the Algonquins of Barriere Lake will have to sit by and watch $100 million in resource revenue fly south each year like the geese.
And have you noticed the enlightened paternalism that is creeping into the coverage of the split in the Assembly of First Nations? Shawn Atleo is now the darling of the mainstream media precisely because he is joined at the hip with the prime minister, precisely because he disregarded instructions from key chiefs not to meet with Stephen Harper on Ottawa’s terms.
Set against that is the fact that the chiefs who supported Chief Spence and split with Atleo are now being described as the “strident”, “hardline” or even “terrorist” faction. Silly me. Here I thought they were just opposed to environment- and democracy-busting omnibus legislation like most other Canadians, and expected their constitutional rights to be observed.
The scandal of this story is not the stubbornness of Chief Spence, who was pilloried this week as a “f—ing fake” in the comments section of one online newspaper. The real scandal is the ease with which the Harper government not only smeared Chief Spence in an act of stupefying hypocrisy, but also every other First Nations group which no longer follows Atleo.
Senator Patrick Brazeau, who couldn’t even arrange a meeting with Chief Spence based on his soaring reputation in the aboriginal community, said that “accountability” was the key to improving the lives of First Nations people.
All the strings attach to all of the prime minister’s puppets at the same point — the tongue. If it were just the fact that Brazeau is a company man now, fair enough. When you get a plum, between bites you have to do what you’re told. Understood.
But Brazeau made his comment about accountability in the same week Diane Finley’s department lost personal data on 583,000 Canadians — social insurance numbers, dates of birth and contact information.
And Patrick, just in case you’ve forgotten what the auditor-general thought of your government’s “accountability” rating with respect to enormous sums of public money, you might want to ponder the words of John Wiersema. When rolling out his spring report in 2011, he said that he had never seen anything like the abuses of the G8 and G20 summits in his 33 years working in the AG’s office.
“Rules were broken,” he told the public accounts committee. “Lawyers could have an interesting debate as to whether any laws were broken.”
In gov-speak, that is as close to an indictment as you are likely to see. I readily apologize to Senator Brazeau if he has already delivered a stern lecture to Tony Clement on the importance of accountability.
Until there are more attempts to offer the public an image of aboriginals which is more factual — of their reality as well as their rights — this debate will be conducted with all the decorum of a fistfight at a wedding.
So far, the Harper government has offered up a variant on Noam Chomsky: manufactured fear. Instead of having timely and civil conversations with aboriginals, the government has encouraged the perception that Idle No More is not a human rights and constitutional movement, but a nascent insurrection. One wonders why the prime minister has yet to pay a courtesy call on Chief Spence to ask her to end her hunger strike. Practically everybody else has.
Since life imitates art, here’s a modest proposal. Why don’t all of them — the politicians, the pundits, the pollsters, all of them — re-read Beautiful Losers. The question that Idle No More is putting to aboriginal people is the one posed by Leonard Cohen’s lecherous parliamentarian, the man known as F, to his tormented friend, the narrator: “Why have you allowed yourself to be robbed?”
Could the answer be “misplaced trust”?
Original Article
Source: ipolitics
Author: Michael Harris
No comments:
Post a Comment