The Big Apology

The world is filled with stories of good intentions gone bad and bad people put in positions of trust. There is nothing right about what happened in the past with the aboriginal schools, but the Canadian conscience once it became aware of the realities of what took place has responded correctly. The issue I have is not with the present Government, but with the spineless milksops that came before them.

But I can assure you I will not be dressing in sackcloth and pouring ashes on my head over mistakes made by others in past generations, but as a society my hope would be that we gravitate towards being a more understanding and thoughtful people because of those mistakes.

Having lived close to 4 reserves out west, Sweetgrass, Poundmaker, Red Pheasant and Cochin and daily observing first nations peoples I can tell you I have absolutely no understanding of why the conditions on many reserves are as they are when I saw the resources that were available to the bands. Sweetgrass and Poundmaker both had excellent farmland on them and it was available to any Indian who wanted to farm along with all kinds of assistance to get them started.

Housing was available to anyone who wanted it, the effort was minimal on their part. It used to burn me when I was working myself to exhaustion and barely keeping ahead of the game that many Indians I knew never seemed to do a days work but somehow had a better vehicle than I could afford. They started a plant on the one reserve to produce prebilt homes for the reserves in the area. This came along with training, good wages, the best of tools and working conditions but in no time at all, no one showed up for work, all the tools and lumber had been stolen and the place was left to rot.

There is lots of talk about the value of the native culture and tradition as being the good old days and how it has been taken from them. I can't see why anyone would want to return to the poverty, living conditions, disease from a past that is nostalgically looked on as the good old days of life as a hunter gatherer. But its hard to grasp how defined group of people can expect to enjoy the benefits of a modern society, with cars, 4 wheelers, ski doos, canned food, electricity, televisions sets, etc without fully participating in an economy and contributing on the same terms as everyone else.

But maybe there is a solution, the plains indian lived off the buffalo, well maybe we could start raising buffalo in captivity and provide the men in each reserve with horses, spears and bows and arrows. We could then turn one or two buffalo loose each day and they could hunt them down, hack themm to bits and lug them home. It might take a while to accumulate enough skins to make tents and clothes so we could provide them enough from a tannery to get them started. A couple of big stocked ponds should provide fish and we should make detours around the reserves so they could be isolated again. Make it easy to get back to living like prehistoric man again. maybe that would be the best solution, but somehow I don't think that is what they want.

What I have seen is indians who want everything modern, want it paid for by someone else and to put as little effort as possible into getting it. Think have you ever seen an indian with a job? My experience with the indian kids I went to school with was this, while going to school there was no difference between them and anyone else but after leaving school it didn't take long to catch onto the fact that you could do better by doing nothing than by working. Of all the Indians I knew only one worked hard enough to achieve anything, the rest just went onto permanent pogey.

Like I said I can't understand and am glad I'm not charged with the responsibility of addressing and finding solutions to the multitude of aboriginal issues that swirl around.